Monday, July 21, 2003

bye bye!. And it's all over, bye bye Ranier and lovely Seattle! 7:07:20 PM    comment [] J2 - Envision Virtual Reference. We have a little audio problem, but hopefully they'll resolve it momentarily. Launched in Sept. 2002, Library Lawline is/was a pilot program in virtual reference at a group of law libraries in the northeast (including public, court, and academic law libraries). They begin, after a short intro by Tracy, with a skit dramatizing the initial task force meeting to consider virtual reference as a project. After the skit, Tracy recapped the months in between that initial meeting and launch of the pilot, as well as the yearlong pilot project. Another skit follows, dramatizing the evaluation meeting after the pilot project. Tracy then followed up with the epilogue and invitation to ask questions. Someone from USF asked about dual queues for academic/nonacademic. Jeff Dowd indicaetd that there was initally a hesitancy on the part of each as to whether the other could handle their patron base. Missions conflict a bit, as well as the style of interaction in the reference transaction. Joan added that the comfort level with patrons in knowing how to handle patrons is really different. Academic librarians aren't used to asking questions like "how do I become emancipated from my parents who are beating me." Tracy followed up that ultimately we all wanted enough patron traffic to get experience by doing a single project, but now we split bc of the aforementioned interests. Sam Trosow from Univ. of Ontario said he was concerned that they were using a private vendor. He thought ultimately libraries had to have control over the software and logs. The absolutes are a little silly, given that we rely on proprietary vendors for our OPACs. I agree that supporting open source is great, and puts us in a position of much more control, but saying it's essential might be going a bit far. Kelly Browne from UConn talked about pulling out of the NELLCO project and starting up with the UConn system with a different software vendor. Chris Bloodworth from Wayne State talked about not doing virtual ref at Wayne State Law, though there are other campus libraries that are providing it. He asked about policy development in terms of the provision of legal advice, and also percentage of users who used the service. Diane Frake repeated that it was an emphasis from the beginning that we not provide legal advice, and Scott Matheson added that it was part of the reason that we had only professional librarians answer questions. As far as statistics, Scott answered that by far the public (CT and MA) court libraries had the most patrons on the service. Cheryl Nyberg asked whether all patrons had access to the same licensed resources, and also whether librarians searched the patron's library's OPAC to refer them to appropriate print sources. Diane Frake answered that we were concerned initially about the licensed resources. For Lexis/Westlaw, we worked with them if they were a faculty or student. Joan said that w/ a licensed resource at Boston College, they would use co-browsing and have the user authenticate, so that the transaction would make use of whatever resources the user had access to. Barbara Brandon from U. of Miami asked about transaction logs and the USA PATRIOT act. Scott answered that personally identiable info is optional, and it's purged in 30 days. He also mentioned that there's a notice upon login that the entry of info is completely optional, unless you want an emailed transcript. Barbara Traub from St. John's asked about the types of questions, in particular whether they got a lot of jurisdictional questions. Scott answered that the training was almost entirely technical, and a bit of "how to conduct a reference interview online", but no substantive training on other jurisdictions' resources. They did build some free legal resources pages, though. Joan Shear answered that she would often get a patron who had found the right page, and just hadn't chosen the right link. Jeff Dowd answered that he was quick to say he would get back to a patron later, call up another one of the librarians, and email the patron later. Joan added that she did follow up as well. And because transcripts could be shared between librarians easily, patrons could be referred out to someone better able to answer the question. Someone from Cooley spoke on using DocuText, staffing about 20 hours per week. She asked about staffing, with concerns about the amount of time required to answer questions. Especially when they're having to cover some times online and also in person. Joan talked about situations when she had multiple patrons. She'd defer to the person in-person, and would put the online person "on hold". She would also use the system to conduct a reference interview, and send answer later to their email address. She said many people were thrilled to log off and get an answer later. Not that different from handling in person and on the phone, once the librarians get comfortable with the technology. And you have to keep people informed as to what you're doing. She also asked about staffing from home. Someone from Seattle U. wanted confirmation about the assertion that "an academic law library couldn't do this on their own". She was interested in why they thought that. Members from the panel thought it was a combination of coverage, cost, and number of patrons. Someone from U of Alberta spoke on doing virtual on their own and then collaborative; She said they've noticed that they're getting lots of "local environment" questions. She wanted to know how many nellco had gotten. Joan answered that they covered it so heavily -- asking libraries to provide links to their OPACs, to their hours, etc., and that they hadn't needed those things very much. Someone from a County law library in California talked about their work over the last year and a half or so. He asked about the toggling issue -- multiple patrons at once, pushing pages to patrons with different browser versions. Scott answered that he pushes and then tells them what they've seen, asking if they see, and sending a URL if they didn't get it. Joan added that if you're on the patron end and the librarians crash, it's blind, but vice-versa there's some info that you can see to tell you a patron has crashed or left. But that it's important to put the patron on the newest system. 7:07:14 PM    comment []

