Ike Garst Memorial Service

Ike Garst, my Dad, former owner of Berthoud Pass ski area, professor, entrepreneur, and much loved friend, passed away on August 1 in Denver, Colorado.

The Garst family will hold a memorial service and celebration of life this Saturday, August 5, at 1:30 pm at Trinity United Methodist Church located at 1820 Broadway, Denver, CO 80202. **If you intend to come, please let us know so we can help the church plan by filling out this form: https://goo.gl/forms/3VC5k9jIm2CyLIor2.** 

Remembrances can be added as a comment here, or sent to the family at nicolegarst@gmail.com.

Obituary below:

Clarence E “Ike” Garst was born on August 22, 1950, in Hillsboro, Illinois, to Naomi and Clarence E “Zeke” Garst.  When Ike was nine months old, the family moved to a farm near Buffalo Center, Iowa, where Ike grew up. He lived and worked on the farm alongside his grandparents, parents, and brother. Ike was baptized and confirmed in the Buffalo Center Methodist Church. He graduated from high school in 1968, having played football, run track, and participated in Future Farmers of America, among other activities.

Ike then attended Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, obtaining a degree in History and Business.  After college, he taught school and coached in the Hawarden/Ireton, Iowa, school system, and then returned to farming. As a winter diversion, Ike spent two seasons managing the Quadna Mountain Ski Area in Minnesota. During this time, he developed a love of skiing that would lead him West. In 1976, he relocated to Colorado, where he worked for the Keystone Ski Area, but ever the entrepreneur, Ike wanted more. With help from his Iowa family, along with a good deal of confidence, hope, and resolve, Ike purchased the Berthoud Pass Ski Area in early June, 1977, at the age of 26. A few days later, he returned to Iowa where he married Lucy De Bonis on June 4. Less than a week later, the couple returned to Berthoud Pass to begin their life together.

Ike and Lucy owned and operated the area for ten years, where they lived year-round in the lodge at 11,314 feet. During this time, they welcomed two daughters, Beth and Nicole. Ike was an innovative ski area operator, and is most remembered for being the first in Colorado to allow snowboarders on the lifts. Despite being a skier himself, Ike is affectionately known as the “Father of Colorado Snowboarding.”

After leaving the area in 1987, Ike and Lucy came down the hill and settled in the Denver area and welcomed their third daughter, Ashley, into their lives. Ike then taught entrepreneurial studies, and continued the varied life of an entrepreneur. He started and sold companies in the financial services industry and served as a consultant. In 2004, he returned to the mountains and the ski industry in Summit county, maintaining other side ventures.

Ike enjoyed fishing, hunting, camping, skiing, and being outdoors. He remained a student of History, and was an avid reader and museum patron. Ike maintained his faith through membership at Trinity United Methodist Church. He was devoted to his family and friends and was the consummate conversationalist and host.

After a 12-year battle with brain cancer, Ike was admitted to the Denver Hospice Inpatient Care Center. He passed away on August 1, 2017, at the age of 66, with family by his side. Ike is survived by his wife, Lucy; daughters Beth, Nicole Forsythe (Chuck) and Ashley (Sam Opp); grandson Colin Forsythe; mother Naomi; brother Gary (Debby); extended family members and many, many friends. He was preceded in death by his father, Zeke.  As a final gift to others, Ike donated his body to medical and scientific research through the Anatomical Board of the State of Colorado.

Agile, Applied: Conversations with Local Leaders

Join me to talk about #Agile, #Scrum, and transforming your business and work! Download the flyer: agilescrumlunchesktos_2015.

Learning to Teach Online – resources for instructors

Lately I’ve been (lightly) dabbling in podcasting with my colleague, Alan, over in Kirkwood’s Distance Learning department. It’s been a fun monthly plunge into some issues in education – considering blended courses, teacher presence, motivation and engagement in the classroom, and this Friday, we’ll look at new online instructor training.

Alan introduced me to the Learning to Teach Online (LTTO) project out of the University of New South Wales in Australia. In my work as a librarian, interacting with all kinds of faculty who teach face-to-face, online, and in blended environments, it’s fantastic to be able to hear from instructors all over the world about what it’s like to teach online. I particularly learned some interesting things from the Managing Your Time When Teaching Online video/resource packet, and Creating eBooks for Distance Education.

Happy learning, all!

And then there were three

Greeting again, world.

It’s been too long, but you know what? I had a baby, and have an exciting new (full-time) job.

Stay tuned for changes to this blog – though I suppose that’s the death-knell of many a blog, eh?

