Updated 8 Nov 2005: Links to audio and video at bottom of post.

Yesterday, Roy Tennant presented the Fall 2005 Phineas L. Windsor Lecture at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.  It was entitled, "The Academic Library in a Googlezon World."

Before the lecture, Roy met with with students in an informal discussion hosted by the student ASIS&T chapter.

I’ll start with my notes from that meeting:

What Roy would like to see in LIS graduates (keep in mind a digital library focus):

• "Graduates who like any metadata that they see."  That is, know/be able to discern the strengths and weaknesses of each type, and when it is appropriate to use for any particular user need.
• XML/XLST experience
• Knowledge of software.  That is, what you can do; how hard it is to do something; basic programming – looping, data structures, etc., so that you know when you are being BSed.  Some will need a deeper knowledge than others of course.  Which langauge?  Impossible to tell.  Learn one or two currently in use, and then learn as much of a new one as you need it.
• Personality traits:
• Learn all the time / on-the-fly
• "Eye on the horizon and and ear to the ground."  Asking "shouldn’t we be looking at this?"
• Not wedded to job description – exploit your talents

Discussed Web4Lib discussion list as a good resource on the web and libraries, broadly based.  Suggested browsing the archives to determine if fits one’s interests before subscribing.

Talked about what he calls "strategic learning."  Take a brief look at something new to get a quick sense as to whether it is useful to oneself, one’s users, or your library.  If not, then move on for now.  Circle back after a while once it is more developed to look into its current usefulness.  Once it is useful, learn enough to do useful work.

I was very pleased to hear Roy say that his "MARC Must Die" spiel of a few years ago was over the top.  He had identified the wrong solution to the right problem.  He told us that he addressed the "correct solution" in "A bibliographic metadata infrastructure for the twenty-first century."  Library Hi Tech.   Bradford: 2004.   Vol. 22, Iss. 2.  [Sorry, doesn't make any sense to link to it unless you have access to the UIUC Library databases.]  Here’s the short version in Library Journal, "Building a New Bibliographic Infrastructure."  15 January 2004.

Now, on the Windsor Lecture, which I am pleased to say was packed.

The talk centered around what Roy called his "trite truisms":

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em

• Open WorldCat records in Google and Yahoo
• Google maps will be able to show the local libraries holding the items in these Open WorldCat records
• Google Scholar showing OpenURLs to content you have access to

Take the concept and run

• Redlightgreen.com simple user interface much like Google.  Provides citations in multiple formats to drop right into a bibliography. …

Stop putting lipstick on pigs

• Do NOT tweak bad systems (see this Library Journal article for instance.)

Be user-focused

• Make the machines perform like a librarian, not the user. 
• "Only librarians like to search, everyone else likes to find."
• 2 parts:
• Needs assessment
• Usability testing (does not need to be high overhead)

Keep what works

• OpenURL resolvers – not perfect, but do one thing well
• Interoperable components

Fix what’s broken

• Our finding tools suck – catalogs, databases
• Focus on specific user groups
• Ask our users AND listen

Strive for efficiencies

• Must streamline where we can:
• Materials acquisition
• Circulation

Exploit new opportunities

• Institutional repositories
• Digital publishing; esp. university presses
• XTF – extensible text format (for instance see 2000 titles from the Univ of California Press backlist with approx. 500 free) [Sorry for no links, but the whole UCP site seems to be down at the moment]
• Robust full-text searching across and within titles

Play to our strengths

Foster agility

• Need for agility stems from uncertainty
• Must have imaginative problem-solving from employees
• Mentioned "
  The Dis-Integrating World of Library Automation," by Dietz and Grant. Library Journal. 15 June 2005.  This is an article co-written by Presidents of two competing ILS vendors.

United we stand, divided we fall

• Internet provides unprecedented opportunity to collaborate:
• Share digital TOCs from books sent to storage
• ONIX data from publishers
• …

Building the academic library our users deserve – modern, professional academic library services.

"We are fully capable of turning these challenges into opportunities."

Questions:

We need "empowering tools for librarians."  That is, not tools that do everything, but tools that do the heavy lifting.

As regards OpenURL:  It is a good model, but does not like that it puts another window between the user and the item.

I apologize that these are so sketchy, but I was trying to pay attention.

PS.  There should be links to RealAudio streams of these talks.  I’ll link to them when they’re up if I’m able.

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Update: 8 Nov 2005  RealMedia here.

RealAudio for Roy’s Windsor Lecture.  RealVideo of Roy’s Windsor Lecture.  RealAudio of Roy’s discussion with the ASIS&T student chapter.