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Stealth Librarianship: Ideas from the ACRL webinar: Suzanne Bernsten

Suzanne Bernsten — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 11:10:00 +0000

Last week, many of us attended ACRL's e-learning webcast: Stealth Librarianship: Creating Meaningful Connections Through User Experience, Outreach, and Liaising.

Here are links to some resources discussed during the webcast:

Stealth Librarianship: Creating Meaningful Connections Through User Experience, Outreach & Liaising: Presentation Slides
Stealth Librarianship: Non-Traditional Opportunites for Interaction: Creative Commons handout from Kiyomi Deards that you can add to
Staying Genuine and Creating Connections: Networking and Involvement for Introverts
#stealthlib Twitter Feed

I am going to share a few ideas I got from the session here. Reply to this post with more ideas...

Inreach - Everyone on staff is a liaison and can work to build relationships across campus.

Cards of Support/Congratulation to Faculty & Students - Send personal messages/cards to faculty who get tenure or sabbatical to congratulate them and offer library support. Or send personal messages to students or student clubs when they publish work or win an award. I am going to try this as two English department students just won a writing award. Regina cataloged their short story and poem and I wrote a blog post about it, but a personal card from the library would be nice.

Roving Reference Wordle: Karl E

Karl E — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 14:10:00 +0000

#ReplaceAWordWithLibrarian: Jesse

Jesse — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:18:00 +0000

Fun article from the Huffington Post on the Twitter trend of replacing one word in a well-known phrase with "librarian." Link.

The Joy of Books: Jesse

Jesse — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 11:43:00 +0000

I wonder if our books do this when we go home at night...

Goodbye Statistical Abstract: Suzanne Bernsten

Suzanne Bernsten — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:55:00 +0000

I just read a post discussing Life After the Statistical Abstract which summarizes of a discussion that took place at ALA Midwinter. It discusses possible alternatives including commercial products from ProQuest, but points out that currently nothing rivals what was available through Statistical Abstract. Learning to Live Without the Statistical Abstract offers a discussion of alternatives including a link to the Guide to Sources of Statistics chart which is Appendix I of the Abstract. This is a list of primary sources of statistical information along with the agencies that produce those statistics.

What are we going to do at LCC to guide students to reliable credible statistics now that Statistical Abstract is gone?

Keeping E-Books Current - Charleston Report Part 5: Regina

Regina — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 08:03:00 +0000

Most of the sessions I attended were those that I knew we are going to implement or undertake in the next few months. One of them is of course, weeding. This session hit home immediately because of our Netlibrary collection weeding project that was started last summer. This session is meant to be a "dialog" session with heads of collection from Texas A & M University, Ken Breen (Senior Ditector of e-book Products at EBSCO) and Matt Barnes (Vice-President of Marketing at ebrary).

They talk about the problem of ebooks that have outdated or superceded information and what we need to do to make them current. There are a few questions posed to the attendees and was the starting point for our dialogue:

Who is responsible for weeding ebooks?

Removing the titles from the library catalog is a pain (but doable), however, how do you removed those that are part of a shared collection such as consortium?

Who is responsible for weeding a shared collection?

How would libraries like to identify ebooks for weeding?

How can a library control access if it removed a title from the catalog but the item is still available in the vendor's database?

Why would you want to permanently delete an item?

What situation would work best for the library?

I spoke to the group about our dilemma with our Netlibrary records. I told Ken since they now own Netlibrary that it would be good if after we deleted the items in our catalog, they can in turn have a switch that can turn off visibility of these deleted records from our students. He said they have not thought about weeding when they moved the platform but now since there is a need for that, they would work towards that functionality.

We also heard from the research libraries' perspective, since they don't ever weed anything from their collection. They want to be able to identify those ebooks that they want weeded but still make it accessible for their faculty or researchers. They want to move these ebooks to a repository much like an online off-site storage so they can be accessed again. Again, these vendors have no way of doing this yet. Apparently, they were so caught up with producing books in electronic form, marketing them to libraries but neglecting the fact that one day some of them would have to be weeded.

In the end, the dialogue produced some lessons and recommendations, in particular:

Libraries mus evaluate their ebook collections regularly (especially if it is purchased)

Libraries mus work together to create best practices for evaluating and weeding ebook collections.

Librarians and vendors must work together to create workflow that is efficient for both.

