Dawn’s posterous

The final day of our Institute was as busy and as fulfilling as each of the others. It began with a lecture by an unscheduled, very welcome guest speaker: Professor Kam Wing Chan, the UW geographer who had addressed us briefly at the weekend symposium preceding the Institute. He told us much more about the way he uses the library web site and online resources in the course of doing his research, providing us librarians with a detailed "user's eye view," a rare and valuable aid to our work. We also made time to hear from Professor Joyce Chen one more time, which gave us a welcome chance to learn more about the X-system digital archive and to ask her our final lingering questions.
During their lunch hour, Steve Shadle and Adam Schiff, UW's serial and monograph catalogers extraordinaires were kind enough to offer a tour of their workplace to the small subgroup of us who expressed interest. The places in Suzzallo where the catalogers do their work were no less stunning than the public parts of the building. We all felt envious: their workspaces appeared cleaner, tidier, and better organized than any of ours back home.
Our afternoon and evening graduation festivities were, in keeping with the two-weeks-plus of activities that preceded them, a perfect mixture of intellectual stimulation and warm camaraderie. Betsy Wilson, Dean of UW Libraries, articulated what we all had been thinking when she noted that rarely, if ever, in one's professional life is one so fortunate as to be granted the kind of opportunity we had just had to come together for two whole weeks with a common purpose relating to our careers. She expressed high hopes for our continued development as librarians and made me feel both encouraged and excited about our futures as well as that of the library profession. David Knechtges, professor of Chinese literature at UW, spoke about Robert Darnton's article "The Research Library in the Digital Age," wisely and acutely expanding its frame of reference beyond the inevitable Western-centric one. Harry Bruce, Dean of UW's I-School, outlined seven trends that characterize the I-School movement. Happily, these reinforced and overlapped with many of the points Betsy had made in her earlier talk, entitled "Leadership of Research Libraries in the 21st Century." The final formal speech was by the distinguished Eugene Wu, retired director of the Harvard Yenching Library, who just happened to be the first Chinese person to graduate from what was then the UW's School of Library Science. He emphasized the fact that a Chinese studies librarian must not merely be someone who knows Chinese and library technology; a deep scholarly knowledge of the country and culture is also required. He challenged the UW I-School and East Asian Studies Department to create a joint master's program to properly educate future Chinese studies librarians, and this two-week program certainly demonstrates that there is no place and no leadership better suited for this task than UW and its Dean of Libraries, I-School Dean, and Library Director, Zhijia Shen.
Each participant was called to the stage individually to receive a diploma-like certificate--and be professionally photographed in the act. This might sound like an exaggerated act for a "mere" two-week-plus experience, but if you were there, you know it didn't feel that way, and if you have followed this blog I hope you have sensed that we really deserved to be honored as graduates of something significant. One of our classmates, Ye Ding of Georgetown University, even gave valedictory remarks on our behalf, as did one of our instructors, Tim Jewell, on behalf of his colleagues.
Fittingly, the closing reception was held at the cafe across from our training room in Suzzallo Library, which had been the source for the caffeine that kept many of us fueled through the long days of intense back-to-back lectures. After enjoying some delicious party food and pieces of graduation cake, the brave and talented participants, instructors, and guests among us performed traditional Chinese songs, which gave me one last chance to pick out Chinese words and phrases and deepen my understanding of the language and culture. Like the rest of my colleagues, I am now back at home and spending a lot of time reflecting on what I learned about librarianship, the new friendships  I made, and the incredible generosity of the UW and the numerous sponsors of the Institute. I won't be able to go to China with the subgroup that is traveling there in October, but I will certainly insist that one of them blog that experience for all of us.

