Submitted by Richard Sapon-White, February 10, 2020

At my first ALA meeting as Chair of the International Relations Round Table, I was mainly busy with round table-related meetings but managed to squeeze in several interest groups that related to cataloging/metadata. Highlights appear below.

Round Table Coordinating Assembly

Chairs and representatives of the various ALA round tables meet to discuss relevant issues. The focus of this meeting was on the report of the Steering Committee for Organizational Effectiveness, which is leading the way to reorganizing ALA. Of greatest concern to the round tables is a proposal that they each have a minimum number of dues-paying members equivalent to 1% of ALA membership. IRRT, one of the larger round tables, offers international members free membership, so despite our numbers, IRRT needs to do a major membership drive in the coming few years. Needless to say, with many round tables on the chopping block, this was an animated and rather contentious meeting.

We’ve Got to Stop Meeting Like This…Making Meetings Work

This workshop for ALA officers and committee chairs was conducted by the ALA Council’s parliamentarian, Eli Mina. He discussed how to create agendas and conduct meetings so that the focus is on getting work done. He had many useful tips, plus attendees were given two books on meetings that he has authored.

IRRT Welcome Session

This Friday afternoon meet-and-greet, sponsored by the IRRT executive board, attracted international visitors from Japan, Canada, and several other countries. Midwinter is not as heavily attended by international librarians as the Annual meeting, but it was nice to welcome those who could make it and answer questions about the conference.

IRRT All-Committees Meeting

As IRRT Chair, I was kept busy throughout the meeting answering questions about the round table and plans for the Annual Meeting in Chicago in June.

ALCTS Faceted Subject Access Interest Group

The FAST Policy and Outreach Committee promotes adoption of FAST and related tools. They posted an FAQ about FAST and have webinars planned for later this year. They are also developing training materials.

Future of Subject Access at the British Library: The British Library is conducting a project to add controlled vocabulary to records that lack any subject access. They especially were evaluating FAST and found the terminology compatible with LCSH and linked data. Assisted by OCLC, they decided to test the ease and efficacy of adding FAST terms in several workflows and are now considering replacing all current workflows with FAST. They will use FAST for British literature and media colletions. They didn’t want to stop using LCSH for mainstream materials. This approach will be used for grey literature, electronic media, Asian and African collections, archives and mss. They have a need for more training.

Discovery of datasets in catalog: Rowema Griem, Tachtorn Miller, Yukari Sugiyama (Yale) found that datasets are not cataloged in any consistent way. There is a limited number of dataset-related terms in controlled vocabularies. There is also a lack of guidelines to distinguish datasets from other computer files and/or recording dataset characteristics in MARC. The 336 field can be used to identify a computer dataset, but a 2nd 336 is needed to identify what type of data is included. A list of proposed terms had been proposed via SACO for LCSH and LCGFT, but some were not accepted. More information can be seen at http://Web.library.yale.edu/cataloging/datasets

IRRT Executive Board Meeting

Approved plans for Annual and awardee for the IRRT Mission Enhancement Grant (Ray Pun, who will be planning a conference on linked data in Croatia). Also approved a revision of the round table’s officers manual.

Steering Committee on Organizational Effectiveness (SCOE) meeting with round tables

SCOE is causing quite an upheaval in ALA, recommending a lot of changes for association governance. The impact of these changes on the round tables in particular has the potential to eliminate many of them. This session did not allay anyone’s fears. I believe that IRRT is probably safe for now, but we will need to up our membership in order to stay viable.

International Relations Committee

As IRRT Chair, I attended the IRC meeting to report on IRRT activities. IRC debated a resolution before council that would have ALA go on record as opposing recent legislation to prohibit the US government from conducting business with firms that support the boycott/divestment/sanctions movement against Israel. None of the 3 committees, including the IRC, that this resolution was referred to by Council voted in favor of it.

PCC Participants meeting

Several presenters discussed the evaluation of Romanization in catalog records. A recent survey indicates that librarians, especially tech services librarians, rely on Romanization greatly. It is also used for online searching as well as pronunciation and marking resources. A very interesting set of presentations that favor continuing the inclusion of Romanized data in records.

