Liminality Rules

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've spent the last three days attending preconferences or meetings here at ALA. I spent Thursday at the Taiga forum, designed to bring Associate University Librarians or Assistant or Associate Deans together to talk about issues of the day. This is the third forum and the second that I attended. My colleague Mike Furlough was also their along with 78 other library administrators. In preparation, we read Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger, the keynote speaker . He is an advocate of he digital environment and user control. At the end of his talk, someone in the audience asked him about his use of libraries and he said he didn't use libraries -- that he got an advance for his book and if he wanted a book, he just bought it.
This is one of the few spaces in which librarians at the same level and of different backgrounds can meet and talk about concerns and I hope it continues. The planning committee did a great job and Beth Camden was a perfect host.

Committee meetings started in earnest on Friday. The AULs for Technical Services in the large research libraries met Friday morning. The set up was fair, though the Philly crew snapped right into action when asked, the topics interesting and there were about 200 people in the audience. This was my first meeting as chair and I confess to being a bit nervous, but it went fine.

I'm watching and reading John and Elyssa's blogs with interest as they bring their cool hand helds to the conference and will be interested in hearing the results of their use. This conference more than ever has shown me how woefully outdated my laptop is and how useful a small device to take notes, get my email, phone, and text messages would be. Ah, and that I could listen to music on while I walk and take pictures for my Facebook site with. Hmm, sounds a bit like an IPhone, doesn't it?