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

Tuesday, D.C. al fine. Came back to the hotel after the briefs session to rest up for the evening's festivities. Went to the SR-SIS' standing committee reception (which had the best food thus far -- wines and cheeses and meats from everywhere imaginable, with well-versed catering staff to explain it all) and then had wine and chocolates back at the hotel w/ friends and commiserated over the lack of great programs this year. 12:07:31 PM    comment [] H4 - State Appellate Court Briefs. We started a little early, hrm. Mike Whiteman from Northern Kentucky University is speaking about his state appellate court briefs project, which it looks like was done in-house. They used undergraduates to do the scanning, which was much cheaper than hiring someone full-time. He served as primary contact with the Clerk's office, and then passed some of that work on to his Associate Director. The Library receives the briefs from the court (via mail), checked against something called a "minute order list," and they only are putting up the briefs from to-be-published decisions. Then they claim missing ones. The Clerk later asked for briefs to be online and available once the case is accepted for oral argument. So this is an ongoing project -- an example of where a school is working with the Court to put their new briefs online. I'm assuming now that they're not doing historical. They don't have search capability yet, but are working with their IT department to implement. Judy Meadows, from the State Law Library of Montana, is up next. She and the last speaker both gave "what we did" presentations, which sometimes aren't very good, but in this case I think that's a good scope. Either you're doing this or you aren't, and if you're not then you want to know what other people are doing. All three had good things to say, clear explanations of their processes (which were actually not that different -- all were in-house!) Oh, and they didn't start late, I just had this session marked down as beginning at 2:30pm, and it actually started at 2:15pm. 12:07:24 PM    comment [] Nice lunch outside at a SW-ish place on the top of Pacific Place. Gorgeous weather, and nice catching up with a college classmate I haven't seen in forever. 12:07:18 PM    comment [] G5: open linking. After introductions by Mary Jane Kelsey, first up is Chris Pierard from Serials Solutions. Chris and others founded the company with the original goal of solving the same problem that SFX solves -- managing e- access to a particular citation in one of your aggregate services. His focus at this point seems to be on the selection process for choosing a software system or systems to handle your link resolving (or, at least, the core functions of a link resolver) He lists three key ingredients of a link resolver: Content provider participation Data about your collection Resolver software He emphasized the importance of having accurate, complete data in order for a link resolver to do its job and get you to the article. It's common (and problematic) to have things like incorrect (or missing) ISSNs, excluded/embargoed resources, or improper syntax. He's showing the results of a search now, showing where content is available. I'm not entirely sure what product this is that he's showing, though. In examining the data about your collection, he suggests asking yourself questions like "how many content providers are included in your kb?" That's a hard question -- what's your kb? How do you draw an effective line around it? Another issue is title variations -- he's using JAMA as an example, with slight variations in spelling/syntax, and also a historical ISSN change. They have a process that gathers them, "normalizing" them into one authority record. He notes that all link resolver products are predicated on the same open url standard, with features and functionality similar, only being able to facilitate article-level linking for the content providers that have adopted it. So it's accurate data that he's emphasizing (and pushing for support among content providers, I think). Next up is Nettie Lagace from SFX. Nettie is the Product Mgt Librarian at SFX. I saw her speak at the NELLCO ref meeting a year or so ago, and found her presentation style clear and effective, with ppt slides that illustrate well this technology. She's beginning with an intro to the whole process, the language of sources and targets etc., something that probably should have preceded Chris' presentation. She's good at picking up on language that Chris used in order to further explain the service, though. I'm curious about how educated the audience is on this issue -- and now she's polling. Only about 1/6 of the audience raised their hand when she asked how many people had heard of the openURL standard. I first heard of SFX and the openURL standard about a year and a half ago, I think, and we've been experimenting since then. One thing she's showing that I haven't given a lot of thought to is using your OPAC as a source. For some things, this could be helpful -- either as a replacement for 856 fields, or even for non-serials to jump-start other db or web searches. If you could configure a web search option to search google and add a site:.edu phrase into the search, you could help users quite a bit with topical searches. She