{"id":421,"date":"2017-05-25T11:47:14","date_gmt":"2017-05-25T15:47:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/assessment\/?p=421"},"modified":"2017-05-26T13:26:16","modified_gmt":"2017-05-26T17:26:16","slug":"lacuny-2017-whats-next-for-the-academic-librarian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/assessment\/2017\/05\/25\/lacuny-2017-whats-next-for-the-academic-librarian\/","title":{"rendered":"LACUNY 2017: What’s Next for the Academic Librarian?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the LACUNY 2017 Institute, a small conference sponsored by the Library Association of the City of New York at\u00a0 LaGuardia Community College. The theme was The Future of Librarianship: Exploring What\u2019s Next for the Academic Librarian<\/em>. I was drawn to the conference anticipating several lively panel discussions of interest to me: the application of organizational development towards more inclusive environments at work, egalitarian teams for grassroots organizing, and building the post-collection library (i.e. no physical books at all).<\/p>\n

What a wonderful professional development opportunity for librarians.<\/p>\n

In this post I want to share the themes from Barbara Rockenbach\u2019s rich keynote address, Thinking about IMPACT on Research, Teaching and Learning. <\/em>Rockenbach currently serves as Interim Associate Director for Collections and Services at Columbia; her talk drew upon broad experience,\u00a0 from computational methods applied to humanities scholarship to undergraduate research and instruction. I especially liked how she\u00a0 connected the themes of space, collections, partnership and context to both current research and\u00a0 real life examples from her home institution.<\/p>\n

The library can be a space that puts the user front and center, preparing spaces that are flexible, that facilitate conversations, that are moving from passive to active space in support of student success. The space may be quiet, social or collaborative. For instance,\u00a0 Studio @ Butler<\/a> is “co-owned and co-programmed by faculty” and provides open labs, instruction in tools like R and Python, and \u201ctalk shops\u201d that incorporate both formal presentation and experiential workshop.\u00a0 A great example of David Lankes\u2019 “library as conversation” with the community.<\/p>\n

Rockenbach used Lorcan Dempsey<\/a> ‘s ideas to talk of the future of library collections \u2013 valuing less what a library \u201cowns\u201d to the service a library facilitates.\u00a0 We will be thinking less about \u201cour collections, our systems, our buildings\u201d to considering the communities we serve. Thinking less about the life of the library towards thinking about the library in the life of the user<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

The library is a partner in the work of scholars. Columbia participated in a collaborative Librarian Liaison Institute pilot<\/a> with Cornell, ARL, and the University of Toronto. Its much discussed report (here at Temple too!) on the evolving role of liaison librarians had this\u00a0 as one conclusion:\u00a0 librarians need to focus away from the work of librarians to that of scholars, and to develop engagement strategies based on their needs and success factors.<\/p>\n

The April 2017\u00a0 US Library Survey<\/a> suggests a disconnect between university administration and library leadership, in terms of how the library contributes to the\u00a0teaching and research mission of the institution.<\/p>\n

Library directors are pursuing strategic directions with a decreasing sense of support from their institutions. There is evidence across the survey that library directors feel increasingly less valued by, involved with, and aligned strategically with their supervisors and other senior academic leadership.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pointing to Columbia’s<\/a> efforts, Rockenbach says that libraries engaged with strategic planning efforts are less likely to suffer this fate. Libraries need to commit its values as well as its objectives<\/strong> to the larger institutional context.\u00a0 For instance, what does it mean to be a diverse and inclusive library?<\/p>\n

The library provides space for learning, but also serves as\u00a0 an alternative to the formal classroom. The idea was captured eloquently by Ta-Nehisi Coates\u2019 in his Between the World and Me<\/em> :<\/p>\n

I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And, a big thank you to Barbara Rockenbach for allowing me to re-cycle her perspective on the\u00a0 future of academic libraries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the LACUNY 2017 Institute, a small conference sponsored by the Library Association of the City of New York at\u00a0 LaGuardia Community College. The theme was The Future of Librarianship: Exploring What\u2019s Next … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4680,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,67,55],"class_list":["post-421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conference-reports","tag-conferences","tag-organizational-change","tag-strategic-planning"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/assessment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/assessment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/assessment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/assessment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4680"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/assessment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/assessment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/assessment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/assessment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/assessment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}