Charleston Conference Report Part 4: Regina

Regina — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 21:38:00 +0000

Today was another busy and jam-packed day full of keynote speeches, sessions, and lively discussions to attend. The morning started with a keynote speech from the legal counsels at U of M, Stanford University and another lawyer specializing in competition and copyright for libraries. The title of their presentation was "The Long Arm of the Law." It's basically a crash course on copyright, fair use especially in this digital age. They also brought us up-to-date with the leading developments in cases such as Skyriver versus OCLC, Google Books settlement, Georgia State University case against their e-reserves, John Wiley's case against first sale and FTC investigation on Google.

I also attended the lively lunch discussion about the results of ebrary's and Cleveland State University's "Global E-book Survey." It basically compares the 2008 and 2011 trends and perceptions on ebooks by students. We got a sneek peak into the results which would be made public on the ALA Midwinter meeting in January 2012. I plan on presenting the results of the survey to the library staff possibly during our Department meeting because I think the results will give us an insight into students' perceptions and attitudes towards ebooks.

I attended the session called "If You Buy It, Will They Read It" which is about the experience of the University of Utah Libraries in evaluating the purchasing patterns of their subject librarians. In particular, they examined the firm orders made by their selectors over 3 years (2009-2011) and compared the use statistics of the books they selected in print and electronic formats. The patterns they discovered provided me with an inspiration to go beyond the review I have started and drill more into the specifics by subjects.

I also attended the session called "Launching and ePreferred Approval Plan" which is a joint presentation by the Head of Collections and Acquisitions at Duke University and YBP. Duke University librarians talked about how they implemented an e-book only approval plan from their print approval plan at YBP. They talked about the challenges and success they achieved from implementing such a plan. I was already thinking of this anyway with my recent meeting with YBP and it just gave me the pus to try and pilot it in the Library.

Lastly, I attended a presentation from Doug Way and Julie Garrison from GVSU and Rick Lugg from Sutainable Collection Services about "Implementing a Disapproval Plan: A Case Study of Rules-Based Weeding." This is so interesting because this company is the first to develop a data driven deselection system for libraries. It is pretty much like an approval plan where you set the parameters for acquiring new books except it is the opposite because they created a set of rules for weeding their collection "scientifically." It is very inspiring and revolutionary, one that I hope to be able to do when we do our weeding next year.

Finally, we capped the day with the Firday night dine arounds. We RSVP'd way in advance for restaurants we want to go to dinner. And then the organizers put all those people who chose the same restaurants so we can have dinner together. Our group was a diverse mix of people and it was fun to just talk to each other and at the same time enjoy the good food that we were served.

Charleston Conference Report Part 3: Regina

Regina — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 07:43:00 +0000

Thursday was the start of the conference and our day started at 7 am for breakfast. The opening ceremonies started at 8:00 am. Keynote speech was at 8:15 am with Michael Keller, University Librarian of Stanford University as one of the speakers. By the way, Charleston Conference organizers appoint a moderator who among his other duties is to watch the time so that the speakers do not go over their allotted 45 minutes of talk. Even the notoriously naughty speakers who go on and on tow the line. Hmmm, we should have that here at LCC (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

Keller’s talk was about the “Semantic Web for Libraries and Publishers.” In this thought-provoking speech, he mentioned that there’s just way too many silos of information out there. The landscape of discovery and access is in shambles. Search results from Google offer little precision and offers a lot of ambiguity. This is what he refers to as the dark world of the web. He talks about the efforts at Stanford to build a web of data called the semantic web. His talk was followed by MacKenzie Smith, Research Director from MIT Libraries. She talked about “Data Papers in the Network Era.” It was way over my head but it is interesting to learn developments on this front especially from this top universities.

I don’t have the time to write a summary of each of the sessions I’ve attended since I’m going to head down to a session in a bit, but I thought I’d list them out here (this is only for yesterday, Thursday):

Let’s Get the Dialog Started: Keeping E-Books Current (speakers from EBSCO, ebrary, EBL, Texas A&M University)

Electronic Resource Assessment: Adventures in Engagement (speakers from Columbia University Library)

The Role of Reference in Discovery Systems: Effecting a More Literate Search (speakers from GVSU, Georgetown University, Credo Reference)
Is there a Future for the Collection Development Policy (speakers from University of South Florida, Tampa)

In the evening we head out for the grand Charleston Conference reception (from 7 to 9 pm) held at the College of Charleston gardens. It was yet again a chance to experience Southern hospitality at its best and get to meet more librarians. It was a fitting end to an otherwise long day.