Alas, poor Dr. Joyce Chen did have more material to teach yesterday than time, partly because we deluged her with questions, particularly about issues related to the challenges of displaying Chinese characters. The PowerPoint slide on that topic was quite dense, and I haven't made my way through it yet, but the number 54,711 appears on it repeatedly and appears to be key. She did have to skip her demonstration of their digital archive system due to lack of time, but we are apparently going to try to carve out another slot for her on our final morning in the classroom.
Jennifer Ward began the second of her two-part lecture with some observations on institutional repositories. I was relieved to learn that UW's has not caught on wildly with its faculty, because that has also been true at NYU, and in some ways it has been hard to understand why. Jennifer also demonstrated a number of practical uses of Web 2.0 apps, including how you can stream your del.ici.ous bookmarks into Facebook and also use an RSS widget to show new book lists there. I friended her so that I can take a good look at her profile and possibly adapt some of her nifty techniques.
After a very brief lunch break it was time to board the bus to Redmond. Despite everything that the so-called Evil Empire has said and done over the years, what longtime PC user wouldn't relish the chance to set foot on the campus? This one certainly did. We were welcomed graciously and given delicious snacks and a chance to catch our breath before the presentations began. What could be more interesting to a group of librarians than to learn about how Microsoft's small team of librarians (12 in number, although they also outsource a lot of routine tasks) meets the needs of its 91,000 regular staff and tens of thousands of contingent employees. Soon after the librarian lecturing us began showing us the library portal designed for their multitude of users and explained that they circulate materials worldwide, I couldn't help asking if perhaps MS had developed the perfect integrated library system. But no, like the rest of us, they use a third-party system. However, they do have developers at their disposal to soup it up as requested. They have naturally had to develop additional subject headings for subtopics under computer languages such as C++ and C#. Their book collection development program is based entirely on user requests, and their focus is on providing enough copies of the right books, in paper or e-form, to satisfy employee needs at all times. It was fun to see individual titles listed with notations indicating 19 copies held, 19 copies checked out, 10 patrons on waiting list. These are monitored weekly to determine whether additional purchasing is necessary. As is true for the rest of us, database selection is more complicated, and they struggle to adjust their subscriptions when it appears that there is significant overlap among resources.
An employee of Microsoft Research's Cambridge, UK, office who happened to be visiting presented to us about some of their ongoing projects. I was completely wow'ed by their Research Desktop (click the link to see the brief, stunning video demo). It protoypes many of the functionalities that we at NYU are hoping to incorporate into a research portal suite of applications for which we are just beginning to sketch out the technical requirements.
Lee Dirks of Microsoft's Scholarly Communication division explained the many ways in which the company is reaching out to academic institutions worldwide in the hopes of partnering with them to develop add-ons to Microsoft products already purchased but not being used to the fullest. All of the resulting add-ons will be free and open source. Lee has worked as a preservation librarian and maintains a deep interest in that field; in fact, he worked at OCLC's Preservation Resources division before joining Microsoft. It's great to know that voices like his are being heard in Redmond. Lee was excited that an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about their new free research tools for scholars had been the Chronicle's most viewed item that very day.
I missed a bit of the most exciting part of the trip because I spent some time trapped inside a stairwell with our UW tour guide (don't ask). When we finally were able to rejoin our group, they were in one of a series of suites showing possibilities for the workplace of the future. In one, we were placed in front of huge screens representing various departments of a pharmaceutical company. The FDA notified Manufacturing of a product defect, and with just a few drag and drops of documents and communications to the responsible parties, we were able to rectify the situation far more quickly than is possible with today's technology. The very coolest demo was last. We entered a conference room designed for virtual collaborations. It had two round tables equipped with tablet PCs for all participants and huge screens subdivided into areas for display of materials and of photographs of the people at the meeting. Naturally the cameras could sense who was talking and automatically focus in on them. First we role-played as two groups, one in Seattle and another in Beijing, but by and by we needed to call in another colleague who was on a business trip in Chicago. The demo suite had a panel that pulls out into a pretend hotel bed, complete with stocked minibar to the side. One member of our group got into the bed, fired up a tablet PC, and beamed us the missing document. But now we needed to get the information to a doctor's office in yet another city. Yet another area of the suite was revealed to be a medical office stage set. A practical vision underlies all this techno-glitz, however: the idea of a fully networked world of medical information that gets the right treatment to the right person at the exact place and time of need.
Our group was given exclusive use of the Microsoft Visitor Center for a reception to conclude the visit. There, while enjoying drinks and appetizers we were invited to play with the Microsoft gadget of our choice. I do love those tablets! And many of us availed ourselves of the opportunity to send home an electronic postcard like this one.

