ACRL New England Chapter Spring 2005 conference, report
“The Future of Academic Libraries”
May 20, 2005,
Introductions
Colleen Anderson, president of ACRL/NE, welcomed the attendees and introduced Brian Courtemanche, director of the Rivier College Library, who also welcomed the group. Mr. Courtemanche gave a brief history of
Ms. Anderson then acknowledged the hard work of the planning committee for the conference, under the leadership of Nancy George of Salem State College. She also mentioned the sponsoring vendors and encouraged the group to visit the vendors during the breaks and lunch: Ovid; ProQuest; Ebsco; CAS; Waldo; and H.W. Wilson.
She also mentioned upcoming ACRL events; details are available on the ACRL/NEC website at http://www.acrlnec.org
May 25: Collection development SIG; program on resource assessment at Elms College (MA)
June 2: Serials and Information technology SIGS on archiving of electronic journals at
June 6: Retreat sponsored by the ACRL/NEC board, to discuss ways to make ACRL/NEC more viable and useful to its members; all members are welcome to attend.
June 10: Library instruction SIG (NELIG) annual program at the
Ms. Anderson introduced the first speaker of the day: Frances Maloy, President, ACRL National, who is currently the leader, access services division, at
Ms. Maloy then moved to a discussion of technology. Today’s students have grown up with various beliefs, such as that computers are not technology; the Internet is better than TV; and with a zero tolerance for delays. In order to adapt to the learning styles of these “millennial” students, Educause, in its Research Bulletin 2005, emphasizes a shift in teaching from “sage on sage” to “guide on the side,” meaning that teaching is no longer only with a faculty member lecturing to a class but is moving towards the faculty member leading discussion, being “on the side” guiding the students to learn and discuss the material. She mentioned that the decreased funding and increased emphasis on assessment, along with the change in student demographics and duality of the needs of researchers, means that libraries will have to adapt to new roles while maintaining some of their traditional roles.
“Why do people come to the library?” The library is a warehouse of books as well as a place for students and others to use technology and to find/use information. In all of this the role of the librarian is still important. Ms. Maloy mentioned the dichotomy between traditional libraries, with stack space and computers, networks, etc., and libraries designed around the newer model of information commons (with little or no stack space and mainly space for computers and other technology). She mentioned articles from the New York Times, 4/25/05, “Mailer’s miscellany: author sells his archives…”, and 5/14/05 “College libraries set aside books in digital age.”
Ms. Maloy mentioned Google, whose mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. She asserted that Google’s mission is our mission, and that, in some ways, Google achieves the mission better than libraries do. Libraries need to emulate Google’s “almost fanatical devotion to its users.” She quoted the CEO of Honeywell as saying that strategic thinking is the pursuit of the right questions; libraries tend to emphasize the right answer rather than the right question. An OCLC survey revealed that undergraduates are not likely to ask librarians for assistance in using the web and that only 21% of students indicate that they turn to librarians with questions. Perhaps we should become more like Google in order to encourage students to use us: put ourselves where they are and make it easy for them to turn to us with their questions.
She feels that we librarians need to free our minds of old ideas and to assess our level of support, how we fit in with the goals of the institution, and decide with whom we can form partnerships.
The second speaker of the morning, Brinley Franklin, vice provost for university libraries at the
Mr. Franklin contended that librarians now have a tremendous challenge to make the library an important part of the campus core. Peter Brophy’s The library in the twenty-first century: new services for the information age touches on this mandate. Mr. Franklin envisions that we will not teach information literacy as much in the future, since students will be able to find more information themselves. He wonders whether reference and interlibrary loan will become unmediated in the future, much as circulation (self-serve checkout) and reserve (electronic reserve) are now. He quoted a college provost who said that the role of librarians will shift from managers of materials to managers of access to materials (in some ways this is already occurring). Mr. Franklin mentioned that all libraries will become consortially interdependent and that libraries need to have more centralization; we must stop duplication of effort and act more consortially.
Scholarly communication was the next topic covered. Currently we have a convoluted system of funding research in the
The third and final speaker of the morning was Roy Tennant, user services architect for the
The Google search screen is simple: one search box with 2 options (Google search and I’m feeling lucky). It doesn’t make the user choose where to search.
By contrast, the UC Berkeley library search screen is complex, with multiple options to choose from, some or most of which the user has probably never heard of:
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