The Delicious Burden

Getting It System Toolkit (GIST) released yesterday

Yesterday, the GIST team released the Getting It System Toolkit to the public and now we are awaiting feedback and input from other libraries.  
Today, the Acquisitions clerk and I sat down at my library and went through the workflow for the acquisitions processing and worked out the bugs in our request process.  Its going to take a little while to get used to, neither of us has used ILLiad before, but it really streamlines the request workflow, which was a holy mess before.  We were getting requests from a number of different interfaces (emails through my work account, the library's php request form, the website suggestion box, emails routed from the director's office, etc.) and no real easy way of managing the overload of paper this created.  Print out the request (email, flyer, brochure, website, etc.) put it in a folder, check library holdings, find a vendor, download an OCLC record, create an order record in the ILS, and on and on.  The GIST interface and the backend ILLiad request form takes all this disparate information (request, holdings, price, user feedback) and puts it into one place.  It is pure heaven...it also automates the communication portion of the request, by setting up customized emails and with one click I can send a faculty member an email to let them know I have ordered their book.  I love it!
 I am really looking forward to when faculty and students get back and start using this request system in earnest.

Here's the text of the release announcement:

Milne Library at SUNY Geneseo is releasing the first version of the Getting It System Toolkit (GIST) on Wednesday, August 19th.  GIST was developed at the State University of New York College at Geneseo with an eye toward converging ILL and Acquisitions workflows and user interfaces, while leveraging the strengths of various workflows and systems. Beware: GIST was designed to transform the business of borrowing, buying, and accessing.

The purpose of GIST is to provide a new model and useful tools to integrate and optimize acquisitions and interlibrary loan services, and to promote regional collection diversity.  It is a system for merging Acquisitions and ILL request workflow using one interface, allowing for user-initiated requests, coordinated collection development and acquisitions.  The project integrates disparate content and workflow (holdings, price, user feedback) that is hard to merge in many ILS.

So how does it work? 

GIST uses customized ILLiad 8 workflows, client layouts, and web pages that display discovery information from Amazon Web Services (price, reviews, & ratings), the WorldCat API (holdings information), Google Books API (table of contents or full/partial text), and open access content, and prompts for user input and feedback.  Why?  Currently, most acquisition and ILL requests are done through function-based departments, with their own workflow and multiple methods of input from librarians, faculty, students and other users.  GIST allows a library to customize and configure the request management process through:

    * Automated holdings information check using the WorldCat API service (local, regional, state, etc.)
    * Purchase price look-up service using Amazon and other vendor APIs
    * Collection of user feedback (should library purchase this item?  Is it essential, non-essential, etc.?)
    * Customizable emails and workflow enhancement by using the ILLiad software on the staff side

The GIST team at SUNY Geneseo is interested in getting your feedback. Go to the Getting It System Toolkit Blog (http://gettingitsystemtoolkit.blogspot.com/) and give us your feedback! 
Interested in downloading?  Check out the GIST Documentation and installation instructions at http://toolkit.idsproject.org/doku.php?id=wiki:gist. 

Libpunk

A new twist on an already familiar concept has hit LibraryLand and Kathryn Greenhill writes about it on her blog, Librarians Matter.  Greenhill has coined the term "libpunk" to refer to technologies which libraries have taken upon themselves to create and implement, using non-proprietary or open-source software and without the traditional institutional alliances.  These tools are usually created to help connect users and expand knowledge about a subject, not to make money.  She gives examples:

• Grassroots-organised library unconferences
• Casey Bisson’s Scriblio, which is a library catalogue based on blogging software Wordpress
• John Blyberg’s work on the SOPAC , a social OPAC layer over the top of a proprietary Library Management System
• The “ Five Weeks to a Social Library ” free grassroots course
• ...and many more

The idea of libpunk comes from the term "edupunk" coined recently by education blogger, Jim Groom and posted in a controversial article on Wikipedia; (yes they do have standards):

Edupunk is an ideology referring to educators and education strategies with a do it yourselfmashups, and podcasting (DIY) spirit. Most instructional uses of blogs, wikis, various among many other uses of emerging technologies might be described as DIY education or Edupunk. The term was first used on May 25, 2008 by Jim Groom in his blog, ^[1] and covered less than a week later in the Chronicle of Higher Education^[2].

Examples of Edupunk are Legos, Edusim, chalk, Hypercard, Moodle, use of the Bliki (blog and wiki mashups), students' art work on the outside wall of the classroom, and students teaching their teachers how to use technology.

Edupunk is also a rejection of efforts by government and corporate interests in using emerging technologies to exercise control over education, its processes, and its stakeholders, somewhat similar to punk ideologies. There is also an element of resistance to large and influential education businesses like Blackboard cooping emerging, collaborative, DIY technologies and techniques and repackaging them as their own product.

