Liminality Rules

Usually I write about things related to librarianship, but tonight I have 15 kids in my house. My youngest daughter wanted to have a party with her friends. 13 girls and 2 boys are in our family room watching (well, not really watching, more like screaming at) a movie. Armed with Mountain Dew, pizza, and other types of food, I estimate the next four hours are going to be a bit unnerving. So far I've vetoed Rocky Horror Picture Show (a movie that my oldest daughter watched at way too young an age because it's one of her father's favorites) and any R rated movie that the kids weren't supposed to bring. I have turned on a light and will attempt to keep them in the house and add some structure to a party where I know they would rather I be anywhere but in the house.

One thing I've noticed is that 1 kid brought her laptop and all brought their cell phones and seem to be texting during the movie. Some look a bit gothic, some very preppy. The boys seem okay...one has braces and is pretty quiet and one just likes to hang out at our house. He comes with us to dinner and shopping. Since he says thank you and please, I don't much mind. He's a nice kid and has some challenges in his life.

I wonder what the future holds for these kids? Some are well off, some not very at all. Some are bossy (my child) and some are compliant. Some are loud ("shut up" seems to be a favorite word) and some just seem to be grateful to be around other kids. Some come from two parent households with engaged parents and others, well, others are not so well off. They are mean to one another, loving with one another and yell a lot. Some kids don't like the yelling and they're upstairs in Julie's room with her Mac.

Tomorrow I'll let you know how it turns out. Three more hours to go....

The only thing that seems to be changing faster than a teenager's mood is the price of disk space. Best Buy is advertising a terabyte hard drive for $279.00. I said to my husband, "didn't we once buy a 10 megabyte hard drive?" and he said, yes, and we paid $400.00 for it. That was, as they say, back in the day.

In any event, the party went fine, my daughter was happy, and no damage was done. However, the next party will have fewer kids and be a bit shorter.

Tonight I'm off to the Charleston Conference. I have a special place in my heart for this conference because it was one of the first conferences I attended as a new librarian back in the early 1990s, it is where I heard one of my former bosses speak before she became my boss and thought, "boy, this woman is smart" and because so many wonderful friends and colleagues will be there. Bob Alan and I are presenting with two of our Illinois colleagues and working on this project has been so interesting. For me it has become a jump start to get back to my research agenda after a hiatus. We examined approval plans at both institutions and examined the use of the materials that we receive on the approval plans in order to determine whether they are cost effective. As soon as the presentation is over, I'll put up a link to our slides.

Collection assessment is a topic near and dear to my heart. We spend millions of dollars on resources for our users; careful assessment of the use of these books is good stewardship.

More later as the the conference starts tomorrow.

The Charleston Conference is almost over. Several of the presentations were excellent. It was great to see old friends and to make new ones. This conference used to have about 400-500 people in attendance; it has grown to over 1100. It seems like it was bursting at the seems, but people had a good time and there was a wide array of program choices.

Yesterday, Four CEOs talked about the greatest challenges to the scholarly communications. They talked about developing new business models, the rise in social networks and communications, and consumerism in China. China, they said, will have a huge impact, and is already having a huge impact, on scholarly communications output. They also talked about the Espresso book machine http://www.ondemandbooks.com/ which they predict will have a huge impact on scholarly publishing. Inexpensively created books, on demand.

Then Chris Matz from Christian Brothers College did a wonderful session about using the libraries annual report as an outreach tool for faculty. While he was at the University of Memphis, he wrote 38 different annual reports, each tailored to a specific discipline. I thought he was very industrious, creative, and probably pretty tired since he did that all in 7 months. He cited an article by our very own Bernadette Lear (Tis Better to be Brief than Tedious)...way to go, Bernadette.

This morning Ann Okerson moderated an excellent panel discussion on "What Do Users Want". Lucinda Covert Vail talked about the mechanism they went through at NYU to gather information about the "primitives" -- basic process of faculty and grad student research through surveys, focus groups, and interviews with faculty in order to discover their research process so that the library could discover ways in which it could best meet their needs. Cecily Marcus, the CLIR Postdoc Fellow at Minnesota talked about the new library portal geared to assist undergraduates.

Our talk was this afternoon comparing the approval plans of two large ARL libraries (Penn State and the Univ. of Illinois.) We looked at cost/use by publisher and subject and drew some conclusions. Almost 70% of the books purchased at Penn State and 62% of the books purchased at UIUC circulated at least once in an up to two year period. We have some great data that i'll post soon. We view this as a starting point for collections assessment and we have three or four more studies we either want to do together with Illinois or along. Bob Alan from Penn State and Lynn Wiley, Leslie Rios, and Tina Chrzastowski from Illinois worked on this with me. It was so much fun and we got some great comments.

