Southeastern Library Assessment Conference

I attended this conference in Atlanta last week.  Librarians from Georgia Tech, Georgia State and Clayton State have organized this conference three times in the off year of the "big" Library Assessment Conference. Assessment librarians just can't wait two years to get together!

Some noteworthy presentations included the keynote, Ann Emery, who has her own analytics company.  She had an excellent presentation on data visualization.  I also liked a session from Southern Illinois U at Edwardsville on international students.  We probably need to learn about about our foreign students' library needs.

I didn't get to attend a session on assessing first year information literacy but it looks very interesting.  Instead I went to one on strategic planning from UT Knoxville where they talked about keeping the organization focused on their plan and the tools they used to do so.  Very helpful!  I also presented on strategic planning the next day.  I used a new tool (to me)  -- Mentimeter -- a polling app I learned about from Sam Harlow via Jenny Dale.  It's wonderful!  Much easier to use than Poll Everywhere. 

All the presentations are here. 

Charleston Conference 2017

Some notes from last week (but with an emphasis on the unofficial business info track we have been developing).  --Steve

https://liaisonlife.wordpress.com/2017/11/14/charleston2017/

LJ: Five Trends Changing Higher Education That Librarians Need to Watch

Interesting column from Library Journal's Stephen Bell:

Five Trends Changing Higher Education That Librarians Need to Watch | From the Bell Tower

In short:

1. 21st Century Transcripts
2. Move to Microcredentials
3. Tuition-Free Higher Education
4. Analytics on the Rise
5. Librarians as Campus Leaders

See the full article for details.

GCEC 2017 in Halifax N.S. (Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centres)

I attended and spoke at an entrepreneurship education conference in Halifax two weeks ago. Details at https://liaisonlife.wordpress.com/2017/10/25/gcec2017/ .  --Steve

Society of American Archivists annual meeting report

From July 23 through 30, I was in Portland, Oregon for the 2017 Society of American Archivists annual meeting. Much of my time there was spent in SAA Council meetings or meetings of sections and committees to which I'm the Council liaison.

The week started with a day-long Council meeting on July 24. At that meeting, we:

• Issued a statement on Concerns about 2019 Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas, which was shared via the SAA website, social media, and an all-member email. 
• Approved a petition to form a new section, the Independent Archives Section. 
• Discussed the results of the Membership Committee’s Survey on Barriers to Participation in SAA and agreed to utilize the analysis during their strategic planning session at the November Council meeting. 
• Discussed the procedures and criteria for component group funding requests and agreed to review a revised draft at the July 29 Council meeting. 
• Approved SAA support for two International Council on Archives documents, the Principles of Access to Archives and the Basic Principles on the Role of Archivists and Records Managers in the Support of Human Rights.

On Wednesday, in addition to attending a number of section and committee meetings, I along with my two fellow first-year Council members organized and led SAA's annual Leadership Forum. This Forum brought together leaders from component groups across the organization to discuss collaboration, cooperation, and strategic planning. Thanks to lots of focused pre-event publicity (and promises of candy and buttons for attendees), we were very excited to have nearly 70 attendees at the Forum -- attendance in past years hovered around 20 or 30. Post-event feedback was extremely positive, and we plan to use what we learned as well as the feedback received to revise and update the leadership manual portion of SAA's website in the coming year.

Other less exciting but equally important Council responsibilities throughout the week included meeting with vendors to thank them for attendance and solicit feedback for our 2018 annual meeting in Washington, D.C., and attending the annual SAA business meeting on Friday afternoon.

While I wasn't able to get to many educational sessions due to Council responsibilities, I did attend (at least in part) three really strong sessions. Those sessions focused on email archiving, diversifying the archival record, and/or community archives. In particular, I was interested in one session focused on ways in which universities have enabled students to do intensive research into university history (and specifically underrepresented aspects of university history) through fellowships or projects in the archives. This session tied in nicely with some of the work we are doing with our 125th anniversary student researchers, but it also reinforced the importance of supporting this type of work on an on-going basis.

On Saturday, after our 7:30am Council meeting, we hosted The Liberated Archive Forum, which aimed to bring together archivists and community members in conversation over issues of documentation. The Forum was a departure from the typical annual meeting structure, and we were all very excited to see strong attendance.

And, with the end of the annual meeting on Saturday at 5pm came the end of my first year on SAA Council. Now I feel I have a better grasp on how the organization operates, I look forward to the remaining two years of my term!

Report from The Innovative Library Classroom 2017 conference

https://liaisonlife.wordpress.com/2017/05/15/report-from-the-innovative-library-classroom-2017-conference/

--Steve

OCLC Resource Sharing Conference 2017

March 14-16, 2017, I attended the OCLC Resource Sharing Conference in Virginia Beach, VA. This conference used to be named the ILLiad International Conference and was organized by Atlas Systems, Inc.  As OCLC announced their intent last year to build a new cloud based product to replace ILLiad, the conference changed hands and names. Users of the current OCLC ILL product, WorldShare ILL, were invited in addition to ILLiad users. 

The new product is named Tipasa after an ancient trading post and UNESCO World Heritage site in Algeria. Migration to Tipasa is by invitation from OCLC. OCLC began the Tipasa migration process last year by inviting small academic libraries using ILLiad “out of the box” to consider migrating.  Out of that group of @400, @75 volunteered to be early adopters.  To date, 26 of these libraries have gone live and others are in the queue to migrate.  OCLC is ready to begin phase 2 which will include medium academic libraries and those that use Rapid ILL.  Phase 3, which should begin in 1-2 years, will consist of large academics and Docline users.  (OCLC does not have a date by which they plan to have all 1,200 ILLiad libraries migrated.)

Tipasa uses responsive design to allow for the same look and feel regardless of the device on which it is used. It will include a patron interface like My Account in WorldCat Local/WorldShare Discovery.  Within this interface patrons will be able to place and monitor orders, receive links to articles, renew loans and cancel requests online.  The link to request checked out items via ILL will still be available in the catalog and will still populate those requests. 

Also, OCLC recently purchased Relais International which is now used mainly for consortia lending but has an ILL component.  While there is no OCLC roadmap for Relais yet, they plan to move it into the cloud and are in the early days of determining how to make Relais work with WorldShare Discovery.  Thus, OCLC eventually plans to provide 3 ILL services:  WorldShare ILL, Tipasa and Relais.

Academic Libraries Supporting Entrepreneurship online symposium

Some librarians from Toronto and Pennsylvania organized an online symposium called Academic Libraries Supporting Entrepreneurship. I provided a lightning round titled "What I’ve Learned from Four Years of Teaching a Three-Credit Entrepreneurship Research Class". The slides are posted at https://liaisonlife.wordpress.com/2017/03/02/alse/ .

The morning plenary focused on issues with using library business database subscriptions to support campus entrepreneurship projects. (The Bryan School has long emphasized experiential learning tied to local economic-development, so this is hardly a new issue here).

I missed the concluding plenary because I had to teach my class!

--Steve

USASBE 2017 report

Business librarians represent at USASBE 2017

https://liaisonlife.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/usasbe2017/