ReadWriteLib – Emily Alinder Flynn

When it comes to electronic theses and dissertations, Ohio is unparalleled in its dedication to its students and their research. The OETDA Conference, held on March 6th, 2015, is proof. Though it is a smaller conference, the graduate school and library attendees were engaged and fostered discussion throughout the day, during sessions and breaks. The buzz in the room was palpable as people shared how they help their students and care for their research as ETDs after graduation.

The day began with exciting news of Ohio being selected as the next state to host the national USETDA Conference in 2016. The conference will be held in Columbus and is being hosted by OETDA, with supplemental help statewide as many schools want to be involved with planning. What a wonderful opportunity to show everyone our community supporting ETDs and put it to use.

Next, Austin McClean, Director of Dissertation Publishing at ProQuest, demoed the new Dissertations Dashboard which drills deep into the statistics of who uses your institution’s ETDs. Available to those who purchase PQDT Full Text or Global and the statistics can be broken down to outside of campus and on-campus as well as provide granular download trends, with the ability to compare your institution with its peers. In the works is an Authors Dashboard for people who have uploaded their ETD to ProQuest and Academic Genealogy that shows professors advising on dissertations and a family tree of researchers.

The keynote speaker unfortunately couldn’t make it to the conference itself due to a snow emergency but he was able to give his talk virtually. John Hagen, consultant/owner of Renaissance Scholarly Communications, discussed current and future ETDs trends, including ORCID, Vireo 3 release, security issues, open data, and publishing perils. Since we are in an age of great technology and interconnectedness, we must make the most of the tools and possibilities to support students and promote their ETDs and research to the best of our abilities.

After lunch, I provided a year-in-review for the OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) Center which surpassed 52,000 ETDs this fall. A few of the OH-TECH developers, who make the ETD Center possible, attended and helped field questions with me.

Tim Watson, Director of Graduate School Graduation Services at The Ohio State University, discussed the formation of the OhioLINK ETD Council, his role as Chair, and the work the group has done thus far. Graduate and library staff from member institutions are on the council and serve as a liaison between the wider community and OhioLINK and the developers.

Susan Banoun, University of Cincinnati, lead a lightning round panel discussion about library and cataloging trends for ETDs. Emily Hicks, University of Dayton, Sevim McCutcheon, Kent State University, and Sean Crowe, University of Cincinnati, shared their workflows within the library and relationships with the graduate school when dealing with ETDs and providing records for each item into their local catalogs.

Next, Emily Shaw, The Ohio State University, briefly described their latest project of digitizing theses to upload into the ETD Center. Dissertations were done previously and were not nearly as many. Others around the US have done similar projects, including Oregon State, University of Florida, and Arizona State.

To wrap up the day, Lou Haines, University of Miami, shared her experience running a 3 Minute Theses (3MT) competition on campus and played the video of the winning talk. UM is the first school within the state and she encourages others to get involved, offering to help provide resources to get it started on other campuses, hoping to create a network for competitions like other regions in the US. The 2015 competition is underway now, with 27 total participants and 10 finalists who can be at any point in their research process, most from the sciences but several English PHDs are competing as well. This reminds me of Speech in high school and the weekend meets, although 3 minutes makes 8-9 seem like an eternity. What a great way to learn to hone your research to a digestible, brief synopsis, and possibly win some prizes in the process.

OETDA is a wonderful conference and opportunity to spend a day with a niche group who cares about their student and their ETDs. I can’t wait for next years!

A 40th anniversary is quite a feat and this year’s ALAO was no exception, complete with a cake with raspberry filling to represent the ruby milestone for the four decades. Congrats, and here’s to 40 more!

ALAO is the Ohio Chapter of ALA’s ACRL (American Library Association’s Association of College and Research Libraries division). Though the unifier is higher education libraries, the various topics of sessions show the range of interests and needs of academic libraries.

Courtney Young, current ALA President, opened the conference as the keynote speaker with her address focused on diversity and our ability as librarians to further diversity not only in our professor and materials in our libraries but also on-campus and even in the wider communities. Outreach is one of the means that can manifest in many different ways including, as she pointed out, working with campus study abroad programs.