As I mentioned, in her first lecture Professor Joyce Chen opened our eyes to the abundance of open access resources available from Taiwanese sources. Well, she prefaced her second day of remarks with an addition to her initial presentation that took the form of an entire page of links to open access Chinese dictionaries. Accessible from this page, there are both standard Chinese-Chinese dictionaries as well as more specialized ones, including a dictionary of Chinese proverbs that is searchable in English and even includes a tiny bit of help in English for that function. The focus of her talk was the many digitization projects that originate in Taiwan. Taiwan Baseball 101 is both fun and technologically impressive, as are the National Digital Archives, which include an English interface. How many digital archive projects in North American include a Chinese interface?
The UW's Tim Jewell and Diane Grover continued to share their experience with us in the concluding installment of their two-part lecture on licensing and managing electronic resources. Despite having a lot of territory to cover in order to give us a crash course in their topic, they were generous in allowing us to interrupt frequently with numerous questions.
Nancy Huling, UW Libraries' head of reference, introduced us to virtual reference in the afternoon. In keeping with the high standards of these Institute classes, she had planned her material carefully. First had scheduled a colleague to send her an instant message early on in her lecture, which allowed her to demonstrate the Meebo service, a free web tool that federates IMs from numerous services and one that we also use for IM reference at NYU. She also demonstrated OCLC's QuestionPoint service, both its e-mail functionality (which we also use at NYU, although we do not cooperate in its use with other libraries, as UW does) and its new Qwidget chat widget. Here again she had a colleague ready in the chatroom so we could see an almost-real-world example of its use. Finally, she passed around the printed text of an e-mail reference transaction that had gone somewhat awry, which was an excellent way for us to learn the potential pitfalls of cyber-reference.
Our day culminated with another exciting vendor demonstration. We saw e-collections of Chinese yearbooks, newspapers, e-books, and reference books, and then were given monthlong trial accounts in each one. Yet another great takeaway that I look forward to enjoying myself and sharing with faculty. Even nonreaders of Chinese will be blown away by the cool newspaper reading software, which emulates the experience of flipping through a real print newspaper and includes the option of listening to background music while you do!

Our colleague Xi Chen of Oberlin (which I'm always proud to acknowledge as my alma mater) has created a beautiful online photo album of our activities. She has a serious-looking camera and the artistic skills to go with it!
This week each day will begin with a lecture by Dr. Joyce (Chao-chen) Chen, who is professor and director of the Graduate  Institute of Library and Information Studies at National Taiwan Normal University as well as director of the university library. Yesterday she took us on an exciting, fast-paced tour of the many, many e-resources available from Taiwan. We were thrilled to learn that many are open for viewing by anyone. I was naturally drawn to the abundant Chinese-language-learning site, but there are many more, on practically every topic you can think of. Professor Chen has her own site, too, which includes an active crawl of Chinese proverbs that I want to parse when I get a moment. Once again I was able to follow along with the PowerPoint slides and web sites, if not the lecture itself. Following along with Taiwanese writing is a bit easier for me, though, because they don't use the simplified versions of the Chinese characters that have been implemented in Mainland China. This means that the characters used resemble those used in Japan much more closely (and sometimes are even identical), which makes them familiar to my eyes.
Timothy Jewell, Director of Information Resources, Collections, and Scholarly Communication at the UW Libraries, and his colleague Diane Grover, Electronic Resources Coordinator, gave us a crash course in the licensing of electronic resources. Their practical, information-packed lecture was enhanced by the accompanying course materials, a to-the-point chapter called "Negotiating a License Agreement," from Rick Anderson's 2004 book Buying and Contracting for Resources and Services AND a sample license (with the names blacked out to protect the guilty, of course). Our creative homework assignment was to locate "terms of death" in the license, which are conditions that are absolutely unacceptable. to libraries. Even though we are not front-line licensing librarians ourselves, it is of course greatly beneficial for us to understand more about this complex process.

The afternoon session was also a very creative and practical one. Our colleague KT Yao, Chinese Studies Librarian at the U of Hawaii, had solicited presentations from three pairs of our colleagues about their experiences with vendor services. This is what we are always eager to hear more of, of course, the lessons learned by others who are ahead of us on paths we are considering or about to embark on. Although the vagaries of local integrated library systems combined with  libraries' organizational differences mean that no two of our experiences will be identical, there is always a tip or trick to be learned. KT had surveyed us in advance of the Institute and distributed a sheet showing which of us uses which ILS, a tool that will be invaluable for the further exchange of information and wisdom in the future.

The day was capped off by the demonstration of a book vendor's system that certainly dazzled me: not only can the librarian log on and select books, she can download free MARC acquisition records for the books as well as a spreadsheet with information about the selections. That alone is pretty cool, but in addition the librarian has administrative powers that allow her to give her faculty members a view of the system that allows them to recommend books to her for purchase. The librarian can then accept or reject the selections, and when she rejects them can note the reason, which the faculty member can see. For the selections she accepts, the faculty member can see updates of where the book is in the shipping and delivery process. Wow! I'll be wearing out my trial account when I get back to NYU, and I can't wait to have my faculty members try it out, too!

