Tuesday morning we awoke to fog and while getting coffee before the first session I got some nice pictures of “that building.”

I went to Paul Otlet, Documentation and Classification (SIGs/HFIS, ED) early in the morning. But having seen the movie twice, having heard Boyd and Kathryn, Boyd, and others discuss Otlet before, I used the time to catch up on email, upload photos, etc.

I do highly suggest you watch this movie and/or learn about Otlet and other early documentalists. This is extremely interesting stuff, and may one day allow us to quit telling bad history that gives so much credit to Vannevar Bush [see my forthcoming notes on M. Buckland's Wed. afternoon presentation].

From here, I stopped by the posters when I noticed Michael Buckland [and others] with one, “Infrastructure for the Representation of Events and their Contexts.” Here is a photo with the project URL and abstract. Very interesting, but preliminary, work.

Next up, Building a Digital Teaching Commons to Enhance Teaching and Learning: The MERIC Experience and Challenges with Ingrid Hsieh-Yee (moderator/presenter) (Catholic U), Sherry Vellucci (Rutgers), Bill Moen (UNT), Fran Miksa (UTA), and Diane Hillmann (via webcast) (Cornell).

Dorky as I am about cataloging/metadata education, this was one of my most highly anticipated sessions. [Photo of bad metadata in action.]
MERIC is the Metadata Education and Research Information Center. Please do not confuse this like a few members of the audience did. This is metadata in its broad sense and thus subsumes cataloging. Maybe we need another word that includes both metadata in its 21st century connotations and cataloging in its 19th century connotations, but there is no question that catalogers have been doing metadata for well over 100 years.

I have been aware of this project, in its earlier incarnation, for a while now. Ingrid Hsieh-Yee wrote Cataloging and Metadata Education: A Proposal for Preparing Cataloging Professionals of the 21st Century. A response to Action Item 5.1 of the “Bibliographic Control of Web Resources: A Library of Congress Action Plan” submitted to The ALCTS/ALISE Task Force (2002/2003). Available here from the LoC [pdf].

This report came out of the same LoC conference as the Calhoun Report. Take a look at the Hsieh-Yee report to see how it can be done. Now if only this report was read as widely; there weren’t very many in attendance at the session either. *sigh* Then again, if they are going to get rid of us, why should they worry about our education?

Ingrid Hsieh-Yee covered the evolution of MERIC, and then Sherry Vellucci presented an introduction and background of MERIC.

The purpose of MERIC is to be “A center for teaching and learning materials on metadata education and research:

To promote understanding and teaching of metadata in LIS community

To support users interested in metadata and cataloging education (educators, trainers, practitioners, students)

To facilitate and promote metadata research

To provide a space for metadata and cataloging educators and trainers to collaborate on teaching, learning and research”

The Hsieh-Yee report recommends three levels of technical expertise [a 4th has been added for continuing education], and also recommended an information package on basic metadata be made available (see M. Zeng), an online discussion group for educators (EduCAT), a Web clearinghouse (MERIC), and a one day conference (details not at hand, but did take place).

Next, Bill Moen discussed the newest instantiation of the MERIC prototype. It has grown significantly since Anita Coleman’s first stab. Bill Moen and his class in Spring 2006, and some overlap into Summer, 2006, designed and built the current prototype. Several of the students who worked on it were in the audience.

We watched a bit over half of an approx. 25 minute webcast by Diane Hillmann who could not be present. It had to be stopped as we were running out of time, though. In it, she spoke of “eating our own dog food.”

Last, but certainly not least, was Fran Miksa, who “from the trenches” provided a non-MERIC particpant view. He commented on what he saw in MERIC, both good and bad, and made several suggestions for its improvement, which the panelists seemed to take to heart.

Several questions were asked, but they seemed to focus on the term “metadata” and its seeming dismissal of cataloging, and also on the intellectual property issues of a collection of learning objects and their usage.

The Awards Luncheon was next. Karen Wickett did a great job representing ASIST@UIUC as Student Chapter of the Year. Other members of the chapter were asked to stand while Karen went forward to receive our award. I am unsure who all was present, but I know Karen, Matt Schreiber, and I were there. Photos: Candy Schwartz reading the citation. One of two of Karen speechifying. Karen and Candy. There were many other awards but I did not write them down. Brenda Dervin, Blaise Cronin, Geoffrey Bowker and others received awards.

The first afternoon session I attended was Education for Digital Librarianship: Employer’s Needs and How They Can Be Addressed (SIGs/ED & DL) with Youngok Choi (SUNY Oswego), Kristine Brancolini (Indiana U), Jeffrey Pomerantz (UNC-CH), and Abby Clobridge (Bucknell) with June Abbas (Buffalo) moderating.

Choi presented “Qualifications for Digital Librarians” which reported on a study by Choi and Rasmussen on the competencies required by digital librarians. These competencies were discovered by content analysis of (academic) job postings (CR&L News, if i remember correctly, was the source of postings). She also compared/contrasted these to the findings of a survey of DL practitioners. Summary.

Brancolini, “Creating a Digital Library Program,” reported on the IMLS-funded, joint efforts of Indiana University and UIUC to create graduate level programs in digital librarianship.

Pomerantz in “Education for Digital Librarianship: Addressing Employer’s Needs” argued that most schools will not be able to offer a full degree in DLs and thus reported on efforts to create and map modules and learning object onto the competencies spoken of by Choi. This curriculum development project is a joint effort of Virginia Tech and UNC.

Clobridge presented “In-House Training for Digital Projects.” Since turning to/relying on formal LIS graduate programs is not always an option, this talk reported on Bucknell’s creation of an in-house education program for current practitioners. Metadata is the issue!

The last session of the day I attempted to attend was New Theoretical Approaches (Papers). The first paper was “A Conception-based Approach to Automatic Subject Term Assignment for Scientific Journal Articles.” I was pretty burnt out at this point but I really wanted to hear this paper and the last one by Allen Renear and Yunseon Choi. Unfortunately, I could not understand one word that the first speaker used in about every third sentence or so. I figured it had to be important but I just could not figure it out from the context, so I left to try and refresh my mind. I never did manage to wander back in time for Allen and Yunseon’s paper. But I just discovered that the full papers are on the Proceedings CD we received at registration. Yay!

I went wandering with Ben to try and find gifts for people. He was successful; I was not. After we returned and distributed one of his gifts, Ben and I went to get some dinner at The Boiling Pot.

After this, members of the fledgling SIG-TAG met in the hotel bar to prep for SIG-CON. I will report on these in my next post.