Summary of Lightning Talks, Monday 2/1/10
Elizabeth Winter February 1st, 2010
Below is a summary of the discussion at today’s Lightning Talks. Please get in touch with the speakers below if you want to answer their question or to share information with them. Also, feel free to comment below. Thanks! -Elizabeth
Alexandra Angeletaki-NTNU (Norway):
NTNU librarians/instructors are doing a pilot project, using e-readers pre-loaded with the assigned texts for a course at the beginning of the semester.
How are others using e-readers? Comment here or email alexandra.angeletaki<at>ub.ntnu.no
Nafiz Zaman Shuva-University of Dhaka (Bangladesh):
Library staff/librarians in universities in Bangladesh are appointed/promoted based on political experience, not on MLIS training, so it is difficult to educate users on use of e-resources. Use is low due to low funding, even if universities are part of a consortium.
Do you have ideas for places to for assistance for developing countries to get the training they need for librarians on e-resource concepts and topics? How about for international consortia to join? Comment here or email nafiz_z<at>hotmail.com
Charlie Bennett-Georgia Tech:
Who has had a good (or bad?) experience with collaboration between departments on different “sides” of the library (public services and technical services)? Some comments from others were:
- Good: e-resources/collection development group with acquisitions and reference folks who make decisions together
- Good: public services librarian working with usage statistics because she is new/young/”fresh” and has an engineering background
- Good: librarian work with both access/activation (back-end) and helping users @ a public services desk (This is a great idea–make sure you try to work the ref desk if you are an ER librarian!)
- Bad: try to ask the other “side” what decisions they’ve made and why, informally (this alone does not work very well).
Join Charlie tomorrow for a Round Table in Amphitheater 204 for more discussion/brainstorming about this. Comment here or email charlie.bennett<at>library.gatech.edu
Todd Carpenter-NISO:
Lots of people are talking about NISO at the conference. How can we raise standards implementation on the priority list of vendors/publishers/librarians? Todd suggested a few things:
- Educate yourselves on NISO and other standards bodies
- Insist on standards adherence in contracts. Talk w/vendors and publishers about standards adoptions (they want to hear that this is important to customers). Attend focus groups and user meetings.
- Participate in open source development that can adhere to standards.
- See who (vendors/pubs) is and isn’t working with standards working groups and ask them why not. Encourage them to participate.
- Get involved. Participate in the standards process.
Comment here or email tcarpenter<at>niso.org
Awa Zhu-University of Wisconsin:
Looking for participants for a survey/interview for her dissertation. The topic is: “Who or what decides who can access what information under what conditions?” If you are a librarian with 3 or more years of experience who can participate in a 30-minute interview, please email xzhu2<at>wisc.edu
David Bigwood-The Lunar and Planetary Institute:
Are there any Texas libraries who aren’t members of TexShare? More libraries can now join since the legislature is no longer in charge of membership. Email bigwood<at>lpi.usra.edu
Sally Krash-Southwest Research Institute:
What are people spending for their e-resources? She’s not asking about specific resources, but about budgets. She particularly wants to talk to other special libraries so that she can take some pressure off of their materials budget by showing comparable institutions’ e-resource budgets. Email sally.krash<at>swri.org
