Please join the ALCTS Creative Ideas in Technical Services Interest Group ALA Annual, an open forum for discussion of all things technical services! Everyone is welcome to participate in any of the 9 exciting roundtable discussions being held on Saturday, June 23rd, from 4-5 pm in Room 398 of the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. Add the session to your conference scheduler: https://www.eventscribe.com/2018/ALA-Annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=380451
We are proud to present the following discussion topics for our session at ALA Annual 2018:
Millennial Leadership Shaping the Future of Technical Services
Presenters: Elyssa M. Gould, University of Tennessee & Erin E. Boyd, Irving Public Library, erineboyd@gmail.com
Retirements, transitions, and promotions are affecting technical services just as much as they are affecting libraries at large. As a result, formal leadership opportunities are now being filled by millennials. While every leader handles the leadership role and its challenges in different ways, several characteristics of millennials make for unique generational challenges: the desire to do meaningful work; obsession with staying connected; and need for instant gratification. This roundtable discussion will explore how millennials can use their unique strengths through leadership opportunities, as well as managing individuals from all generations, including other millennials.
Sample questions include: Millennials are often stereotyped as wanting to do important, meaningful work. How can a millennial leader translate this desire to the priorities of other generations? How can a millennial leader learn how to effectively communicate in a clear, non-social media way? Leaders often have to "manage up" as well as "manage down." How can a millennial leader be successful at this?
Linked Data Implementation: How Can the Rest of Us Get Started?
Presenter: Jodene Pappas, Stephen F. Austin State University
If we had no limitations and could start now, what might we do to get started? Take a metadata class? Find out what the competencies are? Network and engage with a partner to collaborate? From another department? Another school? Another library type? What else? We will be discussing the following questions: 1. The concept of Linked Data has been around since about 2006, yet it has not proliferated, why do you think that is? 2. Should all libraries necessarily transform their data to Linked Data? Why or why not? 3. Many larger libraries use Linked Data. What can we learn from libraries who have already implemented Linked Data?
Technical Services Staff Continuing Education with No Budget
Presenter: Liza Hickey, Peoria Public Library
A discussion on the options and creative ideas for offering technical services staff continuing education opportunities when there is no budget. Potential questions include: 1) Keeping staff up to date and engaged is difficult enough without letting continuing education fall by the wayside due to budget cuts. How does your library deal with these challenges? 2) What are some free online resources for webinars and/or live online training that you have used? 3) What other creative ways do you keep your staff up to date and engaged in their work?
Managing Projects, Managing Change
Presenter: Jennifer Maddox Abbott, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
As libraries continue to rapidly evolve, technical services units are finding ways to reinvent themselves, tackling new tasks, developing workflows, and shifting responsibilities. This is an opportunity to discuss the benefits of framing work as a project, as well as sharing successes and lessons learned through a variety of technical services projects, such as cataloging backlogs, collection shifts or moves, weeding, reclassification, or digitization.
Potential questions will include: What projects have your technical services departments taken on? What made them successful? What problems or surprises did you encounter? Now that a project is complete (or underway), what do you wish you had known before it began? What work does your library or department do that you would like to see framed as a project that isn't currently? What steps could be taken to make that happen?
You Can't Touch These : Ebook and Streaming Media Acquisitions and Cataloging Workflows
Presenter: Mary Konkel, College of DuPage
There are a myriad of acquisition models for acquiring these non-tangible e-resources-- from firm order and packages to PDAs. Once you have purchased, what's the best model for your users to discover them? Come share your trials, tribulations, and successes.
Questions to be discussed include: 1) How is your library acquiring Ebooks? Streaming Video? (Talk about who's selecting, how they are ordered, and where you're vending.) 2) Okay, you've purchased and "received" them, how do you let your users know you have them? (Talk about vendor MARC records, vendor portals, discovery systems like OCLC Collection Manager) 3) Is your acquisitions and cataloging workflow changed or modified when purchasing eresources? Why and how?
Collaboration, Metadata, and Discovery
Presenter: Jeanette Norris, Brown University
We're increasingly moving towards integrating metadata from a variety of systems to improve navigation and discovery throughout the platforms (ex. institutional repositories, digital collections, catalogs, faculty profiles, journal article indexes, electronic databases) that are of interest to our users. This conversation will be focused on exploring strategies to improve those integrations, both based in metadata and in organizational collaboration. Questions to be discussed include: From a user interface perspective, what are the benefits and drawbacks to providing deeper integration of catalogs, licensed eresources, local digital collections and faculty profiles? What are the metadata barriers to providing meaningful integration of content in these systems? What are you doing (or would you like to do) to overcome those barriers? What are the organizational challenges to providing meaningful integration of the content in these systems? What are you doing (or would you like to do) to overcome those barriers?
Creating and Maintaining Documentation
Presenter: Stacie Traill, University of Minnesota
Documentation of local policies, workflows, and procedures is extremely important for technical services units. Accurate, up-to-date documentation facilitates staff training, acts as a record of institutional memory, encourages consistency, and aids data analysis efforts. But creating and maintaining local documentation is a huge task that is often not a high priority in day-to-day work. The goal of this discussion is to share successful strategies for creating and maintaining documentation and learn from each other how we might improve our own documentation practices. Sample questions: 1. How well do you feel your institution manages technical services documentation? What areas do you see for improvement? 2. Keeping documentation up-to-date is especially challenging in an era of library management systems that are constantly enhanced/upgraded and cataloging standards that evolve quickly. What strategies do you employ to keep local documentation "in sync" with frequent changes to systems and standards? 3. What technologies and/or tools do you use to manage local documentation?
Collection Services and Next Generation Integrated Library System Design
Presenter: Christine Dunleavy, University of South Florida St. Petersburg
All around, teams of administrators, cataloging, acquisitions, serials, systems, and public services providers of library services are considering to change, or are changing, or have recently changed from their current integrated library systems (ILS). Years are spent evaluating new systems, followed by more time migrating data and discovery configuration. Training and working in the system takes additional time. A lot of consideration is paid to maintaining the quality of integrating and migrating data based on workflows that are in place at the time of implementing new systems. Concurrently, a lot of new library initiatives that need new workflows and customized data entry points are introduced. New metadata models and vendors’ initiatives demand ILS flexibility for automation. How can libraries’ anticipated needs be served by current or future ILS design? Some questions to consider might be: How can librarians communicate to ILS vendors that we need automated systems that can be tailored and customized to fit special demands? How do technical services librarians manage the ever-increasing flow of data and adjust workflows to handle this? What APIs and third-party workarounds would be useful to you that you would like available in an ILS?
Foreign Language Cataloging: Challenges and Solutions
Presenter: Danijela Matkovic, Yale University
Libraries, which hold a wide range of foreign language materials in a variety of formats, rely on the language expertise of their cataloging staff to provide adequate bibliographic descriptions. The cataloging of foreign language materials presents a series of unique challenges as it requires not only linguistic skills, but also cultural knowledge and additional technical skills. The purpose of the proposed discussion topic is twofold: (1) to identify the various challenges that catalogers face in dealing with materials in foreign languages, in particular, with items in unfamiliar languages and non-Latin scripts; (2) to propose solutions through the exchange of ideas, useful tools, and workflow strategies. Potential questions are: What are the challenges in dealing with foreign language materials? What strategies and types of collaborative approaches to cataloging foreign language materials work best? How to establish cataloging workflows for materials in unfamiliar languages? How best to leverage language and reference tools for the cataloging of materials in non-Latin scripts?
Whitney Buccicone, Chair
bucciw@uw.edu
Ryan Mendenhall, Vice-Chair
trm2151@columbia.edu