What Joe was doing while at the ALA Annual Conference 2007 in Washington, DC [Part 1]

Hi all!

For my first post on the new Maryland AskUsNow! staff blog I thought I'd give a day-by-day review of simply 'where I was' while attending the ALA Annual Conference 2007 that ended earlier this week. This is the kind of thing that I've always wanted to do during our AskUsNow! Liaison Meetings but knew that we'd never have enough time. I'd really like to see this AskUsNow! staff blog be a place for our AskUsNow! providers post after they've attended an interesting workshop, training, conference, meeting, etc. Hey, you could even blog an event while you're there in real time if there's wireless Internet available at the site! If you're participating in the current Maryland Libraries "23 things" project, this is a place for you to experiment as well.

My schedule at these kind of conferences is very much non-stop, and that's the way I really like it. I never even made it into the vendor area at this conference. What I'm hoping for is that some of you may discover some tidbit, such as an organization or an event, that you'd also want to be a part of in the future! So, here's where I was...


Thursday, 6/21/2007

I took the MARC train from Baltimore's Penn Station to Washington, D.C.'s Union Station. For $7 I think that's a great deal.

2:00 p.m.: Met with other RUSA RSS/MARS preconference planning committee members at the ALA office in the DC convention center to collate the handouts into folders for the preconference tomorrow.

7:00 p.m.: Dinner with RUSA RSS/MARS preconference planning committee and speakers at Ristorante Luigino. This was the first time that most of these people had met in person. The planning committee had been meeting via telephone conference and by using an online wiki since the fall.


Friday, 6/22/2007

8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.: RUSA RSS/MARS preconference: "Reinvented Reference 3: Emerging Technologies for Reference Services." As a planning committee member I got there a little early. The speakers were Michael Stephens (keynote and big-picture Library 2.0 stuff), David Ward (on Instant Messaging), David Free (on podcasting), David Lee King (on videocasting), and Karen Coombs (on blogging). I had the honor of introducing David Ward.

The speakers did a fantastic job (in my opinion, AND according to the program evaluations that I saw). The speakers were fun and engaging and every topic was presented with real examples that pretty much any library could model. Julie also set up this AUN staff blog for all of us during a program break. Besides myself and Julie, Betty from AACPL and Lynn from St. Mary's were also in attendance representing AskUsNow! libraries.

One of our committee members, Jami, also blogged the whole entire program here: http://librarianlikeme.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/reinvented-reference-iii-emerging-technologies-for-reference-services/

And another colleague, Carla, also blogged the program and several other VR-related events while at ALA: http://blogs.minitex.umn.edu/digref/2007/06/#001359 (you might need to scroll down to the June 22 entries)

Michael also posted some photos that he took (while speaking) on flickr at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelsphotos/603732636/in/photostream/
(That's me in the front, right. Yes, I wore a suit and was a bit overdressed - some unfortunately said I looked like a vendor. Remind me next time to go more casual to the preconference.)

One closing thought coming out of the preconference: When talking with David Ward, he said that he and others at the University of Illinois libraries were interested in developing a tool that would allow for cooperative IM. I'm VERY gung-ho on the idea of libraries working together to provide an IM service. If I get a chance, I may post a separate message just on this idea.

One more note regarding this preconference: There will be a Reinvented Reference 4 preconference next year at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, California on the same general topic (emerging/recently emerged technologies for library reference service). I'll be a carry over from the current committee to that one as well.

5:30 - 7:30 p.m.: MARS Happy Hour at the Gordon Biersch Brewing Company.

7:30 p.m.: Dinner in old town Alexandria, VA at Le Gaulois Cafe Restaurant with a friend and colleague who, until recent retirement, had coordinated a statewide virtual reference service and written extensively about it - to all our benefit. Besides dining, we were able to write up a proposal for a program description for Annual 2008. More on this later.


Saturday, 6/23/2007

8:00 a.m.: RUSA's Reference Services Section (RSS) Open House and All-Committee Meeting. I unfortunately got there a little late, as I was printing out copies in the ALA office over in the convention center of that program proposal that was just written last night. The RSS meeting was over at the Hotel Washington, near the White House - a good 10 block walk down New York Avenue. For the past four years I've been a member of the RSS Cooperative Reference Service Committee and my term concludes at the end of this conference. I'm also the co-chair, representing the Reference Services Section (RSS) of the joint RSS/MARS Virtual Reference Committee. The VR Committee was a new one started just 3 years ago and I've been co-chairing it since that time.

During this RSS All-Committee meeting was the meeting of the RSS Cooperative Reference Service Committee. The VR Committee will meet tomorrow.

10:30 a.m.: RSS Executive Committee Meeting #1. As a chair of an RSS Committee, I get the chance to also attend and participate in these meetings. There was an orientation for new chairs and some guidelines were approved to go forward.

1:30 p.m.: I attended an OCLC QuestionPoint sponsored program called "Best Practices in Cooperative Virtual Reference." Marie Radford and Lynn Connaway gave a great talk about developing shared expectations in cooperative VR, based on their long-term research project Seeking Synchronicity. Heather Muller from the Washington State Library talked about a visit she recently made to a local school for the blind where she tested QuestionPoint's new Chat 2, available at the beginning of June - which has been presented by QuestionPoint as a more accessible version of the chat, and a version that can be used with mobile devices. It does look promising. I can see some good things about it, but some limitations as well. We'll need to do some experimentation with it here in Maryland. The third speaker was Bill Pardue of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library in Illinois. He had some great tips for promoting the library's VR service on the library's web site. These including the idea of making it ubiquitous - on as many pages as possible and ideally in the site navigation. (This made me smile, thinking of John K.'s recommendation to the same effect at our June AskUsNow! Liaison Meeting). Bill also recommended getting the link into the catalog and into magazine/journal database search and results pages. Julie also already mentioned one of Bill's other recommendations, regarding putting a sign up at the door of the library to promote that the library is never really closed. This was a really good program and it's too bad it didn't get more of a turnout. There may have been only 30 or 40 people in a room that could have held at least 150. I think because it was organized by OCLC QuestionPoint that it might have made people leery of a vendor push, but it really didn't turn out that way at all.

4:00 p.m.: MARS Virtual Reference Discussion Group. Sam Stormont did a great job in his first turn at chairing this discussion group. I've been attending them since the Orlando ALA Annual conference in 2004. The RSS/MARS VR Committee has also helped to support this DG by acting as table facilitators. A few of our AskUsNow! providers were there in the room, including Margie from Calvert Library at the same table. The overall topic was on what you would fix if you had your way regarding your library's existing VR service. I sensed two leading themes come out of the discussions: 1. A great interest in providing an IM service to the library's customers (preferably 24 hours a day, possibly through a cooperative model); 2. Regarding co-browsing, that it either needs to be totally reinvented if it's going to be effective or done away with as an option if it can't be made to operate more dependably. I also had the chance to tell my table my old story about the glory days of cobrowsing circa 2001-2002 when it actually worked at least 90% of the time.

7:00 p.m.: Dinner at Levante's (near DuPont Circle) with a big group of 18 people, mostly people who coordinate large cooperative VR services. We've made it a habit to meet up for dinner at these kind of conferences to catch up and share/swap/steal ideas. What's really cool is that several of these people coordinate services that don't use QuestionPoint, so it's a chance to also hear about features of the Tutor.com and Docutek VR chat platforms (the main competitors to OCLC's QuestionPoint VR chat service) .

[To be continued in a separate post (Part 2), picking up with Sunday through Tuesday]

-Joe