Libraries and I.T.

Yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Ed's "Wired Campus" bulletin features an interesting letter from Pat Steele and Brad Wheeler at Indiana Univ. about the importance of productive working relationships between academic libraries and campus IT departments.

From the letter: "None of the compelling issues facing academic libraries today can be accomplished without strong support from IT departments. ...And, we should note, none of these initiatives can be advanced successfully by IT departments without the expertise, knowledge management, and relationships that librarians provide. Together we do more."

Especially interesting is the mention of cross-institutional collaboration, one example of which is the Hathitrust, and ARL's plan to introduce a new measure of collaboration in 2009.

Libraries for Hire?

There's an interesting article in today's Chronicle about Johns Hopkins' library acting as a library-for-hire to an online college --

http://chronicle.com/free/2008/12/8310n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

It's managed through JHU's Entrepreneurial Library Program. Apparently this program also offers an oral history and editing service, plus rent out library facilities for outside events.

Has anyone heard of other similar programs being offered by research libraries?

Studying Students

Last year I read one of the most compelling studies of students. How do students really go about writing a paper? We librarians may think we know, but wouldn't it be an excellent idea to have an anthropologist and some librarians actually spend a year studying students to find out?

This is what the authors of Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester did. From having students map out or take pictures documenting their every move throughout the day, this study provides a much clearer picture of the day in the life of today's college student--how they spend their time, what pressures they face, when they actually start working on homework and how they go about it. One part of the study asks students what they want out of the library, and they even ask the students to map their ideal library floor plan, complete with librarian/barista staff in some cases. What happens when reference librarians work the late night shift? How can librarians work with helicopter parents? This is just a sampling, as there is so much good stuff in this study.

Even though I read this over a year ago, I still use examples from it in many of my presentations. This study offers an excellent picture of today's college student and is well worth your time. The complete text is still available online.

New Tech Therapy Podcast

Have you been listening to the Tech Therapy podcast series from the Chronicle? These 15 minute segments usually cover topics of interest to librarians. This week's installment focuses on the Future of College Libraries. The hosts describe some new library building projects (treadmills in a library--seriously!) and discuss the importance of the library as place on campus. It's worth a listen, as are others from the series like Libraries vs. IT.

The Name of the Rows

My mother recently sent me a copy (like, a literal photocopy copy) of this article from Cincinnati Magazine that details the changes the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County has been making in its quest to be a more "21st Century Library." We spend so much time in Libraryland navel gazing over this issue in our literature, I thought it was interesting to see a popular press examination of the issue.

For you in the tl;dr crowd, the basic takeaway message of the article is twofold:

1. There are some unique main branch services are being lost because they are collapsing service points and making subject specialists into generalists.
2. The average library user doesn't care and usage stats have gone up since the changes have been made.

Although this is about a public library, we in our academic library can probably learn something from the experiences up in Cincinnati.

Cloud Computing

EDUCAUSE has just released a report about the implications of "cloud computing" for higher ed in conjunction with its annual conference, which was held recently in Orlando (http://net.educause.edu/e08). The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Wired Campus" report just ran a review.

Cloud computing refers to applications and data that don't reside locally on your PC, but on a host computer administered by someone else and accessible via the Internet. Gmail, Flickr, and Yahoo! Mail, for example, are all are on the cloud. On the one hand, you can access your work from anywhere; on the other, you're dependent on a remote system to maintain it.

For general overviews of cloud computing, NPR ran a story in August 2008, and InformationWeek has posted a useful Guide to Cloud Computing.

You can read a PDF version of the report "The Tower and the Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing," at the EDUCAUSE website. Print copies are available for purchase as well.

Presentations Posted

Janet's interesting presentation about the future of academic health center libraries is now posted on Sharepoint. I have also uploaded Tag's " A Day in the Life: UK Medical Center Clinical Librarians" presentation from the Faculty Retreat. Both may be found in the Faculty Council section of Sharepoint in the "Rethinking Research Libraries Year-Long Discussion" folder.