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The following guest post comes from Rebecca Morgan, a graduate student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at Queens College, CUNY. She attended the first workshop in our Digital Preservation Workshop Series and agreed to share her recap here.
The Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) hosted the first of a three-part workshop series focusing on the preservation of digital collections on November 4th, 2009. A wide array of professionals from a variety of institutions gathered to discuss the subject and learn from each other.
Tom Clareson and Liz Bishoff led the first workshop, “Assuring Long Term Access to Digital Collections: An Introduction to Digital Preservation.” Both bring many years of experience as library professionals and each are currently involved with digital issues for regional library cooperatives. Bishoff is director of Digital & Preservation Services at BCR while Clareson serves as Senior Consultant at Lyrasis.
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NOTE: METRO will hold a Shelf2Life information session on November 18 (2-4pm) at the METRO Training Center. All members interested in participating in the Shelf2Life program may contact Jason Kucsma (jkucsma@metro.org) to reserve a seat at the session or inquire about more details regarding the program.
The Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) is the newest participant in BCR’s Shelf2Life program, providing its 250 member organizations the opportunity to make their pre-1923 U.S.-published monographs available as print-on-demand and eBooks for library users through the Shelf2Life consortia program.
METRO’s collaboration with BCR is an exciting new opportunity for libraries and cultural heritage institutions to share access to their legacy book collections with each other without the expense of equipment and significant staff time. With the implementation of the consortia agreement, METRO members will be able to pool their contributions to the Shelf2Life program, realizing the benefits gained from shared access to each other’s collections, as well as greatly increasing the visibility of and availability to those collections.
“METRO is excited to be the first consortium to offer this significant opportunity to its members,” commented Dottie Hiebing, Executive Director.
“By working with the Metropolitan New York Library Council, BCR is able to extend the Shelf2Life program to libraries and archives, large and small. We are also excited to make this a truly national initiative by working with prominent New York cultural heritage organizations,” said Brenda Bailey-Hainer, BCR President and CEO.
Since 1964, METRO has helped its member libraries — including academic, school, public, and special libraries — deliver their services more effectively by providing a forum for libraries to share resources and best practices, while promoting professional development and advocacy.
BCR’s Shelf2Life program grew from a desire to help libraries and other cultural heritage institutions make their unique collections available in digital format. Through the consortia agreement with METRO, these valuable collections will now be accessible to a wider audience.
Shelf2Life Demo from OPP on Vimeo.
About METRO
METRO is committed to helping member libraries — including academic, school, public, and special libraries — deliver their services more effectively and participate in a dynamic regional service network. METRO provides a forum for libraries to share resources and best practices, while promoting professional development and advocacy. Today, with 250 member organizations throughout New York City and Westchester County, METRO is the largest of New York State’s nine reference and research library resource systems, and one of the largest library service organizations in the world. For more information about METRO, visit www.metro.org.
About BCR
BCR brings libraries together for greater success by expanding their knowledge, reach and power. They offer a broad range of solutions and their hands-on, personal attention to each member enables them to deliver effective and timely solutions that help libraries keep pace with new developments in technology and services. BCR is the nation’s oldest and most established multistate library cooperative. Since 1935, the BCR team has helped libraries learn new skills, reach patrons, increase productivity and save money. BCR (Bibliographical Center for Research) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit headquartered in Aurora, Colorado. For more information, visit www.BCR.org or email info@BCR.org.
Getting time off and funding for professional development travel has become increasingly difficult for librarians. While many of us would have loved to travel to Monterey for the Internet Librarian 2009 (IL2009) Conference, it just wasn't in the cards (or the budget) for a lot of us.
In an attempt to bring a small slice of the good work that the Information Today people do back to NYC, the Metropolitan New York Library Council is hosting a panel featuring short presentations from presenters and attendees from IL2009. Our guest presenters include Joe Murphy (Yale University), Karen Schneiderman (Brooklyn Law School), Margaret Smith (NYU), and Lisa Carlucci Thomas (Southern Connecticut State University).
This post is intended to aggregate some additional resources from IL2009 that might be of interest to attendees at the METRO session as well as other librarians interested in staying on top of proceedings from conferences they're unable to attend. Please feel free to add additional resources and comments from your experience at IL2009 with our community.
