 | Abstracts module 1: Trends and Strategic Issues for Libraries |
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General Trends Abstract not available. Recommended reading:
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Search Trends and Implications for Libraries: How Can Users Find What They Need? As the world's knowledge is increasingly being published or converted into a digital form, one of the greatest challenges is designing systems that enable users to find what they need. Users are faced with a universe of information that appears in disparate collections and is searched using a range of tools with differing user interfaces. Searching each collection of knowledge individually is tedious and searching across collections (e.g., using federated searching and search engines) is complex, and often does not provide desired results. This session discussed technology trends in the area of search and issues to consider in digital library projects to make it easier for users to find what they are looking for. Recommended reading:
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Publishers' Strategies Abstract not available.
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$, £ and €: Library Financial Management in the 21st Century Increasingly complex elements need to be considered in financial library management and the last few years have brought several changes. New developments within the information world and in the wider educational context have an important impact on library budgets. E-resources have an increasingly bigger share in library budgets and this has important managerial implications. Elaine Urquhart explored strategies for dealing with a volatile and an ever-changing set of budgetary requirements. She showed how you can produce estimates which are accepted and to what extent stakeholders should be involved in deriving library estimates. Elaine addressed what skills librarians need to manage this increasingly complex situation. The session concluded with some speculation on the future agenda.
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| Abstracts module 2: Technological Developments: Threats and Opportunities for Libraries |
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Wikis: Disruptive Technologies for Dynamic Possibilities As defined by the Wikipedia, "[a] disruptive technology is a lower performance or less expensive product or process that gains a foothold in the low end, less demanding part of an existing market, and then successively moves up-market through performance improvements until finally displacing the market incumbents." (Wikipedia February 6 2005). 'WikiWikiWeb', 'wiki wiki', or 'wiki' is "a server-based collaborative tool that allows any authorized user to edit pages and create new ones using plain text HTML" (Chawner and Lewis, 1). 'Wiki wiki' is a Hawaiian term for 'quick' or 'super-fast' (Wikipedia February 7 2005). As viewed by Ward Cunningham, the father of the Wiki, "a wiki is a freely expandable collection of interlinked Web 'pages', a hypertext system for storing and modifying information - a database, where each page is easily editable by any user … (Leuf and Cunningham 2001: 14). "Wiki is a … collaborative space … because of its total freedom, ease of access, and use, [and] simple and uniform navigational conventions…. "[It] ... is also a way to organize and cross-link knowledge … (Leuf and Cunningham 2001: 16). The first wiki, The Portland Pattern Repository (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors) (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory) was created by Cunningham in 1995. Established in 2001, the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) - the "free content encyclopedia" - is the largest public wiki with nearly 469,000 articles in English alone (February 7, 2005), with thousands of new articles added and tens of thousands of edits made every day (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About). While the current number of public, private, and personal wikis is unknown, SwitchWiki (http://www.worldwidewiki.net/wiki/SwitchWiki), a comprehensive directory of public wikis, includes entries for more than a thousand implementations. Since their initial introduction, the use of wikis has grown to include a range of collaborative activities in a wide variety of organizational environments, notably in corporations, institutions of higher education, and libraries. Current applications of wikis include project management, agenda solicitation and distribution, customer relations management, documentation, minutes preparation and review, scheduling, task management, as well as organizational news and events, among others. In this presentation the general nature and structure of select wikis was reviewed, and the features and functions of popular wiki software engines, and the content and use of wikis by select businesses, colleges and universities, and libraries (2005b) was described. Concluded was with speculation about the wiki as an environment, framework, and venue for Disruptive Scholarship, a proposed model for alternative scholarly authorship, review, and publishing (McKiernan, 2005a) References
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Advances in Access Management: From IP-Ranges to Shibboleth While the access management to digital library resources still largely is based on users' IP-addresses, a new technology (Shibboleth, an architecture and implementation of Internet 2) is emerging. It promises inter-organisational and location independent single-sign-on access to a wide variety of web based resources as well as improved access management. Features and technology of Shibboleth were explained. The current status of its deployments in the US and many European countries was presented. Implications and benefits of Shibboleth for access to digital library resources were discussed - exemplified by the deployment in Switzerland and some use cases. Indirect access via a Shibboleth enabled proxy was shown and direct access to content providers was discussed. Finally, it was outlined what may be expected in the years to come. Recommended reading:
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A Million Computers Just 'Walked' in: Are You Using the Mobile Potential? The smartphone, the Personal Digital Assistant, the Personal Media Player, the Blackberry, the Personal Assistant, Communication and Entertainment device, more computing power in a pocket than flew on board the first space shuttles, what does this new level of very personal computing and communicating power mean for the future of your library? This session looked at the range of Mobile Internet Access Devices, such as Smartphones, PDAs, Personal Media Players etc, and the concomitant range of developing applications which are likely to impinge on the services provided by libraries. What are the ways in which this technology can be used and how is it going to develop? What will happen, when a student enters the library with a device capable of communicating to any computer in the world; carrying all of their teaching and learning materials; capable of watching video, animation; downloading electronic publications and course notes and communicating to the local library computing service, and automatically being identified by the service and sent information relevant to their own needs and preferences? That student has already entered the building. How does your educational establishment's technology greet the new technology? What is the potential and what are the longer term issues for implementing support for mobile technologies in education? We examined technology and the developing applications and looked at some of the issues and possible solutions. Recommended reading:
