TLA Conference Notes: Day 2, Session on Cool Websites

(Day 2 was April 27, 2006)

Title: "Sixty Sites in Sixty Minutes."
Presenters: Jenny Levine, the "Shifted Librarian", and Susan Skyzinski, senior librarian relations consultant for Lexis-Nexis (Dallas).

Note: The presentation and the sites can be found at a wiki Ms. Levine created for the presentation.

Shifted Librarian is one the blogs on my aggregator, but the title of the presentation itself would have gotten me to see this as well. It was a good chance to learn about a few new tricks.

Before presenting the 60 sites, the Ms. Skyzinski gave some tips on how to make a similar presentation for other audiences. The concept is something that can work for any situation where one needs to present information. We often get e-mails from colleagues; we have reading lists, blogs, other items on our aggregators. You can then use these as resources. Make sure you put links and so on in a place you can find them. Ms. Skyzinski gave what I thought to be a curious tip, and that was to read the airline magazines, which have a diverse range of articles, so they can help you find ideas for presentations. Fortunately, you can see the editions at the airlines' websites. She also discussed a little about evaluation of websites (accuracy, authority, etc.). Once you do the presentation, always ask the audience to share other ideas they may have; this can get a conversation going and make a presentation more interactive.

You can also tailor your presentation to available time. For instance, make it "30 sites in 30 minutes" instead. Overall, use your expertise (this remark served to reassure audience members that this is something they can do easily).

(I found it ironic that Ms. Skyzinski mentioned that librarians often just want the facts. At times, her lecture on presenting did seem a bit too long. I just wanted them to get to the actual sites. Maybe I was just being a little impatient since this is stuff I have experience with, or maybe, I just wanted the facts. Then again, when the presentation came up to the Unshelved site, she was actually reading parts of the site. I am sure she was a fan and wanted to convey this was a good site for librarians, but I could have done without her reading the site's character primer. It was as bad as a presenter who puts up a Powerpoint and reads the slides).

Do remember to doublecheck all links and that the information remains current. Do yourself what you expect your audience to do.

Ms. Levine then started with the sites. She pointed out that it is good to use wikies as a tool to put resources together. One could use if for a presentation. Do note that if there is no Internet available at your venue, you may have to print it out or put it in something like PowerPoint, which you can save on a disk or a flash drive. There are other tools, such as Squidoo, which creates "lenses" for item lists (I definitely have to play with this one sometime). Levine calls these "lenses" pathfinders. One thing to think about is the idea of putting things we create out for others to find on the Web, which is what tools like this allow us to do. Another interesting idea was using del.icio.us at the reference desk to save commonly used websites and resources.

A Faculty Reading List

I am always interested in reading lists, so here is another one. This one is put together by the Arts and Sciences Faculty at Dominican University. From the opening statement:

Dear Readers,
My faculty colleagues across the Rosary College of Arts and Sciences have put together this list of recommended texts, organized by academic discipline. We're not claiming that these, much less only these texts are absolutely essential for the various disciplines in the College. We're not creating the ultimate eternal canon! Indeed, many of these texts have sparked great intellectual controversy and continue to do so. Such textual provocations may have much to teach us. We're simply offering, as educators, our considered suggestions for some of the texts we think students, prospective students and lifelong learners would do well to consider. We hope you'll engage many of them as conversation partners throughout your educational journey, and we hope you'll add to the list with your own insights and discoveries.
Happy reading!

Jeff Carlson
Dean, Rosary College of Arts and Sciences


The list seems to really go all over from mathematics to theology to literature. I will admit that some books are out of what I consider my reader's profile. Nevertheless, I figure it is important to be exposed to new ideas. At the risk of embarassing myself, here are the titles from the list that I have personally read:

• Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
• W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
• Steven D. Levitt, Freakanomics
• Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Howard Gardner, Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice
• Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities (actually, I have read most of Kozol's books).
  
• Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales (in Middle English, mind you. To this day, I can recite the opening lines of the Prologue thanks to a professor who made us memorize them).
  
• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
• Langston Hughes (while I have not read Collected Poems, I have read most of his poetry)
  
• William Shakespeare, Hamlet (actually, read a good portion of his plays and sonnets. My personal favorite is Henry V.)
• John Milton, Paradise Lost
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (read Tom Sawyer too)
• W.B. Yeats, (while I have not read his Collected Poems, again, have read a good portion of his poetry)
  
• Thucydides, A History of the Peloponnesian War
• Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
• Dante Aligheri, The Divine Comedy
• Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
• Cathechism of the Catholic Church (hey, I went to Sunday school and Catholic high school, what did you expect? Still, doing my best to recuperate)
• Austin P. Flannery, ed., Documents of the Vatican II (while I did not read this particular edition, I did have to read some of those too back when).
  
• William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
• Plato, Republic
• Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
• Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
• Isabel Allende, La Casa de los Espíritus
• Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha (senior year in high school, and recently last year)
  
• Ruben Darío, Azul
• Benito Pérez Galdos, Misericordia (read this in middle school. Hated every page. Think of the one book you had to read in school that was forced).
  
• El Poema de El Cid (now, this was cool, even in archaic Spanish, back in 10th grade).
  
• Federico Garcia Lorca, Romancero Gitano
• Gabriel García Marquez, Cien años de soledad (in case I have not mentioned it before, this is my all time favorite book)
• The Holy Bible (yes, the whole thing. Catholic version, so I got the Apocryphal books the Protestants skip).
  

