The second day of the conference was a different day for me as I had the opportunity to present my poster session with Meghan Eccelstone. I also got to learn about other new projects being undertaken by librarians across the country working in different contexts including designing information resources for people with HIV/AIDS, building resources for visible minority users and more. Though I am a bit biased as a poster session, I would certainly recommend this session to future attendees. You can learn a lot in a very short time and it is also a good way to find out about works in progress.

The first session I went to today was given by Hansel Cook, a librarian at St. Mary’s University which looked at “Libraries in wartime.” It reminded me very strongly of an article that I wrote earlier this year. I’m happy to see that others in the profession are looking at the difficult topic of how war affects libraries. The second session I went to was a rapid fire delivery of talks on “what’s cool at your library.” With nine presentations, there’s too much to report on. One specific idea that struck me as great was suggested by Nicole Eva, a librarian at the University of Lethbridge. The idea is to use computer screensavers to display library information (e.g. advertise reference services). They also regularly rotate and refresh these screensavers. It had never occurred me to me to that. There was also a memorable quote on service by presenters from McGill University: I do not care what you know until I know you care. My view is that most (if not all) in the profession care a great deal, but perhaps we need to emphasize that fact more. I rounded out the day by dinner with some friends and attending the annual general meeting of CASLIS.

I haven’t  blogged about the many vendors and exhibitors at CLA yet, so I’ll do some of that here. The Privacy Commission of Canada (they use Twitter, YouTube and have a blog – a rare thing in government, but something I hope to see more of) had a booth about their public education efforts.I think they do well in this effort. On the vendor front, I had a look at the new products offered by PlayAway which is all about delivering audio books on custom made players. In schools (and libraries to some degree), these are very popular in the United States to give students other means of accessing content. The company also puts best-sellers and fiction on the devices. The library model at play is that you have the device (physically, it is similar in size to an iPod), plug a standard AA battery into it and then ear phones and away you go. The recording cannot be modified by the end-user (which is apparently a plus for school libraries in the US…). I think there is much merit to providing audio for students. Finally, I also checked out the offerings by Adam Matthew Digital. I has a look at their Grand Tour research tool and was quite impressed with it. The content is stylishly presented, fully integrates social media sharing and combines original content (they commissioned a photographer to travel around Europe documenting sights for the product), original sources and more.

The day began very early for me as I attended the First Timer’s breakfast. This was a good chance to meet some people in the profession. One interesting trend I’ve noticed at CLA is that there are relatively few people from Ontario (or Toronto) present. That means I’ve met lots of people from Alberta, the Maritimes and other provinces that are largely (though not complete) unknown areas. Conferences are tiring experiences, but rewarding.

The keynote address was given by Professor Joseph Janes of the University of Washington. His talk was called, “Rethinking the Library,” and it was an engaging look at this vital institution. He also provided a short and memorable summary of the defining attributes that define a library (and make it different from other things): place, collections, support, interaction, and values. I wouldn’t elaborate on each idea, but I do find it better. Also memorable, if somewhat ominous was his remark (which I am paraphrasing), “Don’t waste a recession.” In light of the fact that print will now be of ever decreasing importance, he observed we must be better online than we are now. This leads to his two part conclusion: be where are our users are & remember that “search” can also be a quest for meaning.

For the rest of the day, I went to three sessions on widely differing topics: designing an online resource, intergenerational attitudes about work and a workshop on professional image. The workshop on professional image – given by Lynne Mackay – was a high energy session with nearly a hundred people in attendence. It focused mainly on clothing, but looked at in a very thoughtful way. There’s much to learn here ranging from learning the five “levels” of dress (formal, professional, business casual, sportswear, holiday wear) to matching colours. Given that librarians absolutely love to classify knowledge, this aspect appealed to many. The session on designing an online resource was given by Margaret Fulford, a librarian at the University of Toronto, inspired me. She designed the Canadian Women Fim Directors Database and led us through how it was planned and executed. It inspired me to see that learning tools like PHP and mySQL are possible. The session that explored intergenerational views on the profession is difficult to summarize. It covered everything from how we define success, work/life balance to having conversations on career matters.

