January 22, 2008
Library Subject Guides in the Multidisciplinary, Interdisciplinary, Trans-disciplinary World
The Women's Studies Section of ACRL offered an interesting discussion topic at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia last week, "(Re)Thinking Subject Guides: Interactivity Unbound." This group offers great topics which generate a surprising amount of interest, based on the fact that I ended up sitting on the floor for this.
There was a great deal of sharing from a number of institutions on how they are dealing with subject guides. Two libraries mentioned using LibGuides from Springshare. Here are a couple of examples of institutes using it, Boston College and Dalhousie University. I'm not going to get into the pros and cons of this software in this entry, since my purpose is to simply spill the gist of the discussion that took place.
Another management system mentioned was Luminis, which offers personal portals with tabs and will automatically show subject librarians.
A Michigan State librarian mentioned using open source LibData for subject guides, created by University of Minnesota. Here's an example of one of their subject guides for African Studies
Wayne State mentioned using Conduit software to create toolbars with different categories.
There was talk of using Del.icio.us to create a feed or list of online resource into guides but people agreed that it doesn't work well for personalizing a guide once you're in Del.icio.us.
One participant said there is such a thing as too much information and offers strictly one page guides to undergraduates at the University of Central Florida.
There was talk about whether "emerging technology" is the best thing to use for subject guides. Some folks said good ol' paper handouts work best for them. Others give handouts during instructional sessions but also offer them as PDFs and post links to them online.
We discussed using wikis as subject guides and I was surprised by acomment from one librarian who said people at her institution bulk at offering wikis for students because the library discredits using Wikipedia for academic research so creating one might encourage the wiki mentality. (Honey, the wikis are already HERE! Read Everything is Miscellaneous)
University of California - San Diego's Science and Engineering Library talked about using wikis but one person said they ended up with too many wikis and couldn't tame the clutter. They are now working on working out ways of creating better control over wikis and working toward standardization.
It appeared that many librarians opted for newer, easier technology for subject guides in order to circumvent institutional IT departments which weren't allowing them to create their own personalized tools for specific courses or topics.
Someone in the group asked if anyone kept statistics on the use of subject guides in their library and there was very little response to that idea. One library had surveyed students to see what they would like in a subject guide. There was no mention of the results of this survey. A couple librarians mentioned they relied on subject guides for answering research question from disciples in which they were not as familiar with resources. Others said their faculty used subject guides and even suggested topics for guides. That lead to a discussion on how you determine which topics need subject guides. Most librarians base guides on the disciple areas within their institutions. If you don't offer a major in European Studies do you really need a subject guide on that? This ends up being one of the major problems facing librarians as disciplines become more and more intertwined.
Posted by swortman at 04:44 PM | Comments (0)
June 26, 2007
ALA Annual Conference Photos
More photos available on Flickr.
Posted by swortman at 03:56 PM | Comments (0)
June 24, 2007
Saturday @ ALA - EBSS Day
Saturday was EBSS Day for me. EBSS is the Education and Behavioral Science Section in ACRL. The day started at 10:30 with committee meetings. Being relatively new to ALA I made the mistake of volunteering for too many things. Consequently I'm on two committees that met at the same time and were presenting programs Saturday afternoon, one after the other.
The Reference Committee talked of creating an EBSS wiki for information in research on education and behavioral science librarianship. The plus would be the collaboration. The minus side would be the collaboration. Too many wikis have been created which end up being just the work of one person. People, particularly graduate students, seem to be worried about being judged on what they submit to a wiki and feel it should be a finished article. Either that or they don't like the idea of someone else editing their ideas. In the work intensive environment of a graduate program there is not enough time to contribute to wikis and blogs if it's not going to get you extra points on your CV.
EBSS Program Saturday Afternoon
EBSS started the afternoon program by presending the Distinguished Education and Behavioral Sciences Librarian Award for 2007. Patricia O'Brian Libutti, recently retired social sciences/education librarian from Rutgers won the award. I don't know her but liked her immediately when she announce that she was going to take the $1000 award and go fly fishing with her husband. Now that's a woman who plans to enjoy her retirement!
After the award came the program, Empowering Data: Persuasion Through Presentation.
