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sha towers

Being Essential Is Not Enough, Part 2 | Peer to Peer Review - lj.libraryjournal.com - 0 views

  • Solving a problem that already exists for your faculty (such as compliance with a mandate) is more likely to generate support for the library than trying to convince the faculty that they have a problem.
  • Listen also for areas of emphasis that you might not think of as relevant to the library.
  • Sometimes aligning your library with institutional goals and programs means creating new services, and sometimes it means adapting old ones. Since our host institutions are always changing, it always means responding quickly and nimbly to new programs and priority shifts.
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  • Instead, she worked with her leadership team to create a two-part document: the first section outlined the library’s significant achievements over the past year, and the second explained what we want to do in the coming year.
  • the message our vice president received was not “Here are all the reasons why you ought to give the library more money.” Instead, it was “Here are some of the most important ways in which the library is moving the university towards its goals, and here are ways in which we could do that even better if we had more resources to work with.”
  • Thus, the message our vice president received was not “Here are all the reasons why you ought to give the library more money.” Instead, it was “Here are some of the most important ways in which the library is moving the university towards its goals, and here are ways in which we could do that even better if we had more resources to work with.”
  • Map your library’s programs and services to the mission of the university and you will be seen as an essential strategic partner, not just another piece of costly infrastructure.
  • Takeaway lesson: Map your library’s programs and services to the mission of the university and you will be seen as an essential strategic partner, not just another piece of costly infrastructure.
  • Solving a problem that already exists for your faculty (such as compliance with a mandate) is more likely to generate support for the library than trying to convince the faculty that they have a problem.
  • offering dedicated collaboration space for use by faculty working in those clusters, reaching out to the clusters with targeted information about existing technology offerings in the libraries, and “providing dedicated subject specialists for each faculty cluster to work across the life-cycle of their research to offer guidance and connections to services
  • Sometimes aligning your library with institutional goals and programs means creating new services, and sometimes it means adapting old ones. Since our host institutions are always changing, it always means responding quickly and nimbly to new programs and priority shifts.
  • It’s not just what your campus leaders and spokespersons say, but how often and in how many contexts they say it that will tip you off to a particularly important or emerging area of institutional focus
  • ask yourself what the library might do differently (or what it might already be doing) that could have an impact on that goal, even if the goal doesn’t seem to be connected directly to library services.
  • ask yourself what the library might do differently (or what it might already be doing) that could have an impact on that goal
  • , even if the goal doesn’t seem to be connected directly to library services.
  • not just what your campus leaders and spokespersons say, but how often and in how many contexts they say it that will tip you off to a particularly important or emerging area of institutional focus
  • Listen also for areas of emphasis that you might not think of as relevant to the library.
  • If the library is doing things that don’t help further the goals and strategies laid out in them, ask yourself why—and unless the answers you come up with are unusually compelling and can be defended (with a straight face) in conversation with your provost or vice president, seriously consider discontinuing them. If your library is doing things that actively undermine those goals and strategies, stop doing those things immediately. As you consider establishing new programs or practices in your library, ask yourself from the very beginning how those new programs or practices will help further the strategic mission of your institution.
  • If the library is doing things that don’t help further the goals and strategies laid out in them, ask yourself why—and unless the answers you come up with are unusually compelling and can be defended (with a straight face) in conversation with your provost or vice president, seriously consider discontinuing them.
  • your library is doing things that actively undermine those goals and strategies, stop doing those things immediately. As you consider establishing new programs or practices in your library, ask yourself from the very beginning how those new programs or practices will help further the strategic mission of your institution.
  • no library that aligns itself to institutional priorities will end up serving all programs and all academic disciplines equally
  • our budgets and programmatic support should not be distributed equally across disciplines, but should reflect the curricular and strategic emphases of our host institutions.
  • means your monitoring of institutional communications for strategic hints will have to be sensitive to nuance
Jeff Steely

The Battle of the Books-Again | Peer to Peer Review - 11/19/2009 - Library Jo... - 0 views

  • It's our job to understand what people need from libraries and what they think they mean before we explain the limits we face and the choices that have to be made. We can't create the library of the future by talking exclusively to other librarians or by watching undergraduates use the library as a comfortable and inspiring place to hang out between classes. We have to understand what libraries mean to people who we may not see in the library all that often.
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    Barbara Fister on "power struggle over what a library is-and who gets to decide"
Jeff Steely

Trends in Digital Scholarship Centers (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu - 0 views

