• New CEO: In the last year or two, Innovative Interfaces, Inc. (the vendor of our “Integrated Library System”) was bought by a couple of private equity firms. The new CEO, Kim Massana, who took the helm last August, opened the conference with a presentation that this reporter found surprisingly candid and mildly encouraging. Among other things, he emphasized that Innovative is investing in staffing – they have hired 20 since last Fall and will add another 40 by the end of 2013 – and international outreach, opening offices and implementing library systems in China, many Middle Eastern and African countries, and Central and South America. He spoke openly (and emphasized that “The New Innovative” strives to be more open), acknowledging problems with previous product roll-outs and saying they should have done better. He also pointed out their new model of customer service – each library will be assigned a Library Relations Manager and communication of all kinds should go through the LRM.
• Keynote speaker: Garry Golden, a trained futurist (yes that’s his real name and real occupation – you can’t make this stuff up), spoke about some of the trends he sees that will impact libraries in the next 3-5 years. One of his first points is that libraries have been communicating their primary value as “Access to Collections.” In the near future, he suggests that may evolve to “Mastery of Learning.” He described the learning environment over the past centuries as moving from the Era of Apprenticeship to, with the help of books and industrial work, the Era of Institutions (schools) and now, with the Web and the knowledge economy, it is becoming the Era of the Learner, as individuals develop self-directed curricula and “training.” He described the Web as changing from purely informational to more social and it is now becoming “a platform for managing our lives and personal behavior change.” Where the focus was formerly on access (“is it online or offline?”), the focus is rapidly changing to outcomes (“is it software-guided?”) He described adaptive learning platforms that actively respond to how the learner is learning, and suggested that “libraries need to get ahead of the adaptive” notion.

Conference sessions I attended focused on:

• Collection Development: One session focused on Decision Center, a new III product that will launch in June. The general idea is that circulation data from item records and payment information from order records is uploaded nightly to a Postgres server that III hosts, enabling web-based querying using canned reports. It will greatly simplify extracting data to help with data-driven decision making in budgeting, purchasing, and weeding. The product manager is a former Collection Development librarian at a major public library system. III hired her about six months ago. Another presentation described an exhaustive weeding project. Three other sessions were presentations about what data to extract from Millennium for various CollDev tasks, how best to get that data, and how to analyze it. Let’s just say that Excel is a Millennium user’s best friend.
• Catalog/System management/administration: I attended multiple sessions focused on loading catalog records, particularly those for eBooks. A particularly helpful presentation described intensive use of MarcEdit for pre-load cleanup. (They prefer to minimize the number of load profiles, because MarcEdit is so much easier, and it’s so nice to have streamlined load profiles.) Another interesting session described one library’s approach to sharing responsibility for their ILS.

Between formal presentations and open forum discussions, I have a number of “new tools in my toolbox” that I will be putting to work and sharing with colleagues. Additionally, while visiting Innovative’s Library Relations Manager booth, I learned that the New England Innovative Users Group will convene next month at the University of New Hampshire. The last such meeting was apparently over seven years ago.

