by Michelle Kraft
What does the future hold for libraries? CNN.com believes it will be one without books. The CNN.com article primarily focuses on public libraries and the young hip library-chic librarians embracing technology. (By the way I hate how CNN has sort of split librarians into the young hip techie librarians vs. the old out of style bookish librarians. It irks me. Tech savvy has nothing to do with being young, old, hip, boring, chic, or dowdy. Both types of librarians have tech savvy and non-tech.)
The article, “Welcome to the Library. Say goodbye to the books.” on Boston.com (posted by Cynthia on Medlib-l) is about one prep school’s idea of the future library. The school eliminated the 20,000 volume collection and will be spending $500,000 for a “learning center.” Laptop friendly study carrels ($20,000) and three large flat screen TVs ($43,000) projecting data from the Internet will occupy the space where the book stacks once stood. So what will students read? Where are the English lit. books that they might read for class? Ah so glad you asked. The school bought 18 electronic readers ($10,000) which will be loaded with these tomes. My first thought, only 18 readers for a whole school to loan out? My second thought, what a licensing nightmare. Maybe I am overly sensitive to that because science and technology materials tend to have more licensing hoops to jump through than high school resources….Read entire post by Michelle here: http://kraftylibrarian.com/
by John D. Sutter
(CNN) — The stereotypical library is dying — and it’s taking its shushing ladies, dank smell and endless shelves of books with it.
Books are being pushed aside for digital learning centers and gaming areas. “Loud rooms” that promote public discourse and group projects are taking over the bookish quiet. Hipster staffers who blog, chat on Twitter and care little about the Dewey Decimal System are edging out old-school librarians.
And that’s just the surface. By some accounts, the library system is undergoing a complete transformation that goes far beyond these image changes.
Authors, publishing houses, librarians and Web sites continue to fight Google’s efforts to digitize the world’s books and create the world’s largest library online. Meanwhile, many real-world libraries are moving forward with the assumption that physical books will play a much-diminished or potentially nonexistent role in their efforts to educate the public.
Some books will still be around, they say, although many of those will be digital. But the goal of the library remains the same: To be a free place where people can access and share information.
“The library building isn’t a warehouse for books,” said Helene Blowers, digital strategy director at the Columbus [Ohio] Metropolitan Library. “It’s a community gathering center.”…
Read entire post here: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/04/future.library.technology/index.html
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. – fragment from “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost
We have many pitfalls in life. One of them is doing the expected simply because it is expected.
This post occurred to me while enjoying the evening light under an umbrella in the rain, 30 feet above the ground in my treehouse. We too often do things — or not do things — because of real or imagined expectations for our behavior. Perhaps it is because I have spent my life defying expectations that I dwell on this. I was a library assistant and a commercial whitewater river guide — both at the same time. I’m a 51-year-old man who builds treehouses — not for my kids, but for myself. I still run on the spur of the moment like a boy, or crawl under tables, or climb trees. I’m by no means alone — I even have a colleague who builds motorized muffins. I’m telling you, I can’t make this stuff up. There are some of us who refuse to accept social expectations as a prescription for behavior…Read entire post HERE.
Wanda Pearson, executive director of Brownsburg (IN) Public Library, often wondered how many people left her library discouraged after not finding what they needed or a person to answer their question.
She hopes a program that just started this week makes sure she never has that concern again.
“Self service is important, but there are people in a library who need help,” she said. “We aren’t a Barnes & Noble. We are paid by taxpayers and our services are paid by the taxpayers, so we need to be there to help.”
The new initiative, called the roving reference approach, puts a reference librarian near the front door to be more readily available to visitors. Every 15 minutes or so, that librarian pushes a cart with a laptop or just carries an electronic notepad and walks through the library looking for those who may need help.
“The Roving Librarian”…anybody got that domain snagged yet?
Found on: http://lisnews.org/getting_librarians_out_behind_their_desks_and_turning_them_roving_librarians
From the Journal of the Medical Library Association, v. 96(4), 2008.
This current installment of the case study column concerns the role of the medical librarian in basic biological research. In the modern life sciences, the boundaries between the health professions and general biology are becoming increasingly blurred, as both disciplines rely to a greater extent on interdisciplinary, integrative, and comparative approaches for the resolution of major questions (Figure 1). Correspondingly, the university medical or health center library is rapidly becoming a primary resource for both basic and applied scientists from across virtually all fields of modern biology (e.g., from molecular and cellular biology to physiology to ecology and evolution). In response, the importance of the medical librarian as an information specialist continues to grow at these institutions. This case study documents this expanding role of the medical librarian by focusing on a basic research question that originated from a recent publication on viral evolution. See entire article HERE.
