As the relentless leaflets and committee-spam filling my work inboxes keep reminding me, ALA Annual is most definitely “upon us.” After a much-needed Texas vacation next week, I’ll be speaking/facilitating at the RUSA Reinvented Reference Preconference:

Reinvented Reference V: Using Our Collective Wisdom

Friday, July 10, 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Sponsored by RUSA Reference Services Section (RSS) and RUSA Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS)

Technology, staffing, collaboration, and assessment pose big challenges to most libraries. Wish you could get answers to real world library problems? Tired of hearing “how we did it” stories that don’t mention overcoming hurdles? Wish that sessions were more interactive and less “sage on the stage”? Come to Reinvented Reference V! Reference librarians and managers of reference services interested in discovering solutions to the challenges of staffing models, technology, collaboration, or assessment in an interactive format will reap huge rewards from Reinvented Reference V. Go home with practical, concrete ideas from our expert panel—and your colleagues—that you can implement at your library. Lunch is included.

Speakers: Bill Pardue, virtual services librarian at Arlington Heights Memorial Library; Char Booth, e-learning librarian at UC Berkeley; Lisa Ennis, systems librarian and assistant professor, University of Alabama at Birmingham; Brian Matthews, user experience librarian, Georgia Tech Libraries [note: Brian is now an Assistant University Librarian at UC Santa Barbara].

Advance Registration (until May 22): RUSA member, $195; ALA member, $240; Non-member, $315; Student, $90
Regular Registration (after May 22): RUSA member, $220; ALA member, $265; Non-member, $340; Student, $115

I’m looking forward to  presenting on something as nebulous as collaboration, and it’s honestly a huge relief for once to be lifted of the perennial responsibility of addressing “technology.” The workshop is following a model that attempts to use case studies as a means of extracting practical strategies from participant experiences – the speakers will do our thing during the morning block, and in the afternoon we divide up with different tables of participants who have identified areas of particular interest from among the four themes, working with them to identify cases to analyze and share. My RUSA Committee (Research and Statistics) is also holding its annual forum:

Don’t miss the 15^th Annual RUSA/RSS Reference Research Forum

The Research Forum is one of the most popular programs at ALA Annual, where attendees can learn about notable research projects in reference service areas such as user behavior, electronic services, and reference effectiveness.

Sunday, July 12, 1:30-3 p.m.

Hilton Chicago (720 South Michigan Avenue), Waldorf

This year’s presentations include:

What WOREP Results Say About Reference Service, Patron Satisfaction and Success

Recipient of RUSA’s 15th Anniversary Reference Research Grant Julie Gedeon and Carolyn Radcliff (Kent State University)

“Teachable Instants” in Instant Message Reference: Taking the Opportunity or Taking a Pass?

Megan Oakleaf (School of Information Studies, Syracuse University) and Amy VanScoy (North Carolina State University Libraries)

Measuring the Effectiveness of Online Tutorials: A Pragmatic Approach

Cindy Craig (Wichita State University Libraries) and Curt Friehs (Kansas City Public Library)

Reference Research Forum Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=115014166367

See all RUSA/RSS Events on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=93192679322

As for the rest of the conference, I tend to go where the wind blows in terms of programs, etc., although I’ll be hanging around Emerging Leaders events when I can -  I was recently asked by the indefatigable Peter Bromberg to join the team that organizes EL. My own experience with the program was quite positive, and I hope to help create more practical impact and less general fraughtness from EL than some believe has existed in the past (see In the Library with the Lead Pipe for excellent  background on this statement).

Last week I attended an excellent in-house staff training at UCB led by Fleur Helsingor of the Kresge Engineering Library on what it takes to make an existing website mobile-friendly using HTML, XHTML, and CSS. This is a topic on the minds of many, and Fleur deftly covers the range of issues involved in this PDF guide:

“A few years ago, if you wanted to make your website accessible to visitors with cell phones, handheld computers, and other mobile devices, you had to create a separate website for them using a special markup language such as the Wireless Markup Language (WML) instead of HTML. There’s no need to do that now — modern mobile device browsers can handle conventional web pages coded in Extensible HTML (XHTML). You can use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to present your existing website’s content in a mobile friendly way.”

