OLA Super Conference 2005

A Report

In early February 2005, the Ontario Library Association held it's annual Super Conference. Regarded as the largest general library conference in Canada with 4000+ delegates, OLA put on a conference with sessions that appealed to public, academic, school and special librarians alike.

Some of the more interesting sessions that I attended included:

Tools for Managing Online Information

A self-confessed Canuckaphile, Gary Price gave a spirited and enthusiastic review of numerous online tools that can be used to simplify your life. Links to all the tools mentioned are available at http://digbig.com/4cnxn

Legal Research for the Non-law Librarian

Although the main focus of this session was on Ontario and Federal laws and legislation, this was still a good session to attend as the information about finding Ontario rules and regulations could be applied to any province. Wendy Reynolds of the Ontario Securities Commission gave attendees a brief review of how bills are debated in parliament (provincially and federally) and then become laws and their relationship to "regulations", as well as how to "note up" a court case.

Learning Commons: People First, Machines Second

This session included two presentations. The first was a review of the development of the Information Commons at the Davis Centre Library, University of Waterloo. An engineering design class at the University of Waterloo assisted in the development process by presenting "ideal visions" for the Davis Centre Library.
The second presentation by two librarians from Queen's University theorized on the concept of a "learning commons" - a centre focussing on people and programming rather than a space with a lot of technology and workstations.

Only Librarians Like to Search, Everyone Else Likes to Find

The closing plenary session featured Roy Tennant who was introduced to the audience as a "prime suspect" in the death of MARC. While Roy is reknowned for his "MARC must die" article in Library Journal 127(17): 26, he agreed that instead of killing MARC outright, he would be willing to let MARC pass away naturally. Roy implies that it's time to start thinking and designing library systems that meet the users' needs. One of the themes touched upon in Roy's presentation was the notion of "marginalization". With so many commercial and sponsored links in google, the quality sites are being "marginalized" in spite of librarian expert searches. For example, a google search for "tsunamis" produced only 3 sites with useful information and 7 "relief effort" sites on the first page of results. A search in the National Science Digital Library, however, produced at least 20 useful sites on the first page. Librarians are also "marginalizing" their own OPACs because they are so difficult to use. He gave us a quote:

"My library catalog is so hard to use that I first find a book in Amazon, then look it up in our catalog to see if we have it."

Roy then demonstrated an alternative to Amazon, the RedLightGreen project. RedLightGreen is a portal to finding books from the Research Libraries Group Union Catalog.

Sandra Wong is a Science Liaison Librarian at Simon Fraser University.

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