also stresses the need for content providers to be OpenUrl compliant, and that targets must have some link-to syntax (just some kind of a pattern -- doesn't have to be a specific kind of pattern). Kimberly Parker, from Yale - Kim is Head of Electronic Collections at Yale, which is a client of both SFX and Serials Solutions. She's going to give the real world story of how this stuff really gets implemented. I should note that this is my institution, and I've had very little involvement in this (though some at some points along the way in the story) But bear with me if I say "we" sometimes. She begins with jake -- a project to collect info about the contents of abstracting dbs and full text resources. Then a database was built... the database of databases (dbow) and electronic journals db (yelmo). Then finally they had a realization that there were too many links. No one's playing along with her storyland theme, though... maybe they're all hungry. So here we have Yelmo -- the Yale electronic library module. We thought it would solve all the problems, slay all the dragons. Yelmo is an SQL db with ASP scripts, running Apache on Unix. There's a workgroup table that organizes items that can be "selected" by selectors. It has a staff interface for data entry and editing, and workgroup/subject assignments. There's also an ODBC connector for MS Access interface -- e.g. batch uploads, queries for analysis etc. And each workgroup can use header/footer to customize output (w/o having to work in SQL). Yelmo's many faces: e-journals, databases on the web (dbow), online books, admin, and ref resources. All of these have a public component, which allows us to search for things like Steadman's on the web, or all the sources of the NYT in our subscriptions. There still were problems, though -- too many aggregations, and a new procedure for each new title list. Yelmo couldn't really bridge the connection between sources and targets. So we brought in Serials Solutions to help with adding aggregation data (work required to tailor it to fit), and also now MARC records for the OPAC. Yale processes the SS data and massively reformats it. It gets dumped into the yelmo db for use. Many other libraries let SS do a page for them. The second addition is SFX, the linking resolver. SFX requires data from yelmo to run in our case (and SS data is dumped into yelmo). We do regular extracts and use DataLoader to keep it running. Kim shows the admin screens, including the DataLoader form. She notes that one disadvantage of using yelmo w/ no help is that it's hard work to keep all of it up to date. So we built our own parser back into yelmo, to feed the public face of yelmo with the data we're dumping in from Serials Solutions. So if you begin in Wilson and follow the link out to the SFX screen, the first choice on the list is LN Academic. The Next option is yelmo, which sends you to a search for the title in the yelmo list and sends the results of that search as if you had begun on that page. But because we haven't set up SFX for all these potential targets, the users still get something (bc the data IS in yelmo) -- it's a much better result than just getting an OPAC search. So a new head for yelmo is the ebooks module (14,460 titles!). Next task is to assemble some friends for the new head... a list similar to the ejournals list. Future plans include ebook aggregation data w/ MARC records; an openlinking kb of books like ejournals; incorporating yelmo with the opac; and more? 12:07:11 PM    comment [] Substance?. I still have some stubstansive things to say about the conference, but I'll get to those later. Meanwhile, we have some pretty shakin' librarians in the Chicago chapter! R and other CALL-ites were getting funky on the dance floor at the West party. Go go! Too bad that S didn't join you guys this year. And T is quite the karaoke dude, singing way more than all the CSSISs there (and winning the contest too -- excellent)! 11:08:46 AM    comment [] Vendors. Yesterday, I spent some time with Lexis and Westlaw. I picked up all of their tchotchkes. Westlaw gave us binoculars and a thermos. Lexis gave us a calculator, a book light, and a weird picture frame with fake fish (????). These were cute, but it seems they've given away more interesting things in the past. This is only my second year attending the conference so occasionally I'll hear things like "Remember when West gave away laptops? That was nice." "And what about the year we got Mercedes-Benz convertable?" "Ohh! Yes, and a few years ago, didn't we all get some real estate?" "Those were the days!" Gotta run to a meeting. More on vendors later. 11:08:33 AM    comment [] Vendors. Yesterday, I spent some time with Lexis and Westlaw. I picked up all of their tchotchkes. Westlaw gave us binoculars and a thermos. Lexis gave us a calcualtor, a book light, and a weird picture frame with fake fish (????). These were cute, but it seems they've given away more interesting things in the past. This is only my second year attending the conference so occasionally I'll hear things like "Remember when West gave away laptops? That was nice." "And what about the year we got Mercedes-Benz convertable?" "Ohh! Yes, and a few years ago, didn't we all get some real estate?" "Those were the days!" Gotta run to a meeting. More on vendors later. 11:08:18 AM    comment []