• “Running a User Experience Group in the absence of a Sys Admin.” (BM). Bentley University. Without a Sys Librarian, III duties fall to a group of 7: 2 tech support, 2 reference, 1 circ, 1 tech services, 1 special collections. 8 staff can access the III helpdesk. Very interesting model.
• “Sierra Roadmap & Update” (BM) III’s pitch for the wonderful new world of Sierra. Sierra will have 100% of Millennium functionality.
• “Learning Library-Specific Context to Mobilize Library Catalog” (BM) At University of Miami concern for the usefulness of the OPAC on mobile devices, even though searching starts with Summon, led to the adoption of Bob Duncan’s mobile stylesheet, with modifications to take care of their OPAC customizations. Definitely worth follow-up.
• Load Profile Forum (BM & AH). Useful review of resources available to load profilers. Wiki available but underutilized! Time for Middlebury to review RDA implications.
• “Automation: Boost your Productivity a Thousand Times.” (BM) Good tech geek presentation. Use of Expect in various flavors, AutoIt plus Java to automate repetitive tasks e.g creating review lists from record numbers, barcodes etc.
• Systems Managers Forum (BM) Mostly controlled by III staff member talking about transition to Sierra + how things would work in Sierra. Take away message – III’s efforts will be largely directed to Sierra development from now on, even though they insist that Millennium development is continuing. My conclusion – Middlebury should consider the future of our ILS with all due haste!
• “When your item types just don’t work anymore” (AH) was a discussion about how and why a library totally revamped their item types (going from around 10 to 101) to help them better identify various formats of material, which in turn aided greatly in tracking statistics of all kinds for all reasons. Most of it is useful ‘inside baseball’ stuff, but one intriguing thing that came out is that they (a public library in Oklahoma) loan out bike locks.
• Two useful sessions focused on using Millennium (and, in one session, additional assistance from an outside vendor) to aid in weeding (AH). (One library had 100,000 volumes in off-site storage to weed.) Interesting factoids: Jefferson County Public Libraries in Colorado (my home state!), with 10 branches, serving 548,000, orders 100-120 copies of bestsellers. They run their weeding list weekly and withdraw about 120,000 items each year.
• Four useful sessions dealt with various aspects of batch record loads, particularly those for e-books. (AH) One session was presented by staff from San Jose State University, where they provide e-books from 17 different providers/platforms, and have patron-driven acquisitions programs from three different vendors. They use a combination of tools, including Excel and WinBatch scripts, to de-dupe and perform other necessary functions on batch records.
• “Using circulation data to validate an approval plan” (AH) described one library’s journey towards refining their approval plan profile (for print books) to match or surpass the circulation rates for firm orders.
• “Getting the most out of Print Templates” (SO) –creating and using print templates for everything from spine labels to hold slips.
• “Centralized Weeding: using create list and icodes to streamline the weeding process” and “Millennium Makeover magic: weeding in an INN-Reach consortium”- (SO) The 1st presentation dealt with both public and Academic libraries and the later was an academic library that was involved with  INN-Reach. In both, faculty  was given a say over the weeding. There seems to be no standard method for choosing what is to be weeded.
• “Creating lists for Beginners – Why created the wheel again” (SO)  In other words, use others’ lists (with permission).
• “Confounding by Copyright?” (SO) It seems guidelines change all the time and you can “buy protection” for copyright privileges.

All of the sessions can be watched on the conference website (use the tabs across the top to browse each day’s sessions). Adam and I will highlight some that we found especially engaging, but if there’s one we missed that you think others would enjoy, please share it in the comments.

Keynotes

Dries Buytaert: Dries is the guy who created Drupal and currently runs the leading Drupal consulting business and serves as President of the Drupal Association. His talk covered where the development team is focusing for the Drupal 8 release. There are three main areas of focus, (1) mobile compatibility, (2) modernizing the development API with the Symfony framework, and (3) improving the user interface for content authors. He announced a tentative release date of August 2013 for Drupal 8.

Mitchell Baker: Mitchell is the “Chief Lizard Wrangler”, the head of the Mozilla project that produces the Firefox browser and Thunderbird email client among other efforts. She talked about the “Maker Ethic” and how the goal of Mozilla it to enable and promote the freedom to create, write, and publish. As she describes, the Firefox browser is but one product to enable this freedom and only one of the many projects Mozilla is engaged in.

Luke Wroblewski: Luke gave a very entertaining presentation arguing that we now need to develop web applications for mobile devices first and worry about the desktop experience second. He presents amble data backing up this assertion, which is guiding the mobile-first goal for Drupal 8. Adding responsive designs for mobile interfaces to our platforms is a 2012 goal for the Web Applications Development workgroup here, so we’ll be doing a lot of work in this space shortly.

Ian’s Picks

Designing Fast and Beautiful Maps: This talk describes the TileMill and MapBox mapping tools, showing how you can transform a simple spreadsheet into an interactive map interface that can easily be added to a Drupal site (or any other website). Though this is probably not something that we’d use for the main campus map it looks like a great tool for one-off mapping projects including student research. By the way, if you have a map that you’d like us to feature on the site or in MiddLab, contact me and I’ll be happy to help you get that map online.

I just want to edit a node and Five things we need to create an awesome experience for content creators: These discussions describe the initial thinking about the user interface for content creators in Drupal 8. While we won’t be moving to that platform until late 2013/early 2014, and some of the decisions about the platform may very well change by then, this is an early warning about what to expect. I should note that some of the features they discuss, like inline editing, are already available to us thanks to the Monster Menus module developed by Amherst.

HTML 4 S – While We’re Waiting for the Revolution: We spent a lot of time thinking and talking about adding HTML5 features to our sites, but that’s not always possible due to assumptions made by the back-end systems as well as browser compatibility. This talk discusses the steps we can take to get “close enough” on HTML5 adoption and some of the pitfalls we’ll encounter that are specific to Drupal, though much of the information here is Drupal-agnostic. I’ll give a small warning that the speaker is quite colorful and animated in his speech.

