Inside ZSR
James O’Donnell Arizona State: Within a Star-Wars-themed keynote (complete with light saber), he remarked that if you buy a knock-off Louis Vuitton bag you expect it to fall apart. If you get a pirated PDF from an offshore website, you get better access and fewer hurdles. Michael Levine-Clark at U. Denver did three local surveys... more ›
On May 12, Chris and I attended the annual Carolina Consortium Meeting at UNCG. The format was half business meeting/half mini-conference with a focus on the resources that we purchase (or potentially could purchase) using the Consortium’s discounts. In the business half, I scribbled down the product names of a few offers that we might... more ›
A building at Portland State University As a collections person, I found this conference rather thin on relevant programming, especially since I knew that Roz/Kyle/Kaeley would cover all the instruction angles. That said, the program committee did a good job of spreading the collections-focused sessions among the time slots so I had at least one... more ›
For the third straight year, Derrik has facilitated group viewing of the online presentations of the Electronic Resources & Libraries conference. Read on for some gleanings I reaped from three of the sessions that I watched live and one that I’ve already seen as a recording. I will probably continue watching recorded sessions as I... more ›
Illinois State University spoke about their experience with Kanopy. Two key observations about impact: After starting DDA, they saw an increased number of requests to license non-DDA Kanopy titles – suggesting that some percentage of faculty users treat Kanopy as a standalone database. ISU had previously bought streaming rights to some individual titles, which they... more ›
Thanks to a fortunate alignment of events, I got to go on an all-expenses-paid (by me) trip to the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, MI at Western Michigan University. Most sessions were 1½ hours long and included three presentations around a common theme. I attended the following sessions (WFU faculty who presented are listed in... more ›
For the second year running, I “attended” the Electronic Resources & Libraries conference by watching streamed sessions. I still plan on watching sessions as time permits throughout the year, since the group purchase that Derrik made runs until the next conference is held in 2015. (ZSR folks: Ask Derrik if you need the password.) One... more ›
I also attended the North Carolina Serials Conference last month. Since several other ZSR bloggers have already reported, I will focus on two ideas put forward during a late-morning plenary session, which featured David Crotty again. Crotty remarked that the paper announcing the cure is not as important as the actual cure. We might make... more ›
Here are the highlights of the most important sessions I attended at Charleston: Derrik has already covered the first session on discovery services. I won’t repeat what he said, except to link to the slides. I’ll also point out that we were one of the 149 libraries that gave approval to be studied (slide 10),... more ›
Since I live very close to the Convention Center, I volunteered for the Local Arrangements Committee. In addition to managing the bag-stuffing operation, I spent several hours staffing the Local Information Booth, from which I gave opinionated advice about local restaurants (and handed out restaurant guides prepared by Hu!). I was thrilled to leave my... more ›