Reports from the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting: Seattle, Washington, January 18-22, 2007

Purpose – To share information and insights from the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting. Several contributors reported on different aspects of this meeting. Design methodology/approach –A report of the conference.Findings – Summary of discussion forums, work of ALA's Divisions, and conference lore.Practical Implications – A working meeting to plan for the annual conference in June 2007. This meeting attracts the current leadership of the different divisions in ALA who are holding discussion groups and committee meetings as there are no official programs at Midwinter.Originality/value – Conference reports on many current trends in scholarly communication issues to information professionals in academia, access, and intellectual property issues related to a range of library environments and the state of the art in technology.

was covered from RFID, financial investments, faceted classification, library network architecture and physical space reconfiguration, and what is coming down the pike with discovery and delivery of library automation systems. The major concerns is being responsive to endusers and making it more effective and efficient for them to search and retrieve relevant output.
Several divisions of ALA began their 50th anniversary celebrations, which will continue through the annual meeting in June. ALCTS had a recap of the first 50 years while offering predictions about what trends may be coming along, including more food and drink in libraries, more of a social feel, more customer services perhaps appointment-based, responding to 24n business expectations, and more mixed media and digital products, with perhaps smaller physical collections and more printing on demand and greater compatibility with hand-held devices.
Seattle was a very welcoming and hospitable city with the conference centralized in several downtown properties. Visits to the relatively new Seattle Public Library were a real treat (see www.spl.org). Known as the coffee capital of North America and corporate home to some of the most prolific coffee establishments like Starbucks and Seattle's Best, the Pacific Northwest is also a great center for public art and Seattle is one of the most renowned centers of glassblowing and examples of American craft. Receptions took place at museums throughout the city including the Space Needle, one of the remaining architectural highlights and memories of the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle. Pan-Pacific fusion cuisine dominated the culinary scene with wonderful seafood, and attendees really seemed to like being in Seattle with mild weather and many interesting distractions. One really did feel incomplete walking down the street without a coffee cup or mug! Julia Gelfand (jgelfand@uci.edu) is a co-editor of LHTN.

Scholarly Communications Update
During the ALA Midwinter meeting the Association of Research Libraries' (ARL) SPARC and ALA's Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Science and Technology Section held joint discussion groups centered on scholarly communications issues. ARL-SPARC jointly sponsored the Midwinter Hot Topics Discussion Forum "Federal Research Access Policies and How They'll Change Your Library" on 20 January. John Ober (Director of Policy, Planning, and Outreach for the University of California's Office of Scholarly Communication) introduced the discussion topic by highlighting work by ARL and SPARC over the past year. SP ARC, Japan, started to support open access publishing (QA) in Asia with over 800 academic and research institutions joining in support of SP ARC initiatives. In the fall 2006, SPARC presented two webcasts dealing with copyright and a second with ···········-········--·""'"'~----LIBRARY HI TECH NEWS Number 3 2007, pp. 7-12, ~Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, 00110.1108/07419050710755063 Author's Rights, which is the subject of a brochure distributed by SPARC. A white paper entitled "Publish Cooperatives" wa<; also released and is also available from the SPARC (www.arl.org/sparc/). SPARC supports legislation introduced in May 2006 by US senators John Comyn (Texas), Joseph Lieberman (Connecticut), and Jeff Sessions (Alabama), known as the "Federal Research Public Access Act"(FRPAA). The bill would mandate the deposit of published research data and documents receiving more than $100 million in federal research funding. The bill has support from an open letter by 132 academic Provosts in supportofFRPAA.
The first speaker David Pershing, Senior Vice-President for Academic Affairs, University of Utah, spoke about the impact of OA to published research on public academic institutions budgets. He described public access as a cost saving solution, describing the escalating cost of academic journals as a "pending train wreck" in public higher education. In a projection of "Journal Costs Relative to University Budgets," Dr. Pershing compared academic journal price increases relative to state legislative funding in Utah for the past six years. He projected if his university had maintained the same number of journals held in 2000, the cost of journal titles after six years would absorb 50 per cent of new legislative increases to the higher education in his state, hence "the coming train wreck" for public higher education. For Senior Vice-President Pershing, "OA is a way to save money".