Two of Friday's sessions included discussion of the digitization of special collections. In the morning, Professor Xiao introduced us to the CALIS (China Academic Library Information System) rare book digital library (choose the guest login option to see beautiful images of ancient texts) and talked with us about the many complex issues surrounding digital preservation. Later, Ann Lally, Head of Digital Initiatives at UW, and Theo Gerontakos, Metadata Librarian, generously shared with us the real nitty-gritty of the best practices that underlie their institution's many digitized special collections. Happily, they are generous not only in terms of their exhibition of the online objects themselves, but also of the data dictionaries and other materials painstakingly created by their Metadata Implementation Group for every project they do. Hearing about the way the group is organized and does its work, which Ann and Theo explained step-by-step, was inspiring--I'm looking forward to sharing their materials and methods, as well as their accumulated wisdom, with my colleagues at NYU. In her second session, UW Information School Professor Allison Carlyle knowledgeably guided us through some online examples of experimentation with FRBR, including OCLC's FictionFinder and excerpts of a presentation by VTLS containing mock-ups of hypothetical FRBR MARC records.

The planners of this two-week program saved an energizing activity to wrap up our first week: a tour of the Suzzallo/Allen Library, in which our classes are held. Neither words nor photographs are adequate to describe the feeling of awe that strikes even as you stand in the high-ceilinged area just outside the third-floor reading room. I'll post a photo of part of the room itself, but the crowning delight of the vast space is a small enclosed area at one end containing the vast desk (and chair, complete with its weary leather cushion) of one of the state's illustrious former senators, Warren G. Magnuson. He donated it to the library on the condition that it be accessible to any student who wanted to sit at it and study. Our tour guide said that there is always someone fulfilling the senator's desire. Part of the Suzzallo Library is called the Allen Library. Our tour ended there, but not before we had a chance to learn about, and thus appreciate all the more, its permanent art installation, beautifully titled Raven Brings Light to This House of Stories.

I'm delighted to learn that another inistitute colleague is blogging. See http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/jingliu/
 

 

After four full days of listening to Chinese, I was able to follow along with Professor Xiao Long of Beijing University fairly closely yesterday. As she narrates each slide, she always says, point number one is. . .point number two is . . .These signposts are oh-so-helpful for the nonfluent. In addition to the slides, during the lecture, Professor Xiao switched to her university library's web site at various points to show us things, such as the digital library of rare books that they are developing with pop-up windows detailing the metadata, as well as  their lists of databases by subject, which resembles the ones we have on our NYU Libraries web site. She also demonstated the vey impressive CALIS platform that they use for federated searching. It is able to search both Chinese and Western-language databases, a capabilty that we are hoping ExLibris' MetaLib will introduce in the near future.

An hour was barely enough time for all four of our groups to make their presentations about strategies for collection development of electronic resources in our second session with Dr. Yuan Zhou of the University of Chicago. However, his keen, concise observations about each one maximized our use of the brief time. The highlight was the presentation/skit in which one person pretended to be a CD resource and the other an online resource: they engaged in a battle of witty one-upsmanship, trading lines that began with "I'm better than you because. . ."

Dr. Allyson Carlyle, associate professor at UW's own Information School, spoke to us for two hours about providing access to digital materials, which in another age would have been referred to simply as cataloging. Listing the acronyms of the topics covered--FRBR, FRAD, FRSAR, DCMI, RDA, IME ICC, etc--belies the fact that these are, in many ways, the most exciting and relevant topics of all! We can talk endlessly about  selecting, acquiring, and preserving electronic resources, but If we cannot provide ready access to them, there is no point!

We seem to be acclimated to the pace of the institute now and weren't as brain-tired as on previous days during the last hour of the day, which was occupied by Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee's lecture on library fundraising. Not being involved in this directly, I was not familiar with the science behind it, such as the rule of thirds and the lopsided ratio (the 80-20 rule, again!) and found it interesting.

I didn't participate in the evening's Q&A about copyright with Professor Chen. Alas, if people can't produce cartoon bubbles over their heads containing the characters of the text they are speaking, or speak at the speed of a 78 RPM record being played at 33 1/3 RPM, especially when the topic is law, I can't really get the gist. Yet.

Today's picture is of the gorgeous Suzzallo Library in which our classes take place. It is situated on "red square" (they really call it that because of the brickwork!)!