LINKS
VIDEOS
Paul Holdengräber interview IL2009 from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.
"Find Out at I L 2009" from Kaygraphic on Vimeo.
Internet Librarian Conference 2009 from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.
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METRO is pleased to announce a call to participate in a forthcoming book, tentatively titled Digitization in the Real World: Lessons Learned from Small to Medium-Sized Digitization Projects. This book is intended to document experiences with digitization projects that fall outside the spectrum of mass digitization initiatives that have tended to be more thoroughly discussed and documented. Digitization in the Real World will be co-edited by Professor Kwong Bor Ng (Queens College, CUNY) and Jason Kucsma (METRO).
Your experiences will provide useful case studies on what works and what does not for libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage organizations managing small- to medium-sized collections. Librarians, archivists, and students stand to benefit from your experiences — learning about the how the key elements of digitization projects play out in diverse institutional contexts. How was your project started? How was it implemented? What organizational and technological obstacles were encountered, and how were they overcome? Were they overcome? What new solutions did your project implement, and were those experiments successful or not? What are some of the lessons learned from your project? Is your project still growing? If not, why?
If you’d like to participate, please submit the following information via email (jkucsma@metro.org) on or before September 7, 2009. (Extended from August 31, 2009)
Name:
Email:
Institution:
Chapter Abstract: 500-1000 words describing the scope of your project and key elements you intend to address in your chapter.
If you thought you missed your opportunity to learn how to work with the open source Collection Management System, Omeka, think again! The August workshop was rescheduled for September 11. Omeka is a free and open source collections based, web-based publishing platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, educators, and cultural enthusiasts. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog. Omeka is designed with non-IT specialists in mind, allowing users to focus on content and interpretation rather than programming. It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation.Complete details and registration are available at http://bit.ly/28Bzbh.
Each month we take a moment to share digital collections created by METRO members. Recommend a collection for the spotlight by emailing jkucsma@metro.org.
The images in this collection were assembled by Anne S. Goodrich (1895–2005) in 1931, when as a Christian missionary in Peking she became interested in local folk religious practices. She studied the paper gods in this collection for much of her life. After publishing her research conclusions in 1991, she donated these prints to the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University.
The images are divided initially by usage: Those which were purchased to be burned immediately and serve as emissaries to heaven; and those which were purchased to be displayed for a year while offering protection to the family in a variety of ways, before being burned. The images are further divided by display locations and by the deities they represent.
View the collection here: http://bit.ly/CNlGD
View more digital collections at digitalMETRO, an online directory of digital collections created and maintained by METRO libraries.
Join us on October 29, 2009 (2-5pm) at SUNY College of Optometry to commemorate METRO's 45th Anniversary at METRO's Annual Meeting. Our keynote speaker for the afternoon will be John Blyberg, Assistant Director for Innovation and User Experience at Darien Public Library in Connecticut. The event is open to all staff of METRO member libraries. Tours of the Harold Kohn Vision Science Library will take place before the meeting. Registration information will be coming soon, but make sure you save the date now.
16 - Code4Lib NYC Special Interest Group Meeting (10am, METRO Training Ctr)
30 - “Social Networking Literacy for Librarians: Emerging Competencies for Emerging Technologies.” (a co-sponsored presentation by the Library 2.0 SIG and the Science, Technology, and Medical Libraries SIG). Details: http://bit.ly/1aAm7c
Add these and other related events around NY and the world to your Google Calendar by subscribing to the METRO Calendar: http://bit.ly/metrocalendar.
The best of August's Tweets from the tweetMETRO feed
(http://twitter.com/tweetMETRO):
Have other news you think we should be sharing with subscribers to this list? Tweet us at http://twitter.com/tweetmetro.
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I've had the
opportunity to speak with a handful of library school classes in the
last year, and one of the questions that always comes up is, "What does
a typical day look like for you?" Maybe it's because I'm a librarian
not actually working in a library. Maybe it's because my job title
is so opaque. Or it's just the general mystique of librarianship. Whatever the reason, I'm glad there's a second-annual
Library Day in the Life -- if for no other reason than to help me document where it is that my time and energy go every day. Sometimes it's
impossible for me to even tell at the end of the day what's been keeping me occupied all day.
