North Carolina Libraries Day

On Wednesday, March 6th, 2013 Cheryl Cross, Nataly Blas, Jose Merlo Vega, a visiting professor and myself traveled to NCSU for the open house of the new Hunt library. The library opened to students and the public this January but it still considered to be in a soft-opening as not all of the technology is in place.

If you have the chance you really should make the trip out to the library. Here are some highlights:

The BookBot:

 

Rather then open stacks Hunt library has installed a bookbot, which can house over two million books (its about half-full right now). The books are bar-coded and arranged by size rather than subject. Patrons order them from the computer and within 5 minutes can pick them up for browsing or checkout. Professors and Students expressed concern about losing the serendipitous book find from browsing so they are currently working on a virtual browse still in beta. This huge touch screen (like seriously the size of a person) lets you search for a specific book or by a subject and see visual representation of the books that would be near it on the shelf.

Technology Sandbox:

There is a room called the Apple Technology showcase (named after donors not the Apple brand) that is a glassed in room within the second floor reading room. It has all the different technologies available for check-out so students can see and use them before checking them out. For our visit they also featured one of the 3-D printers. They actually have three of them and they are generally housed in the 3-D printing room. Students can design their own patterns and programs and pay a nominal fee by the ounce used. The printers take a good amount of time-the squirrel in the picture took about two hours-but are so cool! One medical student created a 3-D model of a trachea to study, so there is actual real-world value!

Study Space:

 

One of the main reasons they built this library was to increase study space for the students. Before it was built they have enough seating for 5% of the campus population in the main Hill library. Now they have two main libraries and enough seating for 10% of the population. They also created a graduate student commons that requires students to swipe their id cards so only graduate students can use the space. They even created a faculty study space for when faculty want to get out of their office.

There were so many neat touches to this library. The group study rooms have whiteboard walls and  touchscreen controllers that also allow students to contact a librarian instantly. There are student workers who wear "Ask Us" t-shirts, they walk around the building and fix technology issues (printing, computers, ect). There are several multimedia rooms that include theater lighting and sound, 3-D cameras and 270 degree screens. You can read more about the library's spaces and see student pictures at the Hunt Library Website: http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/huntlibrary

Webinar: virtual internship and international libraries

On Wednesday November 28, 2012,  I hosted a webinar  about a recent virtual internship project and international libraries. As the UNCG Distance Education Librarian,  I am hosting my second international virtual intern through the DILL (Digital Libraries Learning, an international elite masters program of Erasmus Mundus)  My student last year was in Uzbekistan (view webinar/read about experience) but this year I am hosting a student in Germany. We met when I visited as a guest lecturer in Parma, Italy in September 2012 for the DILL program.  For the webinar, Annabelle Koester presented information on her DILL program experience and her virtual internship with me, as well as a brief overview of university and libraries in Germany.

Listen to the webinar presentation!   and view her slides:

DILL Virtual Internship at UNCG from UNCG University Libraries

Assessment Conferences

Posted for Kathy Crowe...

Kathy Bradshaw and I attended the ARL Libraries Assessment Conference October 29-31, 2012 in beautiful Charlottesville, VA.  We and several other UNCG librarians (Jenny Dale, Amy Harris Houk, Christine Fischer, Terry Brandsma) also attended the NCLA Mini-workshop on assessment, jointly sponsored by the College and Universities Section and the Community and Junior College Section, at Davidson Community College November 2, 2012.  It was the week of assessment!

Some takeaways from these conferences:

•    Provide evidence to show their value and communicate it to stakeholders

•    “Own the change” (John Lombardi, President of the LSU system)

•    Publicize our mission

•    Federal government is dominating accountability in higher education rather than higher ed itself

•    Many faculty retirements and hiring of new faculty.  Libraries need to support these new faculty.

•    We should continue to work on copyright

•    Library assessment had become more external; we didn’t use to have to justify our existence

•    Traditional measures of “goodness” (e.g. counting things) don’t provide an adequate picture

•    Online education will have a huge impact  on higher education

•    Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate!

These were gleaned from the keynotes at both conferences.  There were many great papers with good practical advice.  The ARL conference will post the presentations soon.

Several of us also presented at these conferences.  At the NCLA workshop, Jenny presented on libraries and retention and Amy on library and the QEP.  Kathy and I presented on the mystery shopper project at both conference.  Assessment at the UNCG Libraries rock!