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Workshop on blogs What is blogging, and why is everyone doing it? Can it really help you personally and your library professionally? Yes! Blogging offers far more than just a way to tell the world about your cat or what you had for lunch. Libraries are using blogs to offer new information channels, provide new types of services, and to help manage their own internal information flow. Blogs let you do all of this and more in far more efficient ways, letting you concentrate on the content, rather than the process of publishing online. How much of your web site really changes on a frequent basis? Maybe 10%? You already have a "what's new" section on your site, but turning it into a blog will ease your workload immensely. In addition, blogs can be used in any type of library to enhance internal or external communication. If 2004 was the year of the blog, 2005 looks to be the year of RSS, and blogging is the fastest way for your library to join the RSS revolution. This practical lectured showed you how to get the most out of blogging and why the accompanying RSS feed for your blog is so important. Participants walked out of the session with software recommendations, a range of ideas for implementation, and a list of decisions to consider before embarking on your blog and RSS adventure. Recommended reading:
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| Abstracts module 3: Library Consortia and Licensing |
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Introduction on Consortia and Licensing License agreements on electronic information have become common practice for libraries, publishers and other vendors. They have changed the relationship between these actors in the information chain. The development of good practices in licensing and the realization of beneficial conditions for libraries would have been impossible without the role of library consortia and the international cooperation on these issues. The history of licensing and consortia and the most important legal aspects involved were briefly discussed. The paper then examined the future of consortia licensing and in particular the pros and cons of the big deals, the alternative approaches and the future of consortia in the era of open archives and open access. Now that the access to electronic information and availability of vendor systems to use this information are no longer a distinctive activity for most libraries, the question arises whether libraries should not be prepared to give up some of their autonomy and leave these activities to national or even international entities. The academic library could then fully concentrate on the provision of services that really make a difference for their end-users.
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E-Collections: Where Are We Going and How Will We Get There? E-collections provide opportunities and complexities that are changing the way librarians make collection decisions. Better (or at least more) usage data, variations in licenses and price models, new partnerships by publishers and libraries, all result in new ways to think about collections. New standards for usage data now reveal how many items are requested or downloaded from each source and, combined with cost and size of user population data, can help librarians make informed decisions of what resources to keep. Varying licenses and price models allow librarians to choose between unlimited use subscriptions, pay per use, pay per download, or open access sources. Multiple options must be considered to get the best mix for each library situation and librarians must learn to think of multiple pricing options depending on use and cost of resources. In addition, working partnerships in the publishing marketplace have resulted in interlinked resources through CrossRef, virtual journals, and some duplication of sources across aggregations. Librarians must build interlinked collections that take duplication into account. Library partnerships include multi-library consortia that make collective collection development decisions and librarians must decide which consortial agreements are the best for their library. In addition, library collections are now served by a new group of intermediaries, including link resolver companies and metasearch services. All of these developments allow e-collection development to be more closely tailored to the needs of individual libraries and their constituents, but also require much more time by librarians to decide what among many choices are best for their situation.
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The Road is Paved with Good Intentions: Best Practices for Relationship Management in Successful Collaborations Library consortia have emerged in recent years as significant players in the networked information ecosystem, and play key roles in formalizing business practices as libraries move from informal cooperation to more formal collaboration. However, while consortia are often well-versed in license negotiations and e-collections management, they may underestimate the relationship and change management skills that are critical for successful and sustained collaborations. This presentation explored principles and best practices of consortia with regard to relationship management among members, external stakeholders, funders and suppliers, and provided an overview of factors that can cause good ideas to fail or valuable partnerships to be undermined. The presentation concluded with a discussion of skill development for consortia that wish to strengthen their "collaboration competencies" and advance licensing initiatives as well as new service ventures. Recommended reading:
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Practical workshop: Pitfalls and Boobytraps: Consortia, Licences and Negotiations Goals of the workshop: to help you identify your own position as member of a consortium by analysing the status of your consortium and its main objectives; to make you aware of threats and opportunities of your own consortium; to formulate answers to the question 'what next'. Questions to be dealt with:
The workshop started with a short introduction about what consortia are all about, connecting the workshop to the various presentations of the day.
