OCLS Conference - Day 1

Travel into Salt Lake City went well -- that's always the first hurdle!! Beautiful city with the surrounding mountains! This is my first trip to Salt Lake City, or Utah, for that matter!

Today's sessions...

Mobile Devices and Distance Learning -- I didn't hear the speaker for this one, but I did pick up her handout. There's a term in here I haven't heard before: "m-learning." The increased use of mobile devices brings about the need for libraries to explore reaching students via this method of communication. The paper discusses the challenges along with previous and current practices in higher education. Interesting topic...as with many technological advances, I always try to think about how many of our students would benefit from utilizing this? We sure see a lot of students on their cell phones in the LARCs -- could we be tapping into them via that source as well? Food for thought.

Document Delivery vs. Interlibrary Loan -- this was a discussion group having an open dialogue about how services are provided to distance students. It's interesting to hear how others provide service, if they charge, what tools they use (Iliad, Ariel, etc.). One idea in particular I think we should discuss at our college is the idea of using ILL requests more as a Collection Development tool. Those who are doing this made a good argument that many of the items we buy are for "anticipated use" and may never get checked out, but if an ILL request has been made on an item, purchasing it might make more sense -- at least we'll know it has at least one use then! And maybe the odds are increased that another student will use it, especially if it's for a targeted assignment. I know we do some of this already, but this is more targeted in that they have certain criteria to meet (e.g., less than $100 purchase, not a textbook, not fiction, English language, must be able to get it within a week) and they purchase the book from vendors (they specifically named Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble) that can guarantee arrival in a week or less -- about the same as with an ILL request.

ACRL Distance Learning Section -- this was an open forum discussion about ways to align the DLS strategic plan with ACRL's strategic plan. I think it more turned into an open discussion about ideas and ways we could do more collaboration with each other. This is a difficult discussion to summarize as it was really all over the board with ideas -- many expressed interest in affordable, online continuing education offerings through DLS, developing or utilizing streaming video in online classes (discussion about PRIMO, MERLOT), as well as general discussion about statistic gathering and research topics being pursued by some members.

Keynote Speaker -- Lynn Copeland from Simon Fraser University "Library Services to Distance Learners: Is it Time to Recast the Model?" This was not the best keynote I've heard -- it was perhaps a little too much focused on what we all do. Or maybe we were spoiled a bit last year with a futurist speaker who talked more about tools (e.g., the mobile devices mentioned earlier) and not so much on services most of us are already providing. I'm not sure she ever quite got her point across about how we recast the model -- she expressed concerns about some of the current guidelines, so maybe that's what she was getting at??

Had good conversations with Joan from SCC, Julie from St. Scholastica, and Karen Docherty, who used to be at Minitex, then moved onto CLIC -- she's now down in Arizona at Maricopa Community Colleges. This conference is so small (about 200 attendees this year) that I can recognize faces (and have even come up with a few names before reading name tags!) from 2 years ago in Savannah. :)