Team members on this team come from two different organizations, the Libraries and Digital Library Technologies, a unit within our campus IT organization. Within the Libraries, they come from the IT unit, Cataloging and Metadata Services, Public Services, two of the Campus Libraries, and Library Administration. This is truly a cross functional, cross generational, cross cultural team. However, they have managed to all pull together and do an excellent job of completing the first phase of a very difficult implementation.

Why was this group able to work so well? Several of them had different ideas. "We compromise" said one of the DLT team members. "We work hard and have fun" said one of the folks from the Libraries. "I've been on lots of teams, but this has been my best experience" said yet another. "I can't wait until we move to the basement so I can be next to Janis and Lance" said one of the folks from the Libraries IT unit.

I wish I could replicate this recipe for good teamwork. It seems like they have a few things going for them: 1) an empowering team leader; 2) a common goal and mission (to get this system up and running) and a sense of purpose 3) genuine fondness for one another 4) a variety of necessary skill sets, and finally, administrative and budgetary support.

So, here's hoping that the next phase of implementation goes as well as this phase. Congratulations on a great job.

So, I pose the question to any of you: what benefits do you see working in a consortial environment? Are there any downsides?

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 This conference more than ever has shown me how woefully outdated my laptop is and how useful a small device to take notes, get my email, phone, and text messages would be.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?

Before my brother died, he started giving me Spode Christmas dishes for a Christmas present. Each year for about three years, he'd send me something new -- a place setting, salad plates. My parents contributed some pieces too. After Chris died, I started buying a little at a time and I was always thrilled to find it at TJ Maxx - a piece here and there. Pretty soon my friend Karen started buying some -- a lovely bowl, a bread tray, some serving pieces, a wooden tray with Spode tiles. I get excited thinking about what type of piece Karen might contribute to my Spode Collection. Finally this year, I opened some lovely Spode wine glasses from my friend Lauri. After almost twenty years, I have a lovely collection of Spode and everytime I use it, I think of those family members gone, like my brother Chris and my mother, or friend Karen and now Lauri, who have added to this wonderful collection.

When we all lived in the same town, Karen and her family would join ours for dinner on Christmas Eve and we'd eat off the Spode. Now, since we're traveling back to Illinois for Christmas, the Spode is put away, except for a piece that I took with me to Illinois. I missed using it this year -- not because I love the dishes so much, though I do, but because shared so many wonderful meals on them during times we were together in our house at Christmas.

I think next year, I'll pull the Spode out at Thanksgiving so that when the kids come East, we can use it then. When Lauri comes in December, it'll be out and ready to go. Someday perhaps Karen, Bob, Winn and Heather will join us in State College in the Winter. The Spode and I will be ready for them.

This is exactly what I did two months ago as we are beginning to prepare for the Google Book Project. I emailed Martha Sites at the University of Virginia and asked if we could visit them. We got here yesterday and will leave later today and it's been a great experience. The faculty and staff here have been terribly helpful. We've learned so many things that we will be able to use in our project at Penn State. I think all of us who came have been impressed by the care they take in this project. So, thanks to all of the Virginia folks who have taken the time out of their schedules to meet with us and teach us what they've learned. Someday, we'll pay it forward.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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....

In preparation for Google scanning up to 500,000 of our books, we're going to get our bibliographic and holding records in good order. We need to barcode items that need barcoding so that the holdings records are accessible. We know we have at least 200,000 books and serials to barcode. We also need to spend some time analyzing what we're buying and how they're being used. Finally, we have so many treasures in our special collections. Should we be pooling resources from around the Libraries to bring these treasures to light?

Once we get all this work done and Google scans our books, will people read the digital copies? I think they will. I watch my 14 year old read story after story on her Mac. She reads more on her Mac than she does in print now. That 14 year old will hopefully be a college freshman in 2011. Will software exist to more easily read ebooks? Will we all have ebook readers? Will we be using Amazon's kindle? Will Google have invented a reader? I'm thinking we might want to do a pilot in the next year or two and test out some of these readers.

I'll write more about our collections and the google project as time goes on.