On a rainy Friday morning, I strolled up the McGill University campus to participate in the Emerging Technologies Interest Group (ETIG) “Library Camp” event. We covered many of the topics that are current and of interest to Internet aware librarians: making the best use of social networking, blogging, the right attitude to innovation and the digital divide. It was informative and fun to meet some people that I’ve only known through blogs and Twitter thus far. I took more detailed notes in my Moleskine, but that shall have to do for today’s entry. Tomorrow promises to me an early and long day.

As I write this, it is a dark and stormy night with plenty of rain coming down. There were some major delays in getting here but I am here and the hotel’s Internet connection is going smoothly. I’m excited to begin the conference with a “library camp” event being organized by the Emerging Technologies Interest Group (ETIG 2009). The Library camp focused on emerging technology looks very promising and it strikes me as a great way to launch my own conference experience. I am hoping to blog the conference each day as it unfolds. I say “hope” here since my computer has been acting badly recently (possible hard drive failure). If all else fails, I take notes in my Moleskine and eventually transform those into a post. I may even have some photos to share as we proceed.

Reading outside the field is both fun and very informative. As the title of this blog implies, I’m curious. I like to find out about new things, learn new skills and the like. To that end, I make a habit to read outside the library/information field on a regular basis. You might think that reading a book on statistical analysis would be boring, but Super Crunchers is certainly not. Statistics is certainly not my strong suit, but this book has me inspired to work more on learning these skills. My first encounter with the book’s idea was a podcast at EconTalk when the author, Ian Ayres, was interviewed in 2007. The author, Ian Ayres, is both a lawyer and an economist who is the William K. Townsend Professor at Yale Law School and a Professor at Yale’s School of Management. The book explores how statistical techniques such as regressions and randomization. The math per se is only half the story though. The other half of the story is cheap, powerful computing with huge amounts of data (e.g. “Acxiom, which has been called ‘one of the biggest companies you’ve never heard of,’ manages twenty billion customer records (more than 850 terabytes of raw data – enough to fill a 2,000 mile tower of one billion diskettes.” – 146). There are almost no equations or math anywhere in the book which might explain how it reached best seller status.

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At long last, the iSchool Podcast has released the final episode of its inaugural year, 2008-2009. The final podcast will be of interest to scholars of book history and writing in particular as the noted Professor Martha Driver discusses, “Letter Perfect: A Brief History of Letter Forms and Their Uses in the Period of Transition from Manuscript to Print.” Working on the this volunteer project has been a great education and experience. I continue to find podcasts very useful and would like to make more of them in some future context.

In order to be really good as a librarian, everything counts towards your work, every play you go see, every concert you hear, every trip you take, everything you read, everything you know. I don’t know of another occupation like that. The more you know, the better you’re going to be. – Allen Smith, PhD

Via In Forming Thoughts (which got it from the Bilingual Librarian).

While in-depth considerations of serious and academic new applications is welcome and likely, so is random, joyous play with applications that appear to have no intention of improving the minds of anyone. (Most of the best applications we have we never meant to be anything but fun.) Play is a crucial part of learning, and if we jettison things to[o] fast because they aren’t “serious” enough, we risk avoiding any innovation or valuable learning altogether. Fun things have more potential for social change than boring things. Fun things tap into parts of ourselves that we tend not to invoke when we put on our serious learning faces; those things might be the key to our ability to learn deeply.

- The Tech Ink Manifesto

An interesting manifesto posted over at the Tech Ink group blog. One of the boundaries that is beginning to become fuzzy these days is that between work and play. Play in the sense used above reminds me about being curious and being willing to experiment. These qualities keep one inspired to keep learning. As I wind down my academic studies (still finishing that thesis…), I do want to keep learning and it is nice to think of that activity as play.

Studying history is one of my great passions and I always find it interesting to learn more history. It seems like every year finds me learning more about different parts of history. Recently, I’ve been reading about the history of finance (The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson), but my other interests include the history of communications, the nineteenth century and other topics. I wasn’t always this way though – I once found history boring way back in elementary school. That started to change with my first visit to the United Kingdom in the early 1990s. In addition to getting to see castles, the Tower of London, Bath, Stonehenge and much more, I read the Horrible Histories series. Writen by Terry Derry and illustrated by Martin Brown, the series promises “history with the nasty bits left in.” What counts as nasty bits? Everything from the Black Death, wars, revolutions, feuding royal families and much more! The first books focused on British history, but it is has since branched out to cover the Romans, Aztecs, the USA and many other places. In addition to the many good books, there is also a BBC TV adaptation and a musical. These short books introduce young readers to history including politics, ordinary life and everything else. The “Horrible Histories” books – and that delightful first visit to Europe – are part of the reason that I am so interested in history.