Charleston Conference Report Part 2: Regina

Regina — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 07:18:00 +0000

The conference started on Wednesday with preconferences and vendor showcases. I arrived in the afternoon so immediately after I went to the vendor exhibits. This is the only conference where vendors and publishers are only allowed to exhibit on the 1st day of the conference for about 7 hours. The idea is that these vendors are participants too in the conference and as such they should not be just standing by in their booths pitching their products and services. Also it allows the librarians to focus on the vendors they want to meet and not be distracted when the conference starts. I got to meet with my regular contacts from YBP, EBSCO. I met with the Gale folks, Proquest, CRCnetbase, Credo Reference and many more.

I got to attend the “Showdown at the Charleston Conference.” This is an annual tradition wherein vendors face each other much like a showdown in the OK coral so that they have a no-holds barred product faceoff. It aims to have an honest exchange between competing products in the library marketplace to get beyond the usual sales pitch, and explore the issues that concerns us and our libraries. For this showdown, they focused on ebooks and usage statistics. Three ebook vendors EBL, ebrary and EBSCO had a showdown (since this is a showdown, the Presidents and VPs of each company face off). For the usage statistics, PaperStats from Pubget face off with ScholarlyStats from SWETS. It was fun to see how all these vendors try to outdo each other mch like saying “I’m better than you so take that!” all to the amusement of the attendees.

In the evening, I attended the YBP/ebrary cocktails. I roomed-in with my friend Fran Krempasky, head of acquisitions from Cooley Law School. In there we met with the MI delegation from MSU, WSU, GVSU and U of M. I got to meet and talk to my counterparts from Yale University, U of Chicago, Columbia University, and many more. It is shocking to hear their stories especially those that involve layoffs. Over drinks (open bar but I didn’t drink though and confined myself to a harmless pineapple, cranberry cocktail) and Southern food like crab cakes and fried green tomatoes we chatted and laughed the night away.

Charleston Conference Report Part 1: Regina

Regina — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 06:53:00 +0000

Before anything else, I’m going to categorically say that this conference is the best conference I have ever attended in my career as a librarian. It has lived up to the hype that my librarian friends have repeatedly told me ever since I assumed this position at LCC. They all told me “You better attend the Charleston Conference even if you have to take out a 2nd mortgage.” Why so? Well, this is the only conference where a librarian in charge of collection development and management, acquisitions, and serials in academic libraries get to converge, discuss, and network with each other. Add to that is the fact that vendors and publishers—CEOs, Presidents listen to us and demand that we tell them what we want about their products so that they can make it better. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that they feed all the participants breakfast, lunch and dinner and coffee in between.

Anyway, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about the history of the Charleston Conference. In 1989, a group of acquisitions librarians (actually, they were only 2 of them), in Charleston got together led by Katina Stauch because they felt at that time that the needs of the “back-end” part of the library are not being met by ALA or any library conference out there. The next year, they had the 1st Charleston conference attended only by 20 librarians. Now 31 years later, it has since grown into a conference attended by 1,458 librarians and over 40 vendors and publishers.

In my next post, I’ll let you in on the sessions I've attended.

Suzanne's Thoughts about MLA Annual Conference: Suzanne Bernsten

Suzanne Bernsten — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 09:34:00 +0000

Here is a summary of key points from the presentations I attended at MLA this year:

I attended a great presentation about Business Plan Research for Poets: How to Support Entrepreneurs. It was a reminder that a reference interview is important in working with all patrons. One of the librarians recommended asking "tell me more about your project" to get started understanding the information needs of entrepreneurs. I know Kim will be integrating some of the resources mentioned into our business plan research guide, but one resource that sounded especially interesting was Research on Main Street which focuses on finding local business information.

The other presentation I wanted to write about was Local vs. Cloud Based Discovery Systems. Librarians at Western Michigan talked about how they implemented VuFind (an open source, which the presenter described as "free like a puppy") and Summon (a serials solutions product that allows users to search multiple databases and the catalog).

I now understand the difference between the "federated search engine" that we have, MultiSearch, and a web scale discovery system like Summon. Federated search engines connect to each database individually when you perform a search whereas Summon is a database with metadata harvested from publishers and the library catalog. So, Summon doesn't have to wait to connect to each database, the response time is much faster than with a federated search engine.

The speaker at the Academic Libraries lunch, Barbara Jones, from the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom was excellent. She discussed how important it is to protect our right to freedom of speech and how this is tied to academic freedom and academic libraries. She mentioned the Muzzle Awards, given by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression to institutions that limit freedom of expression.

Someone asked an interesting question about balancing between new trends like patron driven acquisition and providing a balanced collection which provides access to scholarship even from those who hold unpopular ideas.

