MLA 2010 Conference - Wednesday, October 6

Wednesday, October 6 – 11:30am-1:00pm
Keynote Speaker – Ed Holahan
“Seven Practices of the Inventive Creative”Interesting, engaging speaker talked about different ways people can be creative and innovative at work. He was a toy creator so had interesting stories about how his seven themes were used in his industry. His seven practices were 1) Dream Dreams (cast a net, not a hook), 2) Be Open and Prepared (loved his Nerf ball examples) 3) Try New & Different Things (had audience move watch or jewelry to other hand and talked about stepping out of one’s comfort zone) 4) Find Quiet Time (he mentioned taking time to meditate/think!) 5) Mak Mistakes (I’m sure this slide drove the librarians in the crowd crazy with his purposeful misspelling of Make!) 6) Share the Dream and 7) Let Go and Trust. I liked his quote “Ideas are Your Gold.”

Wednesday, October 6 – 2:00-3:15
Demystifying Ethnography: Exploring Student Use of Library Spaces
Librarians from Gustavus Adolphus College adapted a University of Rochester study to investigate how students interacted with their physical and virtual library spaces. The librarians highlighted their process for this qualitative research study. They emailed a survey (and had a 26% response rate), conducted eight semi-structured interviews, used linguistic listing, mapping, photo diaries, and image association. They also conducted web focus groups. I loved their incentive ideas for garnering participation including exclusive use of their VIP Study Room and giving out 20 free prints for the student printers. I enjoyed learning about their ethnographic study and how they worked to complete this in one semester’s time. A piece of advice they offered all attendees – use student workers as much as possible to conduct interviews, do the mapping, etc., and start recruiting early!

Wednesday, October 6 – 4:00-5:15pm
Cataloging and OCLC Previews & Reviews
This session was an overview of much of what Minitex does as well as major updates in the cataloging area. They stressed how Minitex will be providing free training for RDA (the proposed successor to AACR2). Although this session didn’t go into great detail about RDA, Mark Ehlert (MII) noted a couple of the major changes: 1) there is greater reliance on cataloger’s judgment and in turn a greater focus on the needs of the user 2) RDA spells out abbreviations and 3) new fields – 336, 337, 338. A final decision about if the national libraries will/will not adopt RDA is expected before the ALA National Conference. Sara Ring also touched on ContentDM (software used in Minnesota Reflections project) and noted that the QuickStart version of ContentDM is freely available so to consider that for small-scale digitization projects.

Wednesday evening
EBSCO Hosted reception at the Kahler Grand Hotel that evening gave me the opportunity to talk and network with colleagues in the state.