Tuesday, July 15, 2003

Finished last night with a fairly standard opening reception -- food was good, though hard to get to, as always. I'd almost rather they assigned us seats, or brought out the food in shifts, or something. It's just such a mob scene. Didn't find a program that looked interesting this morning -- so I took a break and went out to Shoreline and skated with a colleague from Yale for an hour or so. It was a nice change of pace. The Association Luncheon was ok, and the food standard. The gift basket was lovely, too. Thought I had it there for a minute, but then got beat by someone just six years on the other side of 1962. Now there's a big big break before one program and lots of meetings tonight, and then the legendary West Party. 10:07:13 AM    comment []

Monday, July 14, 2003

No answers?. The second session I attedned today was on Analog Media: Maximum Preservation for Today and Tomorrow. While I learned quite a bit, I was somewhat disappointed with the session. The speakers postulated that diginal media is insufficient to preserve documentation long term. While I won't argue with their specific claims, I think the discussion avoided some important concepts. For example, while at one point document management was mentioned, the speakers didn't really discuss this concept as it pertained to document retrieval. They advocated analog methods of preserving documents without discussing analog methods of retrieving these documents at later time. What good is preservation if you can't find the document later? Storage was another question I didn't hear discussed much. Analog media takes a certain amount of space. Library space is shrinking all the time -- where do we put all of these analog tapes? Especially if, as claimed in another sesssion, the amount of digital informaiton on the internet alone will double ever 11 minutes. Certainly the fragility of digital media is an issue -- I know that very well. And I think in many cases chosing the right analog back up can address long-term preservation issues. But I think it is increasingly not a realistic solution for much for our digital output. What should be the solution, unfortunately, I don't know (and neither, really, does anyone else at this point). 6:07:40 PM    comment [] Getting the message. The first session I attended today was "Evision the Future Teaching Role of Law Librarians." I liked the session and Steph has already blogged it in detail. Something the speaker asked us, though, struck me. The speaker had us raise our hands if we used IM (instant messanger); hardly anyone did. That seemed odd to me. The speaker noted that something like 85% of those between 15-25 use IM. Can we really afford to not be using this? While I am a relatively recent convert, I have two accounts (one for Yahoo and one for AOL/Netscape Instant Messanger). I can talk to my mom and my uncle (lawyers in their 50s), my sister, my friends, and the Wall Street Journal (headlines only -- but how cool is that). IMed conversations are a lot faster than email. I can have more than one conversation at once and I can talk to several people at once in an IM chat room. By using IM in my home life, I can "envision" how professors might want to set up synchronous discussions (as well as be aware of what some of the pitfalls might be). Many businesses already use some form of IM in their offices. We should start considering how to use it in our libraries. Imagine -- no more emails that consist of 20 blocks of one line of text each! 7:09:47 AM    comment [] Break. During break today I visited the Seattle Art Museum. They had an exhibit of Pakistani and Indian paintings which was really fantastic. I like the figurative style of the works -- you have to get up really close to take in all of the figures and their expressions. The detail is amazing. I wish I could have stayed a little longer but I had to get back. I also wish I had brought my camera. When I take notes in my unreadable handwriting, I make a lot of doodles. They aren't fantastic or anything but they would have been fun to include. 7:09:36 AM    comment [] Phones. I'll blog more from the actual confernece later, but if you're attending, reading this, and have a cell phone will you please please please put the ringer on "silent' or "vibrate" or something? Thanks! 7:09:25 AM    comment [] Workshop for Academic Library IT Managers. I attended this because I am an electronic resources librarian. While I don't manage a lot of people, I do try to keep track of how we use technology and I wanted to improve how I did this. This workshop included discussions of project management issues, content management systems, distance learning, and video archiving. We focused a great deal on practical aspects. I found listening to the participants discuss real world experiences and issues to be very helpful. Some details: We worked through a couple of exercises and debated the results. In the first exercise, we drew diagrams of the IT structure of our law schools. The org chart for our law school IT is a little complicated and the exercise was made all that more difficult because while I knew what everyone did, I didn't know what their titles were. I remember last year at AALL some speaker suggested this was a Gen X trait, that we tended to focus more on people's skills than their positions in the institutional organizational chart. I think a CMS may be able to help me with a project I am working on, but I am not sure how I would go about it. CMSs can help eliminate many repetitive tasks in designing websites, but they seem very difficult to implement. The easiest database manager to use, Access, isn't very robust. The other systems can be expensive and/or difficult to set up. Those who implement CMSs will have to establish a good return on investment before even getting started. 