The Chronicle of Higher Education article mentions some resistance to course management systems and this is exactly the type of complaint I had when we moved to ANGEL at my institution last year.  The wiki and blog tools in our CMS are horribly inadequate and so, instead of using them, I taught students how to use tools such as Blogger and PBwiki for their class assignments, instead of ANGEL, which isn't social software and isn't designed to be.  So we make our own...
I like the idea of libpunk; libraries and librarians find a need, embrace it, and find solutions to the problem.  We aren't creating applications or using tools for a profit, but collaborating in order to help our users connect; to others, to information, to knowledge.  We are moving away from status quo and dependence on others for our traditional tools and finding aids.  We build our own.  Revolutionary...

The pace of change

Robert Darnton writes about the increasing pace of information change in the June 12th issue of The New York Review of Books and and argues that research libraries will NOT become obsolete.  He notes:

"Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books."

Darnton argues that the idea of textual stablity (in many cases, one version of a text, with all revisions and corrections, published by one publisher) is a relatively recent one in book publishing, and provides an example of how each age of information change goes through turbulent periods of instability and chaos.  In his essay, Darnton uses the example of Google's book digitization program as another of these technological changes which are changing the way we communicate, read and exchange ideas.  But, he also makes a case for research libraries and their continuing importance in a Google world:

1. Criteria of what is important will vary from generation to generation.  Historians and anthropologists of the future may rely heavily on materials which our current generation might consider ephemera.  Analyzing an advertisement in a magazine from the turn-of-the century is an important element in understanding what people bought and how companies marketed to consumers. 
2. Google will find it nearly impossible to digitize ALL the holdings of the great research libraries, and to date they have 28 libraries signed up, but there are nearly 543 million volumes in the research libraries in the U.S.  A bit overwhelming, even for Google.
3. Copyright will be an obstruction that Google might be able to overcome (currently Google is working on arrangements with publishers and authors), but Google will probably never be able to keep up with the flood of new books published every year.  Plus, does Google even promise to conserve texts indefinitely?  They are providing access now, but what is their mission and goal in providing these digital copies in perpetuity?
4. The obsolescence of electronic media -- who knows how long Google will be king or even around?
5. The people behind Google are human and will make mistakes and errors when scanning and digitizing.  The reproductions may not be perfect.
6. Is digitization the best medium for preservation, or will it be eclipsed by something else?  Will  these copies last?
7. Google gets to decide which edition or copies of a particular book gets digitized and then made available.  Are they the best judge of which copy is suitable for a researcher's purpose?
8. The last point which Darnton makes is the one many of us have voiced: the physical properties of the texts themselves.  The size, shape, paper quality and thickness, smells, margin notes, pages which have been dog-eared and stained, the actual feel of a book can be important to the researcher.

The most important point, though, which Darnton makes is this:  Google is great, no doubt, and libraries are well-advised to take advantage of electronic resources, but don't think of libraries as mere warehouses or storerooms of material.  He's talking about the big research libraries, of course, but this could equally be applied for the undergraduate college library as well.  We do our users well to remind ourselves that we are not competing with Google, that we should collaborate and work with services like Google to get at the heart of our collections and make them more accessible.  This won't make us obsolete; on the contrary, we will become even more important as all the technological changes keep coming, fast and furious.

Key skills & resources for first year students

I am at a CIT presentation called, "Introducing Key Skills and Resources to Freshmen Students", presented by Jackie Ritzko and Kathy Maxwell of Penn State Hazelton. 
One of the trends in higher education is to create one credit or three credit courses on information or technology literacy and either require everyone to take the course or designate it as an elective.  Do these work?  How effective are these courses at integrating technology or information resources into the content which students are learning?
This session goes a long way to developing a course where we are integrating technology and information literacy into a first year seminar.  The presenters developed a seminar around:

1. Introducing students to key campus personnel and resources (who is the registrar on campus? who takes care of financial aid?)
2. Divide students into teams.  Develops their group decision-making skills.
3. Integrate technology by requiring students to create a powerpoint (or some other technology creation program).
4. Use a communication format to interview key campus personnel for the content.
5. Used the Gary Smalley personality assessment (lion, beaver, otter, golden retriever) to assess students' leadership and team abilities.

Their integrated first year projects utilized technology and information resources,
Some things they learned:

1. Don't use the same "people" on campus, over and over again. Use a revolving set of campus personnel.
2. Don't assume your students KNOW the technology you are requiring them to use.