DILL Program in Parma, Italy!

The last two weeks of September 2012, I had the honor to visit Parma, Italy as a guest lecturer for the Digital Libraries Learning Program (DILL) of Erasmus Mundus of the European Commission. DILL is a two-year, English speaking, international masters for information professionals to provide them with the skills in the area of digital libraries. It is offered in cooperation between Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences (Norway), Tallinn University (Estonia), and the University of Parma (Italy) and students spend at approximately one semester at each institution, and then complete an internship and thesis.   

View of Italian Alps from Parma

Quaint pedestrian friendly town  

February of 2012, I first learned of the DILL program as I volunteered to host a virtual student, who lived in Uzbekistan as had completed the study Parma the previous fall. [See webinar video: http://library.uncg.edu/info/distance_education/flvfiles/virtualinternship.html]   The success of our collaboration  led DILL Parma coordinator not only ask me to host another virtual student this fall, but also inviting me to travel to Parma to meet and lecture to the DILL students face to face.  I was also asked to meet and lecture to local are library professionals while in Parma.

Visiting Biblioteca Palatina in Parma, Italy

In Parma, I lectured to the students on Creating the Digital User Experience at UNCG Libraries, showcasing   we do collaboratively as a library to virtually support our students such as reference virtual help, our digital library collections, our hosting services, apps, and tool creations, our online teaching, etc. The DILL students asked many questions about our technologies and services, and by the end of my half day talk, I had many DILL students asking if they could work at our library!  My other lecture day covered Designing eLearningDigital Objects where I discussed basic e-learning concepts, instructional design process, and technologies used to create tutorials and online learning at UNCG Libraries.  

While in Parma, I also connected with UNCG Library and Information Studies Department, primarily the Digital Libraries course and professor. Together we formed a secret Facebook group connecting students at both UNCG and DILL to discuss digital libraries. We pulled off a synchronous virtual session using Blackboard Collaborate to join both groups virtually, with video and audio. DILL students introduced themselves, shared their country (they came from 17 different countries across the world!) of origin, and what they were doing in libraries. Though the session was short and mainly involved introductions and sharing – not discussion - the goal was to show the possibility for synchronous, global connecting of librarians and students and its potential for collaboration.

An added benefit was meeting other visiting professors for the DILL program from all over the global including Australia, France, UK, USA and Sri Lanka.  We had some amazing discussions about digital libraries with truly international perspectives.  Visiting the area professional librarians for a morning was also positive experience. I showed them the Digital User Experience slides, answered many questions about how we do things, and  we all discussed libraries and our practices.  They were also impressed by what UNCG Libraries does for their students and said we had the “ideal academic library.” 

"Irma"  and I visiting Parma professional librarians

   

I have remained connected with the students and professional librarians I met while in Parma and hope to build more collaborative endeavors. I am currently hosting a DILL student from Germany as a virtual intern for the rest of the fall semester, planning a synchronous webinar with her in early December as I did with my student last February. I am currently wrapping up a collaborate article on the experience last year with my first virtual intern and the last years’ student intern supervisor in Parma. The Parma DILL coordinator asked me to write on my recent experiences in Parma with the program and she will translate for the Italian audience. She also requested I return next year thrilled with my contributions to the Parma DILL program.   The DILL program coordinator and our library Dean supported this international endeavor with hopes of building a more dynamic partnership with DILL and UNCG,  to create better global perspectives for both parties.   This collaboration has benefited all parties and promoted UNCG, especially the Libraries, on an international scale.
 
Special  thanks the UNCG University Libraries and Koehler Fund for their travel grant to help make this travel experience possible!


PS I had also enjoyed visiting Bologna and Venice for the weekend ... and eating lots of great foods and good wines!

Visited Sala Borsa in Bologna ... 

... in library, ancient roman ruins can be seen below! 

Streets of Venice... 

...and all the canals! 

IASSIST and ALA 2012

I attended two conferences in June. IASSIST is the International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology, a data professionals organization, and you can read about some sessions. I also attended ALA Annual Conference and read a summary if you wish.

Metrolina Information Literacy Conference 2012

A few of us from Reference attended the 7th Annual Metrolina Information Literacy Conference on Thursday. I've posted my notes for the sessions I attended. I also posted the PowerPoint from the presentation Jenny D and I gave. Would love to see more notes if you went!