OMG! Ponies!

In my Digital Preservation class, taught by Professor Jerome McDonough, we recently discussed the following slide as an example of the translation of meaning across various formats. I’d be doing a disservice to the world if I didn’t share it here for your delight:

Some real-life data librarian interview questions

I was recently lucky enough to see the following from-real-life interview questions asked by major universities in the hiring of data librarians, and wanted to share them with you. Though many are standard, and likely not a surprise to anyone who has interviewed before, I found the question about travel particularly interesting – surely universities want well-rounded, worldly librarians, but I can’t help but rankle at the potential bias toward those who are more affluent.

Although these are specific to a small subset of academic library jobs, I’m also curious to hear from you about questions you’ve been asked (or have asked others) in library interviews – what surprised you? What questions were you not prepared for? What lessons have you learned from seeking jobs (or hiring) in LIS?

• What are your professional aspirations, and how do you see this position fitting them?
• Are you more interested in data or in science librarianship?
• Based on what you know of this position, what are the major challenges and how would your skills address them?
• In reference to the role of libraries in e-science, Anna Gold has stated – ‘Key to libraries or librarians playing more ‘upstream’ roles in data science is their ability to position themselves as partners in research.’ What strategies might you engage to do this? What challenges do you foresee?
• How do you see the relationship of the data curation position with science librarians and faculty, given existing relationships?
• Have you travelled and how many languages can you speak?
• What about this position is appealing to you?
• A major part of this position is to create best practices in data management, support data standards and data curation, and promote data access and reuse for the science community. all of these will involve outreach efforts to other librarians and scientists.
• How would you establish such outreach and who would you engage?
• What might the outcome of these efforts be?
• What role do such professional users of the system play in its design?
• Describe your technical skills including data frameworks and standards for data and metadata description, curation, preservation and access.
• What do you consider the most significant gaps amongst the integration of library, data management and scientific workflows and what actions can help fill these gaps?
• Talk about a particular challenging situation in coordination, and how you successfully resolved the challenge.
• Describe your ideal work situation.
• Do you have questions for us about the institution and/or position?

New school year, new blog name

It has been a long summer. And while the humidity and temperature aren’t yet aware of the shift to Fall, I’m heading back for my last semester in my Master’s program at the University of Illinois’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Today, in fact, is my first day of classes, and with the launch of a new semester, I’m also changing this here blog’s name.

What has been known as Libraries with/out Walls is, as you’ve seen, now “Library On/Library Off.” I’m changing the name in recognition of the many other initiatives by a wide range of organizations called “Libraries without Walls,” and to blog about my areas of interest that others may not always categorize as “library” related – hence the library off. As always, I hope you’ll let me know what you think by commenting away,  dropping me a line via email or catching me on Twitter.

As far as my classes for this semester, I’m taking Information Modeling with Karen Wickett, Digital Preservation with Jerome McDonough, and Electronic Publishing: Technologies and Practices with Julia Flanders. (You can read the course descriptions here if you are so inclined: http://www.lis.illinois.edu/academics/courses/catalog.)

Here’s to Library On!

Scholarly publishing: what would a do-over look like?

Yup.

In the January 2009 Atul Gawande wrote Getting There from Here, a piece in the New Yorker about health care reform. In it, he explored how “path-dependence,” in the social science sense, makes reform harder. Despite our most idealized visions of a health care system we could build, had we only a clean slate, what has happened in the past so tethers us down that it becomes hard to see how to get from here (a broken system) to there (that shiny utopian system). It seems so obvious and stupid sounding at first: “the past impacts the present,” but whenever I am frustrated with an old system, it does me good to remember Gawande’s analysis, and path dependence. I find this paradigm shockingly relevant in several areas – old friendships, website redesign, or pondering the craziness that is scholarly communication. There is value in envisioning an idealized new system; but once those ideal plans are drafted, one has to in some ways let go, step back, and try to think about how to get there from here.

In my current issues in collection development class, we were challenged to think about scholarly communication.  Let’s pretend we were unencumbered by history, and Universities and research was just starting up today: how would scholarly communication be changed?

Before I jump in to  the imaginarium, a brief bit about scholarly communication. I’ve written about it before, but it is a complex system with vagaries of all sorts, especially variable from discipline to discipline. If you happen to be an academic and feel so moved to tell us about how scholarly communication works in your part of the world, please leave a comment. (The comment link is at the top of this post, not the bottom.) I’d also like to acknowledge the 2007 Ithaka report University Publishing in the Digital Age by Laura Brown, Rebecca Griffiths and Matthew Rascoff, a far better written, researched, and more authoritative rendering than I can do here.