Pershing talked about how the outlook for Utah legislative funding places higher education priority lower than public education, Medicaid, prisons, roads, and federal mandates. "Libraries cannot continue to consume a larger fraction of new resources", as Pershing described how K-12 performance is a very hot topic in western states where student performance is a concern for educators, in particular the eighth grade mathematics achievement test scores. Colleges and universities face the challenge of recruiting and graduating a larger fraction of young people from increasing student populations from non-Caucasian populations. Increasing competition for state resources for other 8 state mandates pressure legislators and thus legislatures to make decisions on where to allocate addition funding, a challenge when in 2006, five states had budget surpluses compared with 45 facing budget deficits. Higher education also faces competition from the profit sector, from organizations such as University of Phoenix, Laureate, Career Education Corporations, DeVry Institute, and Corinthian.
Science faculty salaries and recruitment offers that include start up laboratory costs are in direct competition with the same funding requested by libraries. The increasing student expectations are for resources and service "anywhere, anytime, and any device" but to hold limits to tuition costs, which have been increasing but cannot continue. Students and parents cannot afford the increases, and state legislatures, will not allow continued tuition increases.
Libraries cannot continue to consume a larger fraction of new resources. Yet there are challenges to use library facilities as Knowledge Commons, group study environments, to develop special collections, and extend wireless computer networking. Students want to use information they can get to quickly and easily from wherever they are. New demands are now pressing for use of images, data simulations, and storage of large files with sound, video, and computer code.
Change is overdue in the publishing of scholarship birthed in higher education, and OA provides an ideal situation, with rapid digital publication and high quality peer review. Pershing closed his presentation by listing reasons provosts are supporting FRP AA legislation.
( 1) Public access leverages collective investment, Carl Bergstrom, a professor in the Department of Ecology, University of Washington, spoke on "Fostering a Culture of Open Access". Professor Bergstrom defined benefits of OA to the author to include wide distribution of work, higher citation rates, and global accessibility of research, as availability of research extends beyond academia. Benefits for readers are instant access to online publications, computer searching, and indexing. In discussing price models for journal publishing Professor Bergstrom used the metaphor of comparing cost model for journal publishing to automobile manufacture. In a commercial journal, publishing articles combine into journals, with author contributions usually submitted free. In this model, the author gives away copyright and publishers' charge subscription rates to readers to purchase access to the published articles (reader pays). By comparison, a steelmaker ships parts to the automobile maker, who in turn assembles the vehicle that the customer purchases. The money from the customer flows to the automobile manufacturer, which, in tum, pays the steelmaker. A third journal pricing model involves author payment for publishing the article as openly accessible, which places the financial burden on authors (author pays).
Beyond cost models, Professor Bergstrom questioned that if some journal publishers currently allow for self-archiving of post-prints by individual faculty from their personal websites, then how many authors choose to self-archive In examining this question, he chose to look at economists, high-energy physicists, political scientists, and ecology and evolutionary biology faculty. In a sample of researchers from the University of Washington, Bergstrom compared the number of journals in each field (n) to the percentage of faculty that selfan:hived article published in journal issues dated August 2006. In examining this small set of titles and authors he found higher percentages of economists (79 per cent) and physicists (95 per cent) self-archived their research and smaller percentage of political science (24 per cent) and biology (30 per cent) faculty made their research openly accessible.
Professor Bergstrom, a biologist, described the archiving behavior of physicists to that of biologists as the result of differing traditions for sharing data in their respective fields. For example, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science does not allow in its published articles citations to unpublished work -ostensibly to provide for peer-review comparison of research outcomes. But in physics and network theory, Bergstrom was able to take advantage of the preprint literature from Arxiv.org to work through the rapid learning curve in a new field of his research. He commented on the availability of papers indexed in Google and Google Scholar and the author's willingness to share research openly. Upon submitting a preprint to Arxiv.org himself, he noted that he received comments to the paper within hours of posting. Professor Bergstrom supports a changing culture of science groups to embrace OA during the research process, where colleagues can trust that sharing their research for comment will not risk having the work misappropriated.
