At the beginning of the last week of this program, Jan Isan gave us a Fish! Philosophy Workshop. It is a technique to make happy individuals alert and active in the workplace. Fish! Philosophy workshop on providing the best customers service through a range of simple tools to meet the needs of customers and to establish strong relationships with them and to meet the needs of the institution. Its central four ideas are: choose your attitude, play, make someone’s day, and be there.
Through the workshop, we learned how to apply the four central ideas in libraries and use them to provide the best services for students, researchers and visitors to the library, in my library we are implementing some of them by creating good relationships with the students and engaging them in some work of the library, and the new was how to connect these four central ideas together. Honestly the workshop was more than fantastic and I was taking advantage of it.
At the end of the day we toured to Grainger Engineering Library and the IDEA Lab, we knew the collections of books in the Faculty of Engineering and technology used in teaching by visiting laboratories and identifying the tools used in them such as 3D printers and others.
The end of this day was different from all the other days. The Mortenson Center and my friends surprised me on my birthday by celebrating my birthday and my new born Zena. It was a beautiful party and felt that was in my country and between my family and my feelings were not described. Thank you my friends for this wonderful surprise.
On the second and third day of this week, we went to Ohio State to visit OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), Ohio State University and Westerville Public Library.
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Incorporated is an American nonprofit cooperative organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs, providing shared technology services, original research and community programs so that libraries can better fuel learning, research and innovation and It has the largest public access catalog online (WorldCat). OCLC provides bibliographic, abstract and full-text information to anyone and WorldCat has holding records from public and private libraries worldwide, and we visited the information center in OCLC, which has more than 10,000 VM (virtual machine server) to keep catalogue information for all library around the world.
On the second day in Ohio State we toured the Ohio State University and visited OSU Research Commons OSU Thompson Library.
OSU Research Commons provides a range of services and an area where researchers can explore collaborative, interdisciplinary and emerging research methods and contact experts for support at any stage of the research process and has a large collection of smart classrooms for service researchers and student. There are large spaces in my library that can be used to create such ideas, but they are expensive and require financial support because they contain a large variety of new technologies.
OSU Thompson Library is the university’s largest library and houses its main stacks, special collections, books and manuscripts, university archives, and many departmental subject libraries. The library was built in 1912, and was renovated in 2009. It is named in honor of the university’s fifth president, William Oxley Thompson. Its contents are estimated at 3 million books and special collections. We toured the library and visited all its sections. The building is beautiful and there are large spaces for students to study, and the amazing thing about the library is that students can bring animals with them inside the library.
At the end of our visit to the Ohio State we visited Westerville Public Library, it is a public library that serves the community of Westerville a suburb of Columbus Capital of Ohio state. The library is small but contains many activities for children and residents of the region and provides many services to visitors, it provides a computer lab and all electronic services of printing, copying, photocopying and fax, and there is a large part of the activities of children. I hope that the public library in my country is at the level of this library, small in size and large in its services.
On the fourth day of this week, Stephen Downie, iSchool of Illinois, Associate Dean for Research, presented to us presentation about research training, talked about the research centers of the iSchool and the nature of her work, and then spoke about PhD programs in iSchool at the University of Illinois. Also Tom Teper Head of Preservation in the Library presented to us presentation about Library Collections and talked about the general collections in the university, including information about the history, budget, and current tools in university.
On the same day we visited TechHub lab in Armory building, this lab contains an environment that includes a variety of modern technologies used at the university such as 3D printers, 3D scanners and 3D cameras. It was a nice and pleasant visit we experimented with all the devices and there was some time to play on some devices.
In the evening, he was there Chai Wai: Libraries for Peace and Sustainability. It is a meeting we took tea with some sweets, we have provided projects for our countries that support peace in all parts of the world, and that people live best by introducing the work of libraries for peace and achieving the goals of sustainable development. The meeting was interesting and beautiful discussing all the issues related to peace and achieving the goals of sustainable development in all countries of the world through the work of libraries.
On the fifth day Alyce Scott gave us a workshop about Planning; Selection and Copyright Considerations; Digitization of Analog Materials; Introduction to Metadata. she spoke about the rights of property and copyright in our countries and in the countries of the world, where in each country there is a law to protect copyright. After that, she talked about digitizing the library materials such as texts, images and characteristics in which the images can be after the digitization process such as clarity and accuracy of the image. After that, she talked about the metadata and how to collect information about anything by applying it practically in this workshop. She distributed strange things to us and asked us to collect information about these things.
On the last day of the week we went to Amish Country. The Amish are a group of people who don’t use the modern technology and conveniences. Transportation for the Amish is by horse and buggy. They don’t have electricity or telephones in their homes. The men usually wear beards and pants with buttons instead of zippers. The women wear white head coverings and plain dresses, usually without buttons. The Amish are known for simple living, plain dress, and reluctance to adopt many conveniences of modern technology. They live in a rural community and they are simple and good people, we have lunch at one of their homes and the food was simple and tastes good, it was a nice experience to get to know this community. Also, we visited Arthur Public Library, it is public library in a rural community. Arthur Public Library contains a small collection of books and library materials and serves the residents of the area of Arthur and contains nearly 20,000 books and special collections, despite its small size but it contains activities for children.