Hmm, not many. I noticed that a lot of the list seems to be textbooks, so odds are slim I may pick those up. Still, there are one or two titles I would not mind reading. At any rate, just another reading list.

A hat tip to Laura Crossett of LISDom.

TLA Conference Notes: Day 1, Session on Thinking Outside the Box

Title: "Teaching Outside the Box"
Presenters: Heather Lamb, Irving ISD and Carolee Wilson, Mansfield ISD

This presentation claimed to "provide an easy-to-use approach to integrating technology into library lessons" (from the conference program). Though it was mostly geared to school librarians, from the description, I figured I would get something out of it. When I got there, there was a good sized crowd; the room was almost full.

• Library skills are not isolated. School librarians are teachers first. For them, planning with other teachers is "on the fly."
  
• Discussed the use of centers (stations) and whole group instruction. Centers allow for peer teaching and collaborative learning. This allows for different learning styles. This does require preparation, but the students can then work independently, and their own teacher would be there as well. This can work by using a calendar of topics for each grade and planning with the teachers. This can also validate what the library does.
  

The presenters were enthusiastic initially, as school librarians can be, and it was nice to hear them speak about sample topics. However, while the ideas were interesting, the presenters were simply a bit too chaotic in the presentation. They would start one topic, then seemingly wander off, stop the powerpoint to fiddle with some other file, so on. Overall, it gave an impression of poor preparation. This is the session I mentioned in an earlier post that I actually walked out as it did not seem to rise to expectations.

TLA Conference Notes: Day 1, Contributed paper on library cataloguing and its value

Title: "You Need My Metadata: Demonstrating the Value of Library Cataloguing."
Presenter: Shawne D. Miksa, assistant professor, SLIS, University of North Texas

Now, I am probably the last person who would be interested in a paper on cataloguing. Yes, I took the required class on it. I can certainly speak the lingo, but I am not a cataloguer, and the minutae does not excite me (I am not making it up when I say I had classmates in cataloguing who got excited about spacing between elements in a record). I do, however, firmly believe cataloguers are part of the public service libraries offer, not to mention the fact that they make my work possible. At any rate, this paper came right after the one on the Millenials, so I just stayed in the room. It turned out that it was not a technical paper, and I did find it interesting.

The cataloguer is the person that ensures the quality of the information in the system. However, this branch of the library profession is undervalued. For one, funding issues can make a professional cataloguer seem as non-essential. In small settings, there is often one librarian who does reference, works with computers (systems work, if they have computers), the cataloguing, cleans the bathrooms and turns off the lights at the end of the day. The problem arises when a cataloguer is lost. Often the job is then cut to pay instead for two paraprofessionals, if the job is even kept.

Authority control is also something that is costly and time consuming. Thus it tends to often be skipped. Libraries often will outsource this operation (and other cataloguing processes) and assume that authority control will be fine, when it may not be. There are also issues of adding local details and other issues. Every collection is different, so using the same headings in every situation is inappropriate. This can also lead to complacency.

The presenter said that you may call yourself a metadata specialist or any other label, but you are still in essence a cataloguer. Do what you need to do to get the job when you are in the market. Metadata may be the sexy word, but it is not a new idea. In or out of the library, the principles and skills are the same.

Cataloguers put the value in "value-added." They can anticipate user needs for accessing materials and using the catalog.

The presenter's presentation gave details of a survey she conducted of public libraries in her area. Some of the findings included asking about use of tools like AACR2, and it found very often that the tools were not used, or at least, were used very infrequently. The findings are limited, and she would like to expand the study.

TLA Conference Notes: Day 1, Contributed Paper on X and Y Generations

Title of paper: "X over Y: Managing the Millenial Generation."
Presenter: Catherine Essinger, University of Houston Art and Architecture Library

This paper was pretty much a list of generalizations with a few management tips thrown in. In my view, it was very much on the light side, especially given some of the recent articles I have been reading on X and Y (see an examples here and here), not to mention how it has been on the biblioblogosphere. It was still interesting, but I think I could have likely passed it up since much of this is nothing new (to me at least).

• Millenials tend to wait longer to find employment.
  
• They tend to be idealistic. Many are very active in volunteering and have a strong sense of social progress. Managers can motivate them by integrating these tendencies into the workplace. Make the employees feel that their work has meaning.
  
• Millenials tend to be social. Access to various social tolls (MySpace, etc.). Supervisor can set rules about using these tools at work (or not), but they need to be consistent and make sure there are no double standards. Also, in the library, zoning may work. This is the idea of creating quiet zones and more social zones. As a generation, Millenials tend to be very cooperative.
  
• They tend to be ambitious. Managers should offer projects that provide for leadership skills and communicate appreciation. However, this ambition can lead the Millenials to seek various jobs in search of new and better opportunities and challenges.
  
• Millenials tend to be very literal. Do use concrete examples in managing.
  
• They tend to be very regimented. This is largely due to the fact that they have had overscheduling from parents, and they were rarely allowed to have leisure or just "free" time. Thus they are used to structure and lots of activity. In managing, you can use lists, guides, and so on. Scheduling does need to be flexible. An example is to let the workers work out their own schedule. Just tell them shifts that need covered and very often they come up with something better.
  
• Overall, you should empower these workers to help you.