Professor Bergstrom introduced a different aspect of his research to the audience by discussing an online project called Eigenfactor.org (www.eigenfactor.org/). This website extends work on value-based pricing of journal publishing (journalprices.com) by him and his father, Theodore Bergstrom, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Eigenfactors.org uses networking algorithms to rank journals with eigenvector centrality, where impact factors are used to estimate journal influence using local citation information. Bergstrom described the project as "eigenfactor ranks journals the way Google ranks websites". Impact factors estimate importance of local citations and eigenfactor uses the entire network of journal citations to give a measure of how much time researchers spend with each journal. The project continues to develop from contributors Javin West arid Ben Althouse, both graduate students working with Professor Bergstrom.
The next speaker was Ellen Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Her presentation looked at OA as a question of "Commons -Public Good'', where "public good" is defined as a resource available whenever needs and each use does not diminish the resources. Her presentation draws on models described in Biologist Garrett Hardin's 1968 Science article "Theory of the LIBRARY HI TECH NEWS Number 3 2007 Commons" (1968) and the connections between fragile dominions, complexity, and the commons based on work by Princeton biologist Simon Levin.
Ellen Duranceau presented eight principles for libraries and digital commons and the interactions with faculty on OA, author's rights, and copyright.
Principle 1. Reduce uncertainty. Move beyond traditional services and systems with OA repositories developed to support faculty in OA domain. Support for faculty needs to continue after ingesting material into an institutional repository. University Presses are closer to start conversations and may be future partners in such repositories. The repositories will serve to gather resources from faculty, and serve as a guide on how and where to publish.
Principle 2. Expect surprises. Adopt flexibility in management structure and adjust rules and policies by monitoring other sources of new data.
To learn more about user needs at MIT two surveys were conducted, 2005 User Survey and 2006 Photo Survey (http://macfadden.mit.edu/webgroup/ usemeeds/index.html). Licensing and ERM systems have been useful for delivering published works but Duranceau described efforts to develop new modalities as "adaptive probingcontinual exploration of alternative management strategies needed even when current strategies seem to be working adequately". Adaptive probing suggests the need for article-level metadata about rights and integrates licensing into ERM system vendors. This enhanced rights control has implications for institutional repositories and there can be a role for libraries in tracking institutional output.
Principle 3. Maintain heterogeneity. No single model for scholarly communications should be supported in the near term but look for application of current and developing strategies, including Green, Gold, and hybrid OA models. OA efforts should match this heterogeneity. Begin analysis of institutional research output and dialog with campus administration to look at new financial models to access.
Principle 4. Sustain modularity for libraries and digital commons.
Move away from hierarchical, monolithic structures, support integrated modular design systems, and alternative staffing arrangements. Libraries will need flexible new services to be part of the Web 2.0 world.
Principle 5. Preserve redundancy. Be efficient with digital materials and services but retain sufficient redundancy to replace lost functionality. Archiving models with built-in redundancy to identify trusted archives for digital content: IR/Discipline archive, Portico, LOCKSS, Print-sharing cooperatives, national agreements to share archival storage, and title-level metadata on trusted archive in ERM.
Principle 6 Ellen referred to a phrase from an article by Ann Prince, "The Planet as Commons" in Sanctuary: the Journal of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, "Inspiration, Education, Cooperation" leading to effective stewardship of the commons. Libraries are part of the ecosystem of scholarly communications and need to support each other to prosper.
The forum provided an opportunity for questions from and dialog with the audience. Additional information on scholarly communications issues, including podcasts and presentation slides, are available from the SP ARC website ( www .arl.org/sparc/meetings/ ala07mw/). The next ARL-SPARC forum will be at the ALA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC June 21-27, with information about the June 23 forum program available at (www .arl.org/sparc/meetings/ala07 /).
Mitchell Brown (mcbrown@uci.edu) is a Research Librarian at the University of California, Irvine Libraries and is a co-editor of LHFN.
