National Library Legislative Day (NLLD) 2009
This year, I attended my first National Library Legislative Day as the Legislative Liaison for ACRL/NY, held in Washington, D.C. on May 12, 2009.
Briefing Day—Monday, May 11, 2009
Legislative liaisons and NLLD state delegates convened at the Liaison Capitol Hill Hotel for an all-day briefing session on Monday, May 11. This event was sponsored by the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies, the District of Columbia Library Association, the Special Libraries Association and the American Library Association.
Following breakfast at 8:00 AM, Monday’s briefing sessions began at 9:00 AM. The presenters were warm, welcoming, and knowledgeable. Their enthusiasm motivated and energized the participants. We were brought up to speed on the USA PATRIOT Act and the reauthorization of Section 215, Appropriations, Copyright, Internet/Telecommunications and how the Stimulus Package could help our libraries.
One of the highlights of the day was the “Advocacy: Bringing the Message Home” session, run by Stephanie Vance (“Advocacy Guru”) with Lynne Bradley and Kristin Murphy from Office of Government Relations (OGR). With much humor—including a “what not to do when meeting with elected officials and their staff” role-playing game and a version of library advocate “mad-libs”—Vance, Bradley and Murphy hammered home the importance of being professional—and being prepared!—if you want to have your voice heard on Capitol Hill. Some of their tips for success in advocacy included: be gracious when meeting with Congressional staff members!—building good relationships with staffers can be the key to getting your point across; keep it simple!—leaving behind a one-page information sheet is much more effective than dropping off a voluminous report; be knowledgeable—make certain you are familiar with the title, number and provisions of the legislation you want addressed; be specific—the staffers will wonder why you paid a visit if you do not clearly articulate your message; keep your group small—space in Congressional offices is limited—some meetings may even take place in the hallways—so avoid traveling in large packs; and be relevant!—Congressional leaders represent their constituents, so it is best to visit those that represent your particular district—or be prepared to explain specifically how the group for whom you are advocating is relevant to them.
Capitol Hill Office Visits—Tuesday, May 12, 2009
On Tuesday morning, May 12th, it was time for the New York delegation to trek over to Capitol Hill to deliver our message to our Senators and Representatives. This was quite a daunting task: New York has 29 Congressional districts (plus two Senators!), and our goal was to pay a visit to each of those offices! To accomplish this, the New York delegation split into smaller groups and worked their way through the three buildings that house the Congressional offices: Rayburn, Longworth and Cannon. Some specific appointments had been made by various members of the group throughout the day. But many of the delegates had not been successful in making solid appointments: instead, they did a “drop by” visit to leave an information packet and to get contact information for future correspondence. I left packets at the offices of Rep. Anthony Weiner, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy and Rep. Joseph Crowley. Some of the lucky “drop by-ers” actually managed to get an unscheduled meeting! I was with Carol Feltes, University Librarian at Rockefeller University when she stopped at Rep. Carolyn Maloney and we got an impromptu meeting with Anna Cielinski, the Congresswoman’s Legislative Assistant.
At 10:45, a small group of us had a productive sit-down meeting with Joseph Glazer from Senator Gillibrand’s office in the Russelll building. Mr. Glazer was attentive to our concerns and pledged to take our messages to the Senator. At 11:30 about a dozen members of the delegation met in the Hart building with Anna Fodor, Legislative Correspondent for Senator Charles Schumer. Like Mr. Glazer, Ms. Fodor was sympathetic to our concerns and was willing to note our suggestions. She repeatedly stressed Senator Schumer’s commitment to support libraries and library-related issues. The delegation expressed their gratitude for the both Senators’ continued support of libraries; we especially thanked them for signing the Jack Reed/Olympia Snowe’s “Dear Colleague” letter in support of funding the Library Services and Technology Act and the Improving Literacy program.
