Tom’s Thoughts

The impact of last night is still dawning on me…it may take several days to appreciate fully what has happened. Let us celebrate this day for its significance and mark this experience in history and in our present, but let us not forget that there is more work to do…or undo as the case may be.

Today seems a bit brighter, my weariness a bit lighter. Hope has been re-ignited, not that which expresses itself in giddiness or self-satisfaction, rather that which reminds one of those who have gone before and not lost faith. This hope is grounded in work accomplished and in fervent devotion to what lie ahead.

[Session at ALA Annual Meeting, Anaheim, CA June 28, 2008]
As one of the founding parents of the LITA Top Tech Trends, I am perhaps biased, but….

I’m really glad that this time more “trendsters” participated in part due to the wonders of technology. The inclusion of additional voices, perspectives cannot but help. These sessions have been widely oversubscribed for several years, a great success for LITA. And I gather that “listeners” this time had the option of coming into the discussion from a variety of virtual avenues. And to some degree the nature of the setup was more participatory. Again, very good moves forward.

The content was generally interesting, though not much new under the sun. Perhaps on that front, this type of activity increasingly takes on a “preach at them until they change their behavior” rather than an opportunity to reflect on a *few* interesting trends, relate some gottchas from the past, and the process of selecting and analyzing trends and their impact on libraries.
I found the execution, however, disappointing. The “trendsters” had good content, but its delivery was troubling for me. First, I found it incredibly difficult to hear much of the conversation from the back and middle of the room. And the “remote” “trendsters” were practically indecipherable. Clearly there was a problem with the in room sound reinforcement, not uncommon at conferences, but adjustments could be made. With a setup as in this room, there should be no feedback through the sound system…none whatsoever. The balance of the in-person mics and the remote audio feeds was off-track.

I’ve always questioned the real value of projecting the “back channel” at conferences, but perhaps for me that’s a learning/info acquisition issue. I was surprised that at times I was able to follow some of the in-person presentation and the “back channel” conversation. BUT the setup and management of the channel was very distracting. It was not clear to me who was controlling what displayed when, perhaps this needs to be handled by someone who is not responsible for any other activities…and one who is viewing the large screen version in order to understand how even slight adjustments can ruin the effect for the audience. The frequent flips between the Meebo room and the Twitter feed were not conducive to following this added information source. Plus, the display resolution projected caused the display of the conversation to flip off the screen each time new comments were added to the Meebo room. Perhaps this could be better handled by having a separate computer used solely for displaying the public side of the conversation. It appeared to me that the feed to the projector was coming from a laptop in use for other purposes by one of the panelists. Thus, some times the display would flip back and forth between earlier comments and the current flow.

I write these things not as a discouragement (although I still question the value of the “back channel”), but as a reminder that we can do much better.

Also, I did find it interesting that I could not get any cellular signal in the room and therefore could not participate in the “back channel.”

[Session at ALA Annual Meeting, Anaheim, CA June 28, 2008]
Joan Frye Williams:

We’re in the idea business.
Relationship management business, more about relationships than transactions.

• “Members” preferred term for what we call users, patrons, customers.
• Thinking about what they will want next.

Not just a place to go, a place to do things

• not the grocery store, but a kitchen
• trust us enough to be a co-creater

Rise in idea of wellness, library is a way to keep your mind alive.

Stephen Abrams:

To survive libraries and librarians must:

• Sustain the progress of building a better generation. Millennials
• Drop the anonymity of librarians–use NAME tags professionals have names.
• Permit and support differentiating by specialization. Nancy Pearl on steroids.
• Get rid of the “cowboy” librarian. Change is necessary.
• Preserve the expertise developed by librarians over years.
• Measure/track top ref questions.
• Share program ideas.
• Collaboratively make each other look good.
• Insist on leadership that calls us on our faults, our failures.
• Stop shallow conversations…”oh, they started with Google.”
• Recognize that everything is mobile, don’t need a physical library for the data…perhaps do for services, collaborative research.
• Allow other adults to decide what level of privacy they desire.

José-Marie Griffiths:

The future of librarians, rather than the future of libraries.

Positive: amount of use is up in many cases, librarians working outside of libraries,

What is fundamental?

• notion of “collection” underpins what a library has been, cannot lose the notion, but no longer physically limited to one location
• “organization” from multiple perspectives and communities, work collaboratively with others, not just ourselves, create more opportunities for discovery
• “discovery and access” where do we play and where do we let others play. what areas in which others may do a better job then we would
• “library as place” increasingly important, physically visits are up, growing evolving, interactions among users (member communities), library a place where communities come together to develop the community, have to have a good understanding of user evolving needs and desires as far as services are concerned, but have to maintain services across generations.

What is important?

