Brick and Click Libraries Symposium
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07419050510644310 |
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| Pages | 7-8 |
| Author | Christopher Cox |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
Brick and Click Libraries Symposium
Christopher Cox
LIBRARY HITECH NEWS Number 10 2005, pp. 7-8, #Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419050510644310 7
Technology has changed the way
libraries deliver services and the way
we do our jobs. It has provided
solutions to practical problems and
made our buildings less content holders
than places where students can interact
with content and with each other.
Northwest Missouri State University
annually brings librarians together in
Maryville for the Brick and Click
Libraries Symposium, a forum for
discussion of technological trends and
issues. The 2005 version, held on the
Northwest campus on Saturday,
October 15, included 30 programs and
five poster sessions. What started in
2001 as a regional program has grown
into a nationwide phenomenon, with
librarians from as far as New Jersey and
California in attendance. Trends of note
this year included using technology to
track reference interactions, to create
knowledgebases and institutional
repositories, and to provide access to
government information in digital form.
Below are summaries of five sessions
from the program.
Jackie AlSaffar, Reference Librarian
and Centers Liaison for Buena Vista
University in Iowa, discussed her
institution's implementation of
LiveTime's customer service and
support software (www.livetime.com/).
Buena Vista offers two online programs
of study to 1,500 students in 15 satellite
centers. AlSaffar explained how
serving this diverse group of off-
campus students has changed the way
the library does business. It has become
highly visible in Angel, the campus'
course management system. It has
established guidelines for mail flow to
provide prompt feedback to students'
e-mail questions, set up test links to
databases and full text to troubleshoot
problems beforehand, and developed
close relationships with other campus
service departments to serve students
better.
With the purchase of LiveTime,
librarians can track customer queries by
using an incident management utility
and create a knowledgebase of
frequently asked questions. When a
student calls or e-mails, a librarian can
open a ticket to note the problem. The
software is LDAP enabled and offers
built-in escalation paths and reporting
capabilities. Since the entire campus
uses LiveTime, questions can be
referred to other service departments. If
similar questions are noted, librarians
can create articles in the
knowledgebase. These articles can
include attached files and can be
searched for by students via a Google-
like interface. The knowledgebase is an
improvement over FAQs, not only
because it can be searched, but also
because of the software's document
ranking system, which takes into
account frequency of use and user
comments to ``bubble up'' pertinent
documents to the surface. All entries are
time/date stamped and are easily
entered, updated and deleted.
AlSaffar's comments concerning
how librarians could better serve
distance learning students were quite
useful. LiveTime, however, was never
demonstrated or screenshots shared.
AlSaffar would have been better served
spending less time on the environment
that prompted the purchase and more
time on the software itself.
In the next presentation, Cynthia
Akers and Tatiana Pashkova from
Emporia State University in Kansas,
joined by Christine Angolia from the
University of Missouri-Kansas City,
demystified digital government
documents for reference librarians.
Prompted by reorganization and the
closing of the government documents
service desk, Emporia University
reference librarians needed a crash
course in government documents to be
able to answer questions and start
thinking like government information
librarians.
Pashkova, inspired by Charles
Seavey's article ``Musings on the past
and future of government information''
in last August's American Libraries,
recommended three groups of sources
for the ``wannabe government
information specialist.'' Sources like
the United States Government Manual
(www.gpoaccess.gov/gmanual/index.
html) and Thomas (http://thomas.loc.
gov/) will assist those new to
government information in
familiarizing themselves with various
government branches and agencies. A
toolkit of web sites such as Country
Studies (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/
cshome.html) and American Memory
(http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/) will
help answer the most common
questions involving government
information: statistics, country
information and primary resources.
Finally, search engines like FirstGov
(http://firstgov.gov) and pathfinders
linked from Godorts's Handout
Exchange (www.lib.umich.edu/
govdocs/godort.html) should be
successful in filling in the gaps.
Christine Angolia followed with a
pep talk of sorts, assuring all that the
same reference interview techniques
(assessing the content, determining the
source, etc.) work with government
information questions as with others.
University of Kansas librarians Carmen
Orth Alfie and Jeff Bullington's
session, ``Government information
awareness to the masses'' covered
similar ground, unearthing
apprehensions reference librarians may
have about utilizing government sources.
The most personally enlightening
presentation was ``How academic
libraries can develop database-driven
web applications using Macromedia's
ColdFusion MX'' by Michael Garrett,
Systems Librarian at Our Lady of the
Lake University in San Antonio.
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