Sunday, June 9

Loyalty and Retention – Building leaders for your unit’s future

• The person who interacts with sponsors must approach their duties as an opportunity to create and maintain relationships
• When seeking sponsors for an event – show up front what your sponsors will get for helping and at what levels they can participate
• Go beyond the basics for sponsorship and show what extras (if any your unit can provide)
• Investigate non-traditional opportunities – sometimes local businesses will be happy to sponsor small events
• Create incentive for members to attend multiple events et. SLA Maryland created a “CRAB Points” system where you received a specific number of points for attending each event and at the annual holiday party a reimbursement of membership dues was provided to the winner.
• SLA Loyalty project has created a blog that can be mined for sponsorship, membership and other toolkits and ideas: http://loyalty.sla.org/
• Be aware of what SLA offers for divisions – webinar software, fundraising advice, etc.
• Above all know your audience and be prepared to keep track of how different people like to be contacted and how to reach them as well as their skills and what they can offer you.

Implementing Open Source

Slides are available here: http://www.web2learning.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/opensource-sla2013.pdf

• Open access not the same thing as open source
• Open source does not necessarily mean it’s free
• Many companies exist to provide open source ILS support
• Open source can be run, distributed, studied, modified for any purpose
• Usually developed in a collaborative matter
• The same logic behind the power of peer review can be applied to open source products
• Peer review – or many eyes on a single project is what prevents a project from too much mission drift (“What’s to stop an ILS from turning into a video game?”
• Community is crucial to the growth of open source projects
• Critique comes from contributions
• Contributing goes beyond writing code you can:

1. Write documentation
2. Debug
3. Educate others

• The mindset to bring to open source projects is once finished hand it off and say “here, try to break it” rather than “here, it’s done”
• Open source software is so popular because

1. Peer review
2. Freedom to innovate
3. Not locked into a vendor
4. Information should be freely shared

• Support is available for open source programs – nearly 50 companies offer support for different ILS and other programs
• If you do not know how to code you can use local support, freelance developers or local students for assistance
• Before picking a program make sure your IT can handle the different systems management and coding knowledge
• If you want to learn to code, pick the project you’re most interested in then learn that language
• Two popular open source ILSs are Koha & Evergreen
• If you are interested in using one or the other you can look up a library in Lib-Web-Cats, see who’s using the software and contact people there to see if they like it
• Know your local support and what they can use (for example Koha needs Linux server with Perl installed)
• Recommended reading for more on open source are (books and websites combined):

1. The Cathedral & The Bazar by Eric Raymond – Compares open source and proprietary software
2. Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business  by Jeff Howe –The best person to do a job is the person who most wants to do the job
3. Embracing Insanity by Russell Pavlicek
4. FOSS4LIB is a website of free/open source software for libraries
5. Lib-Web-Cats is a directory of libraries throughout the world and see what their ILS is, and details about their collect (For example Langson is here)
6. Perceptions 2012: An international survey of library automation by Marshall Breeding
7. VuFind enable users to search and browse through all of your library’s resources
8. Blacklight discovery interface creation
9. Omeka used to create online displays
10. DSpace used for creating a repository
11. PiWik open source alternative for Google Analytics
12. LimeSurvey alternative to Survey Monkey

Monday, June 10

Next Generation Sci-Tech Librarians: Helping Institutions and Researchers Increase Their Impact

There were three presenters and their slides are available here, here, and here.

Beyond the Shelves; E Brown

• Physical spaces are shrinking in favor of e-content, digital archives, and research data sets
• It’s hard to show value added with internal numbers and traditional statistics
• Library value encompass everything from library journal indexes, research analytical tools and informal scholarship
• When looking for value added information you can look at either: personal data (individual level) or collective data (institutional level)

There are many ways to measure output:

• Indexing/Abstracting databases such as SciFinder and Web of Science include citation sorts and H Indexes
• Journal Citation reports show journal performance, not necessarily something that would be useful for faculty
• Scilmago can track journal productivity/output

Research Analytical Tools

• SciVal Spotlight:
  • higher priority research data to preserve
  • interdisciplinary strengths and relationships
  • can see the rank of the authors
  • Academic Analysis
    • 32 sectors of analysis
      • Book
      • Article authorships
      • Citations
      • Awards
      • Grant funding
      • Microsoft Academic Search (free)
        • A way to show impact of library collections
        • Reputation management is important
        • Need to collect different types of data to answer different questions
•  You can use any of the analytical tools to compare collections with the competencies and areas of study seen in your results
• If you have higher output performers you might need to move some collections resources to a different area to accommodate the usage
• Can create peer analysis
• Once you’ve obtained your data you can create customized reports, identify new data that may be useful and develop further analysis

Assessing and Increasing the Impact of Research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology;  Susan Makar

