Reflecting on the ARL meeting last week and OCUL this week, several QUL priority initiatives are high on my mind – e-research services, webscale library management systems and LAMP.

Starting with LAMP, one of the highlights of ARL was an evening in the new Hunt Library at NCSU. Designed by Snohetta, one of the firms designing our own Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts Centre, the Hunt Library lives up to its vision: “Its bold design is a visual statement of its bold purpose: to be a place not of the past but of the future, a place where our students, faculty, and partners can gather to research, learn, experiment, collaborate, and strengthen NC State’s long tradition of leading transformative change.”  It was very interesting being there as we’re considering the fabric of Queen’s campus as a whole – thinking beyond a single building, how does a system of libraries support and impact learning and research across the university?  Lots of food for thought as we move into the final stages of our master space plan.

Discussions of webscale library management systems are really about developing a vision for our digitally dominated environment:  how might we approach the processes of information management and delivery differently within our own institutions and in relation to each other?  The OCUL summit held in February sparked many such questions and the OCUL directors are discussing next steps for answering them.  At Queen’s we identified this as an area we need to begin considering in 2013-14.

In the e-research realm, at ARL we heard about the Academic Preservation Trust , a preservation environment for research content, and at OCUL we’re discussing a proposal for an OCUL community cloud storage project that could play a significant role in developing effective research data management services.  Again I’m struck by how far ahead we are within OCUL, with a decade of experience managing data in Scholars Portal and working collaboratively across 21 institutions.

On a local community note, congratulations to the fabulous spelling team of Jane Philipps, Laurie Scott and Ainslie Thomson, who made it to the final moments of the Grate Groan-Up Spelling Bee on Tuesday evening.  At one point it looked like KFPL and QUL were going to be spelling all night!  In the end a KPMG team took the top speller title.  The event raised over $20,000 for Kingston Literacy and Skills to help support its Family Literacy Programs.

Family… one of my daughters is travelling at the moment so perhaps that’s why I’m remembering a mother’s day spent in Venice, many years ago.  La Festa Della Mamma — a day of people strolling in the streets and the feeling of ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’  Whether you’re a mother or an appreciative offspring, have a happy mother’s day weekend.

The feeling of academic year-end is in the air.  I like to take the opportunity to chat with students in line-ups and elevators, and this week I heard the wonderful pride and new energy that follows hard work.  The smile of a young woman graduating this year will stay with me all summer.  Another equally buoying moment was a gathering of Library staff to mark anniversaries ranging from 5 years to 40 years.  There were 28 people being honoured this year, and seeing the lively conversation around one table was amazing. Altogether, they represent 695 years of service to the university.  So as this academic year draws to a close, I’m feeling the thrill of working with great people at a stellar university with remarkable students.

As we head into May I’ll be at the semi-annual ARL membership meeting, where I’ve been asked to speak on a panel about restructuring, then attending a McGill Queen’s University Press Board meeting and the Spring OCUL Directors’ meeting. I’ll send an update in two weeks from Sudbury.

In your own end-of-term reflections I hope you’ll feel proud of all you’ve contributed to the university and a renewed sense of energy.  I’ll look forward to seeing many of you at the LAMP information session this morning and throughout the spring and summer months.

It was a pleasure this week to host the external reviewers for our records management review, Ian Forsyth of Simon Fraser University and Wess Jolley of Dartmouth College. We’ll see a report from them later this spring that will inform future directions of this critical piece of the university’s operations and historical record.

I’ve had many conversations about the Library and Archives Master Plan with groups of students and faculty in the past two weeks.  Feedback has included very positive reactions to co-locating Archives with Special Collections in Douglas Library.  Awareness of the riches of the Archives has had a boost recently with some wonderful student projects.  One is on the Campus Master Plan blog — a great essay about Queen’s master plans over the years, researched and written by Tony Gkotsis, School of Urban and Regional Planning graduate student and member of the Campus Master Plan Advisory Committee and Project Team.  Another is a significant collaboration with the City of Kingston, facilitated by archivist Heather Home when she connected Steve Maynard in the Department of History with Kingston City Curator Paul Robertson. They worked together to have students in a Canadian social history seminar uncover the stories of people incarcerated in the 150 year-old jail cells located below Kingston City Hall.  There were student presentations at City Hall recently involving City police administrators and members of the City’s cultural staff, and media coverage has included the CBC and CKWS.  The project was also described in a recent Queen’s News item.