• LAM (libraries, archives, museums) engender a huge amount of public trust. More than internet, corporations, gov agencies, individuals developing their own web sites. Must maintain and build trust.
• Workforce study: more librarians are needed, fastest growing sector outside libraries, have focused on technical skills, need to balance with humanistic values
• Biggest threat lack of understanding of libraries and what librarians do. Stop talking just to ourselves. Got milk? Milk was pretty routine, boring, but ad made milk hip again, we need that for libraries/librarians
• Currently organize material at a sub-optimal level, need to think bigger than ownership and accountability
• Biggest opportunity: libraries are drivers of development: personal, community, economic. Need to make this known.

Comments:

• need to collaborate more on shared technology, skills push shared options to regain resources
• need new models of organization
• consolidate delivery of support for efficiency
• member services: we have credit cards that can be used anywhere, why not library cards that can be used anywhere
• How do we help remove barriers?
• How do we get people unstuck?
• Stephen: “Language of libraries is close to language of s&m…control, discipline, etc.”
• Reintroduce play.
• Proactively seek the kinds of people we want to have working in libraries. Recruit younger, earlier-career entrants.
• infonation.ca Canadian workforce study
• We are not saving the world from bibliographic ignorance, connecting people with information and expertise.

David Lankes:
What “should” the future of libraries and librarians in a democracy be?

Participatory Librarianship

• knowledge is created through conversation
• libraries are in the knowledge business
• therefore, libraries are in the conversation business

games: now learn by playing the game, need to approach our systems that way, instruction manuals are old-tech
participatory approach:

• user is in control
• user constructs the system
• it is all about learning; it is not about access
• learning is a collaborative conversation
• librarians serve as facilitators of conversations
• true facilitation with the community means shared ownership
• invest in tools for creation over the collections of artifacts, users make their own artifacts

Dewey-level shift: technical systems, physical spaces, services

changes needed in LIS education

• distributed throughout practice and other industries
• model co-learning in the classroom
• recognize and enhance the participatory network that is a school
• include communication and political skills
• teach the obligation of leadership
• innovative for core principles
• question tradition
• hold the visionaries to account
• where’s the data, where’s the theory

YOU are the future of the library

When I was in Maryland, I attended the Mid-Atlantic Educause meetings. Like those meetings the SER one was focused and pragmatic–useful. It was great to get connected with some more folks in the SE. I’m also always amazed at the people one meets from one’s own institution at events such as this. In my case, I met some folks from UA that I may not have met on campus–good stuff.

Two big take-aways for me:

• Academic librarians need to get more involved in higher ed and technology focused events. Many are already, but more would benefit from networking with their counterparts at other institutions and their colleagues on the IT side of the house, as well as having an opportunity to be exposed to broader issues of teaching and learning on their campuses and within higher ed in general.
• Academic librarians and IT professionals have much to learn from each other, despite the sometimes wide gulf of cultures. There is much in common. Problems and issues relevant to both have been addressed by the other; much could be gained by being at the same table.

[Session at Educause Southeast Regional Conference, Jacksonville, FL June 2-4, 2008]
Call it what you want, but discussions of cyberinfrastructure requires a shared lexicon so that conversations can be understood in meaningful ways.
Collaboration
Significant change in organizational structure and climate.
Communicating across organizational boundaries (within campuses or among institutions)
It’s not just hardware and software, though it includes those, but also people infrastructure.
Disciplinary disparities. Partly an issue of who is in the loop. Institutions will need to follow the money, but need to bring others along.

“It’s not just about me, it is about who I work with.” John Paul, UAB

[Session at Educause Southeast Regional Conference, Jacksonville, FL June 2-4, 2008]
Description of the University of South Carolina’s development of teaching excellence and tech training

big take home: MOU, bulleted lists of who does what, and who is responsible for what
don’t assume faculty know something in particular
establishing communities of practice
seminars/colloquia, bring in people from on campus and off, streamed for future access
consultations
lots of training and development
assessment
only use tech if it will enhance student learning
separate out what and why from how

www.sc.edu/cte www.sc.edu/tts

[Session at Educause Southeast Regional Conference, Jacksonville, FL June 2-4, 2008]
Clemson University renovated an old YMCA building to support engineering and an innovative classroom.

3 projectors that can display 3 different images, instructors station or any of the students
wired and wireless networks

process has been unique in that multiple disciplines are represented and participating, working together to build and review the environment

~$250,000 for renovation and most of the furnishing, don’t have a good estimate on networking hardware (110 wired ports), three wireless access points

[Session at Educause Southeast Regional Conference, Jacksonville, FL June 2-4, 2008]

groups of students (3-4) created wikis based on the identities that recur in Shakespeare’s works (also did Milton)
create an online resource for Shakespeare studies, ongoing research guides
gauge effect this medium has on critical thinking in lit, info lit.