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| Abstracts module 4: Open access and Institutional Repositories |
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Open Access: How to Get There from Here
How can institutions with an interest in open access (OA) help move it forward? Why does OA depend primarily on the decisions of researchers themselves? What can universities do to promote OA? What can librarians do to promote OA? What can funding agencies do to promote OA? What can we learn from the public-access policy of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)? Peter Suber addressed these questions and showed how different stakeholders can improve the system of scholarly communication, share knowledge, and accelerate research. Recommended reading:
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Here, there .... and not yet everywhere. Institutional repositories and what they hold, now and for the future Everybody's talking about them - institutional repositories, that is. Universities are building them, publishers eye them with great interest, researchers... well, what are researchers doing about them? Researchers are now beginning to understand the relationship between open access and impact and as a result are self-archiving their articles in these repositories at an increasing rate. Institutional repositories represent the best, most effective and fastest way to open access, and have many other roles and benefits besides, but they represent a movement in its infancy. Where have we got to so far, and, more importantly, what can we expect of institutional repositories in the future? And where will they fit into the wider picture that Peter Suber expounded upon in his session? Recommended reading:
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Practical workshop on institutional repositories OAI: How to start and keep going! Presented was a case study of Ghent University. How and why did they start, how did they
promote OAI. What was succesful, what went wrong, what didn't work, what arguments were used and why is it so important to keep going on and to join forces. Participants were given the opportunity to test their own convincing skills: as a librarian who wants a researcher to join OAI and as a researcher who wants to escape.
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Practical workshop on Repositories, copyrights and creative commons for scholarly communication Copyright has become broader and stronger. Copyrights should not be an impediment to the sharing of research output. The new possibilities of repositories and Open Access publishing create the necessity to investigate "scholarly property rights" and alternatives like the use of creative commons licenses. Lead by some practical examples participants discussed the possibilities of the use creative commons licenses for scholarly communication. Recommended reading:
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| Abstracts module 5: Libraries and Teaching and Learning |
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Libraries and Teaching and Learning: An Introduction Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have had a profound impact on the way modern libraries operate. The end is still not in sight with major digitization projects underway like f.i. Google Print, Google Scholar, and the Google Libraries project. ICTs are also starting to impact the world of teaching and learning with the advent of e-learning. This introduction will give a broad sketch of relevant trends in the world of (digital) libraries, the world of (e) learning and (e) teaching, and seeks to identify opportunities and challenges for librarians in performing one of their core tasks: the support of educational processes. The presentation drew both on conceptual work in this area, as well as on practical experiences reported in the literature. It attempted to set out a framework for the day's topics covered in the other lectures. Recommended reading:
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"Not the Filling of a Vessel, but the Lighting of a Fire": Enriching Student Learning by Cultivating Undergraduate Research Skills This session provided a brief overview of Information Literacy (IL) standards in North America, Australia and the United Kingdom. Through practical exercises and discussion, we connections between IL and active student learning were uncovered, and discovered were ways to integrate IL standards into course and curricular design and thus foster an environment of meaningful, independent, and self-directed student learning. Special topics, including cultivating campus collaborations, effective marketing and "messaging," program assessment, and assessing student skills and learning, were also covered. Lessons learned from the UC Berkeley Library/Faculty Fellowship on Undergraduate Research were shared throughout. Recommended reading:
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Assessment: a Key Part of the Learning Experience Sheila focused particularly on assessment of learning, considering the different purposes of assessment: Diagnosis;
Formative feedback; Summative judgment; and Course evaluation & quality audit. She identified some library initiatives in the area of assessing information literacy (e.g. project SAILS) and discussed the issue of education for information literacy outside formal education (e.g. in public libraries and the workplace). Sheila highlighted problems (e.g. getting trapped in a "VLE e-ghetto") as well as opportunities. The session included participant discussion.
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Dangerous Discussions about Information Literacy: For full description and links to related resources that will be used in the session, see: http://www.tltgroup.org/InfoLit/Transition.htm. How can we cope with too much information, too many messages, and too many attractive choices for teaching and learning?
What new combinations of skills, expertise, and resources are needed to meet new expectations for the use of information resources and services to improve teaching, learning, and research in higher education?
What are some of the most important changes in the physical, information, and human environments in which information resources are used? Which elements of Information Literacy can be most helpful in these changing environments? For whom and under which conditions? More specifically:
We may consider these delusions (for example):
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