librarianship =

The conversation between Paul Holdengraber, Director, Public Programs, New York Public Library and David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States (AOTUS), was a great way for this government information librarian to start out her conference Tuesday. Below are my notes for your reading fun.

• AOTUS – archivist of the united states
• David is the highest ranking librarian in the admin (“only librarian in the admin”)
• He has 2 missions:
  • national declassification center: 400 million pages need be declassified; end of December 2009; president issued executive order on declassification; docs go back to WWII; intent is open up records/declassify; only justification for classification is national security; declassification process need to be streamlined; how do? ways to use tech to do that
  • open government: all agencies; transparency, collaboration, cooperation; agencies create plans themselves (build from bottom up);
    2009 president issued executive order on open gov
• He has a blog as part of initiative; goal to create community around archives records and how used; create citizen archivists as they can help think through how process and develop collections
• “can’t have open government if not have good records”
• NARA has to ingest records after been created; but created on various platforms with various standards
• About his mission: In NYC libraries are integral to immigrant communities especially younger communities because provide internet access; his goal was to open up archives in ways not been opened before; redesigning website esp for k-12 community; getting kids excited about records is way to teach American history as well as citizenship
• trying to encourage staff to give him a chance to change things; do so by engaging with staff
• gave talk at Duke address called “losing our memory” – comment that “everything is saved; nothing is preserved”
• EMPA – Electronic Message Preservation Act – introduced in Congress recently as first attempt to deal with e-mail as records
• what is his greatest burden/challenge? e-records future is biggest/messiest thing
• greatest joy? getting to know staff and getting to know collection
• what recommendation make to librarians at CIL? push yer supervisors/ get opportunities to get involved/get ideas out/ “folks at top need to be pushed”
• only next job is Vatican

CIL2010, one of my fave conferences, is off to a great start. I’ve seen two great sessions and had a wonderful dinner with some old friends. Today will be exciting: the UNCG ladies have a session at 4pm (unfortunately we are up against Joe Murphy and Marshall Breeding, but you should come hear our story!!) and the awesome speaker’s reception is tonight.

We got into town after lunch, so here are my rough notes for the two sessions I could attend.

Information Literacy: Life Cycle & Economic Benefits
Derik A Badman, Development and Support, Springshare, Inc.
Nathan Flinchum, Community Technology Center Librarian, Public Services, Roanoke Public Libraries

• look at the students through the lifecycle
• info lit through the library lifecycle
• neil gershenfeld = literacy is not just reading & writing; other kinds of literacy are becoming more and more important

how focus on multiple literacies??

• provide earlier education on basic computer skills so can build off that
• getting teens creation opps that aren’t grade/school based (get idea of creation and how creation works and connect to plagiarism and using other people’s creations)
• getting kids into new media/mashups then helps them deal with college research
• most academic work is a mash-up
• libraries are place for creating content esp to create community

What can libraries do?

• support creation — libraries provide “safe area” or sandbox
• support/curate local content — highlight the content communities create (bands, blog posts, etc to the academic libraries’ institutional repositories)
• we need to reach across the aisle to communicate more with our local libraries (even those publics!)
• “continuum of learning”

Session 2: LibGuides: Web Tools to Enhance Information Fluency?

Diane L. Schrecker, Curriculum Librarian, Ashland University Library

• created a libgd for new faculty orientation to supplement in person orientation (where library has a few minutes only)

Kristina DeVoe, English & Communications Librarian, Temple University
Derik A Badman, Development and Support, Springshare, Inc.

• assessing impact of libguides
• any measurable difference in student work?
• evaluating access to guide and not whether content good or designed well
• picked public speaking course with large # of sections and variety of students (freshmen, sophomores, etc)
• already had a research component — annotated bib with 10 sources (explain why chose, summary of source, and how find source)
• lib guide already existed and embedded in some sections
• 16 sessions – 8 shown guide and 8 not shown guide (they were given from library’s webpage all same info)
• using ACRL standards 2 & 4 — hitting intermediate students (evaluate info & organize info)
• did the evaluation of the annotated bibliographies blind
• not exposed students tended to perform better (out of 28 points they scored 18.45 points)
• those exposed to guide did better on types of sources used but both failed at evaluating authority/credibility of author — but they were not asked to comment on authority of author
• one discrepancy = confusion of what library subject guide is versus a library website
• those who were exposed had a choice to use guide or the librarian/ those not only had the option of getting help from the librarian
• what did they learn?: terminology needs to be dealt with; face 2 face matters; need to play more on skepticism so students can evaluate
• need to do some usability studies; try study in distance ed environment where librarian presence is removed
• Check out their libguide and more information @ http://guides.temple.edu/assessLibGuides

Great start! Thanks @cil2010!