10 Digital Gaming in Library Instruction, a report on ACRL Instruction Section, Current Issue Digest, and Discussion Forum, ALA Midwinter Meeting.
If there is one thing that instruction librarians see a lot of these days, it is the discussions of gaming and its educational benefits. From The Sims to Second Life, students are playing games and educators want to cash in on this phenomenon in which users are so invested. Robin Ewing, Circulation Coordinator at St. Cloud University, and Justine Martin, Instruction Coordinator at Minnesota State University, led "Digital Gaming in Library Instruction" as part of the ACRL Instruction Section, Current Issue Digest and Discussion Forum, on 20 January 2007 (www.ala. org/ala/acrlbucket/is/conferencesacrl/ DiscForumMW2007a.htm).
Ewing and Martin provided a background handout (http://tinyurl.com/ 37dd93) with demographics of games, types of games, gamer learning styles, brief discussion of the feasibility of using digital games for library instruction, and detailed reference list. The speakers cited a 2003 Pew Internet and American Life Project report that revealed that 70 per cent of college students reported playing digital games, which suggests these students are also risk takers who like being immersed in data and are highly motivated to succeed. Ewing and Martin explain that parallel processing, "the skill that allows gamers to interpret multiple elements simultaneously", may be a characteristic to be exploited by instruction librarians. Most research is not linear, but parallels gaming as users pursue a variety of sources and avenues in their quest to find the best answer of piece of information. Examples of librarians exploring gaming's possibilities include James Madison University Libraries $158,000 project to transform their tutorials into games and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro's Parcheesi inspired Information Literacy Game (http:// library .uncg.edu/de/infolitgame.asp ).
However, beyond the handout the session lacked spark. Martin and Ewing began by asking audience members to explore questions such as "What do you perceive are the advantages and disadvantages of digital gaming in library instruction" Many of the participants were quite unfamiliar with gaming in general much less the idea of integrating gaming applications into their information literacy programs. Nevertheless, a number of interesting ideas were shared. There was a discussion of game collection building and of Second Life, a 3-D environment where you create an avatar and literally live your life virtually (http:// secondlife.com/). The Army's use of games for recruitment and Cold Stone Creamery's online training program to teach recruits how to grab the right amount of ice cream was discussed. One of the biggest problems it seemed libraries would have to overcome is that most librarian's lack of knowledge about games, how to create them, and the amount of time it takes to develop something students would actually want to play. The James Madison project spent all of their grant money and has only one module completed. There was discussion of collaborations among campuses, and using possible game creation software packages, but with gaming technology development quickly changing, time and money spent would rarely be worth the effort, in the long run. And who says that students would actually be interested in playing a game which assisted them in learning how to conduct research? Would students prefer to keep their gaming separate from their education?
Despite a number of books and articles written on the subject, Martin and Ewing's research failed to reveal any empirical studies assessing the educational impact of gaming. The holy grail seems to be how education and fun might be mixed so students become as hooked on learning asthey currently are on Grand Theft Auto. By the sound of things, it may be a long time before librarians and educators in general figure out the alchemy needed to successfully combine the two.

New Frontiers in Online Learning
Many of us have created tutorials and have some presence in courseware at our institutions. But how effective are those implementations And are there different approaches to online learning which could better benefit our student-; Answering these questions was the topic at the ACRL University Libraries Section Current Discussion Group event, "New Frontiers in Online Leaming" held on January 20.
More program than discussion, the well-attended talk consisted of a panel of experts prepared to speak about online learning in a variety of environments. Betsy Wilson, Dean of Libraries at the University of Washington in Seattle, set the stage with an overview of online learning and an explication of recent trends. She outlined the environment, detailing how Washington began in the 1990s with their UWired program to engage librarians, faculty, instructional designers, and technologists in meeting the learning needs of students in their preferred medium -the World Wide Web. Technology continued to evolve however, and more and more applications and devices -cell phones, iPods, MySpace -entered the scene, challenging librarians to make decisions regarding where they should offer services. Wilson summarized the often quoted 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition (www.oclc.org/reports/escan/) and the 2002 Pew Internet: Internet Goes to College (www.pewinternetorg/report_ display.aspr=71) surveys, which show the student5 entering our institutions to be Internet natives eager to collaborate and interact virtually. Wilson urged librarians to listen to users, conducting assessment~ and focus groups to better understand the impact of technology on student learning. She also suggested that collaborations with other technologically savvy offices could help us to invent new ways of engaging students in an online environment.
