Eponymous blog about libraries

I spent a few days with friends in Chicago after the conference, and then had to get back up to speed at work, so I’m woefully behind on my blogging. But here is a quick link I wanted to show while I was thinking of it.

I recently worked with someone in our medical education department who wanted to gather multimedia/nonprint material to use in a series of classes on host defense. Having found thirty or so prospects, I had to decide how to turn them over to him–now, and in the future.

I set up a del.icio.us account for the project and started tagging the links. Del.icio.us allows you to bundle the tags into groups, so I made sure I used tags that themselves fit into fairly tidy categories. The result: links that can be filtered by format, topic, and source. Want a quiz on coagulation? No problem. This little project is obviously in its infancy but I love the idea of using del.icio.us to offer a form of faceted browsing.

Speaking of which, a favorite example of faceted browsing is the WoW Gem Finder. I don’t play World of Warcraft and haven’t the foggiest idea what this is for, but it’s fascinating to try out and shows how you can incorporate a sophisticated tool in something targeted at informal information seekers.

Some of my fellow bloggers were on-stage at the Social Networking Forum, so I’ll give you the summary as seen from the audience.

First order of business was the blogging guidelines that the task force had released. Some people hadn’t read them, so here’s a link. Someone suggested that the task force do a similar set of guidelines for wikis.

The next topic was a survey that had been done to see where the membership was in terms of their experience with social networking tools. The survey revealed a much greater disparity between hospital and academic librarians than between older and younger members of MLA. Hospital librarians were much more likely never to use blogs and academic librarians were more likely to use them every day and think they are important. The survey results are available on the SNS blog.

The next point was the CE course on Web 2.0, a.k.a. Bart’s ploy to get more Facebook friends. The audience seemed to think the project a success, and the panelists mentioned that they had a higher rate of completion of the course than comparable efforts achieved.

The session ended with a number of audience questions about how to follow up on the CE course, how to use wikis or blogs as public-facing websites, whether the task force would help sections use Web 2.0 tools to deliver classes on other topics, and whether librarians should be teaching Web 2.0 to users.

After snagging an early, plum seat in the hall for the Web 2.0 plenary session (important for the nearsighted!), I’m ready to catch up on some sessions from yesterday afternoon.

Technologies in Teaching started with Jaime Friel Blanck reporting on the results of her, Anna Tatro’s and Stefanie Warlick’s survey on use of web-based instruction—a topic sure to interest me, since I did my MLS entirely online at Drexel. The topics most frequently taught online were information literacy, orientation courses, and classes on how to do certain kinds of literature searches. 73% of the classes were online-only, 51% were synchronous (took place in real-time), 55% were four weeks or longer, and 64% were for credit. There were many more stats where those came from (and Jaime had a handout) but I’ll just summarize by saying that their work showed that web-based teaching can be set up with few technical hurdles and is being used in meaningful ways by many institutions.

Josephine Tan reported on how she integrated the library into the medical curriculum through a combination of online tutorials, podcasts, and blogs. She presented a chart of the four-year medical curriculum and the offerings of the library for each part which were in different formats and covered different topics, e.g. an EBM resources course for third-year students just back from their first clerkship. An excellent chart at the end showed the ROI for her blog activities: it took her 18 hours to interact with 14 users per month when she did so as an in-person consultation, but with four hours of effort on the blog (one hour per week), she could make 200 or more user contacts. While both forms are needed, she showed that a well-written blog can be an important point of ongoing contact.

In this panel, Alan T. Williams also reported on the usefulness of Wimba Live Classroom (which I used for the first time recently and liked a lot) and Feili Tu reported about her library school’s experiences building a library and classroom space in Second Life. If I may be permitted to editorialize, these two presentations were an interesting juxtaposition to me because both environments offer the same thing, on a functional level: a place to interact and work with others online. But they differ hugely in their format and technological overhead. I have been a huge Second Life skeptic since I first tried to run it (not easily) on my fairly tricked-out home PC. Second Life does offer a totally different visual and navigational concept from web tools like Wimba, but I’ve never been convinced that that concept, a sense of physical or geographical space, is needed. I’ve spent the past eight or nine years learning how to interact intensely online, without knowing what people look like or where they are, or any kind of “meatspace” metaphor like that, and I see advantages to that kind of abstraction. I continue to think that we’re going to reach a lot more people with Wimba than we will with Second Life.

