Panelists:
- Kim LaPlante, Northeast Wisconsin Technical College
- Mary Rieder, UW Colleges
- Ed Van Gemert, UW-Madison
- Pat Wilkinson, UW-Oshkosh
- Pete Gilbert, Lawrence University
- Moderator: Gretchen Revie, Lawrence University
Role of library in higher education today
- Kim:
- WI Tech Coll system served 400,000 students last year
- NWTC 43,000+ students, 6,000 FTE
- Education: what you want, how you want it, where you want it
- #1 teaching IL skills - find, evaluate, use - librarian is most important resource in the library
- #2 gather materials - not so much in-house, but provide access; currency (ex: nursing or computer tech within past few years); get copyright permission to put online; video streaming online; cover many counties so has to be widely available
- #3 fostering innovation; disseminate to admin and faculty re: trends, directions to take, grants
- Mary:
- Similar to Tech Coll, with multiple campuses/libraries (13) across state; 50 library staff (~3/library, not all FT)
- Lots to do, little staff time to do it
- Large and growing online student population (1,100 now)
- Undergrad support vs. faculty research
- Started online document delivery, use SCLS and UB forfor ILL
- Non-traditional students doing research from work - needed proxy server
- Online library support has been done from one campus, but will need to hire more
- Templates for course Library Course Pages - citation guides, databases, catalog, ILL, websites - faculty can customize if want
- Coursecasting - podcasting audio of lectures, campus activities (ex: poetry readings), access can be restricted to students
- IL - wide range of students; life-long skills
- Copyright education for instructors
- Pete:
- Googled phrase "role of library in higher education" - found article from 1982, Australian perspective
- Dependent upon educational objectives of institution
- WAICU - 19 private schools - Marquette to Nashoda Seminary - most 1000-2000 students - overall 57,000 students; 1/4 4-year students in state - more diversity and non-traditional students (25+ years old)
- Independent schools: Personal connections, innovate with faculty, mission-driven, about teaching and learning primarily for undergrads, individualized learning, undergrads doing research with faculty
- Pat:
- Utilitarian definition of academic librarian
- Means by which HE gets certain amount of scholarly information to students and faculty
- 11 comprehensive colleges within UW System (2,500 to 10,000 students)
- Academic libraries no longer have a near monopoly - once operated in information-scarce environment; now information-rich
- Grappling with having to demonstrate our effectiveness now that libraries didn't need to 30 years ago
- Admins contact me and ask about # of books in library to put in reports - that doesn't tell anyone anything
- Ed:
- We'll hear more about similarities than dissimilarities today
- We have an incredible wealth of educational opportunities in this state - marvel at how and why that came about
- Over 45 libraries on the UW-Madison campus [well...]
- UW-Madison started 2 years after statehood, library collections go back further than that
- Sister states benefit from multiple research universities
- Wisconsin Idea - Charles Van Hise 1904 - boundaries of university extend beyond boundaries of the state
- My grandfather's time: extension staff, lumbering - natural resources, Now: information technology
- Support for big science, and digital arts and humanities
- Important for quality of life in Wisconsin
- People think "grad students and faculty research" but it's also undergrad education
- Less about internal focus, than external - how library serves needs of campus, city, state
- Article in Chronicle from Monday - UW-Madison difficulty retaining faculty and staff, scary article
- Kim:
- IL - more guides, online tours, virtual ref, more lab staff, hired coordinator for 3 campuses, customized guides for 3 programs, video streaming
- for students who are used to doing their own Myspace and Facebook pages
- Increasing tools at regional centers so anywhere in district students can get what they need
- Cataloging learning objects alongside books, journals, etc.
- Using Delicious account to bring students to recommended sites
- Library blog with RSS feed
- In Facebook - not alot of fans, but we are there - incorporate resources within so if seen, they can use
- Innovation - joined a lot of committees, not just to market library, but to help out as researcher about new technology, trends; More integrated with curriculum dev process
- College-wide online discussion with reading lists, instructors discuss articles posted by librarians
- Want to increase team teaching of librarians and faculty
- Want to make our interfaces more user-friendly; nextgen wants easy, nontrad want intuitive; Voyager 7 this year
- Instructor development role - want to help train re: libraries, work with existing faculty, being added to search teams, so can market library before they're hired because so busy when they start
- Mary:
- Tried some of those things
- Wisco virtual ref consortium - dropped out - staff small, hard to cover shifts - started to get questions about resources we didn't have
- Tried chat and IM ref, our students tend to like email because you can get to it on own time
- New strategic plan - assessment is big - survey a few years ago re: user feedback on Voyager catalog, and lots of changes were made, more streamlined; more campus surveys; 1st LibQual only 118 respondents (not as many as hoped) - will put into report for Library Council
- Budget cuts - created our own licensed resource purchasing cooperative; more collaborative purchase decisions
- Some students want to talk, others to be quiet - customizing spaces
- Online social networking hasn't really gone big with us
- Some of our libraries have LibraryThing and Google Books lists
- May become a baccalaureate granting institution, and will need to support this
- Want to tell faculty what we have, so they can tell students what we have
- Want to digitize non-copyrighted materials
- Want to look at internal and external funding sources
- Pete:
- Wayne Wiegand was my advisor in grad school - key phrase was "the library in the life of the user, as opposed to the user in the life of the library" - to achieve ubiquity, we try to customize our resources/services for users
- Signs and business cards: "Ask us"
- We're also spending a lot of time asking them - formal through SurveyMonkey, and informal through flipchart in library with question: "What one change would you like to see in the physical building?" that users write on
- We ask ourselves "So what?" - what if we just stopped doing this? what would happen? because we have to stop something if we start something new.
