Category Archives: uiuc gslis

Changes

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There have been quite a few changes around here in the last few weeks. The major one for this blog is that I’ve upgraded it to WordPress 3.0 — a very smooth and easy process, by the way — and changed the theme to one of the ones that come with WordPress 3.0 because I liked it so much. The typography is easier to read and the theme is clean and uncluttered.

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.

The class is drawing to a close

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Tonight marks the second-to-last live session I will have with my students in the graduate library course I’m currently teaching. Time has flown by. As always, I learn things during the course that I can hopefully use in future teaching. One lesson I learned long ago is that an online curriculum is only as good as the technical infrastructure and support that is offered to it by the school. LEEP at the University of Illinois has a fantastic, dedicated, service-oriented support team and I am thankful for their help and responsiveness. There have been a few glitches here and there but they have been quickly addressed.

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.

The course so far…

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Last weekend I was glad to meet my students in the course I’m teaching for UIUC GSLIS in the summer session. They are a great group of people with diverse backgrounds and experiences. One person is originally from Argentina and was a professional chess player. Another is — I think — originally from South Africa and is choosing a new career after working in finance/accounting for many years. Someone else joins the class from Alaska; others from Colorado and Oregon. Another person happens to be someone who used to work for the same company I work for. Someone else in the class is a grad student in the Latin American and Caribbean library services unit at UIUC; the exact same position I held when I was in grad. school!

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.

NASIG presentation work

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I am so thankful to have friend Sarah Morris as a partner in our upcoming NASIG presentation. She is always on top of things, always upbeat, always prepared. She has done the lion’s share of moving this whole project forward. Sarah was a 2006 NASIG Student Grant winner and like me is an alum of UIUC GSLIS. She currently works as library systems coordinator (and overseer of all things technical services-related, it seems) at a major international law firm in Chicago.

The theme for this year’s conference in Phoenix, AZ is “Taking the sting out of serials” and our presentation consciously tries to tie into that theme. We’ll be presenting on the topic of “E-Resource Management in the For-Profit World: Soothing the Sting.” There hasn’t been much in the way of past presentations that deal with serials and electronic resources management in special libraries that I can recall so I’m glad our proposal was accepted this year. As always, the coordination offered by the all volunteer efforts of NASIG members of the Conference and Program Planning Committees has been outstanding.

One aspect of our preparation that I wanted to highlight is the fact that Sarah and I have used Google Docs to work out what we want to present in terms of presentation slides, handouts, and outline. This has been the first time I’ve used Google Docs in a shared manner and it really has been easy and useful. What I would have given for such a collaboration tool when working on past presentations! We have definitely come a very long way.

Preparing for the next several weeks

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I’m not sure why this is true but every year around this time life speeds up to hyperspeed and I wonder how on earth I will ever make it through. That’s the main reason why I haven’t posted much lately; I am rather overwhelmed.

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.

Some cataloging history

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The other day I finally had a look at a site that I knew about for a while but had never visited: The Virtual Museum of Cataloging and Acquisition Artifacts, maintained by a library school professor (I think, at the Univ. of South Carolina). I entered the library profession in 1992 so a lot of this, you would think, would be unknown to me. Not so. At The University of Chicago, I well remember many such artifacts being used well into the mid-1990s and, for all I know, still being used today. I remember electric pencils, manual typewriters, the old Cutter-Sanborn tables, and much, much more. One of the things I vividly remember is the old, clunky integrated library system still in use there in the early days of my career: LDMS (stands for Library Data Management System). One of the things that will always stay in my mind when I think of LDMS were the copious staff notes made in serial records by a previous librarian there, Helen Schmierer. (I think Helen may still be active in the profession but I’m not sure where.) Then too, how can I forget the entirely paper-based serial record for active and inactive print subscriptions? And the large, clunky Dieboldt machine that housed the inactive journal subscription records? And the card catalog and the paper shelflist? And the many interesting old cards written in library hand? Yes, there were courses in library school that taught one how to write in “library hand.” And don’t forget the knowledge one had to have of various filing rules. Those were the good old days, may they never come again…

One thing I plan to do is add the link to this site to the list of things my students are to review this summer when I will be teaching Technical Services Functions online again at UIUC GSLIS.

