Texas Library Association Conference - March 31 - April 3rd, 2009

Yup, it's that time of year again. At last check, with over 6000 members, TLA is the 2nd biggest library organization in the states. This year promises to be as jam packed as previous years. Aside from the full program of sessions, I thought I would highlight those events that I am intimately involved with this year.

Hot Topics Slam by Texas CE Providers -- This session was designed to provide attendees with 5 mini-training sessions from 5 different library training providers. The topics are as varied as the needs of library staff.

Continuing Education Providers Interest Group Business Meeting -- I am the outgoing chair and this is the last meeting on my watch. We will be looking at the State-wide training calendar and creating a Master Trainer series for Texas libraries to stave off the impending retirement gap.

TLA Gaming Event -- Every year the outgoing president of TLA is afforded a celebration. The President's Party is Wednesday night of conference and is an all-conference (no cost) party. This year we are saying thank you and goodbye to Melody Kelly, the assistant dean at UNT Libraries (and one of my bosses). Part of this event is a whole Gaming Banaza. TLA has partnered with Best Buy to provide console games, big screen tvs, and all the tech support associated with such an event. MY little part in this play is that I'm the Head Game Warden. I've been working to help organize the event most particularly the volunteer group that will be on hand to assist. We have about 28 volunteers at this moment and still recruiting more. In addition to video games we will be having a tabletop games area.

If you're anywhere near Houston the 1st week of April, I welcome you to come check out the conference. Even if you don't do the sessions, the exhibit hall ALWAYS promises to be worth the price of an exhibits only pass.

Electronic vs Print?

It's a question that probably won't go away for awhile, especially for books. However, for journals I had thought perhaps that question had been answered. At least it seemed so at my previous job. There we had a collection development policy that clearly stated that for journals the preferred format was electronic. While it was the preferred format, it was also acknowledged that electronic isn't necessarily the best format. In many disciplines, Art comes to mind, electronic isn't always the best format and in some cases isn't an option.

So, I start the new job. Budget is looking static for the coming year (something I'm used to) and one of the ideas to reduce spending is to drop the print journals. It seems that for most titles we had electronic and print subscriptions and in some cases (as in newspapers) also receive the microfilm. Up to three formats for some titles and two for most. By going electronic only (mircofilm was addressed separately), the savings weren't as great as I'd hoped, but they were fairly substantial. My big surprise, though, was the response of the reference librarians. The term cancellation was bandied about as if they were losing content rather than a format, which is how they viewed it. Several pointed out that they showed the journal in instruction sessions. The actual journal. While I applaud this, the question I wanted to ask was if they also showed them the online version. We're not open 24/7 and I think it's just as important for the student to know how to access the online version as it is to see the print version.

For me it was a no brainer, if you subscribe electronically drop the print. I'd just gone through this exercise before leaving my old job (converting many print subscriptions to online and a few that were print+online to online only). There was concern for how the faculty would take it. So, it was decided that we would send a letter to faculty advising them of what were doing because we couldn't "cancel" subscriptions (read: formats) without telling them. I gently reminded them that we weren't going to be losing any content. In the end one faculty member requested that one title be retained in print. The majority didn't even respond to the letter. I'm betting a good number of them didn't even know we were still getting some of those titles in print.

We only cancelled titles that we have electronic subscriptions to or that we could subscribe to electronically. I've always thought that one should think twice before cancelling a title held in an aggregator's database and it's because of a lesson learned the hard way. However, as it appears the budget will be tight this year, I'm beginning to wonder if maybe there aren't some titles held in an aggregators database that could be cancelled. There's always the risk the aggregator will drop the title (as happened with lesson learned the hard way) yet many aggregators are fairly stable with their content and some titles, while nice to have, are not core to our programs. Other titles in the same aggregators database or another database could probably fill the need if the title in question was dropped. It's something I'm still mulling over, but I wonder if that would be a better solution that not purchasing books, which I know some libraries have been forced to do due to budgets.

CECS 5210 - Project B and my awesome team

I have a large admission to make, which is probably not news to many people that know me well. I generally do not work well in groups. I get over committed or feel like someone is not pulling their weight or something else inevitably comes up.

Working with my team on this New Faculty Orientation Moodle Course project has been great. It has been a lesson in keeping to my role of project manager and not un-delegating tasks. I've tried to keep my input to feedback without it being prescriptive. I'm not quite sure how well I've accomplished this in anyone else's eyes, but I know comparitive to my previous patterns, it's gone pretty well.

