The ACRL Virtual Conference: Experiencing the Webcasts
Norman Oder and Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 3/17/2009
- Technology maturing
- Not the same as in-person conference, but good enough?
- Content ranging from student "presearch" habits to book selection analysis
| Go back to the Academic Newswire for more stories |
The virtual ACRL experience isn't quite the same thing as going to the live conference: hob-nobbing is hard if not impossible, and there's often little rapport between presenter and audience members when they're all just names on a screen.
That said, the Virtual Conference got a big push this year, and with budget pressures keeping more and more librarians tied to their desks and DSL lines, virtual participation is becoming more appealing by the day. On Friday and Saturday two LJ editors logged on remotely and participated in the virtual conference, both as they were being live cast and checking in with one after the fact.
Here's the lowdown on this year's virtual conference tech, or jump straight to one of the presentations:
The Web is My Library: Undergraduate Students and Their Research Behaviors
Cultivate Your Bottom
The Impact of Data: Analyzing Book Use to Test Assumptions
The technical set-up
All of the hour-long webcasts consisted of a speaker, slides, and an opportunity for audience feedback via chat or “voting.” Some included video segments pushed out to participants, though not all viewers were able to get the distributed video to work properly. These are all reasonable ways to deliver information and, in some cases, even offer some advantages compared to in-person presentations.
When watching an archived webcast, it was possible to rewind to listen again to segments that weren't clear the first time around. And, of course, it was always possible to go back and reference slides.
During all of the webcasts, the audience offered inobtrusive but effective feedback, warning the speaker to slow down, pointing out an error in a slide, and presenting cogent questions. And it certainly was simple to fill out an online feedback form.
On the down side, though the technology was seamless for most, there were snafus; some users indicated that a speaker sounded rushed (likely a result of compression techniques used to combat network congestion).
Perhaps most importantly, only two-way video—clearly not ready for prime-time virtual conferences—could provide viewers with a full sense of a speaker’s affect and let the speaker know that he or she is connecting with the audience. Still, the webcasts were far superior to standalone audio or standalone PowerPoint.
The content: organization 2.0In her session "Can’t Get There From Here: Achieving Organization 2.0," Meredith Farkas noted that, while many academic librarians have familiarized themselves with web tools from tagging to Tweeting, relatively few of these have been successfully implemented on the institutional or organizational level.
There are many reasons for that, explained Farkas, author of Social Software in Libraries, ranging from waning interest after initial infatuation to the seemingly widespread lack of institutional support beyond initial encouragements to "experiment with technology."
The gist of the presentation was that web 2.0 tools—such as Meebo chat widgets, delicious.com reference guides, and Facebook pages—are tools like any other, requiring planning and dedicated staff time as much as anything else in a library's service arsenal. During the introduction to her webcast, Farkas used the Learning Times platform's polling feature to discover that while 48% of live participants said they were using 2.0 technology in their libraries, only 33% felt that they were getting any substantial return on their technology investment.
Much of the webcast information can be found in the blog entry Farkas made following the web cast. Her summary there is also well-supplemented by the webcast slides and other materials linked to from the entry, which taken together would allow just about anyone, especially non-ACRL members, to essentially piece together the majority of the webcast.
It's no news to ACRL attendees that students do most of their research online, something taken as a given during the webcast presentation by a team of librarians from the University of Illinois. In "The Web is My Library: Undergraduate Students and Their Research Behaviors," the researchers explained how they videotaped student interviews and assessed user interaction to figure out how that works.
The presenters cite the prevalence of "presearch," as students quickly use Wikipedia and Google to gain broad familiarity with a topic. But does this transition into more scholarly or authoritative content? The team acknowledged that library resources may be placed where "ingenious but unaware" students aren't necessarily likely to discover them.
The team also observed that the academic library enjoyed very little "coattail effect" from students' past experience with school and public libraries, no matter how positive those experiences may have been. That suggests a greater role for educating the students about what the academic library could do for them. This presentation, in contrast to some others, included video clips via the LearningTimes virtual webcast platform, though some users noted bandwidth issues.
The content: empowering staff
Princeton University librarian Wayne Bivens-Tatum’s session, “Cultivate Your Bottom,” had a clever title but, as even the speaker himself acknowledged, focused on what many people would consider obvious: it’s important to focus not on leaders but librarians and staffers at the bottom of the hierarchy, empowering them to act, and ensuring that they share their knowledge. Only near the end of the session were concrete examples—e.g, seminars, wikis—offered.
“There is always a trade-off between getting the work done and having time for cultivating staff,” one chat room commenter pointed out. Another described training week at her university, in which non-professional and professional staff address topics like dealing with difficult customers and library visits on campus. Another said that at her institution staffers are given 30 minutes a day to “play with social tools.”
The content: analyzing usage data
In “The Impact of Data: Analyzing Book Use to Test Assumptions” a team from Kansas University presented findings that demonstrate the differences between librarian-selected and approval plan monograph use in four disciplines. The working assumption was that approval plan titles might be used more frequently than librarian-selected titles.
In some but not all cases that was true. The books librarians select tend to be more specialized, filling perceived gaps in approval plan profiles. The result was to tweak some of the library’s approval plan profiles with YBP and to lower the funding in one librarian’s account.
There’s a cost both in resources and staff time, they observed, and it’s not worth it to spend a lot of time on things that are never coming off the shelf. A book chapter further explains the study. (When the URL appeared on a slide, participants in the chat immediately requested that the URL should be placed in the chat box for easy cutting and pasting, and a moderator from the Learning Times team quickly responded.)
Read more Newswire stories:
Library Journal Releases 2009 Movers & Shakers List
Lean and Green: Technology, Environment Front and Center at 14th ACRL National Conference
At Columbia Conference, Harvard’s Darnton Asks: Is Google the Elsevier of the Future?
NYU’s Mandel: Google Book Search Incremental, Transformative, Worrisome
Another Harvard School Embraces OA Mandate
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