Adam’s Picks

Real World Performance Analysis: How to Identify Performance Problems in Your Own Sites: This talk provides a good strategy for tackling performance issues in Drupal sites without wasting time on optimizations that won’t have a big impact.

Keeping The Lights On – Operations and Monitoring Best Practices:  This session is focused on practical tools and techniques you can use to keep “your fingers on the pulse” of your site, from availability to performance to security.

Also, we were able to enjoy Colorado for a bit before the conference.

Looking forward to next year in Portland, Oregon, or perhaps Munich or São Paulo later this year!

Brainbow image of hippocampal neurons. Courtesy of Jeff Lichtman/Harvard University

Anha Skop, Asst. Professor of Genetics at UW Madison, delivered a stunning opening plenary “Too Creative for Science.” Her message on the relationship between art and science was punctuated by images of Brainbows, a cell division video, and the Tiny: Art from the Microscopes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A message from the editor

Next we used ARIS to create a simple alternate reality experience, led by David Gagnon. The platform has an intuitive interface, and has been used to create a number of experiences, including Mentira in Spanish. Future versions of the platform will include image matching, currently it supports QR codes.

Francisca Yonekura and Barbara Truman presented offerings at UCF in Everybody Wins: DIY Open Gamification 4All. Kogneato is a self-service platform that allows faculty to create games for assessment. Activities include labeling and flash cards, as well as crosswords and hangman. They also shared their online resource for information literacy.

Maria Woolson and I presented the Middleverse de Español project, where we used Second Life to create a conversation space for language learning. Our session was well attended and received, with a number of questions about the students’ experience and the impact on their learning.

Other Interesting Links from Conference

Games + Learning + Society – http//gameslearningsociety.org

IdeaLab at Carlton College, creative space for faculty, staff and students to show what can be done with technology - http://apps.carleton.edu/weitz/VirtualTour/IdeaLab/

Mystery at MIT - http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/

Poll Everywhere - http://www.polleverywhere.com/

Head Magnet - http://headmagnet.com/

POPUP, Psychology project using Kogneato - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsuZ_FhxkGg&feature=share

Middlebury Links Related to Post

Science and Art
Student Symposium – http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/resources/uro/symposium
Middlab – http://sites.middlebury.edu/middlab/

Geo-located virtual information
Murmur – http://sites.middlebury.edu/seniorfellows/2011/05/17/murmur-hear-it-here/

The instructor was enthusiastic (“We can catalog a-ny-thing!  Even the Dr Pepper I’m drinking right now!”).  The content was elementary (purpose of cataloging, cataloging terminology, examples of catalog records).  I’m glad to have a renewed familiarity with the work that our fine catalogers do.

From Rachel:  Also sitting in on the Cataloging for Non-Catalogers class, and learning to speak Cataloger.  I found the resources and links the presenter provided very helpful.  It’s great to have so much of this information easily accessible on-line.

From Carrie:  I’ve added these two sites to my delicious bookmark collection:

• eduserv’s Online_cataloging_resources Bundle
  Delicious bookmarks for Lyrasis cataloging webinars
• Cataloging Glossary
  Learn what catalogers are saying when they speak in secret code!  From the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries.

And of course, there’s lots of documentation for catalogers on the Cataloging page of the LIS Wiki.

Benefits of open access journals:

• no cost to end-user
• downloaded more, cited more
• more opportunities for collaboration, interdisciplinary studies

Challenges of open access journals:

• may or may not include peer-review
• perception of faculty members (impact on promotion and tenure, concern about author-pays model)
• during this transition period, Marilyn generally recommends new faculty publish in traditional venues til they have tenure

Reasons for library involvement:

• advocate new form of scholarship
• provide repository space
• offer copyright advice
• showcase student work in a place where community can see it; this is valued especially by service-learning projects

In general, the other institutions represented at this seminar seem to be in a situation similar to Midd:  they host an institutional repository and as yet, it has minimal participation.

Day 1: Assessment: Ideas for inquiry & student success

The focus here was on learning-centered / student-centered assessment (as opposed to teaching-centered) Ashley Finley, Director of Assessment for Learning at the American Association of Colleges & Universities, lead this day’s workshop

Assessment as a conversation

Consider the idea that both formative (continual throughout the learning process) and summative assessment (at the end of learning) approaches have a role to play within an overall assessment program, but that assessment is inherently continual–a conversation, if you will.

Planning for assessment

Create a plan using a logic model (create it from right to left and then implement the plan working left to right). Start by defining the goal/outcome, define the evidence needed, and define the resources needed to effect the change, then work through them in the opposite order. Make sure the plan involves clear steps to analyze and share the data with as broad an audience as possible, and a clear timeline for doing so.

