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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science celebrated the ending of its 80th anniversary year by taking a forward look at the future of our field and its graduates. The Information Professionals 2050 (IP 2050) Conference brought in information and library science leaders who discussed key issues related to future visions, skills and values. Themes of the day included the areas of the 1) Information Industry, 2) Libraries and Archives, 3) Education and 4) Information Trends. The contributors are thought leaders of our profession and included: * Marshall Breeding, director for Innovative Technologies and Research, Vanderbilt University Libraries * Anne Caputo, executive director, Dow Jones' Learning and Information Professional Programs * Bonnie Carroll, president, International Information Associates * Mary Chute, deputy director for Libraries, Institute for Museum and Library Services * Lorcan Dempsey, vice president and chief strategist, OCLC * Michael Eisenberg, professor and dean emeritus, University of Washington School of Information * Buck Goldstein, University entrepreneur in residence and professor of practice, Department of Economics University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill * William Graves, senior vice president, Academic Strategy at Ellucian * Elizabeth Liddy, dean and trustee professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies * Charles Lowry, executive director, Association for Research Libraries * Joanne Marshall, alumni distinguished professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill * Nancy Roderer, director, Johns Hopkins University Welch Medical Library * Roger Schonfeld, director of research, Ithaka * David Silver, associate professor, University of San Francisco * Duncan Smith, co-founder, Novelist (EBSCO Publishing) Moderators included, * Susan Nutter, vice provost and director of Libraries, North Carolina State University * Sarah Michalak, university librarian and associate prov

Our major findings are as follows: 1. During one of the busiest times of the academic year, the students we interviewed were mainly using different IT devices to stay in touch with their friends while they were in the campus library. In the hour before we interviewed them, 81% of the students in our sample had checked for new messages (e.g., email, Facebook, IMs, texts). 2. At the same time, many of the same respondents who said they had checked for messages had also prepared assignments for submission (60%), studied and reviewed materials for class (52%), and satisfied personal curiosity with a computer search (e.g., sports score, news, gossip) (45%). 3. Despite the pressing need to complete assignments at crunch time, few respondents reported having used the full range of library resources and/or services during the previous hour. Many more respondents said they had used library equipment (39%) such as computers and printers than anything else, including scholarly research databases (11%), library books (9%), face-to-face reference (5%), and/or online reference (2%). 4. Overall, we found most respondents (85%) could be classified as "light" technology users. These were students who used "only" one or two IT devices primarily in support of coursework and, to a lesser extent, communication. The most frequent combination (40%) of devices being used was a cell phone (including smart phones) with a personally owned laptop computer while they were in the library. In stark contrast, only 8% of the sample could be classified as "heavy" technology users. 5. For over half the sample, a personally owned laptop (58%) was the primary-most essential-device in use at the time of the interview. A smaller percentage of respondents (35%) were using a library desktop computer. 6. More than any other combination of applications, respondents had both a Web browser and a word processing program open at the same time (47%) while they were in the library. 7. Despi

"North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries and its Distance Education and Learning Technology Applications (DELTA) are partnering with strategic consultants brightspot strategy and DEGW to design, share, and promote an updated model for institutions to plan and support technology-rich informal learning spaces. This Learning Space Toolkit will include a roadmap to guide the process along with tools and techniques for assessing needs, understanding technology, describing spaces, planning and delivering support services, and assembling space, technology, and services to meet needs, even as they change."

"Game Changers: Education and Information Technologies is a collection of chapters and case studies contributed by college and university presidents, provosts, faculty, and other stakeholders. Institutions are finding new ways of achieving higher education's mission without being crippled by constraints or overpowered by greater expectations."

"UC Berkeley - Search, Google, and Life - Guest Lecturers Sergey Brin, Bradley Horowitz, Jason Schultz, and more - This free course from the University of California at Berkeley gives you an opportunity to sit in on some of the greatest minds in modern technology as they discuss how their products, services, and companies play a major role in shaping the way we obtain information, process it, and view the world. They also discuss how they came to be involved in those technologies, and how search and search engines work and have changed the internet as we know it."

Find out who is changing the game and what we can learn from their different approaches in Game Changers. Download the entire book or individual chapters and case studies below.

"The NCSU Libraries Mobile Scavenger Hunt is an interactive, technology-rich way to introduce students to the library. Developed in response to student and instructor feedback collected in 2010-2011, it leverages the motivating power of situated learning and the fun of team game dynamics to orient students to the Libraries' spaces, promote the use of emerging technologies, and foster confidence in using the Libraries' collections. The activity is run using iPod Touches and several free apps and online tools. Students answer Scavenger Hunt questions using Evernote, a free app for multimedia note-taking, which is installed on the iPod Touches distributed to the Scavenger Hunt teams. Librarians are able to monitor students' answers in real time as they are entered into Evernote, keeping score on a Google Docs spreadsheet."

Now here's a new take on the "digital native" debate. I once bought into that whole concept, but find myself rethinking it. Perhaps the landscape has just changed so much that I'm on the path of deportation? I love this quote: Digital native is a fantasy invented by the fans of silicon valley to pigeonhole a generation for the sake of selling technology, but the truth is far less convenient. Not only the digital natives, but many people take on a feral state in their interactions with the internet, as it constantly shifts its boundaries, its cities and deserts. Likewise, the library is a place where we ought to allow for the feral. The ACRL information literacy standards are only useful to the domesticated to promote their efficient and purposeful use of the library.

"The Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication seeks to share useful innovations, both in thought and in practice, with the aim of encouraging scholarly exchange and the subsequent benefits that are borne of scrutiny, experimentation and debate. As modes of scholarly communication, the technologies and economics of publishing and the roles of libraries evolve, it is our hope that the work shared in the journal will inform practices that strengthen librarianship and that increase access to the "common Stock of Knowledge.""

The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Texas Wesleyan University undertook a project to find out what a classroom would look like if it were designed by faculty and students-and then to build that classroom. The goal was to promote innovation in learning space design and to advance instructors' understanding of how classroom design impacts teaching and learning. Classroom.NEXT initiated a campus-wide dialogue on the design of informal and formal learning spaces, and faculty, students, and administrators identified flexibility and interactivity as key attributes to be promoted in all Texas Wesleyan learning spaces. Collaboration, particularly student-faculty collaboration, was a central component of the success of Classroom.NEXT. Faculty participants commented that they learned as much from their students about learning space design and technology as they did from the research.

Tabbed display for multiple open wizards in the Workflows staff client for added efficiency; Indexing improvements and additional configuration options for use with the Item Group Editor wizard for increased accuracy and ease of use; Support for multilingual MARC record holdings including display enumeration and chronology information in the same language as the associated MARC bibliographic record, for convenience and time savings; SMS notification support giving libraries an additional efficient and cost-effective notification option for reaching library users;

An interesting opinion piece on the future of the LMS.  Try reading this and replacing "LMS" with "library database" ... what would that look like? 

In March, Inside Higher Ed released an "inaugural" Survey of College & University Chief Academic Officers.  This report was the fourth in a series of surveys of senior academic leaders with the three other reports conducted in 2011 focusing on admissions officers, chief business officers, and presidents.

First open-access e-version issue