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brain dump, or, what will we do with ourselves!?!
9 Feb 09
There’s an awful lot happening in my library, as in others. In my library it all seems to be happening at once. We’ve watched the tide of digital transformation coming in, and this looks like the year we need to learn to swim. We are dealing with budget cuts—realignments, as our Orwellian university administration insists on calling them—by attacking first our few remaining print serials. We’re seeing similar, though smaller, cuts to our print monographs budget. E-books are picking up, but haven’t yet replaced print as the preferred format for books. We do have to wonder if that won’t change in the near future.
At the same time, we’ve seen a collapse in our reference desk statistics. Use stats of titles in our reference collection have declined in an almost linear fashion. We’re looking at a revised policy document for reference that will, if passed, mean a formal recognition that the reference collection is primarily electronic.
Most of the librarians in my department base their work on a liaison model. We have subject specialties that derive from collections responsibilities, coupled with information literacy and specialized reference expectations. We work with faculty in our assigned departments, and we often say to students and faculty in those areas that we are “your librarian”. But we’re beginning to recognize that it doesn’t necessarily make sense for the liaison librarian to manage relatively insignificant print serials budgets or to spend time sitting on a reference desk that is almost always slow.
There’s the potential here to free up a lot of time. What are we going to do with ourselves? I do have a few ideas, and basically I’m just posting to get this bullet list out of my scribble book. What are some of the things we might be involved in?
- Information literacy
- Training (which is different) of staff, colleagues, perhaps faculty and students as well
- Collection and use analysis; the web generates tonnes of data
- public relations and marketing of library resources and services
- fundraising
- research, thinking, writing
That’s my first pass, I’m sure there’s more, and I’m sure these could be well articulated, but really this is a brain dump, so there it is.
Posted by pzed on February 9, 2009 at 11.25am
Categories: libraries
Comments on "brain dump, or, what will we do with ourselves!?!"
good thoughts. i’m having similar conversations with myself these days. my brain dump looks like this…
–cultural, civic and scholarly programming for our libraries — with ties into IL issues and with relevant pr for library collections, services, staff where appropriate. Library as bridge to scholarly and cultural conversation, writ LARGE. i’ve decided this is my dream job btw.
–related to above — curriculum development… we want to integrate into existing curricula, but what about recognizing the unique value of a library-specific curriculum. I think it would look a lot like talking about scholarly communications issues, and socio-political issues in regards to info storage/retrieval and use
–activism: open access movement, intellectual property issues, freedom of expression and speech, net neutrality etc. librarians need to be at the tables where these things are decided/argued. or storming the barricades.
–the one big library thing? what do you think about that?
–while on the other hand, the Local … getting serious about special collections and archives. Not just acquisitions but exposure of materials… via library events/panels but also digitization, dissemination. And by so doing … fostering ties into our local communities, more partnerships with the public libraries, building bridges between scholars and citizens.
these are my thoughts. don’t steal them without attribution you weasel
Posted by Lisa on February 21, 2009 at 1.56pm :: link