For my first session, Ellizabeth Bucciarelli (Eastern Michigan University) in her talk Creating Tangible Connections Using the Intangible Library, walked through the entire process of setting up a new program collection. With such a unique opportunity, she reached out to administrators, faculty, relevant associations, and others touched by this new department program in order to create a strong, open-communication foundation to ensure future success and funding. Among the concerns discussed, inflation for eResources was an important one so that everyone involved knew how library vendors and publishers function so that the new digital collection could remain robust for years to come.

Elizabeth Bucciarelli’s slide exemplifies the culture of librarians working with people outside of the library, especially concerning resources.

With Twitter still a vital tool for librarians, Diane Schrecker (Ashland University) and Kaylin Tristano (Brown Mackie College)’s session titled Engaging Tweets: Twitter as Personal Learning Network covered the basics as well as enumerated the different ways in which to participate on Twitter and useful tools. New to me were Twubs and Tweetchat, additional resources that make use of Twitter content but allow for more customization and monitoring of particular hashtags.

All conferences have swag, but the session on Twitter even had their own: buttons!

After lunch were a brief round of table discussions for half an hour. Empowering Communities through Collaborative Innovation: Doctoral Student Perspectives on Knowledge Navigation in the Academic Library caught my attention. Three Kent State University doctoral students presented their research and fielded a few questions, although more time would have been nice since they all had interesting topics. Shelley Blundell researches remedial undergraduates and there is not much about their information seeking needs and behaviors. Much more than motivation, hopelessness tends to be a main hurdle that remedial students face and most do not overcome. Omer Farooq discussed integrating scholarly communication in to information literacy instruction, which includes not only students but faculty as well. Heather Flynn wrapped up the round table with her research about serving the international students in academic libraries and considering ways to “internationalizing” the library.

Next up: poster talks and cake. What a great combination in the same room, to socialize and hear about all of the wonderful initiatives throughout Ohio and tips/tricks for working effectively.

Joshua Neds-Fox and Michael Priehs (Wayne State University)’s Informing Authors: Outreach Strategies for Engaging Faculty in Scholarly Communications Issues session articulated their efforts to engage faculty about scholarly communication and their institutional repository (IR), make it easy for the faculty to post their work into the IR, help develop an open access (OA) policy for campus, and provide opportunities of OA journals both for faculty and students. WSU is lucky to have a department dedicated to this issues.

As a final session, Tina Franks (OSU)’s Trusted Advisor: Borrowing Ideas from Corporate America to Build Professional Success shared her experience of building stronger relationships with her library users to serve their needs and add value for them. Her inspiration was drawn from a business book of the same title, which focused on earning trust, giving advice, building relationships, engaging new constituents, and changing from transactional to relationship service.

Kalahari Convention Center lion statue stands steadfast, despite the snow flurries outside.

Thankfully, while the weather was cold and snowy, the Kalahari Convention Center was filled with the warmth of ALAO.

Despite the Kalahari Convention Center’s African safari theme, the Ohio weather decided not to coordinate for ALA-O. However, the active and engaged librarians keep the conversation hot and the session abuzz.

Char Booth, Director of Research, Teaching, & Learning Services at the Claremont Colleges Library, lead the ALA-O pre-conference event about library advocacy and outreach, covering the theoretical as well as practical, making it a fruitful session. Having seen Char speak before, she has a vibrant presence and fun yet wise presentation style that draws people to her talks; this was certainly part of the reason for some attending the pre-conference. Her slides are available on SlideShare.

To start off, Char defined advocacy as simply “making people care” and outreach as “making people aware”. These concise yet broad definitions allow for bigger discussions and ideas about what is possible. With libraries, what comes to mind first is promoting resources and services to users but there is so much more to consider and people to keep in mind. As part of the workshop, Char provided a worksheet to generate reflection and table discussions to learn from each other. To make it personal, the first activity was a mini SWOT analysis for a particular advocacy issue or idea. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It is such a great idea because reasoning and logic guide the idea to help articulate not only the benefits but also consider any counters against it and prepare for them. This allows for strong and direct advocacy in any situation. As an alternative, some might prefer the quicker WIIFT method (What’s In It For Them?) in order to make the sell matter for the audience.

