This was my first experience going to VLA and to the Homestead. I'm not going to wax poetic about the drive up there or the elegance of the facility itself. Rest assured I found it all quite stunning.
The complementary valet parking got us in quick. We arrived just in time to see the president of VLA cut the ribbon to open the exhibit hall. The registration line was fast moving and with nearly an hour until the opening speeches, we explored the exhibits. A bag full of freebies (which were okay, but not as grand as I'd hoped) and a couple of pastries later, we were back upstairs listening to David Baldacci speak. Again, I won't try to truly recapture a moment you had to be there for, but Mr. Baldacci was a very entertaining speaker. His stories about becoming and being a successful writer were wonderful to hear.
After lunch, those of us that arrived together ended up going to different sessions. I can only recall those I visited. We'll see if anyone else can be conviced to blog their experiences later.
First Session: M-Learning - What Is Driving Mobility? Mr. Gardner Campbell (English PhD and learning technology expert) gave a wonderful talk about the trend of technological mobility. He began by complicating the definition of mobility itself, noting we are beyond the point of just using mobile PC's. We are well into an age of varied mobile devices, connected to computers, and they are changing rapidly. And we should all be aware that it is truly people that are mobile. Our basic physical needs and day to day lives are what drive the development of mobile technology. The current limits in hardware are the only boundaries. Looking ahead, he sees developments in the semantic web and increasing bandwidth leading to still unimagined leaps and bounds in the kind of information that libraries will be offering by 2020. Finally, assuring us that books will still be around, he pointed out a trend in Japan of ebooks by cellphone driving new users to libraries for even more print sources.
Second Session: More Than Tick Marks. I couldn't resist a session about creating meaningful reference statistics. Eric Ackermann from Radford University bascially showcased a piece of free/open source software called LibStats. With it you can track the time and details of transactions in a quick, but in depth way. In addition to simply recording these stats, it creates a searchable database of the answers given to patron questions. When information can't be found in the library, the fact of a needed resource can be noted for later collection development. Radford University has been pleased as punch with this for two years now. Overall, it has helped their reference department uncover what is actually keeping them so busy, while the old tick mark system appeared to be showing a decline in reference questions. The changing nature of our work just can't be captured acurately by hash marks alone. I'm hoping this might be the answer for us as well.
Third Session: Retool Your Library With Radical Trust. The description for this session was cryptic enough to draw myself and many others as we were implored to just trust the speakers with an hour of our time. Basically, radical trust means involving the patrons in the marketing and other aspects of library operation. The main example they gave was the adoption of LibraryThing into some librarys' cataloging schemes. What if we let the users add to the search terms or append comments to item records?
They also pointed out the need to move beyond rigid, theoretical concepts of what patrons need. Consider library furniture. At the end of the day, many libraries find tables and chairs moved around. Instead of thinking, "Why don't they put these back in the right place?" consider the fact your ideas of "order" might just be artificial and whether you'd be happier managing a museum instead of a library. Polling the public about potential new seating or interacting with them on various social networks are just a few more examples of using radical trust. Libraries need to be living spaces and respond somewhat dynamically to patron needs and "radical trust" is one conceptual approach to this end. If anyone is interested, I have the bibliography handed out in this session.
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17 years ago
