Aaron the Librarian

Word is getting out about ALA Connect which will officially launch April 6th.  Connect is in soft-launch (or gamma) right now, so if you’ve been wanting to take a peek…

Connect is for ALA collaborative work and library-land professional networking. If you’re an ALA member, you can log in with your ALA website username & password - your Connect experience will be tailored to your ALA memberships, you’ll already be subscribed to the discussion pages for the units of which you are a member and you’ll be able to join other existing groups or create your own.  If you’re not an ALA member, you can  register on the site to participate, but you’ll need to be an ALA member to access the full functionality.

See my write-up for this award

In the course of perusing my social feeds on a day off (today), I ran across a link to an NPR story titled: “What’s New At The Library? Financial Advice“.  Having somehow missed any info on this program, most likely due to my use of the “Mark all read” feature in Bloglines after Midwinter, I asked the Council list and got loads of information.

In case you, like me, managed to miss mention of this program; here are some details and some links to more information.

ALA has partnered with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s (FINRA) Investor Education Foundation to produce “Smart Investing @ your library^®“.  The FINRA Investor Education Foundation (IEF) provides grants to “public libraries and library networks across the country, giving millions of library patrons and their families greater access to unbiased investing information and resources”.

“Smart Investing @ your library^®” is jointly administered by FINRA IEF and Reference and User Services Association (RUSA).

In 2008, 13 grants, totaling more than $853,000 were awarded to some great sounding programs in Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Massachusetts, Florida, California, Minnesota, Washington, Kansas, and Ohio.  

In 2009, 12 grants totaling almost $882,000 were awarded to more great sounding programs in Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, and California.

Grant recipients will use the funds to implement a variety of programs and create resources designed to increase patrons’ access to and understanding of financial information. The programs target a diverse group of patrons—among them youth, adults, seniors, families, immigrants and low-income individuals.  The libraries will use a variety of technologies and outreach strategies, including traditional classroom formats and one-on-one education. The grantees will partner with community organizations including schools, universities, community centers and local governments to expand the impact of the services and resources enabled by the grants. Library patrons will be empowered to make smart financial decisions for both long-term investing and day-to-day money matters.

Program details for Smart Investing @ your library^®

This sounds like a timely initiative, I’m glad someone in my Association made this happen & wish I’d heard of it sooner (so I could brag on their efforts sooner).  Yet another reason I didn’t know to explain why I am a proud ALA member.

Proposals Sought for Grassroots Programs at 2009 ALA Annual Conference: Do you have a great idea for an Annual Conference program but don’t belong to a committee or other group that can plan and produce a program? As part of ALA President Jim Rettig’s “Creating Connections” initiatives…  See: http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/governance/officers/grassroots/grassrootsproposal.cfm

People are invited/encouraged to submit program proposals for ~10 program slots with a Feb 2009 deadline for proposals (which is an insanely short planning period for ALA Annual programs, the ‘official’ deadline for programs is something like September the year before the Conference)

The kicker, to me, is people who are not already involved within ALA groups are specifically targeted this opportunity. 

My social feeds communities are already off & running with some ideas for presenting cool stuff… you & yours (& ours, if we’re already hooked up) have a great opportunity — grab it and shake it for all it’s worth1

I’m learning the local budgets at MPOW these days (as the guy wearing the Electronic Resources hat) and it is impressively squirrely. Without digging myself into a hole (since the library, university, state system, and state - let alone the country - are already impressively in the hole) of overly-transparent-ness: “Wow.”

Do you buy your electronic database subscriptions title by title?  Do some come in a “package?”  Do you get some via a consortium?  Do you know what your list price is for each database? Do you know how much you pay for each database “item?”  Which databases are “comes with” databases, which of these actually come free with your main subscription(s) and which have small surcharges attached?

