Short Summary of the 2012 VALE/NJ ACRL/NJLA CUS Users' Conference

VALE , an acronym for Virtual Academic Learning Environment, is a consortium of college libraries in New Jersey. Every year in January there is a meeting on the Busch Campus of Rutgers. There were 295 attendees at this year’s meeting from 45 of the 53 member libraries. This blog entry is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis of the meeting. I am just summarizing the sessions that I attended to help me remember what I learned. Hopefully, this summary will be useful to librarians reading it.

Brian Mathews, Associate Dean for Learning and Outreach at the Virginia Tech Libraries, was the keynote speaker whose address was titled Startup Style: Elements of an Entrepreneurial Librarian. He stated that libraries should be entrepreneurial and learn from the start up culture. He emphasized the importance of innovation and said that both frontline and back office people should push for innovation. He felt that in academic libraries there was too much assessment and not enough innovation.

There were 3 time slots set aside for breakout sessions. Nobody can be at two places at once so I decided to attend the three sessions about the VALE Open Source ILS Project. The goal of this project is to create a single-instance shared library system for all VALE libraries. In the morning session Tim McGeary of Lehigh and Michael Winkler of the University of Pennsylvania demonstrated the acquisitions module of the system. In the first afternoon session the members of the VALE OLS Implementation Task Force (VOIT) demonstrated two of the Discovery Tools that are being evaluated for the OPAC. The two were XC (extensible catalog) and Vufind. They should how these tools moved the OPAC into the next generation by allowing it to meet Web 2.0.

In the final afternoon session I served on a panel with three other librarians to discuss the benefits and challenges of collaboration in this Open Source ILS Project. In my role representing the Reference Services Committee I discussed how it may be difficult to reach a consensus among all parties devising the system. Also there would be difficulty in fulfilling the different needs of 53 libraries in the consortium.
The lunch hour was productive since the Reference Services Committee held its meeting.

Of course a large meeting is a good place to reconnect with old colleagues who once worked at the NJIT Library and who have moved on to other positions. It was also nice to meet socially with colleagues who are also Facebook friends. I am hoping that Powerpoint presentations from sessions that I missed will be posted.