Our Aim:
Delegates from states across the U.S. participated in NLLD, representing a variety of public, academic, school and special libraries and library associations. These libraries range in size from the tiny rural library to the large research institutions. But, while our individual needs and issues might vary, we all aim to provide the highest quality resources and maintain the best possible service for our libraries and our patrons. For this end, some of the issues that were addressed at our Congressional meetings included:
- A plea for continued support for funding ($3,000,000) for the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) and for continued support for funding ($1,000,000) for the Literacy through School Libraries program
- A plea for funding the GPO at their requested $166,307,000
- Urging Congress to vote against H.R. 801, which seeks to amend copyright law and reverse the NIH Public Access Policy that provides access to taxpayer-funded NIH research on the Internet after a twelve-month embargo period
- A call for Congress to support Senate Resolution 118—“articles resulting from federally funded research should be made available through a centralized electronic system, for purposes of access and retrieval by the public”
- A modification of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the “business/library records provisions” to protect readers’ privacy and prevent needless warrantless surveillance
Congressional visits continued throughout the day. An ALA “wrap up” session took place in the Longworth Cafeteria at 4:00 PM.
And then that train ride back to New York!
I would like to thank members of ACRL/NY for giving me the opportunity to represent them at NLLD 2009—it was a terrific experience. Robert Bellinger (New York Public Library), state coordinator for the New York delegation, deserves special thanks for organizing and directing the New York State delegation—and for his patience with us first-timers. It was my pleasure to participate in this event with colleagues from across New York who graciously shared their expertise and time: Sachiko Clayton (New York Public Library), Joshua Cohen (New York Library Association president), Carol Desch (New York State Library), Robert Hubsher (Ramapo Catskill Library System), David Karre (Four County Library System), Sara Kelly Johns (Lake Placid Library Media Specialist), Andrew E. Leykam (College of Staten Island), Michael J. McLane (ACRL Visiting Program Officer for Legislative Advocacy), Elizabeth McLane (ACRL Legislative Advocate), Sara Rofofsky Marcus (Queensborough Community College), Mable Robertson (Brooklyn Public Library Trustee), James Van Bramer (Queens Public Library), Galen Warden, Ristiina Wigg (Southern Tier Library System), and Kelly Yim (New York Public Library).
I am particularly grateful to fellow “newbie” Carol A. Feltes (Rockefeller University) for sharing her time, for her pleasant conversation, for her words of encouragement, for her professional wisdom and for her friendship—I look forward to working with her again next year when we will be sure to get it right!
submitted by Caroline Fuchs
From Transaction to Interaction: Transforming the User Experience Symposium, April 24, 2009
Over 50 librarians from public, academic, medical, and special libraries, as well as designers, content providers, vendors, and others gathered on a sunny April day for the UX Symposium “From Transaction to Interaction: Transforming the User Experience.” The event was hosted by the Memorial Sloane-Kettering Cancer Center Library and co-sponsored by Rockefeller University Library, Weill Cornell Medical Library, the Library Association of the City University of New York, and ACRL/NY.
User Experience, or UX, is a new way of addressing and meeting the needs of all users. It recognizes that in an increasingly competitive market, a successful organization will focus on providing valuable and useful services to all users, regardless of which segment of the market they represent.
The keynote speaker, William Gribbons, is the director of the Human Factors and Information Design programs at Bentley University in Waltham, MA. In addition to his teaching, research, and leadership at Bentley, he has consulted with hundreds of companies, helping them improve product design, usability, and the user experience. He explained that user expectations of institutions of higher education, nonprofits, and similar organizations are the same as for other experiences (such as customer service experiences in retail environments). User experience now is about the experience economy and the experience society. Organizations that successfully meet the challenge in a competitive market are able to differentiate their products and services by offering value and proving themselves worthy of customers’ trust. The user experience can be called many things: customer experience, patient experience, retail experience, citizen experience, but the underlying principle is essentially the same: users expect high-quality and customized responses to their questions and help with their problems, regardless of their age, status, years of experience with the organization, or level of connection with the organization. For example, a university should provide seamless support for and communication with prospective students, current students, and alumni; there should be no loss of users as they move from prospective to student to alumni.
Gribbons reminded the audience of the importance of value of services. He encouraged the audience to focus on delivering value to clients, customers, students, faculty, or however the user group is defined. The importance of remaining relevant is tied to retaining value.
