Remarkably, after being a staunch Twitter-resister for more than a year, I recently took the plunge and created an account.  I did so because Elizabeth Thomsen, whom I highly respect, has encouraged me to do so, and Marci Silverman, with whom I rode my bike cross-country, twittered the whole trip.  In addition, at the recent National Educational Computing Conference, it would have been totally uncool to admit to being Twitter-less.  I began by “following” a few interesting people.  During NECC, I decided that it was time to “tweet.”

I sent one, very banal post.  Following the rules, I tagged it so that it would become part of the pool of NECC tweets by using the #NECC09 tag.  It was, I am confident, completely within the guidelines.

Imagine my shock and dismay when I attempted to log in to Twitter a couple of days later only to find this very harsh message.

I have again followed the instructions and appealed my suspension, but haven’t heard back from the Twitter police.  If you know me, you know that I am a dedicated rule-follower.  I was a girl scout and girl scout leader!  I am a librarian!  If you have a Twitter account, please tweet them on my behalf (@Twitter)  Please help free my account!

The National Educational Computing Conference was excellent in many ways.  It was great to be in the nation’s capitol.  The program was packed with interesting, stimulating sessions.  The venue was spacious and comfortable.  The logistics, including the hotel shuttles, were well planned and executed.  And the vendors by themselves were worth the price of admission.

The entire lower level of the conference center was packed with exhibits.

The booths were attractive, imaginative, and, most importantly, informative.  Many vendors provided scheduled presentations on their products, and all of the exhibits were manned with helpful representatives of the sponsor.  Elvis was there.

As was this friendly Bee.

And the President and First Lady.

BAD

It was a great conference, but I had one significant disappointment.  I had agreed, ahead of time, to be registered as an official conference blogger.  (I also contributed four hours of volunteer time during the conference.)  There was an excellent wireless network at the venue.  Unfortunately, when I unpacked my suitcase late Sunday night, I realized that I had failed to include my power cord.  Having used my computer all day, I was nearly out of charge.  The hotel business center couldn’t help me, but I figured that I could come up with something at the conference.  On the second day, a very nice lady at the NECC volunteer booth let me charge my computer for a couple of hours.  Since the computers at the volunteer booth were not used after 6pm, I hoped to be able to borrow a cord over night.  Alas, my most persuasive arguments did not sway the conference coordinator to whom I made my request.  I think that the situation was analogous to that of academic reserves in the library–even though they may only be borrowed for 2 hours, we allow them to go out overnight, on the theory that no one is being deprived of their use while the library is closed.

I was disappointed that the ISTE rep. was so inflexible.  The down side risk was very low.  I was a registered attendee.  They know where I live.  I think that member organizations (like libraries) should have policies that recognize that they exist to serve the members.  Service organizations need to find ways to say “yes.”   I did manage to maintain a charge by sharing a cord with a couple of different people at my hotel, but it was complicated, and unnecessary.

While I am on the subject, I continue to be amazed that you can count on getting a free wireless connection from every Hampton Inn and Best Western across the country, but the much-more-expensive hotels rarely offer free service.  An Internet connection has become nearly as essential in a hotel room as the lights.  It should not be metered.

UGLY

This is not really the fault of NECC, but air travel has become increasingly difficult and unpredictable as the airlines have cut flights to stem their losses.   On Wednesday, a combination of bad weather and mechanical difficulties resulted in my spending more than ten hours at Washington National airport, two of which were on the tarmac. By the time the plane landed, my husband had already gone to the hospital for his overnight shift, so I was at the mercy of public transportation–very spotty at that time of the night.

It was an excellent conference.  I learned lots of things that I will share with the library staff and with the larger academy community.  But I am glad to be home, and back to work.

Over the last decade, the library profession has been transformed by technology.  While the core principals haven’t changed isince the early part of the 20th century, when they were formulated by the Indian Mathematician and Librarian S.R. Ranganathan, the ways in which librarians select, arrange, deliver, and instruct about our resources are vastly different today.   Making it pretty hard, and very important, to keep up with technology tools that are currently influencing teaching and learning, and finding out about those that are on the horizon.  When I am at the Academy, I feel pretty confident in my status as a technology evangelist.  I am an early adopter, and eager user of available technology tools.  I am on the Academic Committee on Technology and teach teachers about technology tools and their uses in enhancing teaching and learning.    Nevertheless, whenever I attend conferences like NECC and Computers in Libraries, I am  blown away by the things that teachers and librarians are doing on the cutting edge.  It is humbling, but also tremendously energizing.

Before the conference actually began, I attended  a half-day workshop on Fair Use.  Having just spent my sabbatical studying Copyright, including taking seven online courses offered by the Center of Intellectual Property at the University of Maryland, the content was not new or surprising to me.  However, the presenters did an excellent job of pulling together materials (freely available on Wikispaces at Copyright Confusion) and in presenting them in such an engaging manner that the three hours (no break!) flew by.  The session featured Renee Hobbs, Temple University, Media Education Lab with Kristin Hokanson, Michael RobbGrieco and Joyce Valenza.

Joyce and I went to Japan together in 1998 as part of the Fulbright Teachers Program, and it was good to catch up with her.   The bottom line of the workshop is that fair use rights are extensive, and entirely consistent with the purpose of copyright.  We as educators need to understand and use these rights, and model appropriate fair use for our students.  To the extent that Librarians adopt a “gatekeeper” role, we shoot ourselves in the foot.