I highly recommend taking a look at Fleur’s guide if you are considering making your library (or any other) site readable by mobile devices. An excellent point Fleur makes is that many of the conventions that make mobile sites readable by mobile browsers (code consistency, XHTML) are also best practices in web accessibility.

For more recent activity on mobile devices and libraries, take a look at the Summer of Mobile Library Services post at the TechSource blog, which includes information on the second m-Libraries conference happening currently in Vancouver, BC, and the upcoming online Handheld Librarian conference in late July. Also, the University of Cambridge survey-based m-Libraries: Information use on the move report provides interesting findings on mobile library/information use in the UK.

Now that it’s summer and academic librarians have a bit of breathing/reading room, I’ve been getting more and more inquiries about the research report I published via ACRL in late April (and keep them coming, by all means). By way of further explanation, this week I talked with my longtime friend Ellie Collier at  In the Library with the Lead Pipe (podcast interview and transcript), and with Dan Freeman at the ALA TechSource blog (written Q&A). The ITLWTLP conversation steered towards career development, local user cultures, advocacy, and mentorship, while the TechSource post focused more on Informing Innovation itself. Thanks to both Ellie and Dan for the awesome questions.

I’m more than a little preoccupied with fonts and typefaces, and am constantly vexed by unidentifiable ones on signs, etc. that I can’t place or recall. A while back Lia sent me a link to an iPhone application that actually works pretty well in this situation – WhatTheFont.  It uses the same image recognition technology behind new approaches to search and marketing: take a picture of a font using the app interface, which then queries MyFonts, a huge online collection of typefaces, to identify its name. For non-iPhone users, WhatTheFont is also available as a web app and a forum – you can upload images and/or  specify pages to scan for font recognition, or submit a hard-to-recognize font to the forum for input.

I’ve had decent accuracy with the iPhone WhatTheFont app, although this depends largely on the quality of the images I submit. Within a given typeface, individual fonts are distinguished by minute differences in slope, serif, and weight, which makes me wonder how this thing is able to produce results as consistently as it does. That said, the 3G  iPhone’s relative inability to capture clear close-up photos and lack of built-in zoom both  pose obvious problems for visual searching in general. (There  are other photo applications available that attempt to address these limitations). Despite these caveats, on the whole the ability to look up fonts out in the world is an excellent curiosity assuager.

While I’m not planning to shell out for the iPhone 3Gs model anytime soon (I’d rather buy three and a half round-trip tickets to Austin, thank you very much), perhaps the free OS 3.0 upgrade will provide some functionality improvements for image recognition searching.

Now that I’m as good as healed and it’s one down and one to go on the book front, I’m making a concerted effort to break the long silence created by maintaining a life while writing and working with a broken collarbone. I’m going to start profiling some of the library projects I’ve been involved in since I arrived at Berkeley, the most recent of which is an awesome interactive star ratings bar app customized by Erik Rumppe of our Systems department. I recently integrated this rater into a redesign of our local library tutorials page:

The page used to  look like this:

And now looks like this:

With input from an informal working group that manages tutorial content across the libraries, the redesigned page was intended to be more visual, navigable, and less, ahem, u-g-l-y, while giving users a means of providing a bit of feedback on the tutorials to help us evaluate and prioritize them. For those of you on the webdev tip, the dropdown anchor jump menus are powered by javascript – check out the source code for an elegant solution to the proverbial long-list-of-links (hats off to Todd Parks in Systems for help resolving php/javascript issues).

You can find the template for the “Unobtrusive AJAX Star Rater” (and could there be a more hilariously utilitarian name?) at Masuga Web Design.  Erik checked for security and interoperability, made a few aesthetic changes to get our stars looking more Netflixy, and also created a behind-the-scenes database page that tracks and averages the number of ratings for evaluation purposes.

Many thanks to Erik and Todd for being so (unobtrusively) awesome.

