Group items tagged

"It's time for younger librarians to claim the future. I was intrigued when I saw an announcement for an ARL-CNI meeting, "Achieving Strategic Change in Research Libraries", to be held in mid October, because Lord knows this is a good time for strategic change. Yet when I clicked through to the program, I was sorely disappointed. The program is oriented toward library directors talking amongst themselves. In the growing string of strategy meetings and whitepaper collections coming from research library organizations, I see many familiar names. While I find these individuals to be brilliant, thoughtful people, I don't believe much will come out of their talking amongst each other for another day. Library leadership has been discussing emergent roles for libraries for over a decade."

As research library leaders confront turbulent times, they sorely need new tools to facilitate thinking about the future of the institution and to foster dialogue within the community. ARL's new project seeks to envision library futures and will engage the Association's member community in looking decades out at the situations that will confront research libraries. At the heart of this work will be the creation of a set of future scenarios and a toolkit to facilitate research library leaders in their planning and decision making.

It will be interesting to see in twenty years if any of the scenarios pan out. Would someone doing scenarios twenty years ago have predicted just how digital today's libraries are?

In 2008, WebJunction received support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a set of competencies for those managing public access computing in their libraries. As a follow-up to this work, we developed a full Competencies Index for the Library Field, which outlines the full spectrum of library practice. The Index was published in 2009, and since July 2009, we've been using this index to help us identify the topics library staff most need to develop new skills or support around. WebJunction's Competencies for Libraries outlines recent research we've completed in this area.

Good site to be aware of. Thanks!

Note footnote 5: 1. Bourg Chris, 2. Coleman Ross, 3. Erway Ricky, Support for the Research Process: An Academic Library Manifesto (Dublin, OH: OCLC, 2009), www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2009/2009-07.pdf

Yes, this call to action list is helpful. Thanks for linking footnote 5. Linda

In his 12 strategies to make libraries "fit" Bell, among other things, talks about smart innovation and gives examples of companies who weren't so smart.

Addresses this question: If iPads and other new mobile computers catch on, libraries might not need to offer rooms full of computers for students to do their research, writing, and Facebooking. But if that happens, will students have any reason left to visit the library?

After discussing ALA 2010 Annual, the article delves into recent ethnographic studies at various Illinois universities. One interesting finding - generation Y students support "traditional library services and roles," such as staffing the reference desk.

RLG's new report. If you can't read it out, check out p.18 about what libraries need to do to create their own futures. The information about data overload summarized on p.5 is also important.

A new take on asking patrons for input about the library. Ask for project ideas, not just opinions about services.

In the 21st century, ARL libraries are increasingly exploring and adopting a range of new roles in serving research institutions, researchers, scholars, and students, making the time ripe for ARL to organize a new report cluster focusing on key new roles. The series will identify and delineate emerging roles and present research on early experiences among member libraries in developing the roles and delivering services.

from John

Excerpt: "Increasingly, in the scientific disciplines, information ranging from online journals to databases must be recent to be relevant, so Wideners collection of books, its miles of stacks, can appear museum-like. Likewise, Googles massive project to digitize all the books in the world will, by some accounts, cause research libraries to fade to irrelevance as mere warehouses for printed material. The skills that librarians have traditionally possessed seem devalued by the power of online search, and less sexy than a Google query launched from a mobile platform."

If you are rushed for time and can't read all the articles, be sure to read this one.

Eric's current comments about his "old" posting: In a slightly dated LITA-hosted blog posting [1] I addressed this question, and below are snippets from my reply: 1) XML - XML is a sort of modern-day alchemy. 2) Relational databases - Libraries love lists. 3) Indexing - Believe it or not, databases suck as facilitating search, especially considering today's user expectations regarding relevance ranking. 4) Web serving - Increasingly people expect to acquire the information the require for learning, teaching, and research through a Web browser. 5) Programming/scripting - Finally, you will want to "glue" all of the above technologies together into a coherent whole. Please do not be overwhelmed. All of these things can be learned and practiced on your desktop or home computer. They lend themselves better to server-class operating systems such a Unix/Linux, but learning about these operating systems is challenging in itself and not readily applicable to librarianship. All you need is the ability to read books, the desire to learn, and the time to do it.

Since we've written our report, we may not be sharing new articles. I thought you all would be interested in this one anyway.

Since the report isn't totally completed (i.e. I haven't finished my part), I have been fretting about whether/what we should do to update it. A lot has come out since we last met. Do others have thoughts? My mother is in hospice as of Wed. night and I am in and out right now. Melinda

Attendees of the "Play, Learn, Innovate" Symposium on June 7-cosponsored by OCLC and Library Journal-came to get a glimpse of how playfulness and game-like programs and activities might stimulate interest in patrons and innovation among the staff. What they got was a two-hour primer on how a shift away from content consumption may offer libraries a new role in fostering user engagement and promoting creative output. More than 1000 users registered for the session, with some 500 attending live.

A blog posting by Meredith Farkas, from a technology point of view. Includes basic technology skills/attitudes and higher level competencies, such as project management. This is the stuff she wishes someone had emphasized when she was in library school!

another paper article that John has routing

Summarizes and links to "Faculty Survey 2009: Key Strategic Insights for Libraries, Publishers, and Societies."

Interesting discussion of job description for new position at Karen Schneider's library. You can see the the 21st century librarian is going to have to know a lot about a lot in order to be able to function and to be successful...

With so many hats and more in the making, at least librarians won't be bored!

John's literature search