• NIST produces ~12000 articles per year from 3,000 researchers
• They produce data analysis and research materials
• Assessing the impact and impact studies for labs for institution to Assess is important
• Quantifying the impact of a report, analyzing division output, etc. is something the library may be called to do at any time
• To determine the impact of a report they looked through different journals to determine which ones were top tier in their field
• The impact studies could then be used to help researchers determine potential collaborators for future research endeavors
• Help show researchers where to publish or where conference venues might be available
• NIST has been contributing to Wikipedia citations to increase impact
• Museum exhibits have been added as an extension of publication venues
• Increasing impact of digital archives is being explored
• Conducting market analysis for future research direction can be viewed through the lens of these reports
•  Interest areas can be used to seek out potential speakers for conferences

Altmetrics and Revolutions; J. Priem

• Communication is the soul of science and librarians act as a conduit for communication
• The online revolution is not over just because journals are online – online journals are the same product with faster horse, not a new product
• New class of web native to science is emerging
• Dryad and Figshare are two ways to easily put data sets online so others can try to replicate or analyze your results
• Web-native science is about making public rather than merely publishing
• With the amount of information available, our understanding of citation has to change – many useful journals are not cited because their users are not publishing
• Altmetrics measures the impact across many types of use and formats, think of it as an impact footprint
• Impact story is used to track your impact and movement on the web – it looks at different types of impact than the traditional citation
• Eg. The top number of tweets an article gets in a week correlates to the number of citations it will get in about two years
• New research is going to have to find ways to reward broader impacts and web contributions
• There is no way to curate the internet, instead data mining is going to be the best way to access information

Storytelling across multiple platforms

Three presenters: T. Baker (Invisible Children), T. Malory (U-T San Diego), and S. White (Inside Climate News)

Invisible children:

• Focus on making films
• Investment in media needs to be on the level with other competitors for your users attention if you want to be seen
• Commit to good storytelling and it will yield hard front-line results
• Speak simply and focus on an individual story
• Take claim of your own narrative so someone else doesn’t do it for you

UT-San Diego:

• Each new innovation starts with trying to jam the existing information on the new media in the same format
• The value of the experience is not in the content – it is in the sharing
• Let how people want to consume their information influence your format
• Take time to get accustomed to any new formats
• Think about different paths through content

Inside Climate News:

• Don’t shy away from multipart narrative – know the audience and how to present the information
• They experimented with Kindle Singles as a way to distribute their longer story

 

Tuesday, June 11

I presented in the morning at a Speed Geek forum – you can see some of the other presentation descriptions here but I’m not sure when everyone’s slides will be up.  Mine are here.

“How can I be a leader when I ___________________________”

it was very interactive: audience members ask panel members about questions they have about leadership and then the three panelists respond in turn.  I have a few pages of notes but no good format for typing them up so I tried arranging it in the form of question and answer

Q: Are leadership, management and supervision synonyms or how would you differentiate them?

• They are very similar but they are not exactly the same
• Leaders should have a vision for the future and how to get there
• You can be a leader without having a leadership position
• Leadership qualities should be apparent at all levels
• Some people have a bent for noticing what needs to be done and they jump in to do it
• Inspiration can be used to lead from behind/beside and gives others the faith and confidence to do what they can

Q: How can I be a leader when I need to keep a better work/life balance? How can I lead my team when I’m not there?

• Reward  your team for initiative
• “what gets rewarded gets repeated”
• Create pre-work before you leave – what boundaries are there, who should work on what
• It comes down to communication and collaboration with others
• If your team feels abandoned offer to be in touch, know your worker’s preferences and follow through?

Q: How can I lead when my supervisor does not understand my role and what I do?

• People often report to people who do not know what it is you do
• If a boss is willing to learn – converse fact to face and show what you can do
• Try to find an ally among other higher ups for support
• Talk about your impact (direct and indirect) on important projects
• Propose a project or a way to help existing teams
• Know what they want and meet them where they are
• Create formal and informal social conversations
• Create a service that you can add to the organization or department
• Make a friend with their administrators to find out some of their preferences
• Lead with results – show what you’ve done or the actions you’ve taken to help the team

Q: How do I deal with an assistant who works differently than I?

• Create a manual of clear directions and ask for her input on it
• Create a sense of continuity and trust
• Have her make something to offer others for future use
• If you can figure out what makes someone proud, you can help them that way
• Ask how they want to be approached and work with them to try to honor their preferences

Q: What do I do if my bosses don’t support professional development?

• Do it on the evenings, weekends, breaks and honor their choice
• Use vacation/personal time
• Offer solutions first, share results and interesting things you’ve learned

Q: How can you lead if you do not have a leadership role?

• Share what you’ve learned
• Get to know people
• Create short reports about trends relevant to your department and share them
• Build relationships with others
• Meet with people in social/casual settings so you can get a feel of how/when to share important information later
• Go where people are and associate with leaders in the institution
• Never offer suggestions first, start with projects and say what you can do to help

In addition to the notes and slides here, I also wrote a brief overview for INALJ that’s more job-hunter / first time conference goer oriented here.  If you have any questions or comments please feel free to email me!