Jerilyn Veldof, Director of Coordinated Educational Services and Undergraduate Initiatives at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, followed with a particularly interesting presentation seeking an answer to the question: "Does online learning actually enhance learning" She believes that libraries need to move on from the stale, barely interactive tutorials of the 1990s to electronic perfonnance support systems (EPSS). The problem is that, despite our wanting to use tutorials to replace in-person instruction, our faculty do not want it, and our students do not want a simulation of research, they want research assistance at the point of need. We need to shift our LIBRARY HI TECH NEWS Number 3 2007 thinking to address the problems in the research process before our students have them, something Veldof called failure points. EPSS' are instructional nuggets, which "wrap the user in a cocoon of just-in-time help anticipating user failure before it happens". She gave the example of tax software, which offers context sensitive help and does not simulate tax preparation -you actually do your taxes. Veldof then demonstrated some of Minnesota's solutions. One was the Undergraduate Virtual Library (www.lib.umn.edu/undergradf), a portal which offers students citation wizards, research tips, and an assignment calculator which emails students as each step of the research process approaches. The other is the Mellon grant-funded "My Field", a portal destination where students discover, gather, create, and share citations, photos, and other content as they complete their research. These attempts begin to answer Veldof's question, offering flexible EPSS' with reusable components which track learners, use various authoring tools, offer customizability, and most of all, enhance learning by cushioning students when they fall/fail. Susan Hollar, Curriculum Integration Coordinator at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, shared her campus's library integration into CTools, a Sakai-drive course management system (CMS). Her library's current service integration mirrors many of our own -a library link in the left menu, e-reserves added, possibly some virtual reference application. After all, CMS' were "fundamentally not designed to include library services and resources". Hence her current project, nicknamed Sakaibrary, more tightly integrates the CMS and library services. Funded by a Mellon grant and involving a collaboration of libraries such as UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, the project's first phase involves the creation of a citation tool. This tool allows the user to create a folder and name it, sean:h library resources, get the citation, and add it to the folder, complete with a pointer to full text. Next steps for the project include adding the ability to save canned searches. Hollar described the project as a fruitful collaboration and suggested that we get to know our CMS developers and get the right people in the same room talking. If we do so, good things will happen that will, in turn, benefit our users.
Christopher Cox (coxcn@uwec.edu Marshall Breeding from Vanderbilt University opened with several general comments on the business trends in library automation vendors. This past year continued to be another remarkable year in the trend of industry consolidation, such as the in the cases of SirsiDynix and Ex Libris/Endeavor. Breeding noted the significance of these mergers in tenns of the change in the investor characteristics from high risk, early start-up early stage. These new mergers are funded by large private equity finns such as Francisco Partners and Vista Equity, which usually invest in ventures that are more mature and offer a longer investment horizon and treat the companies in their portfolios more strategically. This could mark a business plan change, which is more aggressive and ambitious. He hopes change will stimulate better perfonnance of these companies in regard to delivering innovative library products. He suggested the consolidation of ILS vendors could mean that there are more programmers working on few projects, which could result in more innovation in the product offerings.
Next Breeding commented on the open source-based ILSs movement. At one time there was not much of an impact but now there is a major consortium in Georgia which developed using an open source ILS called Evergreen which consists of 252 small libraries. He believes this project marks a change in how seriously decision makers in libraries are considering an open source alternative. He ended by stating that if we do not see the innovation in products of the ILS vendors we might have another alternative to consider. It is a whole new world that is changing rapidly. The concept of the ILS under consideration is changing such as the decoupling of the front-end.