An introductory session on the social web

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Last Friday a colleague of mine (who also happens to be a fellow UIUC GSLIS alum — GSLIS alums are plentiful where I work!) gave a lunchtime presentation introducing the social web to other colleagues in our library organization. We only had an hour in which to present a broad overview and as a result, we were quite rushed toward the end of the time period. We had over 30 people sign up but only about 11 actually showed up, mainly due to the weather, I think. (We had a winter’s-last-gasp-type of heavy snowfall that day.)Our general purpose was to provide some clarity to the various bits and pieces that make up the social web (a.k.a. Web 2.0 and its many derivatives, e.g. Library 2.0). We gave an overview of what comprises the social web in terms of concepts that include friends, commenting, recommendations, “push button” publishing, and so on. Then we covered several specific social web tools such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, tagging, social networks, RSS, etc. Our hope by giving this presentation is that it will be a catalyst for more active learning and participation among more staff in social web initiatives. Our company is only just beginning to explore ways in which to incorporate social web-type stuff into its technological infrastructure. Frankly, it’s not the technical that is challenging but more the cultural aspect. We have a huge way to go to overcome a mindset that can be rather clueless about Web 2.0 and why it might be of value to use and to know about. One of the points that became clearer to me while we were talking about this stuff in that presentation was that many corporations are already on the social web bandwagon in terms of external relationships, i.e. with customers. I suspect that a much smaller set of companies has made progress with using social web tools internally, i.e. for staff use. Part of what my co-presenter focused on was that aspect, that is, identifying what we are working on, testing, or considering for internal use relating to the social web. It seems to me that this is a much harder thing to sell management on or to simply implement with an expectation of immediate, concrete ROI.Even though there weren’t as many attendees as we had hoped, we both really enjoyed giving the presentation. There was quite a bit of enthusiasm among the participants as well, and I think we’ll be planning followup sessions to explore more details of particular tools, e.g. social bookmarking, and how we might apply them in our particular setting. We really want our library to be leaders in this area and we believe there is a strong opportunity for the library to play a significant role in social web initiatives within the company. This is just the beginning.On the way home (it took me 2 1/4 hrs. to drive what normally is a 50 min. commute, due to the snowstorm) as I was reflecting about the presentation, it occurred to me that I’d love to be able to do this kind of thing all the time. To be a sort of evangelist for emerging technologies, if you will. Maybe that’s the dream job I have always wanted.

GSLIS publications digitized

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I was excited to find out that some important publications from UIUC GSLIS are now digitized and available in UIUC’s institutional repository, IDEALS. These include:

Allerton Park Institute Proceedings(1954-1997)
Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing (1963-1995)
Occasional Papers (1949-2004)

These are highly important publications in terms of recent library history, and it is great that they are now readily available like this. I know that the Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing in particular discussed important, cutting edge development around MARC and early integrated library systems (including NOTIS from Northwestern University Library and LDMS from The University of Chicago Library), and that you can’t get a complete picture of library automation history without reading papers presented there. Take a look at http://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/handle/2142/154.

(Found out via message from Sue Searing, LIS librarian, to GSLIS faculty earlier today. )

Behind the scenes

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I was excited to read about a Flickr photoset of pictures taken of various areas within technical services at the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan.  (Seen via librarian.net.)  This photoset provides a lot of insight into how books and other material are received and processed in technical services in a large library.  Having taught a course in technical services librarianship, I am well aware of the utility of this kind of picture collection.  Most of the students who take my course have never worked in technical services and don’t have much of an idea what technical services is.  The class I’ve taught in the past is an online course and one of the biggest drawbacks to an online venue is the inability at times to give students “hands on” experience.  This is particularly the case when teaching  technical services.  In UIUC GSLIS’s online curriculum (LEEP), each class has only one opportunity to meet together in person, called an “on campus day.”  Usually for a portion of that day, I schedule a tour of UIUC’s Main Library technical services operation.  Feedback from students has shown that this firsthand look at technical services is tremendously helpful.

Surely the next best thing would be to show and discuss this photoset in class or have students look at it on their own.  That would go a long way toward demystifying some of the physical aspects of this area of librarianship.  I’d love to see more such photosets crop up on Flickr or elsewhere.  Folks, let’s shed light on technical services in libraries of all sorts!  Bring “the back room” out into the open!  I think a lot of people, including our library users, would find such exposure fascinating and insightful.