Another change is that I’m leaving my current job to go back to the library at the company where I work. I’m leaving information architecture to focus on managing the library’s web presence along with a few other people, starting July 12. I’m happy to be going back to a place with which I am familiar, to a setting where I think I belong.

I’ve also begun what I think is the fifth year of teaching an online course at UIUC GSLIS. This year is the first time I have used GSLIS’s new online classroom platform, called Elluminate, which is much more interactive and functional than the previous method of conducting classes over the Internet. One of the things I am most looking forward to in the class is the last online class session, when Tim Spalding of LibraryThing will join us to share his views on librarians, the future of books, library data, or anything else he deems important to discuss.

I’ll miss interacting with this group of students but at the same time — and I think they would agree — there’s something nice about hitting the home stretch. An awful lot of stuff has been compacted into a very short timeframe (eight weeks) during summer session.

I’m also looking forward to a faculty retreat to be hosted by the school at Allerton Park, a fabulous estate owned by the University of Illinois that is located near Monticello. It’s worth a visit just to see the gardens and the grounds, especially the sculpture scattered throughout. The retreat will be held over the course of two days in August and I have been asked to facilitate one of the sessions, a technology “show and tell.” I’m really looking forward to that.

Aside from the panic I felt in needing to be in two places at nearly the same time (NASIG in Phoenix, AZ and Urbana-Champaign for the on campus class session), everything went smoothly. I’ll write a bit more about my NASIG experience in a separate post. Fantastic location and great conference.

I love teaching. These people are really smart, ask challenging questions, think broadly about the role of technical services within the library organization. It is heartening to hear them tell me that they feel a course like this should be required, not optional in the library school curriculum. I’m biased but I completely agree, because I believe that what we call technical services is the very backbone of library service.

One thing I’ve spent time on this weekend is preparing for my upcoming class for the LEEP program at UIUC GSLIS. I love teaching the course but it is a lot of work to prepare for it and to figure out how to make it fresh and new each time. And there is always room for improvement.

Then there is the online course I agreed last Fall to create for NASIG. That is due sometime in July. But even before that I need to complete preparations for my presentation at the upcoming NASIG conference in the second week of June. I’ll actually be co-presenting with friend Sarah Morris and we’ll be talking about managing electronic resources in special library settings.

All work-related projects seems to implode upon themselves at this time as well, and I am scrambling to keep up with lots of stuff there, too. One of my staff members left for greener pastures in March and he is strongly missed!

Sometime soon we will be going on a mini-vacation to do some fishing and enjoy the outdoors so that is something I’m really looking forward to. In addition, Keegan will be out of school soon.

This morning we went to church and I’m glad (as always) that we did, because we received refreshment and encouragement there. This afternoon we went to a few stores and mostly drove a bit in the countryside just north of us over the border into Wisconsin.

The next several weeks will be quite hectic but I know that our Heavenly Father will meet all our needs. Along that same vein, would you please pray for some people in my extended family and friends? My sister-in-law’s brother and his youngest son (age 11) suffered severe injuries and burns in an accident a week ago or so. They and their family need all the support and care they can get. Also, someone I wrote about some time ago, John Fawcett, who has battled a recurrence of cancer for several months, has decided to not continue any treatment. I imagine this means that he could die at any time and I know his wife and young children also desperately need prayer at this time. ]]> http://www.familymanlibrarian.com/2008/05/18/preparing-for-the-next-several-weeks/feed/ 0 http://www.familymanlibrarian.com/2006/06/23/this-summers-class/ http://www.familymanlibrarian.com/2006/06/23/this-summers-class/#comments Sat, 24 Jun 2006 03:37:48 +0000 Steve http://familymanlibrarian.com/?p=473 The following is a group photo of this summer’s technical services functions class, which I am teaching. They are a great group of people!

There are 22 people in the class and as Mark Lindner remarked on his blog, this has the makings of an excellent group, with varied backgrounds and interests. (By the way, it was great to finally meet Mark in person! A great guy, and one whom I am pleased to work with.) Several students in the class work in public libraries; one works in a school library. As usual there are other students who have no library (let alone technical services) experience, and then there are those who have worked for several years in this area already. All of them bring valuable insights to class discussions.