Like many others, I have a fear of appearing too pollyanna when I talk to faculty about libraries. Some cite the notorious inferiority complex in academic librarianship to explain this feeling, which has been discussed often and thoroughly enough to not merit rehashing here. For the record, I feel no inferiority – merely a difference in my orientation, so to speak. Ours is a service profession with a broad, generalist perspective, at once diametrically opposed to and supportive of the specialization and focused  inquiry that drives research and instruction in higher education. As such, the discourse of academe/ics is necessarily more critical than the discourse of librarian/ship. When these worlds collide in conversation, the scrutiny of the academic “gaze” tends to make many of us wary of appearing naive and/or insufficiently phlegmatic when we explain who we are and what we do.

I think that by avoiding excessive earnestness, I have sometimes prevented myself from achieving my natural level of enthusiasm when communicating with professors, lecturers, and (to a lesser extent) graduate student instructors in the course of my job. I have noticed another factor that arises from my fear of coming off as a soft touch (and there are a lot of gender implications here – I would love to hear others chime in on this) – forced brevity. In my interactions with faculty and graduate student instructors at Berkeley I typically speak from a place of extreme practicality, which many of us do instinctively  - cut out the chaff and the boring librarian talk, and go straight for the information need jugular. I tend to focus with laser precision on what I can do for a particular faculty member in terms of facilitating student research or aiding instruction, in working with information resources or the learning management system. Particularly in research institutions, we are drilled with the notion that faculty are busy busy busy, which they invariably are, but maybe less so than we think when presented with a proposition that may make their working/teaching/researching lives easier. Focus in communication is essential, but why not try to achieve it in a way that invites faculty to think and care about the matter at hand?

Cut-to-the-chaseism and fear of untoward enthusiasm has at times thwarted the end goal of my formal and accidental outreach -  the palpable, lightbulb-coming-on instant when an audience of one or many begins to see the benefit of libraries in real and personal terms, as opposed to vague and abstract ones. In other words, when they begin to consider not what they have always thought librarians do, but what they just realized what I/you/we can do for them. You can see it in faces and posture when this happens – it’s like turning a tough room when giving a presentation, and it usually has something to do with showing a bit of personality while you are busy communicating your utility. Bell and Farkas offer different perspectives on the issue of the “sell” moment in library advocacy – how do you promote, educate, and engage without feeling like a huckster?

I have begun to reflect that the terse, seen-not-heard library hard sell puts the proverbial kibosh on the kinds of conversations that could, if engaged in on a large enough scale, do something about how libraries and librarians are perceived within higher education. When prompted, I can go into a sort of rhetorical trance about how research, media, technology, and information is changing, and why this makes libraries/librarians even more integral to higher education, society, and culture. I have also had a tendency to assume that this is something most teaching faculty do not want to hear. In some cases this may very well be true, but in just as many others I think it’s a topic of interest, and one that many actually want and are willing to explore (to varying degrees of intensity, to be sure).  Most of ACRL’s list of strategic priorities for 2009-2013 attempt to turn the focus of academic librarianship outwards towards integration and outreach in campus technology, education, and learning. I believe that a more conversational, authentic approach to advocacy during outreach is essential if we want to “develop institutional understanding of librarians’ roles in enhancing teaching and learning.”

It is critical that academic librarians work towards this goal from a grassroots level as well as an institutional one. I have highly personal  insight into the process and pitfalls of developing faculty understanding of libraries – I have a professor father and a professor stepmother who have many professor colleagues and friends, some of whom have known me since I was knee-high to a whatever.  I’ve thus had many an opportunity to have the kind of informal, “so, you’re a librarian?” discussions with diverse teaching and research faculty that are so oddly rare in the working context of librarianship – conversations about reading culture, information flux, and academic perceptions of libraries and librarianship (in the best case scenario, facilitated by beers). I have heard about how they use libraries in their personal research, when they integrate information search elements in to coursework and assignments, and who they think librarians actually are in highly personal terms. Not surprisingly, most have a deeply perceptive handle on the information resources in their own fields and institutions, but an incomplete picture of the resources and services that are available in other contexts. I have also learned how to mount a convincing defense of why libraries should continue to receive institutional dollars in the first place, which, by the way, is one of many rhetorical aces that all of us should have up our sleeves.

