joy at moll projects dot com
This will be a long post--I want a place to throw all the things I learned in the last couple of days at the Missouri Library Association conference.
After volunteering at the registration desk and listening to the motivational speaker at the General Session, the first real library-related session I went to was on the Missouri State Publications Access Program. This is the new electronic version of the depository program that used to send tangible Missouri government documents out to about 40 Missouri libraries.
The electronic access program should provide easier access to current government publications by the citizens of Missouri. The program is also working on preservation issues, storing older information in a digital archive--although I'm concerned that I didn't hear anything about migration of data from one electronic format to newer ones in the future.
I was sitting next to my government documents professor, Charley Seavey, and we were both concerned about the interface to the electronic documents. He called it "clunky." The search box on the MSAP page looks, for all the world, like a Google-style search. But instead of getting KeyWord In Context search results from a search of the full text, the results come back as an on-line library catalog keyword search. Missouri librarians won't have any trouble using it (although they may be surprised, as I was, to encounter it for the first time) because the underlying architecture is the Mobius consortium catalog. But I think the average Missouri citizen would be mystified--and there's nothing to direct that person to his or her local library for assistance.
I picked up a whole stack of Census brochures at the session on American FactFinder. The session was a PowerPoint presentation that took us through all the features of the American FactFinder web site with relevant examples. I suspect I could have learned the same thing by thoroughly exploring the site myself (and should have when we covered this in government documents class a couple of weeks ago), but it was faster and easier to watch our presenter go through it.
As an aside, the main census site has some cool facts up about Halloween today:
Halloween 2004: Oct. 31.
In a program entitled Mud, Mosquitoes, and Mysteries, I learned about educational standards and how they would apply should I ever want to work with school librarians to teach K-12 students about government documents. Here's the most directly relevant site--one compiled by the presenter of the program: Rich Resources for the Not-so-rich School Library Media Center.
The presenter mentioned this article from an Australian publication which looked particularly useful for planning a project in cooperation with a school library: Bund, Alan. "Public and School Library Cooperation: Evaluation Checklists." Aplis 15 (September 2002) : 100-103. The article is available as a pdf file to Mizzou students through the Academic Search Premier database.
I also learned that the ALA publication Information Power: Building Partnerships for Learning is considered the bible of school librarianship and is a must read for other librarians who want to do outreach to schools. And I learned about these three related sites for educational standards and their application in Missouri:
Finally, I went to a session called Information Literacy and Primary Sources in the 21st Century, presented by Mikael D. Kriz of SLU's library which examined the benefits (access, access, access) and drawbacks to having primary source material available on the Internet. He had a great example regarding the loss of context. He showed us a painting that was paraded through the streets during the French Revolution. Seeing it on a screen, one imagines a poster-sized painting, perhaps held up on a stick or carried like a sandwich board. But the actual painting has life-size portrayals of the people and is fourteen feet long! Knowing that creates an entirely different picture in the mind's eye of how that painting must have been carried in a parade.
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