Jim Rettig, ALA President-elect ULA/MPLA Keynote

I went to the ULA/MPLA conference in Salt Lake City last week and wanted to post some of my notes from the conference. I figured a good place to start was Jim Rettig’s Keynote, “Creating Connections–Ideas for Our Association’s Future.”

Summary/thoughts

Rettig speaks about how he will be a champion this year for libraries in general; he feels that his main duty as ALA president will be library advocacy. He also spoke about librarianship as a profession and how we need to redefine our identity as librarians.

Favorite quote

“What if they started [ALA] from scratch? If there were no ALA but we needed one, what would it look like? It would be filled with small groups of people who share interests, meeting and connecting.”

Here are my complete notes from the meeting:

We have a lot to offer; libraries help people to prosper; we provide services that help people lead successful lives;

Still the only agency in the United States that can provide life-long learning from cradle to grave;

SKILLs ACT; one of my main duties as ALA president is advocacy for libraries; we can enhance our advocacy efforts in many ways; SKILLs: every school within its district will sponsor a school library specialist; if schools don’t have that media specialist the students go to the public library; but the public library can’t put librarians in the classrooms; they can’t make contacts with teachers in the lunch room;

Mesa Arizona incident: every teacher librarian will be eliminated in 3 years and replace with an aid; Spokane Washington mom’s formed a grass roots movement for funding for school libraries; they formed alliances and ALA gave them great data about school libraries from their efforts

Advocacy for libraries

ALA issues and advocacy on the top nav bar from ALA.org

Click on take action: with your zip code you will have the contact info for all of your representatives, local, state and national;

ilovelibraries.org launched at end of annual conference of ALA; meant for people who are not librarians but love their libraries

We have a lot in common but we have not promoted it with each other; instead we have competed with each other; we need to come together and make the case for libraries; when you are going into a recession and people are going to need job finding tools it is the wrong time to cut funding for any community college or library

For the 17,000 who participated in an ALA survey the direction of ALA most voted for was library advocacy far and away;

People who have never experienced good library services have no idea what they are missing; our biggest challenge is getting people’s attention; once they have experienced them they ought to be booked;

Who are we

Who are we collectively and who do we want to become? mostly female and mostly white; also mostly and aging profession (not this room I don’t think); AARP research said 60% will continue to work either for money or for enjoyment post-retirement;

We have competition for people’s attention: facebook, yahoo groups MySpace, blogger;

We used to have a different publication model; now you can set up a blog and publish your ideas and get more than two comments in one day

Social networking instead of conference attendance;

We can’t just count on ALA membership for contribution and collaboration; we have to get their attention and get them hooked by the benefits this association this has to offer; ALA online community software has been described as “less-than intuitive” but we are working on this;

What if they started from scratch? If there were no ALA but we needed one, what would it look like? It would be filled with small groups of people who share interests, meeting and connecting; people want more than one home in the library world because they have more than one interest;

Craigslist: one place where you can look at stuff; it is almost ugly it is so simple but it is effective: we are working on something like this

Online salon and conversations with ALA leaders and members

Juried grassroots at 2009 annual conference: grass roots groups of members (not just people who are on committees) we want people with fresh ideas; there will be a call for these proposals

Unconferences: group of people coming to an online environment to just talk about a topic

Virtual poster sessions opened up to a bigger audience

Diversity: we cant solve this in on year; but we can work on it; scholarships for undergraduates for a day at the 2009 annual conference; show them we are a lot more than books

YouTube questions for the Mid Winter Meeting; questions for the candidates: what do you want to do in the future?

Midwinter meeting: we will be at the point where a new President of the United States will take the oath of office; the national archives have reclassified some documents some dating from WWII; we need to find someone who will prompt the government to be more open.

Bookless Libraries

This is what a lot of libraries could look like in the future. When all books are finally available online will libraries decide to withdraw print? What will we do with the space?
I like the atmosphere of openness the University of British Columbia Library provides. Very nice.

 

IKBLC Interior 32

Originally uploaded by UBC Library Graphics

Leap Year for Libraries

I started thinking about what academic libraries could look like next February 29th (or maybe what I hope they will look like) and here is what I came up with:

Acquisitions

Books will still be a part of the budget but we will see more agreements like the journal-subscription model for serials: print, online only, or print and online. Libraries will be able to decide if they want the book in print or full-text online or both and will pay vendors a fee for each type of access.

Information Commons

Harvard Lamont Library Cafe    Originally uploaded by cindiann

There will be increasing pressure to have a cafe with Wifi for informal collaboration and research. Libraries will need to come to grips with how they really feel about food. The Commons will be a place to share and mashup the streaming content available from on and off campus (e.g., course videos, presentations, YouTube, etc).