After the workshop, the conference got off to a fast start with the Opening Keynote by Malcolm Gladwell, whose best-selling books about contemporary social phenomena are very popular in the library.  Gladwell’s newest work is Outliers.

Because it is NECC’s 30th anniversary, we were treated to an opening gala featuring champagne and cupcakes!

The conference mirrored life in the information age, with plenty of technological overload.   There were keynote addresses, dozens of concurrent presentations, BYOL (bring your own laptop) instructional sessions, poster sessions, demonstration classrooms, ISTE division meetings, and dedicated “playgrounds.”  I volunteered in the 21st Century Media Center Playground, where participants could learn about Web 2.0 tools from wikis to Second Life.

The attendees were extremely engaged in learning from and with the expert presenters.

And all of that content was only the tip of the iceberg.  The vendors turned out in full force, offering displays, mini lessons, and unlimited technical support.  It was both exhilerating and exhausting.  By the time I boarded the shuttle bus route for my hotel each day, I had put in twelve hours of work/learning.  I was on the pink route, naturally.

The conference was held at the DC Convention center.  It a huge venue, on three levels,  on both sides of 11th street.  It took me a couple of days to learn my way around.  The center sported some unconventional sculpture.  This bicycle wreath, suspended in a stairwell,  was my favorite.

I ventured outside of the convention center one evening to attend a client reception and tour of  the new Blackboard coprporate offices.

The Bb offices were beautiful, but couldn’t compare to the understated majesty of the Library of Congress.

LC sponsored an evening reception for attendees.  It was an incredible privilege to be allowed inside areas that are usually off-limits to the public.

The recent Tech Fair featured a wide variety of programming.    Jeffrey Marzluft, the OWHL Associate Director and I attended a session on Open Source Library Systems. NOBLE Executive Director Ron Gagnon provided an overview of the grant application process and timeline, and Elizabeth Thomsen  and Martha Driscoll demonstrated Evergreen and Koha, two of the leading systems.  I have agreed to serve on a working group which will begin this summer to evaluate the options and propose our ideal system.

Emma McElfresh, who manages the library’s Facebook presence, attended a session featuring staff from NOBLE libraries using Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.  The OWHL has long had an active presence on Flickr, and is developing  a new presence on Facebook.

Tim Sprattler, the OWHL Assistant Director and I attended a  session by  Heather Cole, Assistant Director of the Massachusetts Studies Project, on the Mass Memories Road Show.   The Road Show, an initiative of the Massachusetts Studies Project at UMass Boston, is a  project of  UMass Boston and is cosponsored by Mass Humanities.  The project documents Massachusetts history by collecting and digitizing family photographs and their narratives.    Tim has just assumed new responsibilities as Andover’s interim Archivist, and we are exploring the possibility of holding a “Road Show” to collect memories from our alumni in conjunction with reunions.

Libraries have always faced this dilemma, but the proliferation of digitization resources and technology has provided a simple and elegant solution.  Making digital copies of scarce materials allows those materials to be simultaneously used by students at the Academy and scholars around the globe easily and conveniently without harm to the originals.  Fragile originals can be moved from the library (which is not air-conditioned) into appropriate climate-controlled storage.  The current five year strategic plan of the OWHL includes specific goals relating to the digitization of the special collections and some archival material.

Consequently, we are actively participating in the Massachusetts Digital Commonwealth project, and are studying local initiatives to develop standards and frameworks in which our projects will be carried out.  As a part of this research, Tim Sprattler and I attended a program yesterday in Southboro sponsored by Nelinet, titled “Digital Projects Showcase.”

Four very different projects were presented.  Representatives of a national consortium of 100 law libraries (NELLCO) described the development of an open source discovery tool intended as an alternative to expensive and problematic federated search products.  The product will permit the simultaneous searching of a library’s catalog, selected free web sites, and electronic resources acquired through subscription.  Because the content is pre-indexed, the search will be faster and the results will be more relevant.  Mindful that our users want simplified finding aids (and that they will bypass all of our carefully-selected resources and simply rely upon Google unless we give them what they want) we have experimented with two separate federate search products.  We were not satisfied with either one.  We’ll be carefully watching NELLCO’s project next year as it enters the testing phase.  Once the product is fully developed, the code will be freely available to libraries.

The second presentation was by representatives of the Steamship Historical Society of America.  The society is currently digitizing its collections of several hundred thousand images, negatives, and motion pictures using the services of Digital Ark, a company based in Newport, R.I.  The presenters described the challenges of cataloging the images, as well as in scanning degraded photographs originally created using different film types.  We learned a great deal that will be helpful to us in planning our own digitization project.

Kathleen Reilly of the Berkshire Athenaeum local history department spoke about the library’s multi-year project to digitize an extensive collection of scrapbooks and photographs compiled by Edward Knurow.  Knurow worked for the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, and over a decades-long career, collected historical memorabilia which eventually filled 95 notebooks.  The library has indexed and digitized all of this material, and it is available for in-library use.

The final presentation introduced a digital music collection, the James Koetting Ghana Field Recordings Collection at Brown University.