HI! I'm Jason Kucsma, and I'm the Emerging
Technologies Manager for the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO)!
METRO is a non-profit member services organization serving libraries
and librarians in New York City and Westchester County. Our membership
includes over 250 academic, public, special, and hospital libraries
which represent over 1300 branches throughout the metropolitan region.
What follows is my attempt to wrangle some sense of order out of a
workday that usually finds me flitting between email, web browsers, and
the phone like a schizophrenic hummingbird.
5:30
Up for coffee. Read the NYTimes online and check personal email (Inbox Zero at 5:40). Scan Twitter posts from the last 12 hours and check Facebook for anything remotely interesting. Do not find. Check work email to see what's in store for the day. Not much because I answered emails over the weekend. Good.
7:00
Shower
and wake up Mega (my amazing wife, whose name is actually Megan, but I call her "Mega" because she's that great) by
accidentally letting one of the cats into the bedroom. She's also a
librarian working in a non-library job. She's the Digital Assets
Manager at The Granger Collection,
a small, independently-owned image agency. Throw together lunch, shut
down home computer (so my visiting teenage sister-in-law can't spend
all day on Facebook and/or downloading garbage that shouldn't be
downloaded), and head out for work.
7:45 - 8:15
Take the
R from Park Slope to the Atlantic/Pacific stop. Express N is waiting, so I score a quicker
ride to Union Square than if I were to ride the R the whole way.
8:20
Second person in the office this morning. Check work email (Inbox Zero at 8:30).
8:20 - 8:50
Type
up first portion of this day's log, and realize that I'm not going to
be able to sustain this level of specificity throughout the day. Shrug.
9:00
Follow a handful of librarians from last Friday's #followalibrarian Twitter lovefest.
9:20
Listen to a story on The Takeaway about streaming music "on the net."
9:30-10:30
Troubleshoot a problem with the digitalMETRO digital collection directory. The directory is built on the Omeka collection management system,
and we've been testing the batch upload plug-in to add multiple
collections at a time. For some reason, images weren't showing up when
a recent batch was added, so I manually uploaded them. I'm excited
about this little project. We started building it last Fall, and it now
has detailed records for over 160 unique digital collections created
and, well, I'll tell you more about it later.
10:30 - 10:45
Quick check-in on email, tweets, and Facebook Scrabble (playing two evenly matched games with @tadawes and my wife). Write a mildly scathing Yelp review of a sushi restaurant I went to yesterday in Williamsburg. Never again.
10:45 - 11:00
Actually
notice background music on Pandora when Superchunk, Calexico,
Portastatic, Aqueduct, and Apples In Stereo all play consecutively. See
also: Stuff White People Like.
11:00 - 2:00
Work
on pulling together details for our Fall workshop and professional
development schedule. As the Emerging Technologies Manager, one of my
responsibilities is to program workshops for our member librarians on
skills that we've identified as must-have skills for those interested
in keeping their skills current. I work to both identify emerging tech
areas and find expert librarian instructors to teach the courses,
either face-to-face or online via our web conferencing software.
Some of the workshops/events I'm coordinating for the Fall include: A three-day series on digital preservation, Twitter basics for libraries, Zotero basics for research management (for librarians to use and to teach others to use), two webinars on open source software, Library Mash-Ups (with Nicole Engard, LibLime), Text Messaging Reference (with Joe Murphy, Yale), a site visit to the Jewish Theological Seminary's digitization lab, Managing Copyright for Digital Collections (with Linda Tadic, NYU Tisch School of the Arts), and about a half-dozen more. These workshops get scattered around our calendar among other workshops and events we host on more general library professional development topics.
12:53
Interrupt what I was doing when I
remember that I need to send out a follow-up email to people who
attended our free "Introduction to Zotero Webinar" last week. We've
done two of these introduction webinars for about 20-25 people each
session. The webinar is intended to be a primer for those libraries
interested in bringing a "trained Zotero user/instructor" (hey, that's
me!) to their library to teach staff how to use the tool.
1:45
Take a five-minute break to enter the Google Books contest. Eat slice of leftover spinach and cheese frittata at my desk that I made yesterday for brunch.
2:00-3:15
Meet
with a a fellow working on transitioning from publishing to libraries.
