March 5-7, 2012
Boston College
Keynote: What is the internet doing to our knowledge?
Dr. David Weinberger gave a very engaging and well-received keynote address. He’s currently a senior researcher at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for the Internet & Society and Co-Director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School. Other interesting things in his background include a major in Meaning (sorry, I don’t know what that is), faculty appointments in Philosophy and a gag-writing stint for Woody Allen’s comic strip. You may have heard of some of his books: The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999), Everything is Miscellaneous: the Power of the new Digital Disorder (2008), and the recent Too Big to Know (2012). Take a look at his web page and you’ll get an idea of how clever his talk was: http://www.evident.com. He delivered a similar address in February, which you can watch on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SsE25e_G8I
The short summary is that our civilization is built on Knowledge. In the past, the last word on Knowledge was from the experts. When you wanted to know something, you asked the experts. Today, Knowledge is “messier” and the experts are harder to identify. That is not necessarily bad, or that experts can’t be found. Our strategies and tools need to be different, and he had some ideas.
[Joel note: Another take-away for me is the notion of information grazing for researchers. This is one of the messy items Estelle mentioned. In the "old days," there was the book and there was the journal. These days, knowledge is "outed" way before formal publication, and it appears in every conceivable format including some librarians would be tempted to not take seriously as scholarly sources: private web pages, facebook, twitter, ...etc. We should be seeking ways to embrace the evolving ways knowledge appears.]
Service Catalog, Loyola Maryland – Starting last summer, Loyola Maryland has built a service model that costs all the activities of the IT department, including staff time. It is intended as an internal IT model that will be used to estimate project costs and to track IT spending. It will not be used to charge departments.
[Joel note: This is a component of ITIL standards being adopted by many higher ed institutions, including AJCU institutions. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL ]
Managing ITCs and Labs – At Regis, the ITCs have a variety of hardware in them, including wireless keyboards and mice! Students are used to check the equipment in each classroom, and each room is to be checked every three days. To aid in classroom support, a staff member has built an intranet catalog of all the rooms that allows remote access to the computer in the room, and can verify the projector is operational, or turn it off. In addition, the catalog can also be used to indicate when a room needs to be checked (it turns red.) In each room, the student can access the catalog and complete the checklist of tasks for that particular room. The Help Desk has access to the catalog and uses it for support calls. Classroom calls have dropped from 2-3 a week to 1 last semester, the first semester it was in use.
Tablet Pilots – Two schools reported on iPad pilots currently in process on their campuses:
- Boston College: The ACAC equivalent bought tablets and called for proposals. There were 29 applicants and all were funded. The participants could choose iPads (26), ASUSee tablets (3; all were Accounting professors) or Galaxy (0). Academic computing coordinated a kick-off meeting, monthly user meetings, and a blog, used as a repository for discussions and app reviews. Anyone on campus with a tablet was invited; they are called “Friends of the Pilot.” The pilot started in January, and, so far, they report enthusiasm.
- University of San Francisco: Following a successful pilot last year, in which 40 iPads were distributed to successful faculty applicants, a second pilot with 40 more was begun last summer. The pilots are supported by a wiki, email communications, informal interviews and monthly meetings.
Convergence of Content – Regis Librarians have several new publishing initiatives:
Evolving the new JesuitNet – JesuitNet is in a transition period. They have dropped all assessments to member colleges and have been operating on a services-rendered basis. Instead of being focused on a business model, they’ve been somewhat reactionary and focused on partnerships that have already been forged. In particular, they are currently providing services for the Jesuit Commons ( http://www.jesuitcommons.org/). They feel the need to re-assess their role in Jesuit education and asked for comments and ideas of what those of us in higher education need from them
Campus Roundup- Prior to the conference each year, CIOs are asked to submit the three top IT issues on their campus. Here are the trends with the most activity in our Jesuit schools:
- VDI: In addition to the three schools who have piloted this in previous years, Fordham, LeMoyne, Xavier and John Carroll are all at various stages, some having completed successful pilots; in addition, Rockhurst, one of the earliest to implement the virtual environment, is expanding to accommodate any device.
- Document Management: Lots of schools have done or are doing this. All said their implementation was not only successful, but popular; they have had lots of buy-in from departments.
- Lecture Capture: Several schools have successfully installed these this year; each chose a different vendor – Tegrity, Echo360, Mediasite among them.
- E-Mail: Four schools are moving faculty and staff email to the cloud; three of them Google, one Microsoft.
One item drew a lot of comments: Santa Clara, the victim of a widely-reported hacking attack last summer, quickly got approval for a new director of security.
Some of the other items mentioned were Service Cost Modeling, Learning Commons (at St. Joseph’s), Mobile apps, online learning, business intelligence and a study of internal and external forces that effect tuition (at Loyola Chicago)
Additional notes by Joel, below:
Moving a Library Collection?
Xavier removed its library collection over the summer to renovate. Amy Ensor says she would give her first born child to have Lewis & Michael movers involved in a future library move.
Measuring Library Value
Librarians should market the success that reflect their unique skills: digitization; involvement in student learning outcomes; information literacy; technology driven changes to teaching learning, and research; multimedia creation; netequette, search and information retrieval; data analysis; scholarly communication; and assessment;
OCLC study:
83% start with Google
57% use library website
Perception: other areas have more convenient info.
MISO study – see separate blog entry
Web-Scale Discovery for Libraries: Panel Discussion
Alison Morgan (Xavier), Michael LaCroix (Creighton), Bob Gerrity (Boston College)
Alision: compared three: Summon, World Cat Local, Ebsco for discovery. Tried sample questions. Summon & World Cat were finalists, but World Cat worked better for Ohio Link. Using discovery tool, was able to teach much more effectively, as the mechanics of finding things was greatly simplified. Faculty very accepting as well.
Michael: selected Summon for three libraries: Law, general, Health Science. Narrowed to Summon & Ebsco. Team looked at both and thought they were close, but team went to E. Carolina U. They have Summon and team liked implementation and then favored Summon. “Good, but not perfect.” Used all this year, and they like. Instruction changes. Use growing. Librarians like. “Google for our campus.” Summon upgrades every 2 weeks; being very responsive to their customers. Branded as Summon.
Products increase accessibility. Why have millions of dollars of products and not a good way to get to them?
Bob (Boston): Selected Alma Primo. Had “locate number” and texting to cell phone. Primo is now default search & will replace OPAC Ex Libris.
John Popko (Seattle): Last gasp of integrated system
Joan (Fairfield): using Encore, and they love it.