My free McGraw-Hill chair massage, which took place next to the MLA ‘09 booth’s soothing Hawaiian song and dance. (If you slept late and missed their big performance this morning, they’re doing more in the exhibit hall at 12:30 and a few other times in the afternoon that I don’t remember. They’re to the right of the bottom of the escalator.)

I felt like I was in Hawaii already! By the way, it was a really excellent chair massage, and I now feel a bit like a noodle, which is convenient as I’m about to go for Italian food with some other folks involved in the NLM Disaster Informationist project.

This morning I heard that there are 2,484 attendees at the conference, which doesn’t surprise me after my experiences yesterday in the bustling exhibit hall and poster session.

I went to the exhibit hall first—something I’ve never experienced since the first conference I attended, Code4Lib, didn’t have much of a vendor presence. Overall, it made me wish I knew about our library’s current offerings in more detail so that I could ask smarter questions. My library divvied up a list of resources we were interested in, so I went to the McGraw-Hill booth with a list of questions about a particular product. I had a nice conversation with their representative and was happy that the booth I volunteered for was the one giving away free massages! Now I just need to find a free moment to claim it. I also got a cool CD of Nature podcasts, which I think I’ll enjoy because I’m a fan of the Scientific American podcasts.

I had a poster to present yesterday (it’s still there on board #69, if you care to look), so as soon as I was done at McGraw-Hill, I ran upstairs to grab a cup of tea and station myself. I spent a pleasant hour punctuated by visits from my NYU colleagues. A few people took my card to remind themselves to look at the poster online later, some skimmed the title and walked on, and some stayed and talked with me for a while. Obviously, I liked that best, since some of the most interesting things we found in our project didn’t fit on the poster (at least, at any font size that could be read!). My only regret is that I couldn’t go and see other posters while the presenters were there during that hour.

I was able to stay for two presentations at the “Bridging the Gap” session on education and technology. The first was from Melissa Rethlefson and Ann Farrell from the Mayo, talking about a thirteen-week course they led to teach librarians and associates in their network of libraries about web 2.0. Their clear statistical analysis revealed which topics participants liked best and stuck with (reading blogs, using wikis) and which they found difficult and didn’t pursue (online collaboration, PubMed mashups). It was hard to write down all the details so I’d urge you to look for their presentation online. They suggested that anyone teaching similar topics keep it short and simple, offer comprehensive instructions for newbies and a liaison to help them if they get frustrated, and recognize that participants need to take responsibility for their own learning.

Marcus Banks and Sadie Honey from UCSF (the third author, Julia Kochi, was not on stage), spoke about their experiences with projects in perpetual beta, or what they prefer to call iterative design. They showed a very helpful chart of a continuum of systems that are amenable to iterative design: least likely are systems that are highly interdependent (e.g. ILL), next are established policies at your own library, and best are entirely new offerings (e.g. a wiki server). Marcus presented a number of slides on lessons learned, which I’ll summarize briefly: set expectations, be realistic, train users to give good feedback and yourself to hear it productively, consider dependencies, pull the plug if you need to, and finally, be prepared to take what you’ve learned and do it all over again.

I really enjoyed the Tech Trends panel this morning. The format had each panelist speaking briefly about a trend–no Powerpoint, hooray!–followed by a Q&A period. Rikke Ogawa was on-hand to navigate to relevant websites. (If only MIS would issue me a high-tech pair of eyes that could read the text at that distance.)

A quick listing of the topics: moving content out of isolated silos and into the workflow of our users; QR codes; emerging standards for social networking; courseware systems and what they can do beyond just hosting classes; personal health records; mobile devices, texting, and short-form blogging; and new interfaces such as multitouch and how they can help with collaboration in meeting or study settings.

I won’t be able to distill all my notes right now, but I’ll describe a few of my favorite moments. QR codes are like barcodes but can hold lots more information (I first read about them in the NYT last year). increasingly, I’ve been seeing museums offer numbers you can call on your cellphone to hear an audioguide (like at the current Murakami exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum) and QR codes could offer a similar function in an easier, more data-rich way.

I also liked hearing about the ways that new hardware could support group learning and collaboration. Innovative study spaces are something I started thinking about after visiting Yale’s new Bass Library last fall, and now the NYU Health Sciences Libraries are thinking about similar issues. But why should it just be arranging tables and chairs around the same old computer set-up? As librarians we can be tempted to think narrowly about interfaces and focus on the web, but there’s much more to computing than that. Bring on the “Minority Report” screens!

Memo to self: check out Evernote as soon as you have time.

88% of of those surveyed in the room want the panel to be a yearly event, so there will be more soon, I’m suree.