SLA Academic Division

Copyright Session from EDUCAUSE

Missed the talk at EDUCAUSE 2009?  You can still watch video and view slides:

It is About Time:  Getting Our Values Around Copyright Right
In this talk, Lawrence Lessig will review the progress of the "open access" movement in education. He will make a call for educators to finally resolve this issue in a way that enables the potential of technology for education.

Proposed SLA Name Change

After extensive study through SLA's Alignment Project, next month SLA members will have the opportunity to vote on a new name for the association:

The SLA Board of Directors is excited to propose that SLA change its name to the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals, or ASKPro. All SLA members are encouraged to voice their opinion on this proposal by casting an electronic vote in a special referendum that will begin on 16 November and end 9 December. The result will be announced on 10 December.

What do you think of the new name?  Join in the discussion on Facebook and Twitter.

New Opportunities for Liaisons

With competing interests and an increase in user self-service, the role of the departmental liaison becomes even more important.  When once it might be common to see your faculty weekly or at least monthly, now an increasing number of them rarely darken the door of the library.  So how does the liaison continue the conversation with faculty? How does the liaison provide needed services to meet the changing needs of faculty, and better yet, anticipate those needs?

The August 2009 issue of ARL's Research Library Issues focuses on the liaison role.  Read more.

Back-to-campus Celebrations

Academic libraries are becoming increasingly creative in their back-to-campus welcome events, often held during orientation or the first days of classes.  University of Kentucky has its Hubbub, Georgia Tech has its CeLIBration, and I recently learned of Cardinal Stritch's Librarypalooza.  I know many of us are looking for other examples.  What did you do to welcome students to your campus?  Please share in the comments!

Don't forget to vote!

Voting is now open for the 2010 Board of Directors (polls close October 1st at 5pmEST).
The candidates are:

President-Elect: Agnes Mattis and Cindy Romaine
Treasurer: Karen Reczek and Dan Trefethen
Chapter Cabinet Chair-Elect: Liz Blankson-Hemans and Debal C. Kar
Division Cabinet Chair-Elect: Mary Ellen Bates and Stacey Greenwell

Cast your e-ballot today!

Want to become a blogger for the Academic Division?

cc licensed flickr photo shared by minifig

If you're interested in adding your voice to the blogdom, consider blogging for the Academic Division.
As this is the first year of the division there are lots of opportunities to bring the issues of academic librarians to the SLA through this blog - and we'd love to have more contributors.

Blog posts could be:

• current issues in academic libraries (hello Google Books Project!)
• interviews with members of the Academic Division (since we should all be getting to know one another)
• "big picture" posts on the role of the library in the college/university
• discussing the Annual Conference
• and of course, bids to answer the eternal question: what does it mean to be a special librarian?

All those interested or who are looking for more information, can leave a comment on this post or contact me at amybuckland ~at~ gmail.

Looking forward to new recruits!

The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age

The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, a MacArthur Foundation Report, is an important read for academic librarians. For the most part, the university learning experience has changed little in hundreds of years, with lecture still the predominant format and grading individualistically focused.  With the advent of collaborative online tools and the resulting changes in student learning styles, the learning experience has to become more collaboratively focused.  The report itself (and an upcoming full-length book) was developed though face-to-face and virtual contributions from a wide variety of scholars, including a few academic librarians. 

One of the principles for the future of learning is a de-centered pedagogy.  So often we shun sources like Wikipedia, but recognizing them is likely in our students' best interest:

To ban sources such as Wikipedia is to miss the importance of
a collaborative, knowledge-making impulse in humans who are
willing to contribute, correct, and collect information without
remuneration: by definition, this is education.  To miss how
much such collaborative, participatory learning underscores the
foundations of learning is defeatist, unimaginative, even self destructive.

Interesting!  Take a look at the entire report

The Impending Demise of the University?

Don Tapscott, the opening keynote speaker at the 2005 SLA Annual Conference in Toronto, has written a thought-provoking piece on challenges to the university as we know it, The Impending Demise of the University.  From the needs of today's student to the changing model of education delivery, this is something we academic librarians really need to be thinking about:

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.

Read the entire article.

Call for editorial board members!

Practical Academic Librarianship (https://journals.tdl.org/pal/) is the Academic Division's new open access, peer-reviewed journal.

We are currently building the editorial board and are looking for academic librarians who consider themselves experienced in the publishing process. We are looking to build an international board, with members whose expertise hails from various areas of academic libraryland:

Access Services
Acquisitions
Administrators/Managers
Cataloging
Collection Development & Management
Community Colleges
Consortia
Digital Repositories
Electronic Resources
Information Literacy
Private University/College Librarians
Public University/College Librarians
Special Collections/Archives
Social Media, etc
Statistics (user studies, etc) expert
Subject focused librarians (Architecture, Engineering, Medicine, Political Science, etc.)
Technical Colleges
... as well as other areas.

If you are interested in joining the board, or wish to nominate someone for a position, please send a CV and (very brief) statement of interest to founding editor Leslie J Reynolds at leslie *dot* reynolds [at] tamu *dot* edu.

Universities and social media

Mashable's recent post "10 Ways Universities Share Information Using Social Media" touches on some interesting uses for social media, all with a view to increasing the dialogue between the university community and the university itself.
Which of these could you apply to your library? How many of you are already using social media?