He posited the question, “What is a trusting relationship that is mediated by technology?” Social networking is an example of trust mediated by technology that many of us are familiar with; the emergence of online maintenance and distribution of personal medical records is an example of an area where health care agencies must work to earn users’ trust.
Gribbons mentioned a new area of study known as the service sciences, the behavioral study of how people use services. The theories advanced by this emerging field will certainly inform the development of user experience practice in libraries and other organizations.
Through detailed study and assessment, an organization such as a nonprofit or a university can create a UX-centered environment.
For the organization that wishes to improve its user experience, Gribbons offered the following advice:
-identify all population segments and run focus groups with each -consider doing an ethnographic study of users, including observations and interviews (though be aware that this is resource-intensive and time-consuming)
-perform usability studies of technology-driven services
Before the day’s end, the symposium participants broke up into small groups in order to address two questions:
1. How do you contribute to the total customer experience?
2. What ideas do you have to improve your users’ experience?
Each small group then reported to the entire symposium. Some reported that they found success by taking simple actions, such as eliminating jargon, such as the acronym OPAC , from the library’s website. Others had redefined the concept of “outreach” to include not only drawing users into the library but also getting library content out of the library and into the hands of users. Others had built faculty trust in the expertise of librarians through orientations, events,roundtables , and discussion groups. Another successful practice that was reported was the “branding” of the library as the hub of the institution.
Finally, Gribbons described an effective way to package and persuade a university’s administration about the importance of library services: to emphasize the library’s commitment to a high-quality user experience and its important role in communicating value to faculty and students.
By Anne Leonard
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ACRL National Seattle 2009
All of you who attended the ACRL National Conference in Seattle, please send me your reports, observations, reflections etc, and I will post them here. In the meantime, here is a bit of what I got out of the conference:
After arriving Thursday afternoon and being HORRIBLY disappointed by the absence of scheduled keynote speaker Naomi Klein, I got up early on Friday and went over to the convention center where ACRL/NY members (and my colleagues) Susanne Markgren and Carrie Eastman, and our colleague Leah Massar had their poster in the first poster session, which ran from 9-10 on Friday morning. The posters were at the very back of the exhibit hall, but once I navigated past the variously hungry and bored looking vendors, I found my esteemed colleagues and their fantastic looking poster (pictures soon) “Teaching the Faculty New Tricks: Collaborating Across Campus to Provide Professional Development Opportunities.” They were literally swamped with people asking them questions and wanting to chat. I took pictures of the commotion and then looked around at the rest of the posters on display.
The next thing I wanted to see wasn’t until 10:30, so I had a chance to wander around the vendors a bit. I bought three books at the Continuum table and checked out a new journal from MIT press called IJLM: International Journal of Learning and Media http://ijlm.net/, which is pretty cool and free online for now, so you should check it out if you’re interested.At 10:30 I made my way to the inexplicably and embarrassingly named “Cyber Zed Shed,” for a presentation by Nedra Peterson, Director of the Woodbury University Library, titled “Pop culture Multi-Media and Library Instruction.” In this presentation Peterson demonstrated how she uses clips from films (High Fidelity, The Ring, School of Rock), TV shows (Buffy!!!!!), and music videos (Green Day’s American Idiot) to teach concepts like classification, format, proprietary databases vs. the freeweb, bibliography, homage and appropriation vs. plagiarism, and critical media consumption.