Cataloging

I would like to say (once RDA finally is adopted) that in four years MARC will at least be enhanced by FRBR principles or, even better, MARC will be replaced altogether (*sigh* if only). As it is, this seems optimistic in the extreme.

Interlibrary Loan

Although the total number of interlibrary loan requests may not go down, there will be less requests for individual articles as more content is available online. I actually tried to find a citation in Ebsco, Gale and Proquest recently that didn’t have either an HTML or PDF available; it was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Requests will increase for items which are not online (old–out-of-print, but still in copyright–books) or, in the case of special collections, may need institutional authentication. ILL will be sending out a sort of temporary login for digitized special collections.

ILS

Open source initiatives like LibLime will be a more popular option for libraries because of their timely adoption of user-centric tools for searching and collaborating. The expensive ILS vendors of the past will be marginalized as more libraries turn to ILS overlay systems (Primo, Endeca, etc) or open source options like LibLime for simple, intuitive searching.

Reference

While face-to-face interaction will still drop over the next four years, virtual reference will increase. iPhone functionality in most phones by 2012 will make texting a library easier and more comfortable.

Publication

Open access journals will still be an issue for some academics but the number of citations to free online articles will continue to increase, despite the ‘experts’ who only see top-tier journals as viable publication outlets. As citations from free articles skyrocket, most scholars will admit (either privately or openly) that open access journals are really making a substantial impact on scholarship.

Of course there are many other aspects of libraries that will evolve over the next four years but these are what I would like to see happen. Maybe some of my thoughts are a bit drastic for just four years. If you think about it though, last February 29th, most people were just starting to glimpse the power of Google; Facebook had just barely been launched; and user-generated content and blogging had just started gaining real traction.

Future of Libraries

I have just spent the last day and a half reading AACR2, rules for NACO, and articles centering on the relevancy of libraries in the Information Age. Many people tend to be pretty optimistic about the future of libraries and this of course has excited me because it is my chosen profession. However, I am still left in doubt over a couple of issues that no one seems willing to address. After reading David Lewis’s “Strategy for Academic Libraries in First Quarter of the 21^st Century” for the third or fourth time,

I was struck by some of his thoughts.

What will it mean to libraries when all books are potentially full-text searchable and available to everyone with an Internet connection?

This is certainly a relevant question but unfortunately I do not believe Lewis explores it in his paper fully. Although it is possible that copyright will not be an issue in the future, it is more likely that the ability to actually read the books that are digitized and searchable in full-text will still be dependent upon purchasing and license agreements. Libraries lend print now…perhaps they can just expand their policies to electronic items like streaming music, video and text.

Lewis brings up the topic of bundling but he does not explore the possible implications for monographic items—as of yet bundling has solely been used by vendors to offer subscriptions to multiple databases and journals. Why couldn’t this model transfer to online monographs? Perhaps a 30-day previewing authorization then the library would have to pay for the book if desired. If the library keeps the item, there will need to be some sort of notification to the cataloger that the library now has access; really the electronic journal model is increasingly applicable here. Instead of bundles of journals libraries will get anthologies of books, music, or other media formats. However, while everyone seems to think (erroneously) that the need for cataloging will decrease as print and other physical formats are phased out, if we acquire electronic formats of music, video and text, electronic cataloging will only increase for monographs just as it has for journals recently.

Later Lewis admits that “While some print materials will remain important, particularly monographs in the humanities and social sciences, in general, print materials will cease to be the primary part of working collections.” Will monographs still be king in the humanities publishing world? This is an important question for anyone interested in the future of scholarship in the humanities. Are humanists going to adopt electronic publishing models eventually? It seems that even Lewis believes it will be a long time before the monograph is supplanted by online publications.

Finally, and perhaps, most disturbingly, Lewis writes about open-access publication methods:

From the perspective of students and faculty, the growth of open access means that more high-quality scholarly material is freely available (and most easily found with Google or Google Scholar). This frees them from reliance on their campus’s library as the sole source for scholarly materials. Over time, this will mean that the library’s collection of purchased materials, in both print and electronic formats, will be less important. The good news is that as this happens, libraries will be required to purchase less. The especially good news is that this should happen first in the area of science and technology journals where the cost of materials has increased at double-digit rates for several decades. The bad news is that much of what libraries have done in the past is make available purchased collections, and, as this role declines, so may we.

Here again Lewis does not really offer any kind of solution except that we need to be curators of this free content. However, it seems to me that if much of what we do now is to provide access to costly materials, when those materials really are available free online libraries won’t be necessary any longer. Instead libraries would simply be marginalized… all the university would need is someone to update a subject page periodically with the most recent links to the hottest journals and monographs online. Barring that, there will be no real reason for a user to come to the library—they can simply search the web for the content they need (why bother even going to a subject page?).