Late last fall I submitted an application to speak at the Utah Library Association Conference in St. George with Annie, Regina, and Cheryl. Luckily our proposal was accepted.
Presentation Abstract:
This is a four part presentation on the evaluation, selection and re-evaluation of electronic databases. The first part on evaluation will include demonstrations of free online assessment tools, review sources, rubrics, and ideas for comparing apples to apples instead of tangerines and kumquats. The second section will have tips for decoding the sales pitch into real decision making information. The third part includes advice on dealing with vendors and negotiating the terms of license agreements. Our costly, recent difficulties with existing licensing agreements will be aired. Lastly, the re-evaluation of databases through statistics tracking and assessment will be discussed.
In our application for presentation we had to fill out learning objectives and active learning techniques we would be using during our presentation.
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Sessions on Day 1
First was the Keynote by ALA President Camila Alire. She spoke about advocacy and how all staff, particularly the front line public services staff are advocates. For more information on her speech see: http://www.camilaalire.com/
Next I attended a session on Ebooks from a Business Perspective. BYU surveyed its Business faculty regarding eBooks and presented the results. Some interesting bits:
23% of Business faculty haven't checked out a physical book in the past year.
1 in 10 had never checked out a physical book.
Some business sources - economics are most heavily used
3 of 12 of the most used ejournals for the campus are business ejournals
Libguides stats 182,884 visits for all of them. (18%) 25,783 were for business & economics.
They are using Gale Virtual Reference platform along with Safari, Ebrary and NetLibrary.
I followed up that session with one on 19th Century Periodicals
They shared many URLS:
Victorian Short Fiction Project
http://vsfp.ctlbyu.org/
Wellesley Index (pay or subscription site)
http://wellesley.chadwyck.com/marketing/index.jsp
Waterloo Directory (pay or subscription site)
http://www.victorianperiodicals.com/series2/default.asp
Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/index.php
Victorian Research Web
http://victorianresearch.org/
Research Society for Victorian Periodicals
http://www.rs4vp.org/
RSAP: Research Society for American Periodicals
http://home.earthlink.net/~ellengarvey/index1.html
Lastly I attended a Futures presentation.
Unfortunately the presenter for the Science Fiction part was ill and unable to attend. What we got was a definition of Postmodernism and how it applies perceptually to libraries and librarians.
* suspicion of reference librarians
* class is disingenuous
* hard to use systems seem like control
* library = information hoarder
* librarians are not finished mourning the library
Day 2
Our session, unlike the others I attended really did incorporate active learning techniques. I used the Cephalonian method, Annie used learning teams, and Regina used a hands on exercise. Cheryl began the session with a lecture that had lots of useful and helpful URLS which kept the note takers busy. All in all we did very well, especially for a two hour last session of the conference time slot. Our attendees stayed and a few others came in. Only one left and she told us why during the break.
For more photos see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jsemenza/sets/72157625367830621/
(Written Dec 2010)