Finally, I wanted to post a link to the presentation Regina and I did at MLA (Free or Cheap Tools You Can Use to Improve Your Library Website) if you are interested. I put links on Delicious to the tools we discussed. The presentation slides should be posted on the MLA website soon.

Ethereal eBooks, The Cloud, & Library Collections: Karl E

Karl E — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 10:21:00 +0000

I keep finding the most amazing articles in Searcher Magazine. In the September 2011 issue there is an article titled 21st-Century Lending Libraries: Books in a Cloud? which goes into some great detail about many of the issues involved in ebook publishing and the difficulties libraries face in collecting ebooks. Nancy K. Herther, an Anthropology/Sociology Librarian from the University of Minnesota Libraries does an excellent job covering consumer issues, major platforms, the future of publishing, the growth of ebooks, and it's impact on libraries.

20 Coolest iPad Ideas for Your Library: Regina

Regina — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 10:49:00 +0000

Now that our new iPads have been delivered (it just came this morning after our RST meeting), we might want to look into this blog post about some cool ideas on how to use iPad for our library. At least we got one already going (see #3). If we can do much more than just roving reference, then we're not that far behind after all.

Enjoy!

Screencasts for Chat?: Karl E

Karl E — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 11:06:00 +0000

Lauren DiMonte and Joanna Szurmak from University of Toronto Mississauga created an incredible prezi presentation for the WILU 2011 conference. It's not just cool, but it provides many great ideas for how to create screencapture tutorials and how to utilize Prezi to for that purpose. They also talk about using screencapture tutorials via chat/virtual reference...an interesting thought, no?

Browsing the stacks: Karl E

Karl E — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:30:00 +0000

At first glance the title for this post would seem the farthest thing from "library 2.0", but based on interactions with two different students today, I believe, that no 2.0 library, or 3.0 library for that matter, especially at the community college level, can do without the stacks. Why? We will continue to have students come to our campus who are totally new to libraries, or returning after many years. We will continue to have students who are not sure exactly what they are looking for, but when you get them to a section of books that "clicks" with them, they immediately, and intuitively grasp the power of browsing the stacks.

In the article by Tim Newcomb: Is a Bookless Library Still a Library?, forwarded by Shawn, I thought the author did a good job of pointing out that most libraries, into the foreseeable future, will need to strike a balance between that which makes our institutions traditional, timeless even, and that which makes us cutting edge. It's clear we need to embrace new technologies, new modes of service, and new ideas for conducting all of our internal business. But, it's also clear that we can do all of those things while continuing to support services and techniques that are valuable to our patrons.

AL 2011: Innovate, Collaborate, Connect: Rachel

Rachel — Mon, 09 May 2011 08:36:00 +0000

Colleagues and Friends,

I realize it's been a long while since we've actively engaged the Next Chapter blog but thought it'd be nice to use this space to discuss our time at the MLA Academic Libraries 2011 conference. When we have used this space in the past (for instance, in discussing LOEX), I found hearing everyone's insights to be very useful!

Some basic questions to get us started (Feel free to answer all, none, some):
Your favorite session and why?
Tell us something new you learned.. and is it applicable to us?
Any surprising sessions: i.e. you learned something you hadn't expected to? you realized LCC Library is already doing something like it?
Anything you take issue with?

Let the sharing begin!

-Rachel

Using Facebook to Explain What a Database Is: Suzanne Bernsten

Suzanne Bernsten — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 09:39:00 +0000

From friending to research: Using Facebook as a teaching tool by Anne Pemberton - College & Research Libraries News

I ran across this article the other day and thought it presented some great ideas for using Facebook to help students understand what a database is. I tried using some of the concepts in a Writing 121 class yesterday and it worked surprisingly well.

First, I asked how many students use Facebook. Everyone raised their hand. Then I explained as the article mentions, "You know what a database is because you use Facebook." You can explain that students are records in Facebook, like articles are records in a database. Each piece of information about a person (name, birthdate, etc.) is a field, such as the article title, author, etc. in a database. You can also ask how many students are in MySpace, etc. to explain the concept that there is some overlap in content between databases, just as there is some overlap in social networking sites.

I also asked how students got into Facebook, and they replied that they signed up. Then I asked how articles get into databases and went on to explain that the database companies pay publishers to include articles from periodicals. Finally, I asked how pages get onto the web and we talked about how it is like Facebook, anyone can post anything.

I won't summarize the whole article here, but take a look. It contains a lot of great ideas to use in instruction!

