Technology of Outreach: How Technology Supports the Connection

The next program I went to was the Technology of Outreach: How Technology Supports the Connection presented by ALA’s Office for Literacy and Outreach Services (OLOS)

The program was moderated by Zora J. Sampson, University of Wisconsin-Barron County, and the speakers included the following:

-Patricia A. Kreitz, Director, Technical Information Services, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University

-Steven R. Pisani, Head, Cataloging & Interlibrary Loan Services, Westchester Library System, Ardsley, NY [interestingly, there is another Steven R. Pisani who is an actor, stuntman, musician, etc.]

-Jacquie Samples, Serials and Electronic Resources Librarian, Metadata and Cataloging Department Senior Acquisitions Librarian, NC State University (Hilary Davis could not make it to the conference)

-Ewa Barczyk, Director of Libraries, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries

Some of the PowerPoint presentations have been graciously provided and hosted by University of Wisconsin – Barron County’s (UW-BC) Library . Those include the first two of the following:

-Kreitz’s Changing the Service Paradigm: The HEP-SPIRES Evolution
-Pisani’s Acceso a Información: Providing Bibliographic Access in Spanish
-Samples and Davis’ Technology of Outreach and Outreach of Technology

There were two key highlights for me from this program. The first was the idea that face-to-face outreach is still valued in the age of push based technologies like RSS. While many libraries are beginning to use RSS, podcasting, and blogs as a means of outreach, NC State University has a face-to-face program entitled the “CiNC Tour”. CiNC, or Connecting In North Carolina, sends librarians out to places like Lowe’s Motor Speedway and the Village of Woodsong. With all the talk about what push technologies can do, it’s very reassuring that the human element is still being utilized to create personal relationships between libraries’ and their constituencies.

The second highlight of the program was the Ewa Barcyk’s entire presentation. Being quite interested in digital image repositories and imagebases, Barcyk offered attendees and overview of the University of Wisconsin’s digital image collections. One specific exemplary example was the Mark Avery Collection of the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. Little information was known about each photograph. The university called upon the retired theatre community to assist in the creation of additional metadata. The actors & actresses were said to have a fantastic recall of whom they worked with—even remembering the names of children actors & actresses. Another really interesting topic was working with donors. Like museum curators, Ewa and the university’s library staff courted Thomas and Jean Ross Bliffert. The Bliffert donation and the resulting online collection demonstrate the libraries role within the community as a “safe haven” for cultural objects.

One final note. Kreitz described a repository of grey literature for the sciences that I though sounded incredible. It provides open access to 374,421 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology. Interested? Go to http://lanl.arxiv.org/ [curiously, the site is mirrored at http://xxx.lanl.gov/].