If you’d like to know more about any of them, please contact me: megan.dazey@umontana.edu
OCLC Enhance sharing Session
Jay Weitz gave his usual thoughtful News from OCLC presentation. The new WorldCat Rights and Responsibilities policy will be effective August 1, 2010. OCLC is adding records to WorldCat for digitized books from Google Books and the HathiTrust Digital Library. Ebsco has acquired NetLibrary from OCLC. OCLC has now implemented most of the MARC 21 format changes for initial support of RDA. The RDA toolkit is free until the end of August 2010. Success and problems with the new duplicate detection system (DDR) were also discussed, please report any incorrect merges to OCLC, still report duplicate records, and provider neutral records are being accounted for in the DDR. Connexion 2.3.0 is to be released end 2010/beginning 2011 and will have the new fixed fields present. The number of institutions participating in the Expert Community continues to rise, keep updating the records.
This was an informative discussion about OCLC products, it was nice to have the ability to directly ask Jay certain questions.
OCLC Symposium
This symposium brought together Catherine Mitchell and Andrew pate to discuss “The Future of Publishing : Libraries and the changing role of consumers and creators.” It was very interesting to hear about how new publishing platforms (Amazon, iPad & The Espresso Book Machine ) are changing academic publishing. My biggest takeaway are that IR’s should not be used just for deposit of materials, but for dissemination of the same material, and that low circulation numbers are fine for a University Press, as long as the Press is still profitable.
NMRT- Conference 101
This was my first ALA Annual meeting, so I went to the Conference 101 sponsored by NMRT. They gave a good overview of what to expect from the conference and how to navigate around the different venues and how to choose what programs you want to attend. This would have been better as a webinar prior to the conference. The very large number of attendees made it a little hard to meet new people. If you have never attended a conference of any type before, then this would be a program that you should definitely attend.
ALCTS 101
This was an introduction to the structure of ALCTS and an introduction to most of their Sections and a few of the Interest Groups. It was a great chance to meet people, network and eat cake. Being new to ALA this year, it was a great way to meet people with similar technical services interests on a fairly small scale (less than 50 people were at the meeting). I would recommended attending this meeting if you are unfamiliar with ALCTS or just want to meet more people with a tech services background.
Technical Services Managers in Academic Libraries Interest Group
This discussion was divided up with a different tech services related topic at each table. I sat with the table discussing “Collaboration of Technical Services with IT Services.” At the table were Tech services heads from a wide variety of libraries, from a department of 4 people, to a department of 25+ people. It was incredibly interesting to see how every tech services department seemed to have a different relationship with both Library IT and Campus IT. Almost everyone at the table worked with the Voyager system. It was great to get ideas on how to incorporate IT more into the tech services department to better utilize their skills about the Voyager backend. My take away from this discussion is that my library currently has a good set up, but with a few little tweaks it could be better. We are currently working on getting batch loading more integrated into the department workflows, and having other basic searches done within tech services, rather than in IT.
Poster Sessions- Session 1 : the collectors : posters on acquisitions, cataloging and classification, collection development and management, history, serials, and special collections.
After finally finding where the poster sessions were hiding in the Exhibits Hall I was pleased to find that they also had a small booklet with the abstracts and contact information for all of the posters being presented at the conference available.
During this portion of the poster sessions, I was most interested to see the posters about
“Transforming Special Collections: a Lib Guide to Innovation” and “Keeping the baby, throwing out the bathwater : adopting a homegrown catalog interface”
Ebsco Publishing Academic Librarian Luncheon
This was, of course, a sales pitch, but it came with a free lunch! The Ebsco Discovery Service (EDS) was shown, which was interesting to see after having only heard about it. My library is using Serials Solutions Summon product, so it was interesting to see the comparison. Other Ebsco products were also shown, but I found the EDS to be the most interesting of their products at the moment.
Salman Rushdie
Sir Salman Rushdie spoke eloquently about how all writers should be able to write any type of book, especially kids books. He told stories about his first kid’s book “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” and about his upcoming children’s book “Luka and the Fire of Life.” He also spoke about his life in the years after he wrote and published “Satanic Verses.” It was very interesting to hear the stories behind the news headlines.
Cooperative Collection Development
A panel of presenters spoke about cooperative and collaborative collection development to help with an individual library’s budget concerns. Some of the takeaways from this program included : Be sure to brand items and your catalog so that patrons know where the money is coming from for the information. Any cost saving benefits considered must outweigh the barriers encountered when implementing the idea. Keep things simple and have something in it for everyone (cooperative agreements). It is easiest to target one specific area for cooperation rather than every format and every item in the libraries.
Cataloging and Beyond : the year of cataloging Research
This was a disappointing panel discussion. I had expected to hear about actual research projects being conducted in libraries. Instead the speakers spoke about why we needed to conduct cataloging research. Maybe next year research will have taken place and the presenters can then talk about what has been learned from the research.
Top Technology trends
A panel consisting of : John Blyberg, Lorcan Dempsey, Jason Griffey, Monique Sendze, Cindi Trainor and Joan Frye Williams, moderated by Gregg Silvis discusses about the current tech trends in libraries, trends within a year and trends in 5 years. My top take aways from this panel discussion are that we are moving towards touch based interfaces and our interaction with objects will be changing on a rapid scale (also, we can’t forget about the lighting differences between what is needed for touch based screens vs. a desktop screen). Libraries need to embed IT in day to day work with staff across the library. The lines are blurring between information about a thing and a thing (this was probably the most conceptual concept in which to wrap my mind around, but can also lead to some interesting discussions within a library context). The discussion was to continue on the LITA blog after the conference, http://litablog.org/category/top-technology-trends/
Collection Evaluation During the Economic Crisis: Case Studies in Academia
Three presenters from Academic libraries across the country spoke about how their libraries are dealing with the economic downturn and the loss of library funding. Many libraries have already cut their materials budgets pretty deep but have to continue to do so. Even consortia deals aren’t safe in today’s climate as some of the big deals are being broken as libraries continue to try to save money. Some of the specifics in each of the libraries was interesting, but again each library is facing its own sets of needs and user expectations, so cut must really be considered on an institution by institution basis.
Heads of Cataloging Interest Group
Christopher Cronin and Shawne Miksa both gave presentations about “RDA: What Cataloging Managers Need to Know.” Some basic takeaways from both of these presentations: No RDA records will be in OCLC before Oct 1, 2010. Begin using RDA jargon in everyday conversations now. Use and test the RDA Toolkit now while it is free.
Technical Services Workflow Efficiency Interest Group
A discussion between a large academic library, a smaller academic library and a book jobber took place. It was interesting to see the different sides to the same problem. The main part of the discussion that interested me was the move from traditional cataloging to more metadata. Many places are now ordering the eBook by default and ordering paper as a last resort, this naturally changes the work that is being done in a tech services department. We should all focus more on the unique items the library owns and purchases and rely more on the publishers and jobbers to create correct and in depth MARC records.
I found this group to be so interesting that I volunteered to become the next co-chair.
Stress and Depression in the workplace: effective methods for preventing and/or treating emotional challenges
This session did not turn out to be what I was expecting. I was expecting to learn ways to deal with an over stressed or emotional staff, but instead the presenters focused almost exclusively on your individual stress and overall body’s well being. The two speakers were by far the best presenters that I saw at the conference, of course they weren’t librarians, so that might have had something to do with it. The crowd learned that individual changes to your lifestyle can affect your overall work life as well as your individual health.
Closing Session featuring Amy Sedaris
Amy mostly took questions from the audience in a humorous manner.