Finding “ins” in terms of utilitarian and/or emotional advocacy to faculty is difficult enough in and of itself. I started thinking about all of this after a serendipitous conversation I had a few weeks ago with two professors at Berkeley who are involved in the graduate teaching and learning department (where grad students learn how to be future faculty). The discussion was in regards to an exploratory pilot service idea I’ve been mulling over of developing a “clickable reader” or a deep-linked online syllabus. To make this very long, fraught, not-yet-fully-formed notion somewhat short: because UCB does not provide e-reserves in the traditional sense, instructors end up using the campus course management system to upload and link to course readings online and/or require students to buy expensive printed course packets. Preliminary inquiries into this process are starting to show that links to licensed electronic resources do not enter the equation as often as they should, meaning that effort is being duplicated and resources are likely being purchased multiple times.

Thus, I’ve been thinking about how we might create a combined web-based application and human-powered service that would mitigate this problem by leveraging librarian expertise  and better using our Sakai-based course management system to help instructors not only develop their online course readings, but save them for future editing and reuse. This would effectively reduce end costs to students, highlight the resources already provided by the library, and use our research skills and interdisciplinary knowledge to make an end-run around the difficulty of tracking down and linking to online sources (not to mention the persistent lack of a truly effective metasearching service). This “clicakable reader” would allow faculty to submit a reading list and have library staff investigate the quickest, cheapest, and most stable path to said information via a link, scanned chapter, or print reserve copy, and communicate this back to said faculty member with information about how they can stage these readings in the course management system, and/or with information on copyright and fair use. In essence, four birds with one stone – a human-powered metasearching service that would reduce faculty reliance on printed course readers, promote visibility of library resources, preserve reading lists for future reference and revision, and provide education on CMS use and copyright issues. (More on this if/when/as it materializes.)

This long aside was intended to illustrate an instance when a service idea allowed me to not only speak to library resources, but demonstrate and/or make the case for my expertise as a librarian. This potential project opened the floodgates for issues surrounding costs of higher education, fair use, scholarly publication, the Google Book settlement, the changing role of the academic library, and more – an amazing conversation, and one that gave me great deal of insight  into the areas I need to be focusing on in terms of my faculty outreach. It’s not often enough that I have the chance to speak about these topics from the heart with instructors in ways that are honestly and critically explored, which, the more I think about it, should be a central aspect of what I do. Who better to discuss the importance of intellectual freedom, information organization, and media/technology literacy than with those who to varying degrees have devoted their careers to these questions?

For me, it’s an ongoing matter of figuring out how to make these conversations productive, to bring my insight and energy to light and make these integral angles of the way I deliver services to those I interact with. I firmly believe that the impact of any form of communication (instruction, presentations, training, writing, whatever) has as much to do with the conviction behind whatever is being communicated as the way it is presented – enthusiasm is just as important as savvy, in other words. With this in mind, I plan on rededicating myself to being exactly as stoked about what I do as I actually am, instead of working my way up to and around it in faculty interactions. Why shy away from my convictions, which are what led me to this field in the first place?  I’m going to try to be more conscious of the fact that I have much to say about library essentiality and effectiveness, and I will do my best to jump headfirst into these moments when they present themselves.

My favorite partner in crime, Lia Friedman, got written up in an actual honest-to-god online newspaper for being an awesome librarian/ movershaker/activist/blogger:

The article continues at some length about what Lia is up to in the library world and elsewhere, which I love. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but this should happen more often from outside the professional microcosm when librarians do good work. Many congratulations for being recognized  for your long list of contributions, Lia.

Because of my dislike of one-shotters, and with the caveat that my slides don’t make a lot of sense without narration, I wanted to share a couple of presentations I have given in the past few weeks at Berkeley. The first, directed to library staff in a panel on emerging library technologies on the library site, introduced the local UCB Library FAQ knowledgebase that I developed with a few colleagues recently. Originally Chad’s bright idea back at Ohio University, the dynamic/interactive/much improved Library FAQ runs on free/open source software platform KnowledgebasePublisher, super easy to install and customize:

(Big aside here, but if you use KBP and are wondering how to automatically track extant and new entries via Google Analytics – add your GA snippet to the /client/template.txt file above the </body> tag of whatever template code you are using. Works like a charm, and when you enable site search tracking in GA can provide a powerful usability meter for both the FAQ and a library site overall.)

