Information about ARL’s satellite meeting, The quest for deeper meaning of research support, to be held in Cape Town, South Africa, on August 13 and 14 is now available. Registration is free but you will still need to register to secure your place.
Thank you to our sponsors: EBSCO Host, Thomson Reuters and Sabinet.
In James G Neal’s “Big Questions”-blogpost he points out that collaboration will be one of the important ways of achieving and maintaining success for academic libraries in the near future. In a time of austerity and reduced budgets for academic libraries worldwide, collaboration designed and planned around getting more services for the money is necessary. However, in addition to this kind of collaboration among academic libraries who are geographically close and at similar level, there is a need for collaborations aimed at developing and supporting libraries in the poorer regions of the world. In this scenario one will often see one of the academic libraries as the stronger and more developed, and the other(s) as poorer and in need of support. The benefits for the library being supported are obvious, but what about the benefits for the supporting institution? Apart from “feeling good”, what is in it for them? Do academic libraries in more developed countries have a moral imperative or a mandate from IFLA, even, to support development in academic libraries in the less developed regions? Will support for international library development be de-prioritised when money gets tighter, or will there be external funding that may also be useful for the supporting academic library?
We invite you to submit a proposal for the first day of the satellite meeting of IFLA’s Academic and Research Libraries’ Section to be held in Cape Town South Africa 13-14 August 2015. The meeting will be held at the delightful “The Range” – a wine farm in Tokai, Cape Town. Closing date – 27 February 2015. How to submit an abstract.
The Academic and Research Libraries Section (ARL), with generous sponsorship by Ex Libris and Sage, is offering THREE (3) Attendance Grants for the IFLA Congress in Cape Town 2015 to an information professional from each of these regions:
Each grant covers the registration fee of Euro 470 as well as support for travel and/or accommodation up to Euro 700.
Closing date for applications is Friday February 27 2015
See ARL news for further information
For the third year in a row, Stanford Libraries opens nominations for the Stanford Prize for Innovation in Research Libraries (SPIRL), a prize to recognize and celebrate innovation through programs, projects, and new or improved services that benefits users. The deadline for entries is January 15, 2015. Please see SPIRL for further details.
One thing ARL wanted to do this year is to talk about some “big questions” (and even the little ones). Our first topic is put forward by James G Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian Columbia University.
You are now invited to have a read of the information provided by Jim and then respond to the questions he has asked. Thank you to Jim and thank you to everyone for your (future) contributions! Let’s make it a lively discussion.
The questions:
1. How are new forms of collaboration different from the traditions of academic library cooperation?
2. How do academic libraries need to change in order to participate effectively in these new relationships?
3. How is library collaboration evaluated in terms of service improvements, user success, and financial cost/benefits?
The background:
Radical Collaboration: Academic and Research Libraries Working Together in New Ways
Cooperation is part of the DNA of the academic and research library. From the conditions of knowledge scarcity over the centuries to the oppression of information and data over-abundance in today’s and tomorrow’s library context, cooperation has been and will be a constant for service, success and survival.
But the definition and view of the academic library as an independent and self-sustaining organization, collaborating and sharing resources on the margin, has persisted. The future health of the academic library will be increasingly defined by new and energetic relationships and combinations, and the radicalization of working relationships among libraries, between libraries and the communities they serve, and in new entrepreneurial partnerships. The context for collaboration and innovation is rich and powerful. It combines rapidly evolving user requirements, a recognition of the need to rethink redundant inefficient library operations, an increasing emphasis on unique resources, a focus on the need to achieve scale and network effects through aggregation, a mandate for systemic change, and the unprecedented economic pressures.
Radical collaboration encourages academic libraries to move in four new directions. The first is mass production, including back-room operations like acquisitions, cataloging, electronic resource management, and preservation, for example, that might be based in regional distribution centers rather than in every individual library. The second is centers of excellence, deep and shared polycentric strategies for specialized expertise or services. The third is new infrastructure, building the technologies and functionalities for areas like digital ingestion, processing and archiving. The fourth is new initiatives, new programs and projects based on shared investment in experimentation. In all four cases, the measures of success must be quality, productivity and innovation. Are we producing something new, saving resources, and achieving something better together than working alone?
Slides from our Joint Session with Serials and other Resources, and the Committee on Copyright and Legal Matters, are now available.