Managing Emerging Tech

Fall, 2009 – Professor Claudia Perry

GSLIS 756 – Managing Emerging technologies

“This course will introduce students to the administration of digital and multimedia resources (software, hardware, peripherals, tools and services) in libraries, with an emphasis on strategic planning and change management. Other issues addressed will include funding, staffing, training issues, evaluation, selection, accessibility and intellectual property concerns relating to new technologies. There will be a practical focus on technology grant writing. Current and developing uses of emerging technologies (e.g. Web 2.0, Library 2.0) in libraries and information centers will be discussed and demonstrated, with selected hands-on practice by students in the GSLIS Mac lab. The course will be taught primarily face-to-face, interspersed with selected classes conducted online, using the Blackboard course management system and/or the Epsilen ePortfolio system.” (from professor’s syllabus)

Reflections:

At the beginning of the class, each student selected a topic to research, and then he or she created a wiki and gave an in depth class presentation. Topics included Sharing Websites, Librarians as Publishers, Gaming and Virtual worlds, e-Books, Folksonomies, Mass Digitalization, Open Access Publishing, Citation Managers (RefWorks/Zotero), e-Learning, Instant and Text Messaging in Libraries, and Open Source Software. The idea to set up a wiki for the graduate program was Professor Ng’s, and he gave a guest lecture on wiki technology (here is a link to his quick cheat sheets on wiki construction. All the wikis from class can be found here.

I loved creating wikis and found that it was very interesting how composition styles need to change when writing for the web, and how it needs to be visual, with more white space, and be accessible to those who scan for content. My topic was Open Source Publishing, and the wikis I created can be accessed from this link.

Boone Gorges gave a guest lecture on RSS, Twitter, and mobile technology, and how the role of librarians has changed from being the managers of content and keepers of the keys, to being content filters in a world where information is available to all. Here is a link to his presentation. He really set the stage for what was to follow and I got totally excited about RSS and Twitter, and it was on Twitter that I learned about the Worpress Camp NYC 2009, which I attended at Baruch. WordPress was one of the technologies that I had been putting off learning about, and I was glad to finally have a chance to check it out. At Baruch I was fortunate to attend presentations on how WordPress is being used in Academic environments. It was here that I learned about CUNY Academic Commons (via lectures from Boone and Matt Gold) and about using WordPress for e-Portfolios. I created a wiki page about it (which has since grown substantially and is now on Wikipedia). I also learned about Scriblio and met the librarian who developed it, Casey Bisson.

The final project for class was to create a mock grant proposal. This included writing a letter of intent and then the final grant proposal (including a cover letter). I chose to propose developing a Web 2.0 alternative portal to a small academic library using Scriblio and WordPress. My idea was to capitalize on Scriblio’s ability to “enhance” bibliographic records by showing each as a “blog-post” and using external “connectors” to Google Books, Amazon, Library Thing, and Flickr. My grant proposal can be found at this link. I found how complex and demanding grant writing is, and how important it is to truly understand a projects components before jumping into development.

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