Before Clifford Lynch presented his trends, he commented on the previous remarks regarding the ILS and catalog trends. He stated that he is more skeptical about these trends. He suggested that perhaps the previously made statements about the sorry state of the ILS systems being the result of the failure of the automation vendors to provide innovative products might not be accurate. Lynch believes the underlying conception of the ILS systems might be problem since it is very conflicted and flawed as we move into a digital world as opposed to describing and keeping track of physical artifacts. A lot of the digital content is not in our libraries or described in our ILS systems to index. By looking at these underlying structural issues it explains why Google has become the preferred search engine for researchers. He is concerned about the cost issues and whether open source systems will really be better or cheaper in the long run. He reminded the audience that many ILS systems came out of innovation decades ago and are rooted in universities. In general, we do not have many good examples for dealing with this complex issue.
Lynch described the emerging work in digital object reuse and interchange among digital repositories. He described the results of a workshop which included CNl, the Mellon Foundation and Microsoft on the state of the art of moving materials between repository systems. At the conclusion of the workshop they discovered there was a large problem. We have the protocol for metadata harvesting which allows us to pull metadata out of these repositories but in terms of migrating and replicating these changing objects there is a big problem. The Mellon Foundation has funded the open archives team including Herbert Van de Sompel and Carl Lagoze to pull together an effort to develop an object exchange and reuse protocol similar to the protocol for metadata harvesting.
Lynch next spoke about data curation and the report of a workshop sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries on the role of data curation in various libraries. Stimulated by this report there is going to be a call by the National Science Foundation to fund projects in data curation. Lynch believes that of all these efforts there will emerge strategic directions for the future of research libraries.
Lynch made comments on the amount of experimentation developing in Second Life such as constructing building, conducting teaching and conferences, and building research structures. Although these developments are thought provoking, Lynch pointed out that no one really knows or can present evidence of what kind of activities in this environment are effective or merely trendy. He sees a problem emerging in terms of how we evaluate the usefulness of Second Life as a tool.
He noted the emergence of the next generation of faster wireless which will perhaps narrow the gap between the kinds of performance on hard wired connections and the new state of the art wireless connections.
In conclusion he updated the audience on the noteworthy trend in the area of personal catalogs. Especially noteworthy is the development of large scale digital inventories which include not only books but large catalogs of music which can be cataloged by automated copy cataloging setvices such as Gracenote (www.gracenote.com/). These automated cataloging setvices offer very poor quality cataloging with questionable descriptive practices. Lynch suggested that perhaps attention or intluence to the substandard practices might need to be addressed.
Karen Schneider opened with comments on the subsequent implementation of alternative ILSs such as Endeca at NCSU (www.lib.ncsu. edu/endeca/) and Aquabrowser (www. medialab.nl/), which involve the decoupling of the front-and back-end of the ILS systems, recognizing that the ILS is an inventory tool and not a presentation tool. These developments are noteworthy but they pose additional problems such as maintenance in what Schneider calls an "ILS fruit salad".
Schneider mentioned a few important publications which included: Karen Calhoun's, The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Other Discovery Tools (www Joe.gov /catdir/calhoun-reportfinal.pdf) and Karen Coyle and Dianne Hillman's, Resource Description and Access (RDA): Cataloging Rules for the Twentieth Century (www.dlib.org/dlib/ january07 /coyle/0 l coyle.html).
Andrew Pace was the final speaker on the panel. Pace spoke about a few concerns. First the discussion about RDA and the Coyle and Hillman piece which Pace believes started in the wrong place. Their argument started in description but it should be focused on access. He feels that there is too much emphasis on the MARC record and more focus should be paid to the infonnation technology side of this issue.
Pace next spoke about Google and how he has tried to discover from Google what the interface and search results will be for large Google digitalization projects where there are "billions" of articles and books in the database to search. He has not received an answer other than the first results in the display will be very relevant which Pace is not quite satisfied with as a "real" solution.
For more on the LITA's Top Technology Trends see the LITA Blog with podcasts of all the panelists and discussions with the audience at: www .litablog.org Colby Riggs (cmriggs@uci.edu) is the Project Coordinator in the Information Technology Department at the University of California Irvine and is a contributing editor to LHTN.