Part of advocacy includes data and assessment to show the value of your library and what it does. This might be driven by on-campus data collection and analysis. However, Char enumerated several great online sources for library data to replace or supplement your own data:
Ithaka S+R US library survey
NMC Horizon Report: Higher Ed Edition
EDUCAUSE ECAR (Student and Faculty Technology Research Studies)
Project Information Literacy

Outreach, then, makes use of the advocacy and Char certainly interrogated it from many angles and offered numerous possibilities. Two main approaches are DIY (Do It Yourself) and LSEDIFY (Let Someone Else Do It For You). For the benefits and concerns for each style, check out Char’s awesome slides at the link provided earlier in the post. Part of her comparison included the feel for particular audiences that each brings to the table, which is important to consider to ensure that the outreach resonates and is effective, such as a professional annual report. Whether fun or formal, non-scripted or instructional, on-the-fly or well-funded, there are great ideas going on at libraries no matter what the context. With its relaxed spirit and perfect weather, Claremont Colleges Libraries puts their mobile library cart and button maker through their paces constantly to go to their users and engage them. What fun, in the sun!

If that isn’t enough, Char offered more resources and reading for those who want to learn more and steep further in inquiry and ideas, check out the ACRL Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report by Megan Oakleaf. Also, at the end of her slides, Char lists a few books of interest too.

As a first-timer at ALA-O, I can’t wait to see what tomorrow holds! Follow the conference action virtually on Twitter with #ALAO2014 and the numerous session hash tags.

The morning started off with a well-attended 8:30 a.m. WGGS Program about digital humanities, librarianship, and feminism. Four presenters focused on the idea of how digital humanities could create change, be used for activism, and help equalize people and underrepresented issues.

With the conference wrapping up, the exhibition hall closes up early so I spent some time at various booths, trying not to collect too much swag. Having heard about it at other sessions, I dropped by EFF and learned that this was their first time at ALA. Electronic Frontier Foundation prides itself in “defending your rights in the digital world” (www.eff.org). Their swag was a set of safe stickers to cover laptop cameras to protect hackers from spying on you. Also, the NISO booth had copies of a recent bibliographic summary report. Sometimes swag is more professional than fun, though one advanced reader copy (arc), a frisbee, and a water bottle are coming home with me. That’s it, thankfully. Some friends sent boxes, yes multiple, of free books home after spending lots of time on the floor; ALA has its own post office to facilitate this for librarians.

Las Vegas has been a great location for ALA, though I still prefer others better, and the conference itself had wonderful sessions. The sheer amount of meetings, sessions, and presentations always amazes me and so does the number of librarians that turn out for ALA. However, here more than anywhere, it’s been magical.

Stamina can be an issue for ALA conferences not only due to the vast cavernous conference centers and treks to off-site meetings but also the all-day stream of back-to-back sessions and exhibit hall events, booths, and demos. There’s always something to do from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the least, with a few 6/7 a.m. meetings if you’re one of those lucky ones. Then some meetings occur anywhere from 5 to 9 p.m., not to mention the evening social events. In addition, there’s always something that you’ll miss–trades offs need to be made since many sessions are at the same time block. Co-workers, classmates, or library spouses can help tag team topics and sessions, but even then there’s something cool going on too that you will want to be at.

So how do you tackle ALA? This is still a mystery. Up until today, I was doing well at pacing myself but here I am at a 3 to 4 p.m. session that’s about to start, and it’s my ___ today. Yup, I’m feeling it. This is my last today…I swear. There was just so much to learn and hear about that pacing went out the window. But Sunday is always the most packed day, it seems. Good thing that Vegas is a city that sleeps early and doesn’t have a vibrant nightlife. Riiiiight. I’m actually loving Vegas more than I thought I would and have adjusted to the weather–evenings by the rooftop pool are amazing. But enough about that, let’s get on with my full day of awesome sessions…once this presentation ends.

Today began with the 8:30 a.m. Digital Preservation IG on which the presenters discussed their libraries’ current practices or plan for preserving digital content, especially research data. Part of the conversation grappled with how other campus stakeholders including IT fit into the equation.

