Anyhow, to make it easy on anyone who wants to participate, I’ve included the poll below as part of this post. Take a moment to tell me what you think:

[poll=2]

I don’t feel quite as passionate about some of this as Mark and others do. Maybe I should and because I don’t, that reflects poorly on me. I don’t know.

Yet I do have a reaction to the meeting to share, and it is based solely on Jay’s writeup (i.e. second hand at best). My reaction to the whole deal is, why oh why are we still debating and tossing around the same observations and identifying the same issues over and over again, and presenting them as if they are something new and revelatory?! For instance, Rick Lugg of R2 Consulting (whom I know from his days at YBP) gave a presentation that outlined challenges facing those who work in or management bibliographic control (i.e. cataloging) operations. Jay wrote that Rick’s presentation ended with him making the following summary:

1. How do we reduce our efforts and redirect our focus?
2. How can we redirect our expertise to new metadata schemes?
3. How can we open our systems and cultures to external support from authors, publishers, abstract and indexing (A&I) services, etc?

No offense meant to Rick, but none of this is new at all! This is something we’ve been talking about for well over 10 years.

Part of Jay’s writeup also included a summary of a presentation by Mechael Charbonneau of Indiana University in which (in Jay’s words) she “sees the need to optimize the allocation of staff in large research libraries and to free up catalogers to do new things, starting with user needs.” Hello? Why on earth are we not yet way past this stage?

Mark says he is mad; I’m just irked and discouraged by the lack of progress I see.

[tags]working group on the future of bibliographic control, rick lugg, l2 consulting, mark lindner, jay datema[/tags]

Aside from the many warm hugs I received from longstanding friends, here is a smattering of what I remember most about this year’s conference, in no particular order of importance:

• My friend and fellow “way past it” NASIG president, Susan Davis, jokingly remarking that I had peaked early (referring to when I was NASIG president eight years ago) and it was all downhill from there.
• My friend and another “way past it” NASIG president, Anne McKee, mistakenly using the word obituary when referring to me in her introduction of a session I took part in.
• Listening in amusement (and sometimes, amazement) at the open mic session Saturday night as various attendees stood up in front of a supportive audience to tell funny stories, read poetry, or sing acapella. I laughed ’til I cried at the story told by friend Gail Patrick of Depauw University that involved a motorcycle trip, snakes, and a visit to a place known as “The Garden of Eden.” Then there was a hilarious story from one woman that involved her mother’s false teeth. One first-time attendee worked up the courage to sing a solo. The whole event was great!
• Wonderful food and great conversations at the dine-arounds Friday and Saturday evenings. Saturday night especially featured fantastic food at a restaurant in downtown Louisville named Saffron that featured simple yet elegant Persian-inspired food. I had an incredible rack of lamb on a bed of basmati rice, accompanied by a wonderful old vine Zinfandel whose name I can’t recall. I also remember one morning when we sat down with someone I had known for many years who is a cataloger at a state institution in the Washington, D.C. area. She was there with her husband and in the course of conversing with them I was floored to learn that they are avid thoroughbred horse-racing buffs and that they own several racehorses! Even more amazing was the fact that her husband knew of someone with whom I grew up in east central Illinois who is now a highly successful trainer based at Arlington Racetrack. His comment about my classmate, whose name is Chris Block, was simply “Money in the bank; money in the bank.” I told them how much I was fascinated with thoroughbred horse-racing when I was growing up and how Chris planned to grow up to be a trainer and I was going to be his jockey. He has reached his dream but somehow I grew out of any jockey aspirations They even invited me to go with them to one of the nearby stables where they were going to check on the status of one of the brood mares they own. Unfortunately I couldn’t do that because I needed to leave for home immediately after the conference.
• Many stimulating conversations on personal and professional topics with Mark Lindner, who shared the car trip and conference hotel room with me. I really enjoyed getting to know him and was glad to spend time with him. One of his many strengths is that he is unabashedly open and frank about what he thinks and about his life.
• Talking with Sanjeet-Singh Mann, a student grant award winner from UCLA’s Department of Information Studies, about the importance of values and ethics in librarianship, among other things.
• Meeting and talking with Steve Black from the College of St. Rose about the serials course he teaches at SUNY Albany, and also learning about a podcast program he founded for his institution called Periodical Radio, which focuses on interviewing editors and publishers of magazines and periodicals. Steve is also the author of a recently published book on serials management from Libraries Unlimited entitled Serials in Libraries: Issues and Practices.

There was of course much more to the three days. I haven’t even mentioned anything about the sessions I attended. I’ll try to mention some things about that in a different post.

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¹Henderson, Kathryn Luther. “Personalities of Their Own: Some Informal Thoughts on Serials and Teaching About How to Catalog Them.” Serials Librarian 22, no. 1/2 (1992): 3-16.

I will be joining several others in a panel presentation focusing on alternative careers in librarianship to be held on Saturday afternoon. The abstract for our presentation is “Regeneration,” “diversification” and “redesign” are buzzwords tossed around constantly in today’s job market. Those with M.L.S. degrees are facing a sea change of options in their career paths. While these new opportunities can be exhilarating and exciting, they can be somewhat daunting as well. This panel of librarians will discuss the unique twists and turns of their very divergent careers and offer suggestions on how to market your M.L.S. degree for nontraditional jobs. We anticipate and encourage a high level of discussion between the panel and the audience.

Bloggers whom I anticipate will be there — that is, aside from Mark (Off the Mark) and myself — include Karen Schneider (Free Range Librarian), Anna Creech (Eclectic Librarian), Dan Chudnov (One Big Library), Diane Hillmann (contributor to LITAblog), and maybe others I don’t know about yet.

I may or may not be blogging about NASIG experiences and sessions during the next several days. Stay tuned.

As a side note, I am pleased that Mark Lindner of Off The Mark fame will join me on my trip to Louisville, KY to attend NASIG.

I have no idea how many people will tune in to join the online discussion but I suspect it will be quite a few, perhaps as many as 40 or 50 people. The report and Karen’s visit to the class tomorrow have generated a lot of interest among other faculty in the school as well as from other parts of the extended GSLIS community. Mark Lindner will do his sterling job as usual in terms of broadcasting the session and I know that he, too, is really looking forward to it.

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.