shinylib

Outreach, E-Learning, Resource Guides

I was hoping that the first presentation, on providing library services at Multicultural student services centers would help me figure out the next steps to take with a virtual outreach project I am trying to coordinate via the library website, involving student services providers at PCC. It did not, but did at least give me hope and faith that student services providers can take an interest in how the library can work with them to the benefit of our students. The UNM program is a physical outreach project, but many principles work the same: flexibility, visibility, marketing, etc.

Other speakers provided information about services at their libraries that are not transferable or relevant to PCC at this point. University of Colorado – Boulder has developed an in-house database that provides access to library FAQs, course guides, and subject guides. They are having success with this approach and are able to keep better statistics on what students are searching for and can shift the metadata attached to their guides to get students to existing guides that meet their needs but were missed based on the search strategy used. This has interesting implications, but ultimately isn’t what we want to do, I think. I was put in mind of Jared Spool’s talk at Online NW this year, I got the impression from him that search boxes can cause some issues, but I haven’t looked at the UC-Boulder page to see exactly how they have implemented the search feature. Continue reading…

Opportunistic Reference

Lots of talk of that QuestionPoint qwidget going on at this conference. I didn’t realize how many folks were into this vendor-chat thing. Overall I think I’m more interested in bringing IM to our virtual reference offerings. We participate in L-net and I firmly believe in the importance of the service, but I do believe that our students are going to be more apt to use IM. Actually, I’m most convinced that we need to figure out txt reference, but that’s another post.

I really appreciated Bill Pardue’s (slam the boards) talk on predatory reference. As he said, think of it as a nature film: we are question-eating animals. I love that! We consume questions and we need to hunt them down. It may have been once upon a time that our potential users had nowhere else to go, but that is not true any longer. Consider services like ChaCha that are actively stalking our prey (questions). How do we connect to our patrons when they are not in our buildings, virtual spaces, and other ‘expected’ locales? We need to be in the quad, at the caf, over by the gym, in the coffee shop, etc. See the notes on this section for a brief overview of what some academic folks have been doing. Hey bosslady, can we have a hot dog cart, too?! (Or one of those bike ice cream carts, as I quipped on Facebook)

Kudos to Greg Notess for actually making me take an interest in screencasting (libcasting as he calls it). I had really been yawning at this idea for quite a while now, but I am starting to see the light.

Continue reading…

Organizing People & Software Options for Maximum Service

Another session which really illustrates the differences between chat reference and IM reference. Interesting that M. Kathleen Kern reports patrons choose IM over vendor-chat 7 to 1. I understand the limitations of most of the existing IM services, but I’m not sure I see why they developed their own client. I suspect that they were simultaneously developing alongside clients like libraryh3lp and Hab.la, both of which are now freely available and solve many of the issues that prompted them to design in-house in the first place. Also interesting was her discussion of why collaborative VR is worthwhile, even on a single campus.

USC libraries contribute to an OCLC QuestionPoint similar to L-net and still wanted to explore the IM options in addition to the vendor-chat method. Most interesting about this decision was the belief that users should be able to stay in their native chat environment and not have to come to the library website to use the chat service. Other presenters indicate their agencies approached this in different ways, some deciding that forcing users into the library website is the most effective way to provide service and others, like USC, deciding that it’s a barrier. I come down firmly on the side of it being a barrier. If I can get you to remember me as a resource just by getting into your buddy list once it seems far more effective than forcing you onto the library website. Continue reading…

VR Varieties: Specialized, Blended, & Academic

I suppose I hadn’t really grokked the difference between “chat” and IM reference before this conference. Chat reference is used to refer to using some software suite such as QuestionPoint that offers services such as archives/transcripts which can be emailed to the user, some statistics on usage, co-browsing, etc. IM is the use of one of the major IM services (gtalk, AIM, yahoo, MSN, jabber, meebo) to provide limited, but perhaps faster transactions.

I was especially interested in the challenges K-state reported to rolling out IM. Across the conference it seems as though there are reasons to choose to provide chat or IM services. In terms of PCC, I think that IM would be a good option. Many presenters note that IM users self-select and thus understand the limitations of the service–not as apt to ask in-depth questions. Also, IM is (mostly) free whereas a full-service chat suite is gonna cost ya. Continue reading…

Innovative Approaches: Shaking, Sharing, & Spanning

This group of presentations was the first of the sessions I attended. On the whole I didn’t find anything that I can really apply to my environment. I was pleased to see an example of how another library has used video teleconferencing to provide reference service. This has come up a few times now, but I don’t think it will work for PCC…at least not any time soon. It seems expensive and like something that is really going to work for some extra large agencies, but again not too much for us right now.

Here are my notes, slides will be available at BCR soon. Continue reading…

“Reference in the Age of Wikipedia, Or Not…”

David W. Lewis of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis was the keynote speaker for the Reference Renaissance conference. His talk was good, but didn’t inspire me the way I was hoping. Perhaps it was the style of the address: mostly using a lot of quotes from other notable thinkers in the field. I was hoping for more synthesis… slides will appear at BCR later. Apologies, my notes are fairly jumbled and you’re probably better off waiting for the slides. Continue reading…

Things to do in Denver yadda yadda

Arrived in Denver with significantly less drama than was involved in getting to Anaheim.* The Reference Renaissance doesn’t actually begin until tomorrow but today held registration and a reception, replete with mediocre snacks and pricey booze. I digress, the snacks are not the reason I’m writing.