Each of my team members have taken their piece and blown my expectations out of the water. The course module (thanks Deb) is spectular. It includes not only the necessary content but online "quizzes" and checklists/treasure hunts to engage the faculty in active learning. The original hope was that our final product would give a faculty memeber an opportunity to experience an online course as a STUDENT. This layout certainly fits the bill.

The Moodle Orientation guide and the Course Guide have allowed our "documentation specialist", Kirsten, to really shine. Even in the midst of health issues, she has pulled through and created some guides that will make the life of a new faculty member easier that first week here.

Our team of video producers, Danny and William, have pulled together a polished welcome video from the dean of the new college. I saw the YouTube version this weekend and was excited that it could soon replace an old video that was a little embarassing to have on the web. They have also been responsible for pulling together our links repository and our new organizational chart.

I still have the final report to submit once we've had some evaluation and user testing this and next week. We're almost done and it's been the best team experience I've ever participated in. Thanks team!!

I'm such a geek...

So, this morning, I got email from ILLiad telling me that some of my items had arrived through Inter-library Loan. I went to pick them up and had 3 things instead of 2. One of which was a fed-ex package and had me puzzled. Well, I opened it up and apparently I had submitted a request for someone's dissertation on Cognitive Learning Styles in relationship to web-based learning. I didn't remember that.

I'm sitting here starting to read through it and I'm getting all giddy. So much so that I had to hop on here and write about it. (which if you've been following this blog a while you know I'm the slacker in writing articles) See, I have this 1st draft of a paper due Sunday at midnight that I've not been very diligent about -- and this piece is PERFECT!! It's such a shame that plagerism is frowned on because the lit review of this thing would be something I could pass in. Ah well, there's the ethical side of me I guess.

However, I'm certainly going to use the references list to ensure that I have the quintessential works I need to be able to craft my own masterpiece... (ok, a 20 pg paper is not a masterpiece, but it is going to be a MIRACLE)

Customer service...

I've been thinking about this for awhile, but today I had one of the most convulted customer service experiences yet. I registered for a webinar online with all webinar times given in GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). You had to go to another site to figure out what your time was in relation to GMT and then do the math to figure out which session you should attend. Granted it's a click away, but I'm wondering how many people will sign up for the session listed at 1:00 and miss the time zone (for me, that is a 5:00 am session). As an aside, the company is not located in the US and I'm assuming these webinars for customers in different countires, so I get why they used GMT, but most people are not used to using GMT for a time zone designation.

This is coming on the heels of some challenges in contacting support from the various vendors I deal with. I'm now the keeper of our open URL system, our A-Z e-journal software, and I'm organizing the implementation of our ERM module and looking at that company's A-Z product (we're eventually hoping to consolidate and reduce the number of products we use). Not suprisingly, I've needed to contact customer support. It's not easy. You actually have to tell them to set you up in their system or someone from your library has to tell them, because not just anyone can open a case. Then, you log into their CRM and submit your question. One vendor handles everything through their CRM. So, I get an e-mail after I submit the case and I get an e-mail everytime they reply. But, in order to reply to them, I have to log into the CRM system, update the case, which generates another confirmation e-mail and starts the cycle all over again. So far, they've responded well, so no major complaints, just a lot of hoops to jump through.

I logged a case with another vendor requesting sample records. A week later I called to see what happened. They had it, but it had not yet been assigned. They didn't consider seven days in their queue with no feedback bad. I do. At least confirm that it's been recieved. Calling them of course routed me through a phone tree and ultimately to not one but two people who didn't know anything about the product I was calling about (which at least they acknowledged). I was also strongly admonished to open everything online and have a case number when calling. I'm still waiting to hear about the sample records request and that's a week after they bumped up the priority.

Trying to find a person knowledgeable about the product to ask questions of has proved to be daunting as well. I finally did. They suggested a time to talk which I confirmed. This was all by e-mail, which included a signature block with all my information, including phone number. The response I got to my confirmation was a request for my phone number. I've set my expectations very low for this particular chat.

I'm waiting on a response from another vendor, though the logged case was acknowledged by e-mail. And, I've sent two e-mails to another vendor's support e-mail requesting technical assistance over an almost two week period. I will try calling them today as I've received no response. I'm guessing I haven't logged my question correctly, but, darn it, I looked everywhere for technical support information and the e-mail was the best I could come up with.

I have done customer service of this nature and understand the need for and the use of CRM software. I also somewhat understand the need to designate those that can log cases. From my perspective over the past couple of weeks, though, this process seems to make support choppy and almost always involves a lag time. I need to allow at least a day for a response, which impacts my work.