There were a few other programs that I attended and the conference will continue through tomorrow (I leave about noon.) It was great seeing two of my ARL fellow colleagues (Stanley Wilder and Steve Smith) and we went out for a beer and caught up on what each other was doing.

If you ever get a chance to come to Charleston, I'd highly recommend it. It's a lovely city and you never know who you'll see here. I shook John Edward's hand at the Farmer's Market here once upon a time.

I didn't anticipate the Saturday programs being as good as they were. "Librarians are the interior decorators of structured serendipity" declared Joann Sparks from Sloan Kettering. She showed several cool things that they're doing and one of them was to show an image from a publication of a Sloan Kettering researcher on the library's website. The image changes all the time. I think that's a wonderful idea and seems like something very doable for us here at Penn State. That would be a great thing to show on our plasma screens too, wouldn't it? The next two speakers talked about ways in which to foster innovation in libraries, be it infused throughout the organization or centered in a "skunkworks" type of atmosphere. Finally, Lynn Connaway from OCLC talked about the research her group conducted on peoples perceptions of libraries. As my friend Barbara Winters used to say, "there is no end to the good work we have to do here."

I left Charleston with some perceptions. First, the conference is so different than it was fifteen years ago. This time it was about users, and uses of libraries, assessment, books, ebooks but all geared towards engaging our users and facilitating their work. Gone forever, really, are the days of public and technical services being different -- we all have the same goal. I also am excited about the creativity of our profession. We are doing some amazing things regarding reaching out to our students in social networking environments to creating new open source library systems, to our digitization efforts. There are lots of cool things going on. It was fitting that I spent 45 minutes at the airport talking to my daughter about her assignments at GSLIS at U of I. Doing things like brushing up on SQL, creating programs to examine search transaction logs to see how users are searching, learning about the economics of information, and possibly going to Sao Tome to create a computing lab. Whoa, what amazing graduate school experience she's having. Talking to her, and listening to the programs at Charleston, and finally getting excited about my own research agenda was well worth the trip.

Hopefully my luggage will join me at home today.

I had the opportunity today to take part in a meeting with some folks from ITS and the Libraries and talk about areas in common and how we can work together. Areas such as repository development come to mind because both of us have a sets of expertise that are very complementary. I started thinking about the Knowledge Commons that the Library is creating and the Digital Commons that ITS is creating and how both of those initiatives are opportunities to enhance teaching and learning and to increase our relevancy to our students. We're trying to create inviting and engaging learning spaces and also to say to the students, "we'll come to you" by setting up reference areas in Smeal and other locations and to also bring subject guides and the CAT searching to Facebook and into other Web 2.0 environments. There certainly is, as my friend Barbara says, no end to the good work we can do here.

I wanted to write a blog entry dedicated to the terrific and polite students that I run into in the library everyday. Since I work on the 5th floor, I ride the elevator several times a day. Often when i get in the elevator, I'm joined by 1-6 students. Sometimes they have earphones in their ears and then it's a pretty quiet trip. However, if they don't have earphones in, I talk with them. And the wonderful thing about our Penn State students is that they talk with me back. We'll talk about the weather, what they're studying, if it's cold/warm in the building. But they talk...cheerfully. And when they get off the elevator, more times than not, they say, "Have a nice day."

Another evidence of the politeness of our Penn State students is that both the young men and women hold open the door for me when I have full arms. Each time, I'm surprised, and each time, I say "thank you." I really appreciate their thoughtfulness.

So thanks, Penn State students. Thanks for being polite to a middle aged woman who often has her hands full. It's a pleasure to serve you.

Before the American Library Association midwinter meeting, the Future of Bibliographic Control Working Group will issue a final report. In advance of that report, the Working Group presented a draft report to the Library of Congress this past week. The Library of Congress has made this podcast and it is available for viewing at:
www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/meetings/webcast-nov13.html

The charge of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic control was to:
* Present findings on how bibliographic control and other descriptive practices can effectively support management of and access to library materials in the evolving information and technology environment
* Recommend ways in which the library community can collectively move toward achieving this vision
* Advise the Library of Congress on its role and priorities

The Working Group was appointed in November of 2006 Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services at LC. Working Group information is available at:

http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/

This report will most likely be discussed widely at the American Library Association meeting in January. The Directors of Technical Services in Large Research Libraries will be talking about this at our meeting at ALA. If people are interested, we could have a discussion here at Penn State about the recommendations after their final report is issued.