Busch Campus Center
Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ
For those outside of New Jersey, VALE is an acronym for Virtual Academic Library Environment. It is a consortium of academic libraries in the state. It is always nice to become reacquainted with colleagues that I see only once a year at this conference. A special “shout out” goes to David McMillan, Ray Schwartz, and Carol Nurse who once worked with me at the NJIT Library. I finally met Trevor Dawes of Princeton University whom I have seen numerous times on Facebook, but finally met him. I didn’t meet Amy Kearns, but I did encounter Connie Paul, one of her colleagues at CJRLC. I had an interesting conversation with Judy Cohn, the Director of the Libraries at UMDNJ. She told me about a trivia site call sporcle.com. I have already played it a number of times since Friday. Thanks Judy.
The keynote speaker was Alex Wright, the Director of User Experience and Product Research at The New York Times and the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. The title of his talk was “The Web That Wasn’t”. He talked about people who’s contributions indirectly let to the creation of the World Wide Web. They included:
- Paul Otlet – creator of the Universal Decimal System (UDC)
Vannevar Bush – inventor of early calculators and science advisor to FDR
Eugene Garfield – Forefather of page ranking and citation indexing
Doug Englebart – creator of the online system NLS
Ted Nelson – coined the term hypertext in 1965
Andres Van Dam
Tim Berners-Lee
I will not discuss the poster session and the breakout which I did not attend. For further information please go to http://www.valenj.org/vale/panel/annual-conference-0
Breakout 1 - Streamlining Reference and Instruction Delivery by Mark Thompson of Bergen County College. He discussed the ways he automated scheduling the reference desk and instructional sessions. This methods helped him save much staff time.
Breakout 2 - The State of Reference in New Jersey Academic Libraries. The VALE Reference Services Committee led by Tony Joachim and Pat Dawson reported on the results of the committee’s survey to determine the ways the various libraries are doing reference today. They survey reported on staffing, and the various reference models used throughout the state.
Breakout 3 - Connecting Library Services to Meet Users Needs: Federated Search Unified Discovery Service, Google Deep Web and Semantic Web? Presented by Jia Mi and Yongming Wang (The College of New Jersey). They mentioned that students and faculty have different approaches to information retrieval from librarians. Students often use only one or two databases and don’t understand the differences among databases offered by their library. They mentioned Scitopia.org and science.gov as meta search engines. Mi and Wang mentioned a few commercial products that allow for federated searching of databases. They gave a brief introduction to the semantic web.
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