In the evolving and expanding discussions of learning outcomes, library contributions will be well represented by Cory Laverty and Nasser Saleh at a symposium titled Learning Outcomes Assessment, Practically Speaking, sponsored by the Council of Ontario Universities and other higher education groups. Their workshop on Monday’s program is titled Designing Rubrics for Inquiry-Based Learning: Addressing Process and Product.  It examines an inquiry-based assignment in the social sciences and creates an analytic marking rubric that aligns with learning outcomes. The program describes Cory’s and Nasser’s teaching roles well — academic librarians who work with faculty in different disciplines to design inquiry-based assignments and develop students’ research competencies.  I’m sure that the university administrators and faculty at the event will come away with many new insights and ideas.

Last year at this time we were heavily immersed in information gathering and analysis relating to the Access Copyright license decision. Now we’re wrapping up our e-reserves and copyright clearance pilot project and preparing for the next phase of this service, and monitoring the lawsuit Access Copyright initiated on April 8th against York University.  Our library groups are responding with concerns:  see the CARL and OCUL statements.

Have a good weekend!

There is a growing concern about research data that many libraries, including Queen’s, are helping to address in systematic ways.  Stakeholders in the research life cycle – from creators to stewards to users – are realizing that the policies, infrastructure, standards, training and services in place for preserving and accessing research data are lagging very far behind high speed networks and high performance computing, the other pillars of e-research.  Progress in this arena will depend on people skilled in various aspects of research data management services – people like Alex Cooper.

Fifteen years ago Alex was hired for a project relating to the management of physical books, and wouldn’t have imagined doing the work she does today as data and web support assistant.  Her first job with the Library was a part-time temporary one, applying tattle tape to books being moved from multiple small branch libraries into the consolidated Engineering & Science Library.  She then worked in the Engineering & Science Library, Bracken Health Sciences Library, Interlibrary Loans and the Teacher Resource Centre, before becoming the maps and data assistant ten years ago.

In her current position, Alex is working on the questions and answers around developing data management services on a daily basis.  She has been applying metadata and providing access to data files acquired for our researchers since she started in her position, but more recently she has been working as well with data produced by our researchers.  This is relatively new ground for any library, and it means ongoing conversations with our data librarian at Queen’s and with colleagues across the province.  Alex has been very involved in developing metadata processes for the collaborative ODESI data service of Ontario’s Scholars Portal.

Numeracy and facility with software such as Excel and SPSS are part of Alex’s everyday life, and she has developed web and database skills through many courses over the years.  She notes with a smile that when she did her undergraduate degree in religion at Wilfred Laurier she avoided courses in statistics. But clearly her technical interests have always complemented her humanities interests.  Alex has volunteered for many years with the Kings’ Town Players, doing lighting and stage managing or “anything technical.”  She was stage manager for the show that just wrapped up, Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen, and much as she loved it she’s enjoying more free time after volunteering several hours a day for many weeks.

Kingston is Alex’s home.  Growing up she lived in Scarborough and Thunder Bay as well, but Kingston is where she graduated from high school and was happy to come back to after university.   In recent years it has also been a home base for travels further afield.  Alex has interesting observations from her trips to Moscow and Saint Petersburg in 2010, places she had always wanted to visit.

Alex plans to continue to explore new realms in years to come, ideally with travel across the country, the U.S. and Europe, and undoubtedly with the fascinating research projects she encounters in her work.  With her keen interests and enthusiasm for tackling new challenges, Alex is one of those lifelong learners who spring to mind when we think of Queen’s spirit of initiative.