I also attended a presentation on a Wikidata project conducted by Lori Robare (UO) relating to the Oregon Book Awards and Oregon women mayors.

And last but not least (if you have read this far!) I took a tour of the Free Library of Philadelphia’s special collections and music score collection. One highlight was seeing the stuffed pet raven that belonged to Charles Dickens, named Grip. Dickens’ book narrated by Grip was the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.”

New Roles and Changing Landscapes, ACRL division level committee (member)

Discussions on CUPA (college and university professional association) work on rewriting national library job PDs; discussion on the work on the OER course development on dealing with change in libraries, and the EDI pipeline work.

Climate Change Conversation/World Café (4 hour workshop)

Sponsored by SustainRT and ALA President Loida. The session was learning while experiencing how to run a World Café style conversation session on dealing with climate change.  Key highlights:

• An opening mindfulness breathing exercise to get focused after a crazy ALA and city experience; also had a labyrinth on paper to trace your finger through or use a pen was grounding and centering
• Term “Transformational Resilience” to explain what we need to do now, transform or regenerate while we remain resilient in the horrible state of the world today.
• Idea of doing “snack meditation” to help take care of ourselves in this stressful time; RE: any small moment you have, take time to breath and be present, and letting the mind relax
• Art, writing and poetry are still very important; recited the Green Gulch Farm poem “ we live in all things, all things live in us” AHHHH!
• Espen Stokes’ Five Ds: distance, doomsday, dissonance, denial, identity
• Libraries as Climate Agents; librarians are the most trusted profession after nurses; libraries are culture of trust, a third space, have resources, make connections, can amplify partner voices
• 2020 Earth Day 50^th Start a celebration that day that lasts all year perhaps? Idea of a Human Library climate change themed
• BOOKS: Beautiful World our Hearts Thought Possible; Pleasure Activism
• AUTHORS: Adrianne Maree Brown; Kathleen Dean Moore, Octavia Butler, Grace Lee Boggs
• CHECK OUT: Art of Hosting by Kristen Mastel, U of MN (*download!!)
• WORLD CAFÉ: (quick guide to World Café )
  • This is a practice not a facilitated discussion!
  • Min of 12 people; small round tables with groups of 4-5 max; at least more than an hour; Provide snacks; bring foods to share
  • Include a centerpiece of earth (we have cut juniper pieces, but could be flowers, potted plants etc) ; also have large butcher paper and markers to draw, write
  • Have 3 questions, that are open ended but with solid structure
  • Set the context, why you are here and some guidelines; do a warm up “what is stirring in your right now about Climate Change?” Think, draw/write, then share in small group. (*could also hire a student/volunteer who can draw to be your graphic recorder for small groups!)
  • Each questions will take 20 mins; open one at a time; spend time in small group discussing, drawing, etc; make sure everyone has a chance to share with diverse perspectives and listen in each group
  • Either share out the large group from each table OR have a host stay at the table to share with the next group; since at the end of each question, move to a new table, new people

SustainRT Program: Carbon Offsets Panel

Uta moderated an amazing panel of mainly non librarians on carbon offsets. We are looking 544 arctic square feet a year. This IS a critical time people!  First, always think to reduce and cut back.  The gist is this: Use only 3^rd party certified carbon offset programs; these not only help the earth, but help others (often women, marginalized populations) trying to develop real projects that are earth and people friendly! Social justice and earth justice program.   1 domestic flight = 1 tome of carbon pollution

Panelist 1: Blake of Cool Effects Carbon Company of about 500,000 people; First, reduce your carbon (they offer resources and tools to guide you!), then look to offset your travel. 90% of their work goes to support projects from solar cookstoves to biogas to forest regeneration.

Panelist 2, Jennifer, director of Center for environmental Leadership; Conservation International.  “We need to work with businesses if we really want to change things” Have over 200 partners now. REDD+  helps developing nations to get carbon lower thorough incentives such as empowering women and their project and education (Ex: Alto Mayo protected forest in Peru that is being decimated; they were using ag practices that don’t work in that climate either; so educated them on growing shared grown coffee that is good and why logging is not helping, etc.)  United airlines now offers carbon offsets purchases when you buy a ticket, from working with this group.