Why am I blogging about this? As the video embedded below will show – “The Four Georges” – video is a communicaitons tool that educators and librarians have to master better. The “Horrible Histories” approach sometimes uses old fashioned approaches to history, such as a heavy emphasis on royal history and a bias toward the violent and messy parts of history. Then again, documentaries sometimes have a similar bias. History is complex and fascinating, but one has to start somewhere and these books (and later adaptations) may be a good place to start. That just means we use video with other things like primary documents, journal articles, maps and other tools. Today’s students have a variety of learning styles and text is not going to be the only tool we can use. Librarians may want to think about including videos in information literacy more heavily. That will involve thinking through where videos can be useful and what their limits are. I think a Horrible Histories clip could be a good way to begin a history class, for example. Videos like this could also be an interesting way of asking questions about how contemporary Britons thinks about its past.

There are quite a few clips from the TV program Horrible Histories on YouTube, one of the first examples below: “Born 2 Rule” by the Four Georges. Enjoy! I’m going to be humming this for a while.

The Horrible Histories clip on Roman Emperor Caligula is also well worth seeing.

They don’t teach that in B school — at least not yet. In fact, Rob Carter, chief information officer at FedEx, thinks the best training for anyone who wants to succeed in 10 years is the online game World of Warcraft. Carter says WoW, as its 10 million devotees worldwide call it, offers a peek into the workplace of the future. Each team faces a fast-paced, complicated series of obstacles called quests, and each player, via his online avatar, must contribute to resolving them or else lose his place on the team. The player who contributes most gets to lead the team — until someone else contributes more. The game, which many Gen Yers learned as teens, is intensely collaborative, constantly demanding and often surprising. “It takes exactly the same skill set people will need more of in the future to collaborate on work projects,” says Carter. “The kids are already doing it.”

- TIME Magazine on The Future of Work (May 2009) Article that the quote is from: When Gen X Runs The Show

In reading through TIME Magazine’s article above, I found this quote on gaming quite interesting. It came up suddenly as generational change in management was discussed. This article argues that in about 10 years, “Generation X” (born mid 1960s to late 1970s) will be in management roles and that they will be do better at, “… collaborative decision-making that might involve team members scattered around the world..” The author of the article then quotes the Chief Information Officer of FedEx as saying that World of Warcraft, with about ten million users around the world, offers good preparation. This is interesting speculation and worthy of more investigation.

Many in the profession have been looking seriously at gaming for several years now. In my own courses and professional association work, I’ve used services such as Second Life and others as well. In some ways, “game” is misleading as a term – something like virtual immersive environment might work better as a broad term. Some readers may not have heard about the video games in library trend, so I would point you to this ALA blog dedicated to the topic, a 2007 blog post at the Association of College and Research Libraries blog, and the Library of Congress started a program in 2007 to preserve video games as an aspect of American culture. There is also the Serious Games Canada project which explores, “.. the use of Computer/Video games for non-entertainment purposes..”Also on the preservation front, there is also the project that Professor Megan Winget is understaking at the University of Texas-Austin iSchool: “{re}Create: Studying the Creation Processes of the Video Game Industry.”

There appear to be at least two different trends in the way that information professionals have approached gaming. The older approach is to simply view it as another form of recreation that can be offered to users which is commonly used in public libraries. In addition to that, some libraries are looking into how games (or virtual environments like Second Life) can be used to arrange meetings, create stimulating experiences and so forth. There is quite a lot of debate in the profession about this and it is worthwhile to have that debate.

Here’s what I wonder about though. It is worth experimenting with some of these games to see what they are like and if there is some use for them. The recreation question is a really interesting one to me. Who said that libraries have to focus on specific types of media? If public libraries have feature films on DVD, board games (in some places), then why not video games? It might be decided that it is not a good idea in a given place, but it is worth discussing. The suggestion that games can develop new social skills – such as collaboration – strikes me as speculative right now. That said, I see it as professional duty to stay informed and engaged with how people experience culture, entertainment and information so we need to keep an eye on this.