7:09:15 AM    comment [] AALL Seattle/ Day I. I'm in Seattle attending the AALL Conference. I'll be blogging the conference over the next few days. I won't go into as much detail because I think this time I'll leave the computer behind in the hotel and just blog impressions rather than include pages of notes. I've already finished my first workshop and I'll post my impressions after dinner. 7:09:05 AM    comment [] a full day. Cut out of C early for a little break between programs and partying. Here's a snapshot of what the day felt like. 7:08:48 AM    comment [] C3: Cyber Advanced Legal Research: Educating the Lawyers of Tomorrow. Here, and plugged in! I'm a little dazed at this hour of the day, even with a jolt of caffeine from the Starbucks up Pike (as opposed to the one down Pine, or on the back side or upstairs at the Convention Center). But I'm hoping this has real relevance for what I do in ALR. This is a show and tell, by an instructor from Univ. of Denver. This looks really standard thus far, with no indication of what the real thrust of the content is going to be. I'll give it about 5 minutes, I think. She does pre-class assessment surveys, which are electronic versions of the 3x5 cards we used to fill out in college. Nice, but I think I'd rather try to talk to the students individually. Not that that's likely to happen w/ even a majority of the class, though. She also uses a form of the game Jeopardy! in class -- maybe fairly regularly?? She's built this in html, and uses someone to drive and someone to check first-hand-up. 125 questions total. Check out http://www.law.du.edu/daustin/teaching for more. 7:08:38 AM    comment [] Plenary I. Raucous fun (with farm topics). Pretty entertaining, with a challenge to librarians to be a little bolder, more resilient, more outrageous. 7:08:28 AM    comment [] B5: QueerKids Law. Decided against the preservation program because I've seen an attenuated version already at LLNE; and against the copyright program because I'm certain that someone else from my school will go. I decided to support the SR-SIS' program instead. There's a bibliography prepared by one of the presenters on law pertaining to queer kids, which I'll pick up on the way out. 7:08:18 AM    comment [] Only three hours into the conference, and I've already run into old bosses and colleagues, old CONELL classmates, TRIALL attendees, and a handful of other random colleagues. It's a fun conference, with lots of chances (albeit in short bursts) to re-connect with people you might only see annually. If only there was a facebook... nametags are nearly worthless unless you're standing closer to someone than you ought to be if you don't already know their name, and trying to meet up with people you've never met can be a challenge. 12 noon, off to lunch in aat Bambuza for Vietnamese. 7:08:08 AM    comment [] A1: Envision the Future Teaching Role of Law Librarians. Didn't realize I was running a little late -- but here I am. See the program (linked from AALLNET) for speaker info. I think I recognize the moderator/coordinator as Carole Hinchcliff, from Ohio State. Envision your past (1980) and present (2003) and future (2012) -- where will you be in 2012? It's hard to imagine, really. Tomorrow I'm meeting up with a friend from college I haven't seen in about 13 years, and have realized that my status as techie gadget girl is something that didn't even exist in college. There was no web, no such thing as a browser, and you had to be willing to deal with VAX to experiment with email. Sure I bought a computer, but as a glorified word processor. I couldn't possibly have foreseen the role that machine would play in my life and work over the next 10 years. So what should we pay attention to? The speaker insists that we're not in the business of information -- we're not about answers, we're about questions. Our role is to teach information literacy by improving users' question-asking skills. An interesting proposition, and one that's somewhat counter to the traditional role of the librarian in selecting resources. I wonder if he would say that our role in that sense is dead? He also raises the importance of understanding generational differences -- NextGen accepts virtual behaviors, as opposed to GenXYZ preferring visible behaviors. Information literacy is falling with the prioritizing of PC literacy for NextGen. We have to open up our teaching to accommodate a wider variety of learning styles. We're not just training lawyers (who are traditionally text-based learners). Legal Information (all about it) It's narrative, storytelling (and history is more about storytelling now than it used to be), with deep archives, a structure, a narrow band of user behavior, and shared terminology -- it's ideal KM content. And West figured this out 15 (?) years ago. They don't have the whole world of legal information, but I'd bet that they'd like to. Someone just asked for an explanation of precoordinate v. postcoordinate indexing. Which is a little bit sad. Much like the librarian I spoke to on the phone at a major University Law LIbrary a few weeks ago who asked what I meant when I referred to the item record as opposed to the bib record. I'm glad people are asking the questions, I just think it's sad that someone can be a librarian without a firm foundation in this stuff. What are our goals today? Open up, try to envision the future, look at the diversity in learning styles and motivations, and technological innovations. Dream, dream. So what's the evidencce? 1/2 of us (librarians) are over 55... scary for employers and for the profession, but exciting for those of us who will be job-seeking over the next 20 years. 12% of librarians are 25-34, v. 25% in that range in comparable professions. Wow. 90% of ARL directors are 50 or over. Go See: Kartoo and AnaCubis (links to come when I'm back online), Oingo and Diatra. 7:07:55 AM    comment []