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    "Looking back over the past 18 months, we have four observations. First, we have learned the critical importance of clearly defining the Sherman Centre's scope and purpose for the campus community. Understanding of digital scholarship's boundaries is still relatively low on all of our campuses. Work in the center falls outside traditional norms for how research is done - the norm being that research is a solitary activity, with no "bumping around" required. In terms of libraries, it is definitely outside the norm. Libraries are traditionally very transaction-based: we count the number of people who enter our doors, ask us research help questions, and attend instruction sessions. We have no mental model for tracking activity within a digital scholarship center, which is inherently more relationship-based. Second, we've learned that the relentless demand for physical space on campus creates pressure on our new center. Faculty members and graduate students are always looking for a place to run their experiments and relocate their staff. We often find ourselves having to turn people away when their work is not advancing the digital scholarship agenda. Saying no is not easy, but it must be done to protect the center's integrity. Third, we've learned of the vital need for patience - both individual and organizational. Digital scholarship centers are not created in a day or even in 18 months. Building a good center requires patience on the part of our senior university administrators, faculty, and staff. A digital scholarship program is built on relationships, as well as on the careers of its scholars. Centers evolve as junior faculty members incorporate digital scholarship into their research and then rise to become senior scholars. Finally, we've discovered the strong need for training and mentorship opportunities on our campus. Our graduate students (like any other graduate students) do not enter their programs with deep digital scholarship skills, but they are e
Jeff Steely

Critical Assets: Academic Libraries, a View from the Administration Building - 5/1/2010... - 0 views

  • libraries should support learning that involves collaboration—i.e., getting students to spend time talking to one another in spaces in the library."
  • reinvest in a traditional position, the subject librarian
  • help scholars in the prepublication phase
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  • not particularly concerned about the expense of maintaining libraries. Funding libraries was perceived as the cost of being part of higher education. CAOs were more interested in outcomes—how much were the libraries being used? How central were they to the mission of the institution? In what ways did they enhance the reputation of the college or university?
Jeff Steely

The Case for Mutability: Library 2.0 and Implications for Academic Library Staffing, Or... - 0 views

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    Jim Neal on the future of libraries
Ellen Filgo

FLIP THE MODEL (a pre-print) - The Ubiquitous Librarian - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 2 views

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    ""Academic libraries are encountering a critical inflection point. In our case it isn't a single technology that is disrupting our established system, but a barrage of advancements in publishing, pedagogy, and user preferences. The landscape is shifting around us, and the future of scholarship requires us to develop new skills, design new environments, and deliver new service capacities. In short, we need new operating models.""
Jeff Steely

Changes to Liaison / Instruction in the University Library: A Message from the Universi... - 0 views

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    Some similarities, some differences in what McMaster is doing and possible futures we have discussed.
sha towers

The (Social) Reader's Dilemma: Content + Container = Context - The Ubiquitous Librarian... - 0 views

  • “Content, not containers!” This has been a library theme for a while now: unbundling the meat from the sandwich. It’s about the text and/or images, not necessary the printed vessel.  As scholarly material migrates to digital platforms, the focus is on the content, not the boundaries of “journals” or “books.”
  • Yesterday I downloaded The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery, which is a free PDF. Thanks Microsoft. I’m reading it on my iPad via my Kindle app and everything is fine, right? No! It’s not a Kindle book. It doesn’t allow me take notes, share passages, or sync across devices. Those might not sound like big deals, but they are—or they have become to me. My reading experience is linked to functionality, not just to the content.   So here is this free book, free content, that is essentially useless to me—to the way I want to use it—to the way I work with information. The content is free, but it’s the container I’m willing to pay for. It’s the container that makes the content valuable.
  • Access is no longer enough. I don’t just want to have the content in a digital format. I need it to live and breed and interact with my other content and with the content of my colleagues. It’s the infrastructure and tools around the content that I am willing to pay for. It’s the platform that will continue to grow and make the content more valuable to me over time. This isn’t about preference, but about performance. It’s about creating context.
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  • I want to do stuff with my information, not just read it.
  • Take Facebook—it’s not really about storing your photos, but about commenting, liking, and tagging. It’s the functionality, packaged together with other lifestyle curation tools and processes. It’s about using the container to connect with a community via a very personal context.
Ellen Filgo

Joint Statement on Faculty Status of College and University Librarians | AAUP - 0 views

  • Indeed, all members of the academic community are likely to become increasingly dependent on skilled professional guidance in the acquisition and use of library resources as the forms and numbers of these resources multiply, scholarly materials appear in more languages, bibliographical systems become more complicated, and library technology grows increasingly sophisticated. The librarian who provides such guidance plays a major role in the learning process.
  • Because the scope and character of library resources should be taken into account in such important academic decisions as curricular planning and faculty appointments, librarians should have a voice in the development of the institution’s educational policy.
Jeff Steely

The Myth of Browsing | American Libraries Magazine - 1 views

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    "Although today's academic library users may feel that browsing is an ancient scholarly right, the practice is in fact no older than the baby-boomer faculty who so often lead the charge to keep books on campus."
Jeff Steely

Virtual Dave…Real Blog » Blog Archive » Charleston Keynote Now Streaming - 0 views

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    Great talk on the future of librarianship
Jeff Steely

The strange case of academic libraries and e-books nobody reads | TeleRead: Bring the E... - 0 views

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    Interesting article, and the discussion in the comments is even better.
Jeff Steely

Bike Sharing Comes to the Academic Library « The Scholarly Kitchen - 0 views

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    Thought provoking piece on the message our services send
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