Why Wiki?
maximize creative freedom…we learn as the students do
promote community and collaboration with wikis
make classic texts feel more contemporary
provide insights into how students seek, use, and organize info

Milton, focused on Paradise Lost
themes rather than identities
grant to upgrade quality of the wikis

tweaks:
greater use of formal scholarship required, MLA format & bib
narrow the focus of the wikis, defined target audience
assigned a shorter individual research paper so the entire grade was not tied into the wiki

successes:
engage students with course material, relatable context
greater sense of immediacy, importance to students work
demonstrated classic texts/themes are in constant flux
students went beyond the textual and think creatively
students showed initiative in going out on their own with ideas

medium has a life-span beyond a single class or semester
students took ownership, continued work, evolve

supports different learning styles and information/knowledge acquisition
read outside the text, think more about the history/context

concerns:
suffered from style over substance, no clear relation between text and image; images used as padding
lack of high quality scholarly resources; often unclear citations
over-reliance on general info and summery, not enough in-depth analysis and discussion
occasional lack of audience awareness and cohesion (navigation and usability issues)

How do we promote formal research skills in this new medium?
How do we evaluate work done in a medium that is open-ended, collaborative and in constant flux?
How will this new medium affect how we think about information fluency?
What role does the medium play in shaping how students think and write?

assessment:
much of the value is experiential, how do you grade experience
value can’t be assessed apart from the process of creation or the experience of using the wikis
Do projects like this have value outside a specific user community?
What do they do that traditional research papers don’t? Does one have more value then the other?

a new rubric:
balances traditional scholarship with exploration and invention
needs more reflection about what counts as info fluency in a changing environment…and the nature of info is changing
visual literacy:
relationship between image and text, is it just fluff, or is there more?
Are the wikis visual first and linguistic second?
How do we read and write differently in this environment?
Role of ephemera?

Some students wanted to preserve “their” wiki at the end of the semester.
May seem less authentic

[Session at Educause Southeast Regional Conference, Jacksonville, FL June 2-4, 2008]
University of South Carolina

Still moving out of the 1970’s IT approach focused on mainframes.

• 30 year old legacy systems
• maturing staff approaching retirement
• lack of timely IT responses

New demands:

• competition for the “best and brightest” students (university mission)
• lack of services to give a competitive advantage (expecting tech services that modeled their regular environment
• customer demands for new technology, no confidence that IT could help them with current problems and needs “culture of disconnectedness”

concurrent re-engineering: internal and external foci

Key changes required:

• change driven by the org’s leadership
• re-establish central IT’s identity and purpose
• repair customer relationships
• improve our internal work environment

Decisions:

• university CIO, not reporting to budget and finance, not allied with any one unit on campus
• associate VP for IT and deputy CIO
• director of budgets and HR
• filling other key vacancies with leaders who share our values

Clarify our vision as a customer service focused organization

• hold summits to discuss strategic issues and decisions
• expect staff to provide data for observations, not just opinion

Identifying our values

• We serve customers.
• We value people.
• We operate with integrity.
• We contribute to our community.

Strategic realignment of our organizational structure

Repairing relationships:

• outreach efforts with key customers
• introduce quarterly “Technology Showcase”
• collaborative approach to hiring key staff
• project management

How?

• listening to employees

• survey

• identify issues
• areas of concern
• commit to addressing

• philosophy for managing pay for employees
• pay approach aligns with values
• at least annual reviews

Results:

• created group plug and play

• chili cook-off
• St. Patrick’s Day
• Are you a rock star?

Lessons learned:

• culture change must be intentional from the top
• it does not happen overnight
• focus on service is a product of organizational culture
• leadership living the values
• positive intentional management
• major determinant of the long-term health
• commitments must be visible
• measure what is happening

[Session at Educause Southeast Regional Conference, Jacksonville, FL June 2-4, 2008]

NASA’s IT circumstance: “complex, sprawling, and expensive environment” IT expenses account for 13% of the annual budget. Bolger highlighted their enterprise architecture, a blueprint for where you want to go and a plan for getting there.

They are attempting to address:

• security issues
• need to support collaboration across centers and programs
• proliferation of tools (2,500 applications)
• $2.2B, but don’t have a handle/control over the way many expenditures are classed
• inconsistent understanding of how IT is managed

NASA’s IT key principles:

• enable NASA’s mission, buy before build
• integration, efficiencies, collaboration
• business case
• secure solutions

Transforming work:

• clarify role of CIOs
• increase visibility in spending
• how much consolidation, centralization
• governance
• align to meet customer needs

Anticipated outcomes:

• seamless deployment across centers
• right beneficial IT solution
• build trust of CIOs