2014 IFLA

Last week I went to IFLA for the satellite meeting on information ethics, and the offsite summit on library education. It was a great trip – particularly at the satellite meeting, I met researchers and practitioners from all over the world and had engaging discussions with them about ethical issues in libraries. My own presentation at the meeting was about the ethical dilemmas reference librarians encounter at work. Reference librarians are at the forefront of libraries’ public service. It is imperative for them to maintain the highest possible standards of diligence and ethical conduct under time restraints that often require compromise. In my teaching of reference and information services, ethics is a critical topic. However, I haven’t been able to find any good readings on this topic, so I decided to conduct a survey study to explore how reference librarians handle ethical dilemmas at work, write a paper about it, and then use it for my reference class. The findings were very illuminating – I shared them in a 20-min presentation, and then a 40-min discussion ensued among the audience. This format of presentation was quite unique – it’s more like a seminar, and the presentation is to set the tone for an in-depth discussion on the topic, which actually worked quite well for me and gave me a lot to think about. One of the researchers I met there suggested that everybody studying ethics should study philosophy first, and he himself is currently getting a master’s degree in philosophy – how amazing!

The summit on library education was organized by the IFLA Section on Education and Training. We had a good turnout, and I was one of the eight presenters in the Ignite session about the future of LIS education. It was a little stressful to do an Ignite presentation for the first time. In my five minutes, I told a futuristic story of how a 23-year old girl named Alice, interested in digital knowledge management in the farming industry, receives her education in LIS in 2050. It went actually pretty well – thanks to the power of storytelling! The summit gathered LIS educators from different countries. It’s eye-opening to hear them talk about what LIS education is like in the middle east, Africa, south America, east Asia and other regions. I also met two people from North Korea – they were both wearing pins of Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un. I tried to talk to them but they basically ignored me. I wonder how libraries work and how LIS education is provided in North Korea. Hmm…..

Well, as always, IFLA was a great conference to attend, despite sitting next to a 10-month old sick baby for 9 hours and getting vomited on twice on my way home. Oh well. The fall semester starts today, and I’d better get ready for the hecticness.

QQML 2014

I just got back from the 6^th QQML conference in Istanbul. As always, it’s a fruitful trip. What I particularly liked this year was Cornell University Librarian Anne Kenney’s keynote talk “Defining 21^st Century Research Libraries to Implementing 21^st Century Research Universities”, where she talked about the paradigm shift among academic libraries that are focusing less on measuring what libraries are doing and more on developing metrics that measure how well they are enabling research universities to thrive in the 21^st century. Her talk gave me a lot to think about, particularly for the research methods course I intend to develop that focuses on academic librarianship.

I also enjoyed the LibQUAL-related presentations at the conference, which not only included presentations sharing results of LibQUAL surveys in libraries in different countries, but also one interesting presentation that described translating LibQUAL in other languages ( the historical context, the functionality of the current web interface in handling different languages and a reliability and validity analysis for selected language versions). LibQUAL is a great example of conducting survey research in LIS, and in the fall I will be teaching a course about survey research. So these presentations were timely and beneficial.

During the conference I spent quite a bit of time talking to a group of scholars from Taiwan. Two of them got their master’s in LIS and PhD in education. Their students are school teachers, and they are developing information literacy standards and instruction strategies at K-12 level. In Taiwan, teachers are responsible for information literacy instruction in addition to subject teaching, and now the increasing workload has made it necessary to have special teacher positions that exclusively focus on information literacy. This is quite different from the US, there the trend is reversed and school librarian positions are getting cut everywhere because of budget problems. Another Taiwanese Professor comes from National Chengchi University and they have the only online LIS master’s program in Taiwan. We talked a lot about online education and I invited her to share the experience of their online program at the Library 2.014 conference. It’s always nice to learn about online education from the international perspective.

Finally, another highlight of this conference was seeing my old friends Songphan and Cristina. I saw them last year in Rome but didn’t get to talk much because of our different schedules. It’s just wonderful to see them again and catch up with them.

Doing an Ignite presentation

I will be going to IFLA in August and attending the summit organized by the Section on Education and Training (SET). The theme of the summit is “Library and information education and training: Confluence of past and present toward a strong future”, and at the summit a series of Ignite presentations will be given. I’m one of the presenters, and my Ignite presentation will focus on my vision of LIS education in 2015, which I talked about in one previous post.

Using the Ignite talk format, speakers present a topic using 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds. According to Wikipedia, “Ignite is the name for a particular type of event that is held throughout the world—organized by volunteers—at which participants speak about their ideas and personal or professional passions according to a specific format. The event holds the motto, “Enlighten us, but make it quick!” Anyone can throw an Ignite event. The presentations are meant to “ignite” the audience on a subject, whereby awareness, thought, and action are generated on the subjects presented.” As I was preparing for my presentation, I found this Ignite talk about successfully giving an Ignite talk, which really helped an Ignite newbie like me better understand the process.

One of the things that make me feel a bit nervous about the Ignite format is the fact that the slides are auto-advanced. This means presenters will have to time the presentation really well in order not to go off the slide. This is different from all the other presentations I have done before, for which I have full control of the advancement of slides. Looks like for the Ignite presentation, I will need to create a script and practice it several times to create a seamless match between my talk and the slides.

Though a bit nervous, I do look forward to it. I think this could be an interesting format our PhD students may use to share their research with us during the residencies. If one can “ignite” the audience on the topic of his/her thesis research in a five-min talk, he/she is either a grand master of public speaking, or is truly onto something groundbreaking.

A peek into the future of LIS education

Reference and Information Services is one of the courses I teach regularly. At the end of the course, we always have a discussion about the future of reference. Although most of my students are pretty optimistic about it – they think reference service will be transforming itself to meet the evolving needs of library users and will continue be a core component of library public service, there’s always one or two that would rather bet on the demise of reference. I love having this discussion with my students and nudge them to do some futuristic thinking so they can be more prepared for this increasingly dynamic profession.

I recently stumbled upon a blog authored by a senior librarian at National University of Singapore (Musings about Librarianship), and in one of his posts, he gathered eight articles about the future of libraries and shared his reflections on them. As an educator, this blog post made me think a lot about library and information science (LIS) education in the future. In order to figure that out, we first need to understand what future information professionals will be like. A couple of years ago, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill organized a summit titled “Information Professions 2050”, and a wide array of interesting ideas was discussed. To me, “fluidity” will be a keyword in information professions in 2050. Information processing/organization/management/presentation will be an integral component of business operations. While there may be well defined roles, we will see more and more information-related positions created based on the specific needs of a business. Therefore, my idea for LIS education in 2050 is the capability to personalize and customize one’s education. In his book “Life in 2050”, Ulrich Eberl envisions that people will live in “smart apartments” that can recognize weather and even a person’s face. Given the wide spread of highly intelligent technologies then, apartment is merely one of the many aspects of our life that’s “smart”. Higher education will be “smart” too, highlighted by students’ capability to design their own learning experience and career choices. I think personalization and customization will be two leading forces of LIS education forty years later.

It’s fun to do some futuristic thinking, and we will see whether my crystal ball is precise if I’m still alive by then.