At 1:00, I attended a panel discussion called “Reeling in the Faculty: Baiting the Information Literacy Hook,” presented by several librarians and a Sociology professor from IUPUI (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis). The presentation was very relevant to our recent efforts and ongoing efforts here at Purchase to promote the integration of information literacy concepts into the core curriculum. At IUPUI, there has been a campus wide initiative, which started with and “IL Strategy Group” to create a formal program with a mission statement, goals, and connections to campus goals and gen ed curriculum. The librarians made an effort to “Learn to think about IL from a faculty perspective, and consider what faculty see as the most critical information literacy issues.” The “take away” suggestions from building a faculty/library Info Lit collaboration include:
find a faculty champion
make info lit relevant and focused on faculty concerns
make it easy
combine efforts with teaching faculty and other departments
present at campus conferences
library liaisons can attend discipline specific conferences to find out the concerns of teaching faculty
create a collaborative online space for documentation and sample assignments
publicize documentation to let faculty and admin know what is available
Next, there were more poster sessions. NEXT was the highlight of the whole entire trip and maybe the whole year so far Sherman Alexie http://www.fallsapart.com/, Friday’s keynote speaker. I’m not going to write very much about it because I would ruin all of his stories by retelling them, but it was awesome. I tried to get a podcast or video, but there isn’t one online. There is no way to even come close to explaining the “point’ because there were layers and layers of points, and they were all made in the telling of the stories.
Saturday, I walked up Pike St. in the rain until the poster sessions started at 9. The posters were good, particularly the one presented by my airplane mates, Selene Colburn and Daisy Benson, from the Univ. of Vermont on “Your Questions, Your Library: The Evolution of a Student-Centered Marketing Campaign.” Their poster was all about their slick outreach/marketing campaign that used social networking tools, collaborative design, & student models. Their stuff looked fantastic, and I think this would be a great idea to try at our library. Other cool posters included “Information and Visual Literacy Through Artistic Discovery: Critically Thinking About Information, Knowledge, and Space Through a Collaborative Art Installation,” presented by Stacy Brinkman and Sara Young from Miami University “Are You Ready for the Future of English Composition? Information Literacy, Visual Literacy, and the Digital Video Research ‘Paper,’” presented by Jennifer Corbin from Tulane University, and “Learn. Create. Produce. Helping Undergraduate Students Meet their Multimedia Researched and Knowledge Production Needs,” presented by Melissa Gomis, Laurie Alexander, and Laurie Sutch from the University of Michigan.
At 10:30, I went to one of the Contributed Paper “pairs.” The first one was Understanding the Integrative Role of an Academic Library for Undergraduate Library Student Workers: A Qualitative Study at San Diego State University,” presented by Wil Weston, from, you guessed it, San Diego State University. This was a study about the impact working in the library has student engagement, satisfaction overall experience of college. The second paper presentation was called “Where Have All the Librarians Gone? The Academic Library Workforce of Today and Tomorrow.” It was presented by Barbara Moran, Joanne Gard Marshall and Paul Solomon from the University of North Carolina School of Library and Information Studies. It was fascinating to me, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a proper workforce study of academic librarianship before. The research attempted to answer questions about why people choose academic librarianship and why they leave or stay in the field. There was also discussion of trends in the field, including the predicted librarian shortage as baby boomers retire. (This has been predicted FOREVER. They aren’t retiring.) The researchers documented the career transitions of a number of academic librarians, some of whom stayed in the field, and others who moved to public or special libraries, PhD programs or law school, or, hilariously, became massage therapists. Reasons given for leaving the field and/or changing jobs within the field included a lack of growth opportunities, bad working environments, more challenging/interesting opportunities elsewhere.
I walked through another poster session and then went to another set of papers: the first one was “Academic Library Support Staff Competencies: What should support staff know and be able to do?” presented by Rachel Applegate, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis SLIS. Having worked as library support staff, a library student worker, a library graduate student and now a librarian in academic libraries, Applegate’s study was interesting to me, particularly in terms of the disparities between the duties support staff though were most important in their jobs and those library administrators thought were most important for support staff. This study was connected to the ALA Library Support Staff Certification Project, which is attempting to come up with a set of recommendations and best practices for support staff training. The second paper was, and I am NOT KIDDING, “Improvisational Theater as a Tool for Enhancing Cooperation in Academic Libraries,” presented by Anthony Stamatoplos (also from IUPUI SLIS, those guys in Indianapolis sure are busy little squirrels…). Stamatoplos is a professional improv actor and his presentation was really good, but I am just not sure I am buying it about the improv. I see how the techniques and skills of improv troupes are applicable to library staff, BUT I literally can’t imagine these exercises working in any of the academic library environments I’ve ever encountered. Still, good show.
Sarah VanGundy
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