How about your budget process? Do you get one lump sum budget with cost-centers? Do you get 2 or 3 (or more!) budgets with some things being bought wholly from one budget while others are bought with different amounts from multiple budgets?  Are we ready for one of those budgetary pots of money to disappear with the new Chancellor?  Are we ready for a possible 5% “give-back” to the State? *weep*

I was going to say “Actually it’s not as bad as all that…” but actually… well… it is.  If not worse.

Fun task #1: Report (for University Library Committee meeting) [see previous post for adventures on this front]

• #sessions & searches (monthly, semesterly, academic yearly)
• price per search (monthly, semesterly, academic yearly)
• top 10 (heavily used) and bottom 10 (lightly used) databases
• Future: map databases to departments and # of students served

Fun task #2: Identify items purchased in past few years with Performance Funds that have renewals attached and move ongoing commitments from Performance Fund to Library Budget items

Fun task #3: Budget training

Alright, enough kvetching.  I’m off to go make it happen, and I’m just the guy to do it.

Used to be (at FPOW) I would spend 20-25 hours a month manually gathering database usage data and manually updating this huge spreadsheet with all kinds of fancy cross-links to summary sheets which took me a good three years to build and which I continually tweaked.

Well, a job change a few years ago basically killed that beautiful spreadsheet (different databases, forgot what I did where to make it work right, no time to even glance toward database stats, and other huge little stuff) and I’d been wanting an easy way to skip most of the manual stuff.  Enter SUSHI & COUNTER standards.

After being asked for a recommendation on an ERMS a year (or more) ago those 20-25 hours a month seemed like waay too much hassle.  I explored a bunch of options, never wrote up the process, and in the end we went with Serialssolutions 360 Resource Manager and 360 Counter products as an ERMS and Assessment combination.  (long story short, it meshed well with the rest of our stable of SerialsSolutions products - we don’t do 360 MARC Records since we use the 360 Core A-Z list for all periodicals access)

Time passed, other priorities reared their ugly heads.  More on the story in the next post…

I encourage people to get a handle on their eResources however you may, I had a spreadsheet which did everything except sliced bread.  Now I have a hosted ERMS which I … well I’m getting ahead of myself.

/end backgrounder

The 2008 ExLibris Mid-Atlantic Users Group meeting will be held October 2&3, 2008 at Shippensburg University.  The location was finalized about a week ago, the program proposals request announcement is forthcoming (really soon, I hope), the hotel with discount is something like $60.

Here are some relevant links:

EMAusers.org (soon to be updated with EMA2008 info?)

ExLibris Mid-Atlantic Google Group (discussions and more info)

gMap of Shippensburg University (EMA location is the Ceddia Union Building [the CUB], at the corner of Lancaster Dr & Cumberland Dr - parking is available off Baseball Access Rd)

Oy, I don’t think I kept up with the discussion at all… here’s the #BarCampOhio feed

We started out with “community generated content” and morphed through “using patron usage data for enhanced services” (and should it be “opt” in or “opt out”?) then into “enhanced records - do users want this & what enhancements do they want” on into various discovery tools - Solrpac is very nice (I wanna try a beta for MPOW - can I have an extra few days per week?)

That’s all I can come up with - no real take aways at the moment… post-prandial & post-sponsor speeches chaos ensues

So here it is, less than a week to go before Library/BarCampOhio, and I’m totally dry on ideas (which haven’t already been done to one degree of teh awesome or other).  If you were going to go to a LibraryBarCamp what would you want to discuss / hear ideas about?  How about a hackfest?

Thanks for your ideas!

1. The ALA Washington Office will host the DC CopyNight meetup on Tuesday, August 5, 2008. The event will run from 6:30pm - 8:30pm.  There will be food, refreshments, and free copyright sliders.

Discussion topics: Georgia State copyright lawsuit and other current copyright news and issues.

If you’re interested, please take a minute to RSVP so we know roughly how many people are coming. The ALA Washington Office is located at 1615 New Hampshire Ave NW, 2 blocks from Dupont Circle. Hope to see you there!

Cribbed from the District Dispatch Blog