Panelist 3: Lisa of SustainCERT, part of Gold Standard Foundation (Swiss) started from WWF who realized carbon offsets were being offered with horrible consequences like taking land from native owners to do wind turbines. Need to certify carbon offsets! Need to reduce in a robust and permanent way; also must positively support sustainable development/local community! They also do impact investment funds to show the truth in the fluff.  Their project cycle can take 9 months to 2 years, very thorough.

Panelist 4: David Selden, librarian at National Indian Law Library in Boulder. Their library analyzes and cuts back on 4 things:  energy consumption, paper consumption, air travel, waste (reduction). Yes when it was volunteering and paid on your own or through your travel funds people did not do it. They now decide on a project a year for their carbon offset support. They used the data, proved $$ savings to get admin on board and now use their library budget to pay for carbon offsets when they need to travel

–  if you can show your admin you are saving in other ways, can you use that savings toward the offset purchase? OR will you be willing to pay it yourself ($13-20 a trip!)? its only 2 fancy Starbucks coffees you are giving up!

ACRL ULS Mid-Level Managers Discussion Group

Somewhat good discussion and sharing in a confidential ways about struggles as middle managers. EDI came up in hiring and many were very interested in OSU’s search advocate program.  Too large a group to have serious conversations but did learn a good process managers might use called Situation Behavior and Impact  (SEI) in order to help people grow and change; also “Cultural humility” and “Other oriented” as key terms and ideas for being more open minded.

ACRL EDI Discussion Group (visiting, not member)

Some updates and sharing:

• Only 9 people in the room, including the soon to be chair Derrick Johnson from American U
• Diversity Alliance Task Force ending next year – looking to get this wrapped into this committee!
• Would like to create a TOOLKIT including webinars about it, to help educate marginalized populations and new librarians on things like tenure, and job negotiation
• Mentioned our DSP – suggested they look into U of IL scholarship (need to follow up on what this is??)
• Asking people to please submit EDI related presentations and poster ideas for ALA 2020

Then this happened….   this was annoying when a white male administrator talked for more than 35 minutes about his “great new position” Coordinator of EDI at LARGE RESEARCH Library, both annoying that he dominated so long, and that he thought this idea of a position was the best things ever. I finally called him out on the job a bit “so you can let of POC make the changes your library needs to make in this role and not you as an administrator work on changing your culture and policies?!?” but I did not call him out on dominating the conversations; should I have?? Idk! It was not my group, I was visiting, and others (almost all marginalized populations) did ask him questions that kept him going forever. !?!?

SustainRT  outings: 

US Botanical Garden Tour with the Sustainability Round Table

SustainRT Leadership Dinner

The CNI Spring Membership meeting was in St. Louis this year.
Kathleen Fitzpatrick delivered the opening plenary on topics covered in her book, Generous Thinking. The premise of the book is that we need a paradigm shift, that we need to re-orient the work of the university to focus more on building community.   She contends that universities need to remember the concept of being a public good, that we should restore that as an orientation for all of our work.  We should do the work of the university in public, resisting privatization and turning away from proprietary systems in favor of collectively publicly oriented systems.   She talked about Humanities Commons as an example of this idea of community supported infrastructures – open source, open access, open infrastructures.  Mentioned “beprexit” and how bePress was seen as a “good” player in the library application product space until Elsevier’s recent acquisition.   She talked about what happens when we have success in community supported infrastructure, using arXiv as an example and calling it a “catastrophic success” because it has grown so much (and changed the landscape of scholarly communication in physics-related fields) that it outgrew its infrastructure.  We in libraries are unaccustomed to deep cross-institutional work and coalition – at which point she mentioned Samvera and the collective challenges our community faces about resourcing and sustainability.
We need to plan for demonstrating how the thing supports itself, past the initial funding and energy in developing something like Samvera.  These challenges are tied to the economic concerns that non-profits face, but it’s not merely economic – challenges exists in domains of green standards or tech standards.  Ultimately the most challenging aspect is social sustainability.  These open products need ways to support “groupness” not just a commitment to the product.  We need strong community.   She talked a bit about the intricacies of defining community in productive way that is not just lip service or a way to absolve public support of a thing.   A call to community can be a way to form solidarity, another term that needs to be well-defined.   Fitzpatrick referenced the work of Elinor Ostrum, a 2009 Noble Laureate in Economics (the only female thus honored) and described Ostrum’s idea of common pool resources – “groundbreaking research demonstrating that ordinary people are capable of creating rules and institutions that allow for the sustainable and equitable management of shared resources.”

