Meeting and Presentation Notes from ALA 2007
So I've been back from D.C. for two weeks now, and I'm finally getting around to posting notes from some of the meetings and presentations I attended. These are my personal notes; many of the events at ALA are posted in podcast or some other form at the various roundtable or division websites. Many of the Power Points are available as well.
1. Authority Control Meets Faceted Browse (ALCTS)
The presenters here talked about different ways faceted browsing could be layered on top of traditional library catalogs; for example, Endeca at NC State University's libraries, or Flamenco at Berkeley, which is an open-source faceted metadata search. When you search WorldCat, for example, there's that bar on the left that allows you to narrow results by different facets: format, language, location, etc. These facets could be adapted to whatever is useful at your particular library. One presenter talked about extracting terms from the literature of interest - which I think would be an interesting solution for a specialized library.
Charley Pennell from NCSU envisioned three different kinds of searches: the simple search (author, keyword, etc.), simply navigating by facets, and a combination of the two. He discussed the idea of ranking facets: author might be more important in a public library, for instance. He also talked about mining MARC records for some facets; one danger of removing single words and phrases from fields and subfields he pointed out was that context and relationships can be lost; for example, Canada - Relations - United States. Any three of these singly doesn't convey the relationship among them.
2. Ambient Findability: Librarians, Libraries, and the Internet of Things (ALCTS President's Program)
Ah, organizing the Internet. It seems to be a perennial topic. This program broke it down in a couple of ways. It was interesting to see non-librarians as presenters at this and several other programs.
One presenter talked about organizing one's own organizational website - about balancing user goals with organizational objectives. (You want people to find the library programs they want, for example, but you also want to promote certain ones.) Information is better found when there are multiple paths to the same information. His contention was that users should be able to find information without necessarily having to think about what category it might be in. This is sort of an anti-drill-down stance, and it touches on what I hear more and more: that while librarians organize information according to certain principles and categories, people should be able to find information without knowing or caring about the structure behind it.
The real idea of "ambient findability" - being able to find anything at anytime - was acknowledged across the board as being impossible.
3. Time Odyssey: Visions of Reference and User Services (RUSA President's Program)
I have to admit, I didn't have a whole lot of patience for this program. The conceit of the presentations was that it is the year 2017 - how have reference and user services changed? A lot of what was said didn't seem to me to have anything to do with reference, and I thought the whole exercise was a little bit odd. The presenters were:
Genevieve Bell, anthropologist. She posited that the current surge in library use will continue, and that people weary of feeling isolated will come to use the library as a community space. She also thought that, akin to other times when there were large class divides, people will begin amassing their own personal libraries, and that possibly librarians will hire themselves out to organize and provide reference for these private collections.
Lee Rainie, from the Pew Internet Trust. He had this vision of metadata in everything - chairs, books, doorknobs - without mentioning how this glut (even bigger than the current one) would be managed or organized.
Allen Renear, from the University of Illinois. He thinks that in ten years, researchers (especially students) won't be reading articles anymore; they'll just be "bouncing and flicking" across articles and information, using text mining to gather information from the amount that he thinks is surpassing the human capability to read, interpret, and synthesize. This is a frightening thought, and I'm not sure if it's true.
Wendy Schultz, who called herself a "professional futurist." I had to leave early, and I was glad, because she honestly didn't say anything - she just used a lot of buzzwords like "dynamic exchange" and "environmental scanning" without saying anything of substance. She also kept calling Genevieve "Gertrude," which was awfully embarrassing.