Making assessment a campus-wide endeavor

Approach assessment as a holistic and integrated, campus-wide activity. Many departments are already involved in assessment work. Take stock of current assessment activities in other college departments (involves conversations). Establishing a map of currently ongoing assessment helps everyone identify redundancies AND places where potential collaboration may occur. Ask your institutional research, college advancement, alumni, student life, civic engagement, admissions, and (in Middlebury’s case) Commons offices what they are doing to assess student learning outcomes.

E.g. Say you work in LIS and talk to the campus Alumni office. Imagine that you find out about an annual survey that goes out to alumni 5 years out that asks them to reflect on the value of their college experience. LIS is interested in obtaining feedback about the effectiveness of its information literacy program and adds one question to this survey asking what technology skills they learned, found most useful (or wished they’d learned about) while an undergraduate. This tactic doesn’t create yet another survey but piggybacks on a tool already being used. It also provides a method of measuring an outcome beyond the traditional 4-year time period (continuing the conversation).

Implement and adjust

Make adjustments to the assessment program as needed while it is running. Following the run-through of the assessment program, take some time to evaluate the program’s effectiveness. Revise and amend the assessment program on a regular (yearly) basis!

Day 2: Assessing instructional technology community meeting

Examples of assessment activities at other colleges and universities

DePauw Univeristy, Carol Smith, Director : assessment as a way to inform institutional priorities in IT
Colgate University: Collaboration for enhanced learning
St. Lawrence: ECAR, HEDS, CIRP, MISO, etc. and “run, don’t walk, to your institutional research officer”
Colgate University: Institutional research, planning, assessment effectiveness survey review
AAC&U and MISO: Inter-institutional assessment; VALUE rubrics and MISO survey
Stonehill College: Information literacy assessment program
Centre College: Assessing student literacy through new first year course
Trinity University: Information literacy quality enhancement plan “Expanding Horizons”
Meeting participants resolved to check in on progress of assessment activities at home institutions sometime in September.

Poster Session

In the evening on day 2, I attended a poster session presented by other camp participants. Click to view a pdf of all the poster abstracts. I think I gravitated towards the posters on the topics for which I wasn’t attending workshops or meetings (moodle, digital storytelling). 2 highlights:

Woodle (Moodle at Wooster) findings

I particularly enjoyed hearing from Matt Gardzina, Director of Instructional Technology at the College of Wooster, about his school’s experiences with learning management system (LMS) Moodle (nicknamed Woodle . As the poster abstract explains, and he related in person, the faculty at Wooster ended up not really using Woodle for much more than course readings and a parking spot for their syllabi. They used Woodle elements like quizzes and forums far less. As a result, the instructional technologists at Wooster have started to downplay Woodle and amped up support for their blogging and wiki platforms as alternatives to the LMS. I mentioned the Curricular Technology team at Middlebury’s recommendation to support a suite of tools as opposed to a single LMS, and he agreed that it was a good recommendation, especially given his findings at Wooster. (Kudos to the CT team on validation for their recommendation from a comparable institution! I bet Matt would be willing to discuss this further if you wanted to learn more about the specifics of the Wooster findings.)

Before and After: Augmenting Digital Story Projects

When we teach with technology how can we ensure a balance between student technology fluency and the other student learning outcomes for the course? Brett Boessen, Associate Professor of Media Studies at Austin College, shared some good examples when he explained how he has begun integrating formative accompanying materials (like storyboards) and self-reflective elements (students’ author statements) into a digital storytelling assignment in one of his classes. He played some delightful (and quite good) examples of videos ranging from video screencasts to mashups created by students in his course on Participatory Cultures. By embedding planning and reflective elements in the assignment requirements, Brett seems to have struck a good balance between successfully engaging students with their own process of creating and sharing a story, and achieving technology fluency.

• Drupal now powers over 1% of the total websites, closely tied with Joomla. Wordpress powers about 8.5%.
• Drupal 7’s forms will allow us to add conditional form fields that appear for the user without requiring a postback to the server. See the (very relevent for us) example here: http://d7.drupalexamples.info/form_example/states
• Drupal 7’s User Experience (UX) team has made improvements to the interface that on our site is called the “Edit Console”. You can read more about their project at their website: http://www.d7ux.org/content/
• We can improve our site performance by moving functionality out of the template files and into theme functions. Basically, the way we currently do things, we have to read a file off the server’s disk every time anyone loads anything on the site. By using theme functions instead of template functions we avoid this disk read and dramatically improve performance.
• You can watch many of today’s presentations at http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/schedule for free! Many of those without video have their slides up. The presentations from Monday are at the bottom of the page since, at the time I’m posting this, they’ve already happened and aren’t as interesting to the conference attendees.
• Monster Menus, the module the Amherst developed that lets you add sub-pages and manage permissions is a few weeks away from being refactored to eliminate any Amherst-dependent code. The version we’re currently running assumes that Amherst’s version of Banner exists, which we’ve had to work around. The new version will make this easy for us and open MM up for other schools to use.