If scholarly communication were starting today, it would be able to take into account contemporary information communications technology, like blogs, wikis, open notebook science, social networking, and functionality like rating, commenting, and group editing (such as you  might find on a comment page in Wikipedia). Instead of print journals and their concomicant, long timelines from solicitation, through peer review, to publication, scholars could publish independently on blogs. In the prestige economy, however, there would likely still be a desire for editorial control and peer review. Processes could be managed entirely online: authors upoload content, editors review, publishing staff send electronic invitations to reviewers, reviewers remarks are saved and viewed by the original author who makes changes, publication happens online. This builds off today’s model of scholarly communication, only mediated by CMS or other publishing technology.

More interestingly, technology could enable different and transformed kinds of scholarly communication. The process of peer review could be opened up entirely, where “preprints” (which would need to be renamed, obviously) could be published and then articles both ranked and commented upon; author revisions could then be “finalized” and the process archived like a Wikipedia talk page (can you tell I like that example?). And yet this still doesn’t go far enough – what if technology was moved “upstream” in the scholarly process, where scholars were collaborating in wikis and other computer-supported collaborative environments? Would the concept of the journal article even continue to persist?

The practice of scholarly communication, were it to be built over, would have to take into account not only scholarly process but the tenure review processes that reward scholars, and what counts as “work,” and how those committees know that said “work” is valuable. And goodness, that’s enough right there to make anyone’s head spin…

What do you think? What would you change, imagine, or hope for if the world got one big “do over” when it comes to scholarly communication?

What is a library without books? A true story in two acts.

ACT ONE – Wherein the merits of book-less libraries are discussed

Scene: apartment occupied by two grad students; living room in mild, nearing-end-of-semester disarray. It is late, dark outside. The weather is cold and rainy, and a cat purrs in the corner. LIS Grad Student lounges on a couch, reading from a laptop. Enter Fine Art Grad Student, tired, smelling of lithography, but only slightly inky.

LIS student: “Oh, hey. I just read about a high school Library in Massachusetts that got rid of all its books.”

Fine Arts student, indignant: “What the hell? I think that’s wrong.”

LS: “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

FAS: “Well, libraries are supposed to be full of books, right? I mean, what is this school doing in the library if not reading?”

LS: “They’ve got meeting spaces, a cafe, and three flat screen TVs. Squishy chairs, and the students all get laptops upon entering school. Oh, and they circulate e-reader devices, too. Obviously a private school.”

FAS: “Doesn’t sound like my high school…come to think of it, I don’t even remember if my high school had a library. Still, why even bother to call it a library? What do you think – is a library a library without books?”

LS: “Well, I know it would probably get my ALA card revoked, but I don’t have such a strong, negative reaction to it. I mean, look at use. What good is a library if nobody uses it? You don’t even remember yours. I know my high school had a library, but I was only ever in it to sit and talk with my friends; what studying I did away from home was at the public library. And not like the school library was great – it was tiny and the books all seemed really old and out of date. And as a library worker, I know school libraries often only have a handful of staff, one or two librarians, maybe – and it must be an insane amount of work to purchase, shelve, manage circulation – not to mention being an effective instructional partner for teachers, working with IT, managing database subscriptions, making the case to your administration for your existence, you know… ”

FAS: “But what about kids who don’t learn well from e-reading? I hate reading on my computer.”

LS: “Sure. Just because the library doesn’t have books doesn’t mean kids won’t still read them, and have to read them.  Our books for English class were always kept by the English teacher, anyway…they weren’t even run through the library as far as I know. In fact, when we had textbooks that were given to us for a class, it was always the teacher who checked them out to us, and they didn’t have library call numbers on them. Not to mention I had to buy my books myself for my AP classes.”

FAS: “Don’t kids need a quiet place to study?”

LS: “But during the school day when the school is open, how much time are you even open to study? Aren’t most kids by-and-large in class? And do you need books surrounding you to study? What good is a library at providing study space if it isn’t open after school building hours anyway?”

FAS: “Good points. And I guess if the point is to get kids into the library, it might make more sense to make it appealing…”

LS: “And I see that, you know, the user isn’t always right. I mean, we could get kids into libraries by providing them beer and video games, but it’s not always in their best interests to just give them what they want. And yet it’s not like this new kind of library isn’t supporting learning –  it sounds like college to me, a little – you know, like a dorm lounge or something. You have groups meeting for classes, kids reading, kids watching TV, and someone snoring in the corner.”