Meet to discuss what "emerging technologies" means to libraries and how
librarians can position themselves in job interviews. I felt like I
wasn't as helpful as I wanted to be in the conversation, primarily
because job opportunities are so competitive right now -- everywhere,
not just in libraries.
3:15-3:45
Check in with work and personal email (Inbox Zero for both at 3:45)
3:45
Continue
working on wrangling details for Fall courses. Spend a few minutes
stressing out about a webinar that I have to do NEXT WEEK about keeping
up with technology trends when it's not your job to necessarily keep up
with technology. Take solace in that fact that I got some really great
advice by fellow librarians on FriendFeed.
4:00
Shift from
course planning to answer some questions for a member library
interested in having their digital collection included in WorldCat via
OCLC's new Digital Collection Gateway. A little background is in order.
METRO provides modest grants for libraries to launch or maintain
digitization projects, and part of that includes free hosting of
digital collections on an OCLC-hosted CONTENTdm instance. It's a great
solution for smaller libraries that can't host their own digital
collections, and an added benefit is that they have the opportunity to
have their collections harvested into WorldCat and the New York Heritage
project portal. The particularly library in question had some concerns
about how their items would be represented in WorldCat and how some of
their metadata would map to the WorldCat MARC fields. Do my best to answer their questions and invite more questions for clarification.
4:15
Turn off Pandora to listen to a mix CD sent to me by fellow librarian and good friend Stephen Francoeur.
Great mix of tracks (from Green Day to Okkervil River to Matt Pond PA
to The Faint to The Pigeon Detectives and more). Cliche as it sounds,
music really gets me through the day most of the time. On days when I
listen to only podcasts, I can totally feel the effect that the lack of
music has on my psyche. Weird, but it's true. I also spend an
inordinate amount of time looking for and listening to new music, so
it's nice to have friends recommend stuff that really moves them.
4:20
Back
to course planning. Finish description and objectives for Zotero course
and email reminders to instructors that I still need descriptions and
objectives from. Wonder why I decide to end that sentence in a
preposition and shrug it off.
4:50
Wonder how it became
almost time to go home when I have so many windows open and things
in-process. Begin prioritization of which things NEED to get done now
and which ones I will do tomorrow -- also resigning myself to the fact
that I will likely not leave at 5pm sharp.
5:10
Review notes for my weekly update on a capstone project I'm doing for my summer class in the University of Arizona's Digital Information Management Certificate Program
(DigIn). DigIn is run by the School of Information Resources and
Library Science as a six-course virtual program geared toward giving
some technological skills and concepts to librarians, archivists, and
museum curators. The project I'm working on involves using Omeka to
deliver digital collections. We started out creating a directory of
digital collections in New York City, and the second phase of the
project involves documenting the viability of using Omeka to deliver
digital collections created on the CONTENTdm collection management
system.
5:14
Leave work in hopes of making it to the train before an impending monsoon strikes. Succeed. Read fantastic article on the train about Obama's right-hand lady in NY Times Sunday Magazine.
6:00
Make it back to Brooklyn in time to head to my favorite Mexican restaurant.
8:25
Edit this post a bit and call it an evening.
Libraries are uniquely positioned to serve new roles in the communities we serve, but we need to understand and respond to how individuals are creating their own information environments. That was the message delivered to over 160 METRO members by John Blyberg, Assistant Directory for Innovation and User Experience at Darien Library at METRO's 2009 Annual Meeting. Blyberg's presentation, "Getting Out of the Weeds: Understanding and Managing the Ecology of Information," was the keynote address at the Annual Meeting, which marked METRO's 45th Anniversary of service to libraries and librarians in New York City and Westchester County. 
Each month we take a moment to share digital collections created by METRO members. Recommend a collection for the spotlight by emailing 
METRO is pleased to announce a new collaboration with BCR to provide a new service to help members digitize books in their collections. 
Each month we take a moment to share digital collections created by METRO members. Recommend a collection for the spotlight by emailing 
Through a recent agreement with Mosio, the folks behind the Text a Librarian Service, METRO members are now eligible for a discount on new services. Text a Librarian will waive the one-time set-up fee ($199) for all METRO members. Text A Librarian is an easy, organized and efficient text message reference service that enables libraries to engage with patrons on their mobile devices. There is no hardware to install, no software to download and no phone required. 
The