Perceptions of librarians at CIT

I'm pleasantly surprised by the turnout of librarians at the CIT conference.  I arrived this morning and met my co-presenter, we talked about the conference and she said to me, "I didn't realize that this was a library conference!".  It turns out she was discussing CIT with another faculty member who told her this conference was for librarians.  Which surprised me of course, since I don't think the conference is specifically geared towards librarians, but rather to technology specialists and faculty using technology at SUNY campuses.  It was flattering to think that some faculty view this as a library conference.  Librarians just happen to be one of the main constituencies on campus who use technology heavily; presenting, talking, and using lots of the good stuff.  In many cases, libraries were the first departments to use technology in higher education institutions.  On my campus, librarians are the staff attending and presenting at technology conferences.  In fact, there are two of us from my library presenting today; six of us are here in attendance from my library alone.  The bloggers, twitter users, and presenters are librarians; participants are librarians; learners are librarians.  I'm always impressed by the amount of training, workshop attendance and staff development which librarians undertake.
There may be a flip side to this - the colleague didn't bother coming to this conference because it was a "library conference", but maybe this also means the faculty know that librarians are at the forefront of applying and using instructional technology on our campuses.   Now, if only our computing & information technology department wasn't so territorial about instructional technology, we might be able to work together more productively to create some engaging and worthwhile faculty & staff training programs.

Brainstorming the presentation

A faculty member and I are presenting at CIT next week and I am scrambling to put our notes into some coherent form for the presentation.  At this precise moment I feel like I am "brainstorming" the presentation rather than working on our presentation content.
It presents a few dilemmas:
1. When I put together a presentation, I am obsessive about every little point I am going to make.  This presentation has all the hallmarks of being a free-for-all, which worries me.
2. I enjoy working with this faculty member, and I'm afraid I am obsessing over the presentation because I want her to be impressed by my dazzling powerpoint skills and amazing organization of information.  Ahem, that last part was a bit of an exaggeration, but I do want to impress her.
3. What I struggle with all the time; is this presentation worth the 30 minutes people are spending to hear it?  Are we presenting information that is original, revelatory, and innovative?  Will our talk inspire others to go out and incorporate technology into their class assignments?

My colleague and I are presenting a paper on our collaboration of the past three years.  I worked with this faculty member to infuse technology skills into the class requirements, by teaching her students how to use and evaluate certain Web 2.0 tools.  We started out with blogs, added RSS, then last semester created a library lab environment where students were working with blogs, RSS, wikis, podcasting, Adobe InDesign, and HTML.  Its been an interesting evolution, watching each successive class of students play with the technology.  In the beginning, the technology was really isolated from the class goals and assignments, but the instructor has worked hard to incorporate them into the objectives.  Students use blogs to keep track of web trends, use RSS to monitor each others' blogs (as well as the blogs they are using for their research), create podcasts of audio content for the web, and use a class wiki to develop a communication tool for new visitors to the area.  The results were students who now had a peer review process; monitoring and commenting on each others' blogs and writing about the process on their own blog.  Using a wiki to create a group project where each student could review, edit and comment the group's work and using RSS to keep track of all this information.  The class is a good model for Web 2.0 tools which can enhance and add value to the traditional classroom. 
Now, how do I put this into a powerpoint?  I guess just do it and stop obsessing...

Copyright and DRM: more than I wanted to know...

A couple of weeks back, I went to a copyright and digital licensing workshop in beautiful Ithaca, NY at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (if you have never been and you are a birdwatcher, this is a must-see).  Informative and overwhelming, the speakers were engaging and extremely knowledgeable, took questions and tried to answer or provide guidance on where to find the answers.  Being a copyright newbie, I found all the information helpful, but needed a few days (or weeks) to synthesize it, and now want to present a workshop for library staff on copyright.  IDS folks are pretty savvy, but may not know much about licensing agreements.  Reference and instruction librarians may have more knowledge about licensing, but still may need a refresher on both DRM and copyright. 

Another relevant issue was the support of faculty electronic course reserves in our campus' new course management system (myCourses).  We currently have Docutek electronic reserves (ERes), but will no longer support it at the end of May.  How do we monitor what faculty are doing with their electronic reserves? Do we need to monitor them or should they be left to manage their own course content?  How are other libraries tackling copyright and licensing issues when they have no control over what faculty are putting in their learning repositories?  There were no easy answers at the copyright workshop, and I want to think maybe I am making a mountain out of a molehill, but I do feel as though our library has not really thought through the consequences of how we are handling this problem.  We will provide support to faculty if they want help in scanning or loading content into their course repositories, but does that mean we are also monitoring copyright abuses?  Before, since ERes was housed on a library server, we had total control over procedure and any copyright violations.  Now, since myCourses is actually a remote server, do we have control?  I'm wondering how other libraries are handling this problem.

On the digital licensing front, there were even more questions than answers.    How do we secure access to online resources and manage patrons' expectations?  How do we negotiate contracts to get the best deal for our library or consortium?  If a license is "silent" on an issue, does that mean you can go ahead and do "it"? (actually that last one did have an answer and it is, "no, you do not have the right to "do it" even if the license is silent on the issue).  What about managing digital audio or video content? 
I have lots of homework to do...