There were three panelists/speakers at the program
1. Bob Molyneux, statistician and librarian
2. Steve Hiller from University of Washington
3. Maribeth Manoff from University of Tennessee
None of them really spoke on the idea of persuasion through presentation, which was the theme. They each talked about their experiences which was okay and people seemed to be interested and had plenty of questions duing the Q & A time so hopefully it was something worthwhile.
The thing that really surprised me was the Research Committee's program after this, held right next door. This was the first time for this event which highlighted a few select people's early research attempts. There were five poster session/discussion events which overlapped. Thanks to the generosity of APA the event had a reception with a lovely food spread which always seems to attract people. People had the chance to casually walk around and review each poster session, talk with the researchers and pick up fliers while enjoying fabulous desserts, dips, fruit and coffee.
The five poster and discussion topics were:
1.Information Literacy Rubrics with the Disciplines
2. Innocense Lost: Communication Studies Publishers and the Modern Library
3.Information Seeking Behavior of Graduate Education Students
4. Book and Journal Use in Four Social Science Disciplines
5. Blogging to My Peeps: Communication with Psychology, Linguistics, and Sociology Departments
All were well done and interesting. I think the general feeling was that this format worked will and sessions were well attended, especially considering this was the first time it was held. APA is planning on sponsoring similar events at future annual conferences which is good news.
Posted by swortman at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)
June 23, 2007
Libraries Build Communities at ALA - Friday
I joined a group of about 25 librarians from across the country to work at the Capital Area Food Bank as part of ALA’s Libraries Build Communities. This voluntary program started last year as a way to give back to the local area when ALA became one of the first major conferences to return and support New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Hundreds of people attending the conference volunteered to help the New Orleans community rebuild and the event was such a success it's being repeated in DC. All big cities have their problems, not just NO. Wherever Annual is held there are plenty of opportunities available to say, “ALA was here” besides having its members spend their money.
Groups this year could sign up to work at local schools, public libraries, Habitat for Humanity or the Capital Area Food Bank. This food bank where I worked supplies one million pounds of food per month to area homeless shelters, day cares, and other agencies in the greater DC area. The food is donated by grocery stores like Giant and Safeway, along with smaller local groups. The food pantry also grows some of the food it gives away and offers programs to at risk people within the community, teaching them about nutrition. According to Oye, the woman who directed us and kept us on task there are over 600,000 people at risk of hunger in the DC area. Think of it – filling the University of Michigan stadium six times with people and they’re all hungry! It’s hard to imagine and even harder when you realize, like Pat, a librarian from Notre Dame said that this is just one city and the same problem exists wherever ALA holds their annual convention. On the plus side, we calculated that our group today sorted and packed 40,000 pounds of juice, juice boxes and condiments and 14,375 pounds of pasta and macaroni.
Linda TerHaar Michigan’s Undergraduate Library Director also volunteered at a local school library. I haven’t had the chance to talk to her much but it sounds like her group worked hard, sorting old books and organizing and updating a local school media center collection. I managed to get a picture of her before the camera batteries went dead. Hopefully there will be some pictures on Flckr soon from other people.
Posted by swortman at 09:21 AM | Comments (2)
June 15, 2007
ALA in DC
Here are a few sessions dealing with Social Software in Libraries or Library 2.0 coming up at the American Library Association Annual Meeting. If you see others that might be of interest please let me know.
• Saturday 11:00 pm - Facebook After Hours party
• Sunday 10:30 am - 12:00 pm - RUSA -MARS Chair’s Program - Harnessing the Hive: Social Networks and Libraries
• Monday 10:30 am - 12:00 pm - PLA -LD Wiking the Blog and Walking the Dog–Social Software, Virtual Reality, and Authority Everywhere
• Monday 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm - LAMA -BES Is the Learning Commons Enough? — Asking the Better Questions
ACRL also has a webcast on podcasting (!) coming up on July 10. It costs $, unfortunately but looks interesting "The Classroom Will Now Be Podcast: Podcasting in Higher Education and Implications for Academic Libraries"
(Could we get a group of people who went to ALA to share any innovative things they saw and learned about, whether 2.0 or not present something or blog about it?)
Posted by swortman at 09:00 AM | Comments (0)