I have to think more about using this with a class where there are students not familiar with Facebook, but I think you could use an online phonebook to explain the same concepts.

Web Improvement Team Projects: Suzanne Bernsten

Suzanne Bernsten — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 16:30:00 +0000

Fall Projects

Library Nugget for ANGEL (see screenshot below)

LINKS Tutorial - update links to reflect new website & video tutorials

LibX Toolbar - install in computer lab in TLC and beyond

Google Analytics - use results from site search to improve website

Full-Text Options - make interface more user-friendly

Spring Projects

Library Catalog

Improving Forms on Website

Developing New Content - new LibGuides/webpages

Customized Nugget for ANGEL

If you have ideas or suggestions for future WIT projects, contact Suzanne B.

Online Students and the Library?: Suzanne Bernsten

Suzanne Bernsten — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 15:54:00 +0000

Last week I worked with James Bender's CJUS 101 students to do a library instruction session in Second Life. You can the four students who attended here. The session went well and was a good exercise in thinking about how we can better serve our online students.

One idea I had after the session was to develop a brief tour of the library website in Camtasia highlighting resources for students such as the databases, our catalog, the citing sources guide... Kim and I also talked about inviting some online instructors to our IST meeting next semester to get their ideas. What other ideas do you have for better serving our online students?

The Future of Screen Technology: Karl E

Karl E — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:59:00 +0000

This is pretty awesome eye-candy:

LibGuides for Information Literacy Tutorial?: Suzanne Bernsten

Suzanne Bernsten — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 17:49:00 +0000

I just read Rachel's post from this summer (oops, I'm a bit behind on my reading) about Bloomberg University of Pennsylvania librarians using LibGuides to create an information literacy tutorial. You can see the tutorial, as well as the article Rachel mentioned in College & Research Libraries News.

Just this week I was thinking about adding an assessment portion to the Writing 121 guide because one type of box that can be added to the guides is a quiz box. I hadn't thought about an entire tutorial in LibGuides, but that sounds like an exciting possibility. What do you all think?

Subject vs. Keyword Searching: Suzanne Bernsten

Suzanne Bernsten — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 12:14:00 +0000

I was looking at my quiz results from my Writing 121 sessions and I noticed that more students missed the question about the difference between subject vs. keyword searching than any other question. I was talking with Rachel about this at the Reference Desk last night and she gave me a good idea for explaining the concept. She mentioned that she asks the class how can you tell what an article is about without reading it? I thought this was a great idea, so I wanted to ask for other ideas from my colleagues. How do you explain subject vs. keyword?

LITA Conference Report Part 2: Regina

Regina — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 14:31:00 +0000

For my reference and instruction colleagues, I’ve attended a session on “What can the cloud do for your teaching: using cloud technologies in library instruction” by Chanitra Bishop of Indiana University. In her presentation, she talked about free cloud applications that we can use to spice up our instruction sessions. Among the reasons she gave for why we should use these applications are: it’s accessible anywhere, facilitates sharing, free, no storage issues, and it’s easy to use. I think that the most important reason for using cloud computing applications is that it allows us to engage and introduce our students to new technology. Here are the tools she showed us:

Polleverywhere

It allows participants to turn in their response to a question so library instructors can have a live poll inside the instruction room. This is good for icebreaker questions like “have you gone to an instruction class before?” or “what do you think should be the answer to…”

Animoto

This can be used for photo and video creation and sharing. For example, students can create a library video tour to get themselves familiarized with the library. Aside from being fun, it also allows students to take ownership of the project because they’ve made it themselves.

Screenjelly and Screentoaster

Screenjelly is a screencasting tool that allows recording of your screen activity with voice which you can then spread via Twitter or email. Screentoaster is also an online screencasting tool that allows you to capture videos of onscreen action and embed them on blogs or webpages. There’s a lot of ways we can use but for instruction, it’s a good way for students to practice using a database. Instruction librarians can see what the students have learned in terms of searching databases. The students can then view the tutorials at a later time if they want to.

Google forms

This is also a good tool for creating free forms that we can use for workshop and library instruction attendance and even assessment of what the students learned.

Awesome Highlighter

This allows you to highlight text in a webpage to show others an important part of a webpage that you want to highlight. It’s a great tool for website evaluation. It’s easy to use and you don’t need to sign up and create an account.