Saturday, July 12, 2003

AALL 2003 Annual Meeting. Mail-to-weblog worked, though the applications for my use are minimal. I've arrived in Seattle, settled in to my room (complete with goldfish), and the weather couldn't be lovelier. Two days now, and I don't see any of the haze and rain people seem so fond of associating with Seattle. And it's cool and breezy, which is a nice change. Still have to register this afternoon, but already did my program this morning and am now a free agent for the rest of the week. I'm taking a pretty focused ref/electronic services track of programs, so expect recaps of that nature (beginning tomorrow). 6:07:24 PM    comment [] Just testing email-to-weblog from DTW (with Radio not running). hello hello! 6:07:15 PM    comment []

Monday, July 07, 2003

Lesson of the day. The beta version of the new Google Toolbar does not play well with Lexis. Kudos to the Lexis tech who figured out the problem right away (the pop-up blocker seemed to cause some kind of weird C++ error whenever I tried to access the sign-on page). 6:07:36 AM    comment []

Friday, June 27, 2003

Read them here first. 5 opinions from SCOTUS today -- certainly generated a lot of comment this morning! I learned that they often appear at the AP SCOTUS page first. And you can read in depth analysis over at the SCOTUS Blog. (Sorry no posts in a while -- I had to read Harry Potter!) 1:07:29 AM    comment []

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