Fitzpatrick does not think privatization is the answer, but that it is a real threat to higher ed. She thinks universities need to stop competing with each other, but as it is currently structured, higher ed promote competitiveness to uphold prestige.

Other mentions:   Brett Bobley and the Twitter thread on paper machines ;  Chris Long and Hu Metrics: https://humetricshss.org/author/cplong/

I hope the slides and video of this talk will be posted soon – it was thought-provoking and inspirational.  The closing plenary by Michael L. Nelson was equally so – on the topic of authenticity and integrity in web archives and how that will be threatened in the coming years. Our perception that webarchives are exact snapshots is challenged by his description of how sites (and JavaScript) work, muddying the authenticity of historic sites.  He sprinkled some welcome humor into this seriously depressing topic.

I also attended 2 presentations on aspects of digital preservation, including OCFL, our UO colleagues’ presentation on SLAs for the Digital Scholarship Center,  an interactive talk on privacy an update on Islandora (just curious) and Evviva’s panel on

I also attended the Mental Health First Aid training offered at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Corvallis. This is a nationwide program to teach people “how to identify, understand and respond to signs of mental illnesses and substance use disorders.”

In addition to Beth’s nice summary of the training (no need for me to repeat them), here some additional points that I came away with.

This set of statistics surprised me. Fifty percent of all mental health disorders begin by age 14 (they can start much earlier than 14), while 75% start by age 24. So we’re definitely working with the demographic group (as patrons or student employees) where mental health disorders have already made themselves known or are beginning to emerge.

The “disrupting the ability to Live, Love, Laugh, Learn” threshold means that mental health disorders can disrupt the ability to: work or attend school; carry out daily activities; and engage in satisfying relationships – the primary categories of things daily life revolves around.

When someone is ready to open up to you, keep the following in mind:

• Don’t use diminutives (“Oh, Sweetie”) even in family situations as it trivializes them/their illness
• Be ready to manage and contain your personal shock and outrage depending on the topic (e.g., substance use, issues around sexual exploration)
• Be careful with technique around reflective listening (it might be super annoying to keep hearing “I hear you saying [parrot back statement they just gave]”)
• Be open to written or text communication (or some non-verbal communication) if individual has a difficult time talking about their mental health

If­­­­­­­­ you suspect that person is at the point of doing harm to themselves, several things to keep in mind.

• The imminent threat window is usually about 20 minutes. This is the period in which the person is triggered, but it can pass (though not a given).
  • It is appropriate to ask the specific question, “Are you thinking of killing yourself?
    • Avoid more generic questions like “Are you thinking of committing suicide?” as “commit” language is tied to religious language of sin and “suicide” language is less direct than “killing”. Don’t worry about putting thought in their head…its already there.
    • If the person responds, “Yes”, appropriate to express empathy (“wow, that must be really heavy or overwhelming for you”) and specifically ask if they have a plan
    • If they have a plan, ask if they have taken the necessary steps to carry out the plan (what, how, when)
    • Basically trying to keep them talking to get through the activated period and give time to get help (911) or make referrals for help
• When speaking to 911 personnel or other responders, let them know that person is having mental health crisis (mental health or health personnel may be available to go out on call)
• May also try to determine by questioning:
  • Have you been using alcohol or other drugs?
  • Have you made a suicide attempt in the past?
  • Have you had family or friends or heroes “die by suicide”
• Give health professionals as much info as possible (meds, weapons, stopped treatment, etc)

It was a long and heavy day and resulted in info overload for me. And while I don’t feel like I have the exact words to use on the tip of my tongue, at least I feel more informed about what to look for when working around young people.