This morning I introduced a set of emerging concepts for Stauffer Library and Douglas Library in an informal gathering of Library and Archives staff, as part of our exploration of options for the Library and Archives Master Plan.  The drawings are now posted on the main floor of Stauffer and you can also view them online, here.  In April the LAMP Steering Group will be listening to feedback on these ideas and continuing to seek input from stakeholders.  I’m presenting to many different groups over the course of the month to engage as many students and faculty as possible before the end of the academic year.  I thoroughly enjoyed speaking at the AMS Assembly last night and was impressed with the great observations and questions from many students.

The Library Leadership Team engaged in an interesting exercise yesterday of considering a short ARL-related survey about what we’ve changed over the years to deal with financial constraints.  The list is long and it was heartening to think of how much we’ve accomplished in our restructuring, thanks to many people.  We also reflected on the work ahead to implement the sustainable collection model arising in our LAMP planning.  Ideas are just forming around this and we expect it will involve discussions in many venues in months to come.

The Library Leadership Team reviewed and accepted a project charter for a Disaster Recovery project group to update protocols and procedures relating to physical collections held across the Library and in the Archives. Another defined project on the horizon is a review of alumni borrower services in response to alumni interest.  A lengthier matter to be considered at our next LLT meeting is the development and implementation of a diversity plan, following upon recent research conducted by our diversity specialist Michele Chittenden.  I’m excited about the potential for ways that the Library can make a difference in this aspect of our communities.

On Tuesday several Library people attended a town hall held by the Senate Academic Planning Task Force on virtualization and online learning. If you search for the word ‘library’ in the group’s lengthy draft report you’ll see some nice examples of our engagement in the online learning realm, and of course I also recommend reading the report as a whole.  Various aspects of the online learning environment are on my mind these days.  The roll-out of our new e-reserve service this summer, integrated with Moodle and then other course management systems, will be a major step forward for the campus.  As well, the Information and Communications Working Group of Queen’s Accessibility Framework has prepared an environmental scan and gap analysis with recommendations that will help to address the information needs of individuals with disabilities, including those in the online environment.  Our report will be delivered to the Accessibility Coordination Team and the Executive Accessibility Steering Committee this month.

On Wednesday I chaired a Scholars Portal meeting in Toronto, where we focused on three strategic topics.  We’re seeing interesting requests from humanities scholars relating to text-mining and will be considering the kinds of support that Scholars Portal could potentially provide.  A proposal for offering a cloud storage solution for large amounts of data is being prepared for the OCUL Directors Spring meeting.  And we talked about the migrations that some OCUL members are anticipating within the next few years from traditional integrated library systems to web-scale unified resource management systems.  Members often wonder if there would be benefits to approaching this as a consortia, so we plan to propose a methodology for answering that question in the coming months.

The Research Data Canada initiative continues, with a teleconference coming up on Monday, and various collaborations with CASRAI are under way for the 2nd annual CASRAI international conference (Reconnect13) to be held on October 16-18, 2013 in Ottawa.  There was an interesting article touching on research data matters in Nature last week, here.

I hope many of you will be able to attend the Accessibility Café on Wednesday (11:30 am, Speaker’s Corner, Queen’s Learning Commons, Stauffer Library) hosted by the Senate Library Committee and the Information and Communications Working Group.  Panelists will discuss scenarios involving a student with vision loss, a student with hearing loss, and a student with a learning disability.  It’s a great opportunity to consider what we can do as a Queen’s community that would support these students’ success from application through to graduation.

Meanwhile, enjoy the weekend and the spring light.

This is a very active period for the Campus Master Plan and the Library and Archives Master Plan, and the two projects are intersecting nicely. If you missed the LAMP posters at the Plan Your Campus information exchange on Tuesday, you can find them online on the LAMP site, here, and as well they’ll be displayed along with all the Campus Master Plan posters on the main floor of Stauffer Library starting April 1st.  These posters present the principles guiding LAMP and a few key ideas, and ask for further stakeholder input.