- IL causes increased reference statistics - make appointments for reference conferences, allows us to prepare more than drop-in desk questions
- Going to where the students are, virtually - Moodle course management system on campus (free version of D2L, Blackboard) - created a library module to search catalog, will add federated searching, will be doing Delicious and RSS; working with faculty to use PURLs to link to articles
- Librarians and art faculty talking about digital image provision to studio students - work on things as people ask for them
- Senior experience - every department has to have a culminating experience; opportunity to integrate library across curriculum
- Building new campus center - "living room" - library is like that right now; what will new role of library be? Remote services? Domino effect on other buildings - incorporate learning commons into library?
- Pat:
- Sharper, more public focus on faculty research
- TOC service
- Desktop document delivery - Promised to faculty that we'd get anything they wanted as fast as we could - $10,000/year - BadgerCat helpful as discovery tool, some UW funding
- Less cumbersome for students - added MS Office suite, wireless, laptop checkout, allow people to do things from homepage
- Tried minor physical improvements - quiet study, group study, new archives area (work with classes doing research)
- More fun, fewer rules, no fines for overdues, murder mystery/IL, coffee/cookies during finals, custom-printed mousepads
- Not only tried to handle cuts well, but have tried to improve services - got through to admin, they were happier with us
- Not buried under IT in identity
- Stress one-system, one-library - role of UW-Madison as flagship very important, elsewhere that doesn't happen
- Reducing footprint of materials, to make room for information commons
- Conscious transition to digital resources
- Integrate with CMS
- Increased funding, strengthening cooperative collection development
- Ed:
- Started 1971 as student assistant in library
- Recent strategic planning exercise - not so important what directions and outcomes were - process on large campus (300 FTE) was interesting and informative - wouldn't hesitate to do again
- Strategic partnerships - with faculty, students, other system institutions on digital collections, highlight work by faculty, with Google - transformative work for libraries
- We can do big things, and we can change the world, that's part of our role - will continue to be
- Library space is a physical asset; over 1 million square feet at UW-Madison; reduction of print, want to repurpose, also landgrab on campus; how partner with faculty, centers, etc. or it will be taken from us
- Have lost 5 million dollars in journal collections from budget cuts; ILL/document delivery has done a great job
- Lorcan Dempsey - critical of libraries not "in the flow"
- NIH requirement of uploading publications to PubMed Central - libraries have taken central role, partnered with research admin
- Culture of Sharing workshop last weekend - 50 students, starting Students for Free Culture org on campus - told it was the 1st such symposium in U.S.
- Building collections based on buildings and people not appropriate; need to support multidisciplinarity
- Librarians designed learning outcomes for learning objects - instructors bring images, skeletons, etc. - how help them place into CMS, provide ubiquity
What skills and abilities help librarians thrive?
- Kim:
- Instruction skills with enthusiasm - they just have to share!
- Someone with imagination who has ideas they want to try
- Mary:
- Need IT skills because we're not that well supported, do our own web design
- Multi-tasking - reference in person, circulation, email reference, committee work
- Marketing resources, services, what we can do for faculty/admin/community
- Networking with community - Campus Reads, library boards, helps at budget time
- Ed:
- Social intelligence - build into position descriptions - work as team, partnerships with limited resources and time regardless of subject expertise
- Pat:
- Ability to work in ambiguous situations, take a risk, take initiative; 30 years ago, libraries were run top-down
- Business communication skills - we like academia, and we need to focus our communication on what people need to know, not what we want to show them
- Pete:
- Creativity - thinking energy - I have 9 pages of brainstorming from staff about better serving campus
- Responsivity - reference "house calls"
- Connectivity - knowing people by name, who's doing what
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