Professional Development

Today I had the privilege of attending ASERLs workshop for non-librarian managers in Atlanta, GA. First, I must say, they had very good coffee, the Tech Team would have appreciated this aspect.

This was a very interesting workshop. Of course the morning began with a brief opening, followed by introductions. People from several different universities were represented, along with several different positions within those academic libraries. This gave way to many different viewpoints, which I found beneficial.

The opening speaker discussed “why we do what we do.” I really liked the message from this presentation. The focus not what we do individually, but what we do in regards to the mission of our libraries and inevitably our universities, nation, world, etc. A story was shared (and it may or may not be true) in which John F. Kennedy, while visiting NASA, bumped into a janitor and he asked the janitor what he did and the janitor replied that he was helping to put a man on the moon. We’re not just staff in circulation or tech services, we are providing services for the betterment of the university, and so on.

A couple of other sessions I enjoyed involved the new technologies at research universities and how those affect us and user perceptions of academic libraries. Good news, we’re moving in the right direction and everyone is struggling with the same issues that ZSR is. Bad news, we have to be aware of security/privacy issues and the perception of libraries is that of a place of books - and that’s it. There was also mention of how the library is not where people go first for information and how we are having to compete with Google and other search engines, but in thinking about this I don’t think we should compete with Google, if anything we should collaborate with Google. Should it matter where or how people get information as long as they get good, useful, correct (and if applicable scholarly) information…I don’t think so. I can understand the concern behind that, but I think it doesn’t have to be that way.

The last session involved a three person panel of library directors (deans) sharing “what keeps library directors awake at night.” This was interesting, directors must never sleep. Some of the things directors worry about are: faculty status of librarians (this opened up a big conversation amongst the non-librarians, there are several pros and cons as you can imagine, but the cons seemed to depend on whether tenure was an option), budget issues, information commons and renovations in general, library hours (being open 24 hours), noise created by increasing collaborative space (and other such complaints from faculty), reluctance to change (library and campus wide), and the future of higher education. There were more, but these seemed to be the issues mostly discussed.

There was also mention of disappointment in library science schools. I don’t want to say too much in regards to this topic, especially since I don’t know much about the issue, but I thought this topic was interesting, and especially the openness of this discussion and how all of the directors agreed with this. Enlightening, very enlightening.

Overall, this was a great workshop, I would encourage anyone else in the ZSR Library to attend this workshop. We have been asked as participants to suggest topics for potential future workshops and events and I have a few ideas…

Tomorrow is SOLINET, which should also be interesting.