You know I seldom wax personal here at shinylib, but I have some personal reflectin’ to do. It’s necessary sometimes.

I went out with friends and colleagues this evening for dinner and such and as always happens I tell a lot of stories. (I’m not a player I just talk a lot… a ha ha) Anyway, I was talking about experiences I have had in the recent and less-recent past and I realized (again) that I can be a total ass sometimes. This isn’t really news, but it’s a good thing to reflect on from time to time and to keep in check.

It’s interesting to me how I can leave all most of my judgments at the door when I go to work. I’m not there to stress you about anything, my job is to help make your life easier and I love that you might get to learn something new. But when I’m not on the clock? I’m like a lot of people in our profession, I’m sure: hyper critical and especially snarky about things I find less-than. The world and it’s people frustrate me and don’t behave according to logic and it makes me cranky. It’s temping to say, “Well, I’m not a librarian all the time,” and just dismiss it, but I’m not sure that I’m not a librarian all the time. I don’t shut her off at the end of the work day and leave her in my office. Maybe I should, but I don’t know how.

Anyway, I was reminded tonight that people are more apt to learn things when you’re not an ass during the delivery. Well, the message was more eloquently put, but that’s the sentiment. It’s so easy to remember this when I’m at work, but I need to work on transferring this to my personal life. I’m sure that given time it will make me less $^$%&#@$%* and that could be a good thing. Work-life balance, yanno?

That’s enough personal reflection. More later on conference happenings. Needless to say I’m going to a LOT of virtual reference sessions. That is both good and bad. Good because it’s something I dig, bad because while I’m doing that I’m not getting informed on other realms. Good things I have 2 colleagues here from PCC with me, we can share the knowledge.

*What, I haven’t told you about the near mid-air collision?! Ask me about it sometime…

experience economy @ your library

While I was at ALA I attended the BIGWIG unconference and had a great conversation with David Lee King and other unconference participants about the ideas of experience economy and community development within your digital community. For example, consider the idea of Build-a-Bear (those creepy overpriced bears that you stuff on your own). It costs so much more money to build a bear than it does to just buy a plush bear from somewhere. The idea is that people want to buy the experience, if you just wanted a bear you’d go to HugeBoxStore and buy one for 8 bucks. What you’re really paying for is the experience of choosing fur, stuffing the thing yourself, selecting your own beady little eyes, and having it all stitched together within the hour: customization. Experience economy tells us that people are in search of more than a service, more than a product. Continue reading…

Wrapping up

It’s always a bit sad to leave conference. You make new friends, see old friends, and generally have a sleepaway camp feel about the whole event. At least that’s how I feel about the time spent.

Yesterday I went to the ACRL Science and Technology section (STS) program on innovation in science learning and the ACRL President’s Program. The President’s program speaker, Dan Ariely, was really interesting. So much so, in fact, that I was motivated to buy his new book. I’ve never really done much thinking from the behavioral economist perspective and his talk was quite fascinating. For me, the biggest Ah Ha! was related to the idea of free and what that means to people. Dan suggested that if a person buy’s a gym membership, but fails to use it, you motivate them to come back by reminding them that they are ripping themselves off each month for $__. In the library environment we tend to remind people ad nauseum that what we are providing is free. So, rather than emphasizing that the students have access to x number of databases for free, we need to emphasize that x  percentage of their tuition is spent on databases and they are in fact wasting $__ by not using them. Or something that that effect, he does a much better job with it.

Ironically, this is similar to something I do in the classroom all the time—and I was worried I was doing it wrong. I tell students all the time that our resources are incredibly expensive, certainly not free, and mostly paid for by them. I just don’t emphasize that they are losing out in a financial sense if they don’t use them.

The STS program was interesting although I felt that Felice Frankel, the first presenter, did not have anything for me that I could apply in the library or classroom. She’s the author of several books and is a well-known scientific image creator/photographer. It seemed the session was largely intended to promote her new book of scientific images. The imagery is stunning, don’t get me wrong, and even the concepts around science instruction. I guess I was just missing the bits on science and IL instruction—on a community college library budget. Here’s what there is from my sparse notes… Continue reading…

notes from Anaheim

Just a quick note from Anaheim to say that our ACRL 101 program went off without a hitch. I am so pleased and proud of the work of all of the Emerging Leaders in my group. Planning a national conference program was a totally new thing to me but I think it’s a skill set that I can really get a lot of mileage from.

Had dinner with Kevin and Sara Ryan last night. That was a blast. I was feeling a bit sorry for myself and my lack of dinner company when Kevmo came through with the plan to meet at the Hilton. Sara and I have crossed paths a few times at conferences but never actually hung out. Holy mess, I hope to put in more face time with this powerhouse sometime. Our blends of ridiculous hilarity mesh very well…and there were $9 potato chips!

After dinner and assorted hijinks we parted ways about 10:30 last night…and I promptly got really lost and end up walking all over hell and gone. After uttering the words, “I don’t get lost at conferences too often,” I suppose it’s what I get. In either case I have some gnarly blisters to show for it.

There really haven’t been any groundshaking (for me) sessions just yet. Today I’m off to check out a program on the future of face to face reference and then some research into reference services. After that, it’s an ACRL membership advisory committee meeting and presentation (by me, eek).