LITA Conference Report Part 1: Regina

Regina — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 13:37:00 +0000

I attended the 2010 LITA (Library and Information Technology Association) National Forum in Atlanta last October 1-3, 2010. The theme for this year’s conference was using cloud computing and other cloud services to provide, enhance, and host library services. Cloud computing is an “Internet-based computing whereby shared resource, software, and information are provided to computers and other devises on demand.” Cloud computing and virtualization has been one of the top technology trends in the last two years and it is only now where we are seeing “maturity” and real-life implementation of libraries that decided to take this route.

Among the sessions I’ve attended is “Making your IT Skills Virtual: Tools for Learning How to Implement and Administer Cloud-based Systems” by the systems librarians at Wake Forest University (WFU). In this session, they talked about their experience in moving their library system and infrastructure to the cloud. Essentially, they’ve gotten rid of their university IT and in so doing freed their IT folks the responsibility of hosting their library server, software, and network configuration. They utilized Amazon EC2, a service by Amazon that provides elastic computing capacity in the cloud and allows you to run and configure server instances in a snap. They also used Amazon EBS for to create storage volumes for their servers from 1 GB to 1 TB. Essentially, what Amazon now does is to provide Infrastructure As a Service (IAaS) to libraries and other institutions looking to save money and technical staff time maintaining these servers and storage devises. There are a lot of advantages of going to this route and among them are:

· Lower initial costsà you only pay for what you own

· Flexible and scalable as needed

· Solutions are tailored to fit specific service needs

In addition, they also changed their search interface to VuFind which is an open-source discovery tool designed by Villanova University that allows users to browse and search through resources available in the library by replacing the traditional OPAC. It takes a lot of programming and customization to implement VuFind and I was amazed at how these 4 librarians managed to undertake the scale and complexity that this project entailed. I think that if there’s anybody that can do it, it is them since not only are they librarians but they are also IT experts as well.

One of the keynote speakers in the conference was Roy Tennant where he delivered his presentation “Using the Cloud to Please the Crowd.” He got me on his first slide when he said “Shift Happens!” which is really true because cloud computing has the potential to change the way we manage services and resources in the library. What is good about the cloud is that is is on demand much like electricity. You pay for what you use and if you don’t use it, you don’t pay anything. Cloud computing provides infinite immediately available computer power that is:

· Inexhaustible

· No more RFP for vendors (yehey!)

· No installation and configuration

· Infrastructure becomes somebody else’ headache

· No server support requirements (good riddance college IT!)

· No upgrades to worry about (again good riddance IT!)

· No more dealing with system downtime because vendors take care of this for you.

Essentially, computing power has become a commodity which is good because then we don’t have to get stuck with an annual bill and worry about all those budget drama.

I’d like to illustrate an example that Roy used. If you are a small library, you can put your server infrastructure in the cloud to host your data and it would only cost you about $300 a year to do so. I was shocked at how cheap it is considering that servers cost thousands of dollars and has a very limited life span (5 years and you have to replace it again).

Of course this service also has its drawbacks but you may be surprised that security is not one of them. All the presenters pointed out that since they’ve put their services in the cloud, they felt more secure than they had before when their data is hosted in physical servers. Security is one area that cloud-based vendors have perfected because it is the number one concern.

Another interesting session I attended was “Cloudy With a Chance for Cooperation: Cloud-based Library Management.” This presentation was an opportunity for libraries that have migrated to OCLC Web-Scale Management Services (WMS). If you haven’t heard it yet, WMS is a new service by OCLC wherein they essentially created an integrated library system (ILS) in the cloud. The libraries that have migrated all their services to the cloud were Pepperdine University, University of Tennessee, Idaho Commission for Libraries (representing all academic, public and school libraries in the Idaho state), and the ORBIS Cascade Alliance. The WMS from OCLC essentially puts these library’s cataloging, acquisitions, and circulation functions via the Web with an interface similar to what you would normally see by using Amazon or Google but only better and more “intelligent.” They showed a lot of cool features and I was blown away at how much better we can do our job both at the technical and public services levels. Also, the way in which users can now discover and interact with resources available in the library is revolutionary. I guess the main thing that summarizes all their experiences was “we want to manage information, not technology.”

Second Life and Library Instruction?: Suzanne Bernsten

Suzanne Bernsten — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 11:02:00 +0000

Next week I'll be trying out an instruction session in Second Life for James Bender's online criminal justice class. You can see a screenshot of our practice session. There is basically a big screen which you can type URLs into and give a presentation. I was able to get into ProQuest to search and also chatted with the RefDesk librarians with our chat widget on our Ask a Librarian webpage. I'll let you all know how it goes ...