This year I departed from the norm by having the class meet for part of a second day (usually one day is all we get; the rest of the semester is conducted entirely online). The main focus of this portion of the time together was on discussion about the tour and visit with UIUC technical services folks, followed by a crash course in setting up blogs and the class wiki. There may be some who found this new stuff a bit overwhelming, and that is to be expected. However I tried to point out the importance of getting involved, personally, in investigating these new forms of communication and collaboration. GSLIS has a technology platform for conducting online courses that has stood the test of time — 10 years, to be exact — very well, but there are many aspects that need to be updated. The tech support folks are wonderful, incredible people. They already have begun investigating and testing a new platform for conducting classes, called Moodle (it’s open source to boot). Two of the LEEP courses this summer are using this new platform, which contains built-in support for wikis, blogging capabilities, RSS, etc. For the technical services course I teach, I have had to go outside of the bounds of the LEEP technology to integrate blogs. I chose WordPress.com as the best overall platform for a balance of ease of setup and use as well as a rich set of features (and of course, it is free). A general class blog is now operational and most students have successfully set up individual blogs as well. One of the main assignments of this course is what I’ve termed a reflective journal. It struck me that this assignment would make a perfect match with blogging technology, and it would have the secondary benefit of helping to generate and sustain conversations about themes in the course in ways that a generic bulletin board setup could not. This is all somewhat experimental of course, and we’ll see how people take to the new stuff. So far, I am really pleased.

Oh, one other new tool that I am excited about in terms of teaching this course is the new ability I have to do application sharing via another open source software called Web Huddle. This will make introducing students to ERMS, for instance, much more fruitful than, say, a PowerPoint presentation.

Now I’ve got to prepare more for tomorrow’s first online “live” session, on the topic of acquisitions and collection development. Unfortunately I have had serious problems with connecting to the GSLIS server from my workplace, such that I am forced to conduct tomorrow’s session from home, where there isn’t aren’t such tight restrictions on network traffic!

For example, I continue to be incredibly impressed with Tim Spalding and his introduction of LibraryThing Mobile, something I plan to make use of on a regular basis. I cannot say enough good things about the ongoing excellence and customer focus shown by Tim and his growing team. Congratulations and kudos to LibraryThing! Here’s to your ongoing success.

Then there is the hectic time at work during the past few weeks, as I have been trying to come up to speed with all of the aspects of my job. We are really focused as a group on how to best manage journal information, particularly for e-journals. There is a lot of detail I could go into but this issue gets to the heart of how our various systems interact.

I have been working very hard to prepare for the class that I will be teaching this summer (LIS578LE: Technical Services Functions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science). Class starts next week and I will be on campus at UIUC Monday through Wednesday. Tuesday and Wednesday we will meet together as a class all day. Some highlights of this preparation include the fact that this time around, I will be integrating blogs and a wiki into the class. Also for the first time I am offering students the option of purchasing a course packet. Twenty three students are currently enrolled in the class and one of the neat things about the class this year is that the thought are broken… blogmeister, Mark Lindner, will be my assigned GA from GSLIS, helping me conduct each live class session by setting up the RealAudio feed, initiating and recording my phone connection, and doing other technical support.

A lot more stuff remains to be commented on here but that’s all for now.

I couldn’t agree more with the need for library schools to integrate a course on e-resource management into their curriculum. Furthermore, I think it should be a required course. The course I teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in their LEEP curriculum, Technical Services Functions (LIS578LE), focuses on e-resources quite a lot. But there is so much ground to cover in the course that it seems that there never is enough time to adequately address this important topic.

Because of that, several months ago I approached the associate dean with a proposal for a new course on e-resource management. She was quite receptive to it and asked me for a formal course outline and a proposed syllabus. Unfortunately I haven’t written that up yet. Any suggestions or thoughts about this would be appreciated.