The LAMP Steering Group had a workshop with the CS&P team last Friday focused on Stauffer Library and Douglas Library, in the context of the principles for the plan as a whole.  A set of drawings will be available next week to generate feedback and ideas.  These are broad stroke representations of space for services, collections and learning/study, to show ideas for various programme elements and the relationships between them.  The detailed planning of specific spaces will happen in the future renovation projects to follow from the master plan.  Next month, a steering group workshop will focus on the other libraries, again in the context of our planning principles and the campus master plan.

One of the most significant proposed changes, as you’ll have seen in the posters, addresses the issues pertaining to archival and special collections.  In the drawings, you’ll see a new vision for Douglas Library as a research centre including archives, special collections and digital scholarship programmes, and enhanced student learning space.  The student learning experience continues to be a focus of Stauffer Library.  The original strengths of the building would be enhanced through the most cost-effective shifts of space, and changes would include new elements such as e-classrooms and media labs as well as more student group rooms and study spaces.  I’ll be speaking at the AMS Assembly next week and the SGPS Council the following week and we’re hoping to get lots of student feedback before the end of term, as well as feedback from all of you and our academic partners.

The Campus Master Plan Advisory Group met yesterday with the Urban Strategies team. We heard key ideas in their early stages, such as the priority of creating spaces for more academic programmes on the west campus as well as retaining the current athletics functions and McArthur Hall.  Our CS&P team lead will be joining in our campus master plan vision session in late April, to feed ideas into that process and to ensure our directions align.

I would be happy to visit any unit to talk about LAMP and the CMP, and I’m sure any member of the LAMP steering committee would enjoy a conversation at any time.

Meanwhile, enjoy the long weekend!

We often talk about ‘transformative change,’ but few of us have experienced as much of it as Wenyan Wu.

Wenyan was born and raised in China, and his high school graduation occurred in the midst of the Cultural Revolution.  He worked first as a farmer, then after a year began teaching primary school, which he did for five years.  He also continued to learn:  he studied English through a radio program, a common form of distance education in China.  Until then, his foreign language experience was with Russian, the language taught in high school.  As the Cultural Revolution was abandoned, Wenyan wrote university entrance exams, in English, and enrolled at the Xian Foreign Language Institute in 1978 to study English and English Literature.

Wenyan’s library career began in 1982, when he completed his undergraduate degree and was assigned to work at the Wugong Agricultural Science Research Centre, where he provided information services for seven years.  This was a significant period in library automation, and Wenyan went abroad to learn more about it as a visiting librarian at the University of Manitoba in 1989.  It was also another significant period of change in China:  while Wenyan was in Manitoba, the Tiananmen Square protests occurred.  Instead of returning home, Wenyan applied to stay in Canada.  He enrolled in the Master of Public Administration program at the University of Manitoba and was awarded his degree in 1992.  While he was a student he continued to work in the library part-time, and as he looked for full-time work after graduation his library colleagues encouraged him to consider doing a Master of Library Science.  He decided to take that path, and completed his MLS at Western in August of 1994.  In October of 1994 he began at Queen’s as an Engineering and Science Librarian.

When Wenyan came to Queen’s, there was one other science librarian and one science online database.  BioAbstracts was available in the new Stauffer Library, as a 4-CD-ROM set.  It was a wonderful advance when a CD-ROM tower was installed, eliminating the need to handle one CD-ROM at a time!  Wenyan still remembers the commands required (F2 to search, F4 to display, F6 to print).  Within a few years, of course, the virtual world was burgeoning and the new Engineering & Science Library had opened.

Wenyan’s observations of changes in science librarianship during his career are almost as interesting as the cultural transitions he has experienced.  He notes how technology has transformed the library and allowed a greater focus on teaching and research.  It was a topic he explored on academic leave in 2011, when he visited research libraries in China and learned about their resource sharing programs and information literacy programs.  Wenyan’s own liaison responsibilities are in the areas of mining engineering and computing, and he is currently standing in for colleagues in mathematics, statistics, physics, engineering physics and astronomy.

Throughout his life, Wenyan has seized opportunities to learn and grow, and he has appreciated seeing this in his children as well.  His son has a graduate degree in physiology and is now finishing medical school and his daughter is completing a commerce degree.

