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I started out bright and early this morning filling in for Wanda at a (free) Serials Solution breakfast where they announced the commercial release of their latest product “Summon,” a web-scale discovery service. This, finally, is the answer that libraries need: it “allows the researcher to quickly search, discover and access reliable and credible library content.” It’s “not federated searching, and goes past next gen catalogs. “And, the speaker proclaimed, history will look back on this day as the day libraries took back leadership of discovery of content. OK, I admit, I actually broke out into laughter at this announcement, and that got the rest of my breakfast table chuckling along with me. I quickly got control of myself and listened to three beta partners report on their experiences, issues and hope for this new tool that is going to do away with silos (sorry, Lynn, that’s what they said). David Seamans (who did some consulting work for us back in the day) is now at Dartmouth and he talked about their beta process. You can take a look at the product on the Dartmouth web site. The other two beta sites were Oklahoma State University (a Voyager site) and Western Michigan (also a Voyager site). The consensus was that there is still plenty that needs to be done but that it is speedy. It’s built on the same architecture as VuFind (Solr and AJAX) and one of its main architects is Andrew Nagy of VuFind fame. The most interesting speaker (for us) was Scott Garrison from Western Michigan who talked at length about their VuFind project and might be a good contact for Erik and his group, as they are preparing to go production on it next month.

Following this, I caught the shuttle bus down to McCormick Place to get my missing badge holder. While there, I ran into Debbie Nolan, and my old mentor from PLCMC, Pat Ryckman. I visited the exhibits and got all the pertinent info to get a trophy and t-shirt at tomorrow morning’s Alibris 5K (plus get to Lynn’s presentation on time). I also ran into Carloyn McCallum at the ALA Bookstore (None of my book on display, either they are sold out or too out-of-date, or both!).

I attended a session sponsored by ACRL on “Designing Effective Research Surveys.” Regina McBride, from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, gave a well organized program that would have been very helpful to anyone new to doing survey research, but after 45 minutes when we went into group work without enough worksheets to go around, I left. I did get information on freely available sample calculators that can help you determine if your sample size is enough: http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm and http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html

This afternoon I spent in back-to-back committee meetings for the LITA National Forum Planning Committee. I am on this year’s committee as well as next year’s. This year, the conference is in Salt Lake City Oct. 1-4, and next year it will be in Atlanta. This year’s conference is shaping up nicely and has over 30 concurrent sessions, poster sessions, 2 preconferences and three keynote speakers. One of the interesting things that is done to involve higher participation is 2 sessions of “lightening talks.” This is an opportunity for people to talk (for 5 minutes!) about new technology projects that they are working on, perhaps ones that weren’t in existence when proposals were due several months ago. I volunteered, with Karen Schneider, to be the “wranglers” for this, meaning we will put out a call for proposals, set it up and oversee them. When talk turned to recording the keynote speakers, somehow I found myself volunteering to help record them, since I have such recent experience (and we have the equipment). I’ll be working with another committee member on that, but I hope that my co-producer from the South trip (aka Erik) will be willing to help us 🙂

Tonight, Proquest is having a reception at the Art Institute, one of my favorite art museums. I hope to catch up with some of the ZSR Library folks there, as well as meet some new colleagues.