The second was a 5-minute “lightning talk” given at a library Instructor Development Program event. It’s called “Deconstructing the Learning Pyramid,” wherein I attempted to debunk a popular instructional graphic on active learning that is basically mythical (see Lalley and Miller, 2007, for context):

The learning pyramid is worth challenging because, while based in the absolutely sound idea that learners should be engaged at the point of instruction, it is totally not supported by research and manages to accomplish two unfortunate things: 1)  defines “active” and “passive” without giving consideration to instructional context and learner needs/experience levels, and 2) discourages instructors from playing to their own strengths, if those strengths happen to be at lecturing or something on the more “passive” end of the spectrum.

I believe in stretching onesself and trying new approaches as much as the next teaching librarian, but  it’s a lot better to excel at sage-on-the-stagedom than to fail abjectly at guide-on-the-sideitude (if it isn’t a comfortable form of instructional delivery, that is).

I’m lousy with anticipation, so I am extremely relieved to write that a giant piece of my workload/ brain energy has been officially lifted as of today. ACRL just released Informing Innovation: Tracking Student Interest in Emerging Library Technologies at Ohio University, a book-length research report I’ve been working on for quite some time.

The report is a detailed case study of the student environmental scanning project I spearheaded at OU in 2008 with the help of many colleagues (see my Acknowledgements for the long list of names). In addition to reporting our findings, I discuss the importance of gaining research-based insight into local user cultures in order to inform service development and mitigate the temptation to make potentially off-the-mark generational assumptions about who students are and how they use technology and libraries, complete with a chapter on the practical trials and travails of homegrown research. You can think of it as a quantitative corollary to the University of Rochester Studying Students project – quite different methods of investigation, similar depth of insight. It’s one part presentation of survey results, one part analysis of the academic library emerging technology and assessment cultures that have developed over the last few years, and one part bon voyage/ homage (bon vomage?) to my former employer. The OU Libraries manage to do incredibly innovative and effective work not only on a shoestring, but with an ever-important a sense of humor. It shows in many, many ways, and for this they deserve to be recognized and emulated.

Informing Innovation is available in several forms. Free downloads: the full document in PDF, another version packaged by separate chapters, and an updated and revised template library/technology survey instrument based on the one used in the original Ohio University study. For an introduction to and explanation of the scanning project itself, there is also a streaming dynamic webcast of my and Chris Guder’s 2009 ACRL presentation (no virtual conference login necessary) that summarizes survey findings and explores its practical applications at OU, voice and slides-style. You can also buy a hard copy of the report in book form from the ALA Store.

The template questionnaire is a core aspect of this project, and in addition to the separate download also appears as Appendix A in the full report document. This sample instrument has been pored and picked over by a series of qualified academics and/or librarians, meaning that it can with relative confidence provide the foundation of a sound and reliable survey (one of the more challenging aspects of conducting homegrown assessments). It is also enthusiastically Creative Commons licensed – I encourage people to share, hack, and adapt it at will to conduct similar environmental scans at the local level (and if you do, please tell me about it – charbooth at gmail dot com. I would love to know if anyone takes on similar projects at their own libraries.)

This endeavor has been a labor of (nerdcore) love (of statistics and libraries), and the wonderful folks at ACRL did me the service of allowing me to design the publication cover-to-cover – a giant shout out to Kathryn Deiss and Dawn Mueller for all their editorial help and patience during the process. I also received the honor of having my work both edited and foreworded by Joan Lippincott, an individual I admire greatly for her visionary perspective on technology, learning, and librarianship. Thanks also to Lia Friedman for her relentless collaborative assistance, among other things. Long story short, I’m so very happy to be able to sally this publication forth.

By way of explanation, the wholly unphotoshopped cover shot was taken last summer in Lamesa, Texas, on the drive out to California to start my new job at UC Berkeley. Words to live by, and no mistake.

al and madge, i hope it lasts.