As he approaches twenty years at Queen’s, Wenyan expects that change will continue to be a constant.  It has certainly made for a fascinating story so far.

You still have a chance to catch some great Inquiry@Queen’s events and posters.  The poster presenters will be at their posters in Stauffer Library today, Friday March 8, between 11:30am and 1:00pm. And what could be more intriguing than Skull Lady, Rat Girl and Brain Man: Superheroes of Inquiry!? (10:30, Speaker’s Corner.)  Kudos and thanks to all the organizers of another (the 7th!) fabulous event showcasing undergraduate research, and to all the student presenters and faculty sponsors.

Another repeat event dear to our hearts and library mission is Freedom to Read Week.  On February 26th in Speaker’s Corner, twelve people gave voice to books that have been challenged at various times and places. The range of titles was interesting and varied, from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.  Again, thank you all for your championing of free expression.

Artistic expression abounds in a new exhibition that opened yesterday in the Jordan Special Collections Library:  Contemporary Books Arts in Eastern Ontario.  The launch was very well attended, and featured opening remarks from Margaret Lock of Kingston and Larry Thompson of Merrickville.  They are the coordinators of the exhibition and two of the artists with works on display.  I highly recommend taking some time to peruse the exhibition: there are few places in Eastern Ontario where you would find anything like it, and the books and book objects are incredible.  It’s likely to draw great interest from local communities, as well as students interested in learning about book arts.

It was wonderful to see so many of you at the All Staff Meeting on Tuesday, and to hear about a Queen’s-related initiative in Bangladesh, from Paola Durando. Paola was there in January, as part of a team working on the ICACBR (International Centre for the Advancement of Community Based Rehabilitation) Interprofessional Project on Disability, Maternal and Child Health. Thank you to Paola for putting together such an informative presentation.

I participated in an event last Friday at McMaster University, Looking forward: re-imagining the academic library’s role in teaching, learning & research.  It was a great program that highlighted key things we’re thinking about in academic libraries and provided a useful overview for the university community.  My presentation slides, and a few comments, are posted here.

The Library and Archives Master Plan Steering Group had a workshop with our planning partners at the beginning of this week. It was a ‘vision’ session that explored programme opportunities for teaching, learning and study space and services space.  We’re now moving from the discovery and analysis phase of the project into the exploration and planning models phase.  Following our next steering group workshop on March 22nd, we’ll have a public display highlighting aspects of the project to date, as part of a #planyourcampus Information Exchange on March 26th in the Queen’s Centre Atrium, from 11:00am to 2:00pm.  The display will be mounted in Stauffer Library in April.

The Library Leadership Team met on February 25th.  Discussions included future steps following the February 22nd OCUL Summit on Next Generation Library Platforms attended by Anne Brule, Jackie Druery, Jane Philipps and Michael Vandenburg.  The Summit planners are compiling notes and slides, and then we’ll do some digesting and thinking here at Queen’s and across OCUL.  LLT also reviewed the charter for a project to review the Library’s and Archives’ current fleet of microform (microfilm, microfiche, etc.) readers, identify our needs moving forward and recommend options for replacing our existing aging machines with new equipment.

Have a good weekend, and enjoy springing forward!

Today’s symposium at McMaster University drew a good crowd of people from different parts of the university and other institutions to engage in “Looking forward: re-imagining the academic library’s role in teaching, learning & research.” The organizers did a great job of building a program that highlighted key things we’re thinking about in academic libraries, providing a useful overview for the university community as it thinks about the next stages of the library’s evolution.

It was a pleasure to share the podium with speakers who are thinking deeply about these directions — David Attis, Brian Detlor, Rebecca Graham, Heidi Julien, Parminder Raina, Huzaifa Saeed and Kathleen Shearer.  I was asked to speak about The Power of Partnerships in Canadian Research Libraries, a topic near and dear to my heart.  I found it interesting and a little challenging to approach it with an audience of university administrators, faculty and students in mind — our permutations of partnerships are as familiar to us in libraries as our acronyms, and we know people find those opaque.  I organized things into concentric circles of partnerships, with the researcher at the centre of the target, and in the context of the knowledge transfer cycle and what we know about creating information infrastructures.  Essentially, I wanted to emphasize that we need people in our libraries working in local academic relationships to drive what we do on a large scale, and the large scale enables good things at the local level.

