Refresh

Brian Mathews, the Associate Dean for Learning & Outreach at Virginia Tech, criticizes libraries and their approach to strategic planning in a white paper entitled Think Like a Startup:

“Many library strategic plans read more like to-do lists rather than entrepreneurial visions. With all the effort that goes into these documents I’m not sure that we’re getting a good return. You can easily pick out who wrote which parts: there is a section for public services, a section for technical services, something about information literacy, something about open access, something about providing service excellence. These are highly predictable documents.

They don’t say: we’re going to develop three big ideas that will shift the way we operate. They don’t say: we’re going delight our patrons by anticipating their needs. They don’t say: we’re going to transform how scholarship happens. They don’t attempt to dent the universe.”

But for many companies,  a vision and a strategic plan are two different documents . A vision statement tells the audience what the organization ideally wants to be. For instance, it’s probably not too far from the truth to say that Google’s vision is to provide the “perfect search engine” (something co-founder Larry Page has defined).  But that tells you nothing about how it’s getting there (which is what the strategic plan is).

Nitpicking aside, I know he’s saying that a lofty vision is what libraries need to work toward more than that other thing. He uses a less glamorous metaphor: Are you trying to build the best vacuum cleaner or have the cleanest floors?

Fortunately, I’m part of a forward-thinking organization (with both a strategic plan and the vision to guide it), but it works on a granular level too. Every day, I ask myself what the ultimate goal is for the course activities I design (or other tasks I engage with), and the hard thinking that sometimes follows really makes a difference–even if it is pride-swallowing.

For me, part of the new experience of being an academic librarian is the encouragement to participate in conferences and engage with colleagues from other academic institutions. This past April, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend and present at my first national library conference as a librarian, the Electronic Resource and Libraries (ER&L) Conference in Austin, Texas.

ER&L is a small conference with about 400 attendees. To me, it was evident that this intimate and focused conference, allowed for those of us who work with electronic resources (everything from ejournals, databases, ebooks, discovery tools, Electronic Resource Management systems, and even those engaged in library publishing ventures), being in the same space and engaging with others who do the exact same thing is extremely valuable.

I took a great deal out of the conference, both in terms of the learning experience of working on a presentation with librarians from other institutions, as well as how to engage in a conference as a participant. Though I saw numerous, fascinating presentations here are a few highlights:

All you can ERMS: Laying out the Buffet of eResource Management Systems

A two-session panel discussion with librarians from different institutions on how they implement and utilize their different ERMs. ERMs covered included Innovative (what we have at OSU), CORAL (open source), Worldshare (OCLC), 360 Resource Manager (Serials Solutions), and Verde (Ex Libris).

Take-away: Each ERM offers a slight different solution to the user and selection of an ERM is highly depend on the needs of each institution, however if all the functionality of all the different vendors’ ERMs could be rolled into one product, that would be awesome. That day will come, hopefully sooner rather than later.

The Textbook Affordability Crisis and the Academic Library: Exploring Alternatives (Monica Metz-Wiseman, University of South Florida)

A compelling argument correlating the rising cost of textbooks, total cost of a college education, and student loan debt, and a call to librarians to participate and support the campus discussion on textbook affordability.

Take-away: The total cost of a college education and discussion of student-load debt are issues that are not going to go away. Campuses must find creative solutions to help students with the lowering the total cost of a college education. Librarians have specialized knowledge on the copyright, the economics of information and publishing industry and may be able to offer valuable insight or creative solutions in campus discussions on textbook affordability

Ohio Librarian Get-together:

Although this was not a presentation, prior to the conference two librarians from Denison organized an evening social for those of us in attendance from Ohio. Buckeyes were served and it was a great opportunity to talk to other electronic resource librarians on what they are doing with statistics, ERMs, OLinks and other specific issues or questions I run across all the time.

Take-away: Whether it’s because of OhioLINK or not, there’s a lot of good camaraderie among Ohio librarians who are more than willing to share their experiences and help each other out with issues that may be experienced across academic institutions.

There were so many other fascinating presentations that I couldn’t cover here, but I have notes and powerpoint slides from many of them, so feel free to send me an e-mail if you’re interest in a specific presentation.

UWeekly Cover from January 18, 2012

In spite of its presence everywhere on campus, out of the weekly newspapers in Columbus, I do not typically read the UWeekly (but this may change). I usually glance at the cover article and continue on my way thinking ok, I’m not the target audience, but last week’s cover article made me stop, pick it up from a table in the Tech Center staff lounge and read this one article in detail—twice. The eBook Revolution: When will it come to college campuses?

In Acquisitions, we talk about eBooks a LOT. What the publishers are doing (or not doing) with eBook publication, the user experience (or lack thereof) at platforms that provide eBooks, the discovery layer for eBooks in our collection, and the general incorporation of eBooks in academic libraries.

So, what do you mean “when” will eBooks arrive on college campuses? They are already here! Tens maybe hundreds of thousands of them in our collection.

There are many statements in the UWeekly article, that I would challenge, support with better data, or elaborate on, however, after finishing the article a second time, I realized none of that is important for us as a library. This is an article written by and includes interviews from likely OSU library patrons (mostly undergraduates). Regardless of your opinion on eBooks or on the data within this article, this article provides valuable insight into how some of our users view the notion of eBooks, the confusion and unfamiliarity that exists over e-Readers, tablets, and even eBooks versus eTextbooks (two different animals), and the one factor that is driving many people or organization either into or away from eBooks—money.

So, who else read this article? What does it mean for us? What insights does this bring to your work in the library? And what about the cost of e-Readers and tablets? Will there ever be a point where an e-Reader or tablet replaces the need to buy a laptop?