Sarah the Librarian

I chose to attend a half-day postconference on using and understanding COUNTER 4 reports, which, if you know anything about stats collection for online resources, you know sounds like a potential torture session. Luckily Jennifer Leffler made it relatively painless. I think one of the most useful things about this session was the chance to slow down and just focus on the methods of stats collection. So often I'm trying to grab stats quick to answer a question or make a point and I'm focusing more on the end result instead of the process going into it. This helped me realize that it's important not to skip the process, that it's just that - a process - so it will take time to get it right. But, at the same time, if I take some time to set up the process correctly, then going forward it should be faster and easier and not require all that time for set up. I have done some of this with stats collection, but hearing someone else's process and a more in depth overview ...

The conference overload was starting to happen on Friday, but I soldiered on. At breakfast I talked to someone from a regional library council. Her background is in special libraries, but in her current position she works with a ton of teeny tiny public libraries, so I was excited to find someone with some common ground. As for the opening speaker, I was pleasantly surprised. The head honcho at Alexander Street Press talked about the future of open access publishing and the reception was mixed. First, he was surprised that librarians didn't think all scholarly publishing was going to be open access in the next decade. Then when he described how publishers were going to stay in business, basically by providing services that either make it easier for researchers to publish or to find what they're looking for in bare bones open access text, the crowd seemed ready to revolt and scream that that wasn't really open access. Maybe because I'm not in academia I'm not so up...

The first full day of NASIG was a busy one for me. It started with breakfast with my NASIG mentor, Jeanie Castro from the University of Houston. As a veteran member of NASIG and electronic resources librarianship, Jeanie was really able to get to the heart of want I wanted to get out of this conference and how to do that quickly. She also confirmed my suspicion that ER&L is really the conference for me and I explained why I couldn't go this year, but hoped in the future that I would be able to go. She also made her pitch for joining a NASIG committee and of course sold the committee she's an ardent member of - continuing education. I got really excited about a project she wants to work on down the road sharing case studies of electronic resources librarianship in all sizes and types of libraries. And I have to admit, as a public librarian focusing on electronic resource management I'm interested in any project that wants to add more voices to a field dominated by acad...

Today was primarily a travel day. Since my flight was late arriving, I missed the First Timers Reception and a chance to meet my mentor, so I sat through the opening session in the back with some other late comers feeling completely out of place because it's not only my first time here and I'm the only one from my library, but I'm also one of the few people from a public library here. The opening speaker works at an architecture museum here in DC and gave a lecture on the history of the city's architecture. It was pretty interesting, but also highlighted just how different a type of library conference I'm at. PLA has fun popular presenters. ALA makes bold political choices. NASIG goes for academic detail. During the meal I got to know my tablemates, two of whom bonded over ASL. Since my boss has been taking a library ASL class, I sort of wish she'd been there to contribute to the conversation. The other two at our table were a married couple from Pennsylvania....