Duke's Center for Instructional Technology Showcase

On Friday April 27, 2012 I attend the Duke Center for Instructional Technology Showcase  - a free one-day conference which "celebrates creativity and innovation in using technology in education at Duke with presentations and demonstrations by Duke faculty and staff"  

• PDF schedule is here
• Here is their storify summary.

Session 1: Exploring Games for Learning
Presenters from Elon, UNC-CH, U of Chicago Medicine showcased various types of gaming.  Alternative reality games (ARGs) were discusses the most.

•  U of Chicago folks created a game called Stork. A large team with variety of skills collaborated on the creation - and the trailer for it was, well, amazing!  Its like scavenger hunt but digital with audio, video, mobile, etc. for health oriented learning. ARGs are a great way to engage with youth because THEY get to create it! 
• Elon's  Intro Astronomy Class profssor created  a "reacting to the past" games - no technology involved - but engages students in a SNL,  Daily Show, Cobert Report like situations. Examples are: reading Galileo's texts and role playing as a character at the time and place or engaging in the is Pluto a planet debate.  Setting is key: they physically went to other places like a chapel or bar depending on the screen to give students the feel of time and place.  to debate and role play.
• UNC-CH discussed their ShBANGE collaborative research project another ARG, which involved collaborative between their LIS dept and the librayr. It involved two-weeks of puzzle-solving beginning with a staged marriage proposal in the Pit on the UNC-CH, and then offering clues, leading to puzzles, to more puzzles, etc using Info Lit and Research skills to build and solve the game. (Read more about it)
   

Session 2:  Learning from the Humanities Labs
This session included librarians and students - promoting how libraries should be involved in Humanities Labs and how one student work on her thesis through the lab with help from many people on campus.  

• Student Emma started out the session using Prezi for her presentation which really worked well, showing a layout in  a gallery, that you zoom in to see the digital maps from their special collection embedded in the virtual gallery.  She praised the library and said the library resources were key for her work and got lots of help from librarians on visualization too. She worked heavily in the BorderWorks Lab at Duke: reading travelogues  of visits to Tahiti by past explorers, analyzed scanned maps, created a timeline of events, and created a google earth map showing the explorers movements with various layers to be toggled on and off . Her goal was to determine if there a correlation between eye witness recorded events at island and those documented in England as she wanted to create a vision of Tahiti for 18th century readers.  She also mapped correspondences on a google maps and see the scale of geographic area of letters spread around. Read more about her work here!
• The second project was a Slave Nations Project  - to determine the ethnic origins in Africa of slaves in colonial Haiti - using data and visualization. This was a project from Duke's Haiti Lab, which is the first humanities laboratory at the Franklin Humanities Institute. This project involved collaborate between numerous students and researchers, using a database of of slaves who escaped, database of ads looking for missing slaves and trying  to correlate the data, using share google spreadsheet (until it got too large) and map overlaps on Google Earth to geolocate actual origins of slaves.  These folks strongly comment that they would like to see the library  help host data and databases as they need that core infrastructure to create database driven research projects, saved and shared or privatized if needed.

Session 3: What are your students doing with social media?
First student discussed what social media they are using in general: Tumblr, Twitter, Storify, Facebook, Delicious, Four square, Youtube, Google +

For courses they discussed what faculty are using in their courses:
For Theater class and English classes, posted all materials in Wordpress blog, all digital all in one place,  posts by students to engage w/ each other and document the process. Online interaction among students discussing topic is key. A Biology course used lots youtube videos which student liked.  For a  French classes students had to tweet to each other in French w correct grammar to each other! A Nutrition class used blogs to keep a food journal including  images and notes and quotes from readings for class. A freshman started a duke notes for sciences where people post their large lecture notes to share with each other, and take notes together through shared google docs -  now other classes have created their own with  professors adding content in there too (which can help prof assess if students got concepts or not!)  and is accessible to all in the class!

Lastly they gave advice:

•  Don't be afraid to use social media 'we use it more than email for sure'
• Use Facebook privacy settings so you an connect with students but not share all (you can have private life too) or just subscribe to a student postings.  This makes profs more human to students.
• PLEASE use  google docs for shared notes in your courses
• Try the tweeting in language classes again.
• Love videos

Conclusion of CIT....

Its worth attending not just to see some cool new methods of integrating tech  to support student learning and engagement, but great food and amazing networking. And of course had to take a walk through the gorgeous Duke gardens!