MLibrary Lightning Talks August 2014

From ml2sig

Past events: MLibrary Lightning Talks March 2014, MLibrary Lightning Talks 2013, MLibrary Lightning Talks 2012, MLibrary Lightning Talks 2011

[edit] 2014 August Edition

Tuesday, August 12th

3 PM to 4:15 PM

Hatcher Gallery

Hatcher Graduate Library

Come and learn about the exciting work that your MLibrary colleagues have been doing in these rapid five-minute presentations. A lightning talk is a brief presentation that quickly informs the audience about a specific topic. In this case, each talk will be just 5 minutes long, and will focus on an area of interest or innovation within the MLibrary community.

Light refreshments will be served.

Topics and presenters:

• What Kind of Wolverine Are You? - Britain Woodman and Angie Oehrli (britainw, jooehrli; Learning & Teaching) - Every year the Learning Programs and Initiatives (LPI) team designs a short, introductory session for incoming first-years during Summer Orientation. This session has to be extremely engaging to command the attention of roughly 6,000 students who have to attend many informational presentations during their time here. This year, LPI created an interactive, “Buzzfeed” quiz as one part of the library’s session. Attendees will take our quiz and find out what kind of wolverine they are (collectively, that is!).

• Your data are bad, and you should feel bad - Bill Dueber (dueberb; Library Systems) - A library technologist has a different set of lenses with which to view library metadata and its utility. Using those lenses, I'll give a whirlwind tour of library metadata in a talk that (a) is completely devoid of nuance, (b) ignores the "historical context" in which these technologies were developed (which turns out to be surprisingly useless in actually helping people find stuff), and (c) may well see me yelling. Along the way we'll dig deep into our own Mirlyn data, after which I'll assert that the MARC21 standard is bad, the AACR2 standards are lazy, and that punctuation mixed in with data is raw insanity.

• Gamers as Teachers - Johnathon Beals (johnathb; Language Resource Center) - Playing games can be a fun and socially rewarding experience, but can it also be an educationally rich, skill-building one? That's what the Language Resource Center, English Language Institute, and the Computer & Video Game Archive set out to discover in a pilot course focusing on improving the speaking skills of international GSI students. In this talk, I will outline the methodology behind the pilot, as well as the essential nature of the role that the UM Library's Computer & Video Game Archive played in the process.

• Conservation of an 1826 iron gall ink manuscript - Erin Kraus (erinkraus7@gmail.com; Preservation and Conservation) - The manuscript “La Bascoana” which belongs to the Special Collections Library, was made in the Philippines in 1826. It was written in iron gall ink, which is made from gallotannic acid, which comes from oak galls, ferrous sulfate, and a binder. As it degrades the ink becomes more acidic and damages the surface to which it was applied. This manuscript is a perfect example of the extent to which iron gall ink can damage paper. The binding was a much later addition to the manuscript, so we made the decision to disbind the book and treat each page separately with a pre-coated mending tissue. The pages were then encapsulated individually in Mylar and these were case-bound to keep the manuscript in its original bound format.

• Transforming Ideas to Rich Media in the Engaged Media Laboratory - Jacques Mersereau (jacmer; Digital Media Commons) - This lightning talk will center on how DMC Video Studio, available to the entire University of Michigan's community, allows any creative person the opportunity engage with media technology - to experiment, collaborate, create, professionally record and ultimately publish in the digital age.

• "I Graduated! Now What?": Providing the Best Career Resources for Undergraduates and New U-M Graduates at the UGL and AAEL Libraries - Alix Norton and Alex Purcell (nortona, apurc; Learning & Teaching) - In the MLibrary system, materials on career resources make up one of the most dynamic non-curricular collections, both in terms of quickly changing content and format. As two ULAs in the Learning and Teaching unit, we are working on improving this collection that spans across UGL and AAEL, so that the collections can reflect the cutting edge content in the field, while also responding to students’ growing need for immediate access to materials. This project will include the creation of a LibGuide and the development of an instructional workshop, which we will use showcase the myriad resources that the library has to offer, and how it collaborates with other centers on campus such as the main U-M Career Center. Audience members will learn about the benefits and challenges of conducting a subject-specific collection development project, how to make sure these specific needs of the library's user community are being met, and the surprises we've encountered along the way.

• The Michigan Publishing Backlist Rights Project: What we've seen, and where we'd like to go - Bryan Birchmeier (bryanbir; Michigan Publishing) - Michigan Publishing is digitizing the entire physical collection of the backlist for the University of Michigan Press. As the Publishing Rights Specialist, I am cataloging the rights and permissions statuses of the backlist. The end goal of this project is to determine how Michigan Publishing might use these titles in the future to complement its current list, revitalize contributions of its past and present authors, and provide new ways of disseminating scholarship to researchers, educators, and students.

• Graphic Design with Librarians in Mind: "LibrarianDesignShare.org" - Jennifer Brown (jencb; Learning & Teaching) - “Good” graphic design elements are completely subjective; concrete information about what works, and what doesn’t, can be difficult to discern from the myriad of resources out there, and digging too deeply into this subject can easily overwhelm anyone attempting to create distinctive designs from a blank canvas. Further, most graphic design resources discuss “good” design within the context of advertising or marketing, which overlooks the unique challenges and considerations inherent to conveying higher education related information to professional audiences. During this lightning talk, I will use several design projects I’ve undertaken to illustrate how I incorporated foundational tenets of graphic design theory into my workflow.