(New) Clarkson University Library Director (Michelle L. Young)

Director .. dont offer tenure for that position .. she has an “Evergreen contract”

Director Goal: To set in motion the University Libraries’ transformation towards excelling academic excellence through the implementation of programs, policies and strategies geared towards the innovative vision of libraries in the 20th century.

Notes:

• Risk Tolerant
• Solicit feedback .. Expose and deal with the issues
• Change .. librarians not longer work evenings and weekends – grads for ref.
• User survey – also used for Middle States

1. What did users expect from an outstanding academic library?
2. What were their experiences ant Clarkson University

Handout has vision values and mission statements

Using Resources Wisely – Rich Dreifuss (Geneseo)

OCLC Report on Online Catalogs
 
Catalog Reconstruction (Aleph 500 Cat)

• large team
• good management support
• took 6 months (met every 3 or weeks) – subcommittees did work
• used U Albany usability study
• book “Benchmarking for Best Practices”
• borrowed from U Albany (search options)
• Notre Dame (search forms)
• Duke (tabs)
• MIT (two-way sortable columns)
• used a wiki .. collecting ideas, ranking priority, process notes, changes, collect documents

• Flexibility or Standards: Template or Not -  can use own language
• Pictures – students identify
• Access? Assigned or Everyone (Potsdam)
• Documents / Pdfs / ppts
• Useful to have a basic research guide
• Faculty training .. ESF
• Citation
• Refworks (Endnote?)
• Springshare Community – see other people guides (can copy)
• Link .. Don’t duplicate content on web
• Can create own widgets in Admin – grab code
• Encourage starring and comments
• Link Checker

Keynote:  R. David Lankes – Syracuse

The Mission of Librarians:  To Improve Society Through Facilitating Knowledge Creation in their Communities

Screencast: http://quartz.syr.edu/rdlankes/blog/?p=760

See Join the Mission – http://www.DavidLankes.org

• Serve
• Innovate – bring about change
• Lead – Librarians are trusted 3rd party source, lead on campus, obligation to say “you can be better”
• … global mission .. improvement ..libraries about knowledge not about things … “connective tissues of our organizations” .. out of the building too.
• Permissive attitude of risk
• Knowledge is created through conversation
• Not what we provide
• What we change
• We .. Jump from this to this to this.  Libraries are a museum of technologies that fail