-Uta

Richard’s ALA Midwinter Report, 2019

Here are the highlights of what I attended:

1. Round Table Coordinating Council: The future of ALA Midwinter was discussed. Starting in 2021, Midwinter will move to a topic-themed conference where speakers, sessions, and attendees will focus on finding solutions for challenges facing libraries.  The idea is to make Midwinter more profitable by reducing expenses, although it will also reduce attendance. With a smaller footprint, Midwinter will likely be held in 2^nd tier cities.  Also presented was the jury process for program proposals for ALA Annual; the work of the ALA Steering Committee on Organizational Effectiveness and related move of ALA headquarters to a new building in downtown Chicago; and the “I am ALA” video series.
2. ALA Committee on Supporting Refugees, Immigrants, and Displaced Persons: This was the 1^st face-to-face meeting for this committee, which I was invited to join recently after attending its meetings as a substitute IRRT representative this past year. We discussed a variety of possible projects for the future, including quarterly webinars on social justice, updating the toolkit/resource page for the committee, and other endeavors.
3. IRRT All Committee Meeting: This was the regular business meeting for the round table, bringing committee chairs up-to-date on changes to the officers manual, plans for orientation and reception at Annual in DC, the IRRT poster session, etc.
4. RDA Update: The revision of the RDA Toolkit is progressing, with stabilization of the English text due to be complete by April. Any content changes after April will be limited to correcting errors, improving consistency, and creation of new elements, but not rewording.  Thomas Brenndorfer recommended viewing the RDA YouTube channel and reading the RDA Toolkit beta site.  The 3R project is winding down; the roles of RDA committees, work groups, and regional groups is better defined now.  An example editor for RDA is being sought.  Orientation to the new version of RDA is being developed using live webinars and online courses.  The old RDA Toolkit will be taken down around January 2021, with the new site up about a year before that.
5. Faceted subject terms: A program on this topic will be presented at Annual. FAST Policy and Outreach committee was established in 2018 by OCLC with 12 members.  A survey on Genre Form Terms in Cataloging was conducted this past year. Respondents were asked if a local policy for using genre/form terms was in place.  Most accept such terms in copy and have the ability to search facets in discovery system. Some are applying AAT or LCGFT terms, but are concerned about duplication between FAST and LCGFT.  Reconciliation of terms is needed; for example, Bibliography vs. Bibliographies. Adding genre form terms for special parts of the collection is actually low-effort but high-value work.  What are needed are conversion services to change from LCSH to FAST.  Some terms are in LCGFT but not in LCSH. User studies are needed to evaluate the impact of facets on user searching abilities. Faceted vocabularies could also be used in digital repositories.
6. IRRT Executive Board Meeting: The executive board discussed plans for ALA Annual; made permanent an ad hoc endowment committee; reported on the establishment of a new ad hoc committee to create webinars on international topics; and evaluated plans for future international librarian meet-and-greets at Midwinter.
7. PCC Participants Meeting: I heard reports on LD4P2 (Linked Data for Production, 2^nd phase) to begin shifting library resources to linked data environment. Phase 2 will expand the number of libraries involved to 17.  These libraries will be using linked data to describe serials, non-book resources, non-Roman script resources, vinyl recordings and more.  A sandbox, using Sinopia software, should be ready later this spring.  Later in the year, all PCC members (including OSU) will have access to this sandbox.  Sinopia is based on LC’s BIBFRAME editor.  A conference for LD4P participants is scheduled for May 2019.
8. Heads of Cataloging Departments Interest Group: The first presentation, from Jodene Pappas, was about her efforts to learn about linked data. She read relevant documentation and then manually crosswalked a MARC record to MARCXML, then used LC’s program to translate that to BIBFRAME. While not a method for migrating data from MARC to BIBFRAME, it provided her with a much better understanding of what is currently going on with this transition in the cataloging world.  The 2^nd presentation, by LC’s Erin Freas-Smith, discussed a project to provide article-level metadata for African print journals (which are not otherwise searchable online).  Using volunteer interns from Gallaudet U., the tables of content for each issue were scanned and then manually transcribed into a Google doc.
9. I presented an update on my work on creating subject headings for Oregon Indian tribes. It was well-attended, attracting considerable interest both before and after Midwinter.