From Eagle Dawg Blog; Perspectives in health informatics and medical librarianship at http://eagledawg.blogspot.com/2008/10/friday-foolery-4-1947-librarian.html
I shared this short video with colleagues and many agree that if one listens and does not view the video, it almost works! See what you think!!!
comes news of a recent report from the UK:
Click here to read the full review.
With a response from the Medical Library Association:
MLA is working on advocacy for our members and their roles, most notably right now through the Vital Pathways Project http://www.mlanet.org/resources/vital/. I think I just received information about Sir Muir Gray who’s cited in the paper from the group yesterday and his work in bringing NHS library services to their current position. There are certainly comparisons that can be made between UK and US medical librarians, particularly in the dedication to supporting evidence-based medicine, the importance of lifelong learning, and the importance of being part of the health care team. MLA has had several initiatives in this regard including the informationist, supporting research on the value of the medical librarian, and disseminating a variety of advocacy tools to help librarians promote their value. We continue to work closely with NLM on projects, included our current project of exploring and promoting the librarians’ role in health information literacy.
I am going to pass these documents on to the Vital Pathways group as additional resource documents for their work. Thanks again.
Carla J. Funk, MLS, MBA, CAE
Executive Director
Medical Library Association
From Duke’s Scholarly Communication blog: http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/
…but the article certainly implies that one aspect of the event was assigning blame to university libraries for our inability to make everything free for all on the Internet. The presidents in attendance, we are told, “urged libraries to halt what they described as an assault on the public’s right to knowledge, done in the name of copyright.” It is, of course, both ironic and ill-informed to blame libraries for an assault on the public’s right to know. Our professional organizations, after all, have an official and highly visible commitment to that right that is, as far as I know, unmatched by any other such group. …
Interview with Dorothea Salo John Dupuis, Interview with Dorothea Salo of Caveat Lector, Confessions of a Science Librarian, October 5, 2008. Excerpt:
...Dorothea Salo [is the] Digital Repository Librarian at University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the blog Caveat Lector. Dorothea is well known for her role in the institutional repository and scholarly communications communities; she’s the author of the widely read eprint on IRs “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel,” forthcoming in the Fall 2008 Library Trends….
Q1. …[W]hat do you think about “libraries’ feasible and proper roles in scholarly communication?”
I think a lot of things. I think the institutional repository was a noble and worthwhile experiment, but as a tool for redressing the imbalances in the scholarly-communication system, it is a failure. It may be reborn if the Harvard experiment succeeds, but that very much remains to be seen. This doesn’t mean that I think IRs are useless; they don’t have to be, though they often are. It does mean that we’re going to have to go after the serials crisis in other ways.
I think we libraries have a lot of market power that we are not using properly. I’ve heard publishers talk about their industry, and what they invariably say is “we will follow the money.” That means libraries; as individual subscriptions dwindle, WE are the ones with the money. They’ll follow us — but we aren’t leading them toward open access. We’re squealing like stuck pigs about the stalemate, yes, but we’re not reallocating any of our serials funds to support gold open access. I think this is a serious mistake….
Read the entire post at: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/10/interview-with-dorothea-salo.html
My pals Meredith Farkas and Chrystie Hill, two “movers and shakers” if I ever met any, as well as “official” (according to Library Journal) “Movers and Shakers”, just published the findings from a survey of people awarded this title to try to find out how things were going with them. There is much to ponder in this piece, so I urge you not to be satisfied with the few snippets below, but rather read the entire article.
We asked these Movers directly, and their answer was clear: continue to make time and resources available for professional development, thinking, and experimentation. They asked explicitly for listening, leadership, and collaboration from their institutions. They also wanted room and allowances for failure. “Some ideas die, and some don’t,” they said. “Identify resources for innovative test bed projects and let’s see ‘What if?’”
Most of this group longed for leadership, particularly in the area of risk. They saw encouraging “risk-taking” as part of their organization’s leadership role and called for an organizational culture that rewarded risk-takers “among all staff members.” “Model creativity and risk-taking as leaders,” said one, “reward risk-taking,” “provide admin support for risk-taking,” and “create a better sense of unity and vision,” said others. “Specifically address innovation and practices for producing innovation…make innovative work an organizational effort,” said another. “Show us how to handle failure.”