FAS: “Yeah…but even in college when you had the lounge, there was still a big quiet library to go hide in and get your work done.”

LS: “True. Good point.”

****

ACT TWO, Wherein the author abandons the dialog and gets back to normal blogging voice

I had the above conversation (more or less) with my husband the other night after reading and thinking about e-books, libraries without books,Barnes&Noble’s provision of free e-books within their stores on Nook readers (of course), and privacy issues surrounding e-books. It all got me wondering if e-books are disruptive to libraries, in the sense of disruptive innovations (see both Clay Christensen and Innovation Zen for more on this concept).

If we consider that disruptive innovations take two forms, per Innovation Zen:

“A sustaining innovation hardly results in the downfall of established companies because it improves the performance of existing products along the dimensions that mainstream customers value.

Disruptive innovation, on the other hand, will often have characteristics that traditional customer segments may not want, at least initially. Such innovations will appear as cheaper, simpler and even with inferior quality if compared to existing products, but some marginal or new segment will value it.”

I’ll start off with a few disclaimers, because I believe Christensen’s original theory has a lot to do with economics, and the tangle of libraries and economics is messy: publisher sells to library, library “sells” to an administration/government (insofar as it is funded by the administration of a college, or a government, in the case of public libraries), and yet libraries also “sell” themselves to their patrons. (This is a slippery mess for traditional economic theory, and don’t get me started on issues of library administration, accountability, demonstrating value, marketing…)

Disclaimers aside, when it comes to the library – patron relationship, or even the book – reader relationship, e-books may be considered sustaining innovations in that they add value (you can now read your book without visiting the library – simply download it! You can also now “search” your book in a digital way. AND you can get a whole lot of books on your e-reader, an added value in that you’re not lugging physical copies around). Is this a stretch when it comes to this being “along the dimensions mainstream customers value” – perhaps. I believe the above argument makes sense, but find the “added value” a stretch – is an e-book an added value or an entirely new product? I am inclined to say they are indeed new products- and if they are, then they could fall more soundly in the area of being a disruptive innovation.

E-books look like disruptive innovations in that they (especially initially, in the last 10 – 15 years) have not been something the patron has, by and large, wanted. Surely e-books appear inferior – even with all the innovations of the Kindle and now iPad, issues of readability, ability to annotate (see the Princeton study on e-readers in the college classroom), and even the issue of comfortability (feel of books, ability to flip through them, books-as-treasured-objects, books as scholarly output in the Humanities, et al). And yet is demand beginning to grow and change? The growth of the e-reader market may seem to indicate yes. And to continue following the above description, e-books would indeed (at least appear) cheaper, simpler, and of inferior quality; though for libraries, e-books are not per se cheaper nor simpler given our current systems (i.e. no “First Sale” with e-books, and libraries often have to rely on vendors to deliver e-book content.) To finish going through the definition of disruptive innovation, “some marginal or new segment will value” e-books – that marginal and new segment being those who use e-book readers, those who are affluent enough to have such technologies at hand, and even, some might say, tech-forward folks looking to explore the new ways of reading and interacting with information.

So what? What do we do if e-books are disruptive technologies for the printed book, and therefore for the library? Why does this matter?

1. First and foremost, I say librarians, readers, and book-lovers ought not panic. If e-books can expand access to information, help make reading easier or more appealing, and potentially save books from the (often more FUD than truth) assertions that books are less and less popular and that they can only be preserved digitally, hooray! Then we should embrace e-books and explore their possibilities. AND, we can relax a little – the rise of the e-book does not necessarily mean the disappearance forever of the printed book.
2. This matters for librarians and consumers because we want to keep books and their content affordable and as accessible as possible. If we truly believe in e-books as disruptors, then we need to be fighting like hell for accessibility and funding so that the benefits of “First Sale” are not lost to history. What happens to ILL in a world of e-books? How do libraries begin to circulate e-book readers? Should libraries have a hand in, or even start developing our own readers? Should libraries be in the business of publishing with more earnestness, if the Serials Crisis will spill over into an E-books Crisis?

What do you think? How could e-books as disruptors affect libraries, books, reading, publishing, and the future?

Monetize community participation?

I signed up for the community at www.konigi.com yesterday – and was interested in their opportunity for community members to “monetize” their participation (through their Google AdSense accounts):

Konigi community signup - monetize

I’m not yet familiar enough with this community to know if this actually works – I’m going to suspect nobody is raking in the cash here – but thought it an interesting concept, audience appropriate. Are other web designer, ux, or other communities doing this so far as you know?