All of the sessions I attended today focused on the improvements coming in Drupal 7. Currently, Drupal 7 is in “feature freeze” with 114 critical bugs left to resolve before it is released. At the keynote presentation today, Dries projected that Drupal 7 would likely be released some time between June and October of this year. Even so, and even with the large number of improvements it offers, we will not move to Drupal 7 when it is released. Our challenge is that the system we rely on to provide our site editors the ability to add sub-pages and manage permissions for their site is not part of “core” Drupal – it is provided by a module that is only used by us and Amherst College. I had an opportunity to speak with the developers from Amherst today and our projection is that, at best, we will be able to move to Drupal 7 for the start of Fall Semester 2011.

Even that timeline will be challenging, but I will provide a quick synopsis of each of the sessions I attended below, focusing on how they will impact our site if and when we make the move to Drupal 7.

The State of Drupal

http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/state-drupal

The meat of this presentation was defining a framework for thinking about the future growth of Drupal. Right now the project is at a crossroads where it can continue to add features to satisfy the “enterprise” users of large organizations and compete with commercial CMSs like Microsoft Sharepoint, or it can aim to reduce the number of features and compete for the low end of the market with WordPress, aiming at people who just want a simple site with a few pages that is easy to manage. Dries seemed to believe that the Installation Profile system, of which there are now 19 releases, will allow Drupal to target specific low-end markets while core continues to add features to satisfy enterprise needs, but he seemed unsure of his own assertion that Drupal could do both.

This will be an interesting discussion for Middlebury as it continues in the Drupal community. We are one of those places that has an “enterprise” need that is not satisfied by Drupal core: the need to organize our site as a tree that allows our editors to add to that tree and manage fine-grained permissions in that tree. To that extent, Monster Menus is like our own installation profile of Drupal since we know that it imposes limitations on what Drupal can do since modules need to be changed to intergrate with it. We will have to see what features get added for Drupal 8 and how well they align with our needs.

The Rest

I had actually planned on diving into the details of the afternoon presentations I attended, but have run out of time before this morning’s round of sessions. Today, by the way, seems to be offer a lot more for the people currently running Drupal in production. Monday’s sessions were all about all the cool new features in Drupal 7, which is fun, but not something I’ll be working with for over a year. Today I’m attending sessions on search integration, search engine optimization, cloud computing integration and database optimization. These are topics closer to my day-to-day work.

Here are links to the sessions I attended on Monday. If you’re interested in hearing more, be sure to ask in the comments.

AJAX and JavaScript in Drupal 7

D7UX How to integrate the core Drupal 7 usability improvements with your module

Default theme implementations

Monster Menus

After the sessions, I had a good conversation with Dan and Victor from Amherst about the future direction of Monster Menus. Dan is close to being done with the “revamp” branch of Monster Menus that removes the Amherst-specific code from their system. We’ll want to convert to this and try it out when he’s done since there are some features of our implementation that don’t work right now because the module assumes that it will be able to talk to Amherst’s version of Banner on the backend.

Other interesting things from this meeting:

• They are working on a way to move course sites (which are currently pages in their website – everything Amherst does on the web is in Drupal including their LMS) from one semester to the next while preserving associations like page permissions. This is tricky since you might assign permissions on a page in your course site to one student who won’t be in the course the next time it is taught.
• We should be able to theme the RSS page content type without much trouble (this solves a request that I currently have with Communications to improve the way news items in the Newsroom are displayed), but we will probably never be able to theme the actual menu in the fashion that Drupal expects because of the processing overhead on generating that menu.
• Amherst runs the Google Search Appliance to manage their search services. They allow the GSA to crawl their site as an administrative user and have a Drupal module that filters the search results based on the permissions of the currently logged in user. This is a requirement because their site also includes their LMS which they need to search with admin permissions. They are interested in seeing what we do with faceted search, an area they’ve wanted to look into but haven’t yet had the chance.

We had a lot more discussion about the minutiae of various modules and parts of Monster Menus, but those are the major points. I’ll post again this evening with a roundup of today’s sessions and on Wednesday after I meet with the guys from White Whale.