The Continuing Resource Standards IG was a NISO update, with the focus on linking to journal content with OpenURLs. The speakers spoke about IOTA and KBART. Also, there are recent best practice recommendations and white paper available on NISO.org

Over the lunch hour at the ALA Job Placement Center, Open Cover Letters Revealed had a panel of four recently hired librarians providing advice and the inside scoop on the hiring process and search committees. Check out the event hash tag #alaocl on Twitter.

The CAMMS Forum’s large room filled up and many, including myself, pulled up a seat on the floor in order to hear about linked data, BibFrame, and the semantic web. Presentations varied from conceptual to practical. The Library of Congress’ MARC to BibFrame online convertor was live demoed successfully and excited the room.

My day rounded out with the Collection Development and Electronic Resources IG that discussed usage statistics, both why they are useful and how to obtain them. Although not all statistics, tools, and reports are equal, so there is no one right way or answer.

Good thing Monday is lighter on sessions!

The heat increased today and so did the number of conference sessions. With so many available and of interest, it can be difficult to choose. However, chairing committees means that part of my day was planned for me.

Before heading off to my first session, a quick trip through the exhibit hall proved successful. Dropping by LC’s booth, I found out that the BibFrame convertor would be discussed and likely demo it during the two talks today. But my schedule was booked so I didn’t make it back. However, a quick stop at ProQuest as well paid off as I had a personal demo of the new beta eBook reader for their ebrary and EBL books. It looks great, easy to use, and has many capabilities. The roll out in August for opt-ins will really prove how well it works in more library settings and it will be interesting to hear about.

The morning began with Cataloging Norms Interest Group session. We had two excellent presentations. For the first, Liz Woolcott and Clint Pumphrey from Utah State University gave a talk entitled “Responsive workflow design: creating collaborative cross-departmental teams for cataloging, digitization, and archives”. The second presenter, Yuji Tosaka from the College of New Jersey spoke on “RDA training, continuing education, and implementation”.

Next, I had lunch with COAPI (Coalition of Open Access Publishing Institutions) to discuss open access and find out how everyone and their libraries were doing.

As my final chair responsibilities of Annual, I helped run Library Code Year Interest Group’s Tech Speed Dating event during our session this afternoon. Six experts covered a variety of topics to give attendees a taste of each and answer any questions about: MakerBot – Emily Thompson from SUNY-Oswego, MongoDB – Emily Morton-Owens from Seattle Public Library, WordPress and library websites – Chad Haefele from UNC Davis, Drupal and Islandora – Cary Gordon, President of Cherry Hill Company, Python script – Harrison Dekker from UC Berkeley, and hardware and libraries – Jeff Branson from SparkFun. Group discussion followed about code literacy.

As an audience member for the first time all day, the Preservation Metadata Interest Group had three presentations about BitCurator and its capabilities and comparability with other applications. While it’s mainly for archives and digital forensics, it was great to hear about the important considerations, needs, and tools available for preserving born-digital content and its underlying metadata.

The serendipity of conferences especially ALA is always the best part. Suddenly, a UM School of information alum meet-up occurred naturally as I caught up with fellow classmates and other alums walked by and joined us. Back at the hotel, I ran into one of my co-chairs and had dinner with her and her colleague. Sometimes it is good not to have too many plans, since you never know what might work out.

Join us for Tech Speed Dating in Las Vegas! Learn about 7 different technology topics plus participate in a SparkFun demo at the Library Code Year IG session at ALA Annual.

Topics and experts

• MakerBot — Emily Thompson, Learning Technologies Librarian, SUNY-Oswego
• MongoDB — Emily Morton-Owens, Library Applications and Systems Manager, Seattle Public Library
• GitHub — Coral Sheldon-Hess, Web Services Librarian, University of Alaska Anchorage
• WordPress and library websites — Chad Haefele, Emerging Technologies Librarian, UNC Davis
• Drupal and Islandora — Cary Gordon, President, Cherry Hill Company
• Python script — Harrison Dekker, Head of Library Data Lab, UC Berkeley
• Hardware and libraries — Jeff Branson, SparkFun Educational Outreach, and Nate Hill, Assistatnt Director, Chattanooga Public Library

Add it to your ALA Scheduler today: Saturday June 28th, 1:00-2:30 p.m. Convention Center N119 Don’t miss out on the speed dating fun in Vegas!