Saturday, June 23
STS Program Planning Committee for Annual 2008 (Anaheim)
The committee met and assigned tasks for our upcoming deadlines. We need to line up speakers in the next month, get the field trip (Behind the Scenes at Disney’s Imagineering Headquarters) planned, and put together a plan for a poster session we’re calling the “technology petting zoo.”
STS Meeting for New and Continuing Chairs
Attended this informational meeting as the co-chair of the STS Program Planning Committee.
OSU Beavers vs UNC Tarheels
We were going for Ethopian food, and and since we wanted to watch the game, I asked ‘how ’bout an Ethopian sports bar?’ Oddly enough, we found one!
Sunday, June 24
STS Breakfast
All-members breakfast. There were 10 tables with 10 topics (they called it the 10 squared breakfast). It seemed that everyone had great conversations; I’m writing up the one about librarians using RSS feeds for professional development.
STS Hot Topics
The Hot Topics discussion was all about Survey Monkey and how people are using it.
An ASU science librarian used it to survey her faculty about the top three journals they need. Another librarian used it for pre- and post- tests in instruction, and for anonymous student evaluations. Le Moyne College Library used it to have the community “tell us about your favorite books” and then they put those books and comments into Library Thing and displayed them on their web page. [Loretta is working on something like this right now, with award-winning books]
Marilyn Christianson at Auburn used Survey Monkey in conjunction with an event they held called “Tailgate at the Library” It sounded pretty wild— at Auburn they have a tradition of t-p’ing the trees on campus when the football team wins. Evidently the library got into it, and had people tp trees in front of the library at this event. I digress. They had 800 people, cheerleaders and their mascot, Aubie the Tiger. People were asked to take a survey about the library possibly in order to get a ticket for a hot dog, I might be making that up.
One thing Survey Monkey does not support is something called “piping.” Piping is the ability to move from one question to another based on the response that the survey-taker selects. Piping gives respondents the feeling that the survey is targeted specifically to their answers. High-end survey products such as Perseus allow piping, and look a bit nicer than survey monkey. Perseus is sold as a campus client; we might have it available here; I haven’t checked yet. But for the cost, Survey Monkey or Zoomerang are good products.
LITA Top Tech Trends
Isn’t it great that they finally put some women on the panel? But the room was overflowing and the sound quality was really poor. It’s probably my last top tech trends… I’ll wait for the podcasts and the bloggers (including Jeremy Frumkin). Roy Tennant’s top three trends? 1) the demise of the catalog 2) software as a service [a model of software delivery where the software company provides maintenance, daily technical operation, and support for the software provided to their client ] 3) intense market insecurity because of disrupters such as Evergreen and Koha in the online catalog market.
LIS Reunions
I saw people I know from Tennessee and Alabama. Since my alma mater forgot the Big Orange stickers, I ended up with Alabama stickers on my name tag. Ironic given that the vols and the tide are mortal enemies on the football field.
OSU Beavers vs UNC Tarheels
Although I was supposed to go to the STS dinner, I was unsure about the sports bar aspect of Tony Cheung’s. Since I did not want to miss a minute of the game, I missed dinner to watch the game in our condo.
Monday, June 26
STS Program
Cheryl described this program really well in her report. A few points I took away:
1) Campuses need librarians to apply LIS solutions to information problems, for example , the NSF is already asking researchers for a data management plan, and the NEH will likely add that requirement soon. Are we ready to step in? There is an article in CR&L news entitled Librarians as Partners in E-research (scott brandt) that we should read closely.
2) The future is cooperative rather than at each institutional level. This means that we should be looking for opportunities to build repositories and services at regional and national levels. (for visual collections in this instance, but the trend applies more broadly).
3) Northwestern has a lot of money! Video Furnace is a streaming media repository service that is meant to support changing pedagogical trends and tech-enabled classrooms while addressing the need to upgrade and preserve access to an aging video collection.
STS Posters
The posters were all about visual data; repositories, search engines, and even a new Data Curation program at UIUC.
Exhibits
I briefly cruised through the exhibits between sessions. I got a signed Stephen Parlato dragon print for our nephew, Nash. Thankfully, I only picked up one tote bag - the highly prized DEMCO bag… with outside pockets and a zipper.
RUSA President’s Program
Time Odyssey: Visions of Reference and User Services was the title of the program. I wanted to see it because there was a anthropologist on the panel (Genevieve Bell, from Intel), and she was so good it was worth it just to hear her. Ms. Bell pointed out that libraries are important social hubs, and that they have always been high-tech. Lately people are developing vast personal libraries (sort of like in the victorian age, only with multimedia as well as books..).. attendance at libraries is up… she thinks this is a real opportunity for libraries.
Bell’s “calls to action”
1) as people begin to collect gigabytes of information in their homes, they are noticing that organization is good. Who can help with that??? Some libraries are offering workshops to help users think about the organization of their home libraries (some are offering workshops on Dewey, too, but that’s pushing it !)
2) Libraries are about politics and power. The need for preservation and access to knowledge hasn’t decreased, and this is a continuing fundamental role of libraries. We need to fight for it.
The next speaker was Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. He sees that we will soon have an “internet of things.” In other words, the phenomenal growth of computing power and storage means that we can now pack more data in physical things. For example, IPTV (internet protocol television), where you could be watching the Pink Panther and looking up the composer of the theme music on your IPTV at the same time. TV and computer merged. Another example he gave was Bruce Sterling’s idea of “spime” - how objects will have information attached to them so you can track them through their lifecycle. Rainie also talked at length on the importance of tracking and shaping policy on broadband, privacy and intellectual property. He thinks that librarians should help millennials understand privacy and personal information on the net.
> Allen Renear’s piece was on “How we will won’t read in 2017.” He says that there will be no articles. That we will not have to look for articles to read, but that it will be more like flying a jet plane through an information space. He sees that there will be too many papers for anyone to really read. We’ll have to use literature and data mining to figure out where the good stuff is. Rather than spending time reading articles (a sort of vertical information-gathering model), we flit and bounce through the literature horizontally. Gathering information horizontally is hard work, and tools will need to be developed to facilitate it.There were 2 more speakers, Wendy Schultz ( a futurist - and she says librarians need to become futurist, can easily do so using things we know about such as environmental scanning) and Steven Bell, who blogged the whole thing, but maybe didn’t post it yet.
Tuesday, June 27
STS Tour of the NOAA Library at Silver Spring, MD
The NOAA Library staff gave us a great program. The first speaker was a geosciences guy who recently got an MLS because he spent so much time working with data management and preservation. The second speaker was John Kermond, a polar researcher, presented some indisputable facts about global warming. The ice is melting, folks.
We also had a tour of their amazing collection of materials. 
NOAA is digitizing many of their rare materials, sometimes in cooperation with NARA - they are always looking for funding for this. In the rare book room, they have charts and reports of the Coastal Survey dating back to Thomas Jefferson.
Spent 13 hours coming back to Oregon. I was one of the lucky ones.
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