My presentation slides with notes are posted here.

This week I’d like to provide an update on the Library and Archives Master Plan (LAMP) process, and details regarding a review of the university’s records management program.

LAMP planning is well along the way with the discovery and analysis phase and is entering the exploration phase.

On February 14^th the LAMP Steering Group participated in a workshop with our CS&P team.  The team began by reviewing the context and key strategic objectives of the planning and a summary of their consultations, information gathering and analysis to date.  They described what they had learned in terms of the physical condition and opportunities of each facility, as well as the ideas provided by stakeholders.  They also reviewed the general discussion points emerging in the development of the campus master plan.  In considering the next phase of planning, they proposed principles relating to: teaching/learning and study spaces; services; collections; technology; facilities operations; library as place; accessibility; diversity and community.  They floated a number of scenarios for the facilities in 5-year and 20-year timeframes, to test ideas emerging from the consultations and analysis.  Based on the workshop discussion and further input throughout the process, ideas will continue to be honed until we arrive at the options to be presented in the documentation phase.

In the next LAMP Steering Group workshop, March 4^th, a member of the Campus Master Plan consultant team will join us and we’ll be discussing specific programmatic ideas for the use of our spaces (for example, the spatial relationships of services, collections and teaching/learning and study spaces).

For minutes of meetings and other information on the LAMP project, please see the LAMP website.

The records management review is a university initiative proposed by Paul Banfield and myself, in consultation with the University Records Manager, Gillian Barlow.  A Queen’s web page with information about the review will be available shortly, but meanwhile full details can be found in a background document, here.

An external review team will visit Queen’s on April 16 and 17.  The document above indicates background information they will be considering and the meetings planned for them so far; please let me or Paul know if you have any additional suggestions.  The external reviewers are Ian Forsyth of Simon Fraser University and Wess Jolley of Dartmouth College, selected for their knowledge of records management and digital information management and relevance to Queen’s (e.g. Dartmouth College is a member of the Matariki Network).

Ian Forsyth is the University Archivist and Information and Privacy Coordinator at Simon Fraser University.  He previously held positions as Deputy Archivist for Ontario and was the first FOI/Privacy Coordinator at the Archives of Ontario.  Before that he worked both as a government records and private manuscript archivist.  Ian has over twenty-five years experience developing, implementing and managing archival, information management and access and privacy programs.  At SFU he is responsible for the University’s corporate archives, its records management program and coordinating copyright administration as well as operational activities that enable compliance with BC’s information and privacy law.

Wess Jolley is the Records Manager of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, a position he has held since 1994.  He is a Records and Information Management professional with over 30 years of experience in higher education and non-profit environments.  Prior to Dartmouth College he worked as Records Manager for the University of Utah, and as the Resource and Data Management Coordinator for the California Child, Youth and Family Coalition, as well as in private consulting and data system design for the non-profit sector in California.  In his current position at Dartmouth College, Wess is responsible for managing both a traditional records center for physical records, and moving Dartmouth towards Enterprise Content and Enterprise Records Management systems and workflows.  He has been a Certified Records Manager (CRM) since 2001.

I’m very pleased that we have the opportunity to conduct this review – the university records management program is a critical element of the university’s governance, administration and historical record.  It has been ten years since its inception, and we want to be sure we are well positioned for the years ahead.

Yesterday I attended OCUL meetings involving the Executive Director of the Orbis Cascade Alliance, to learn more about their consortial endeavours and organizational approach.  He is speaking today at the OCUL Summit on URM/Web-Scale Systems attended by several Queen’s people.  This is an area to watch, as we think ahead to the next stage of our library management systems.

Wishing you a happy end-of-reading-week weekend,

Martha