On Ubiquitous Instruction

David Michalski
Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian
University of California, Davis
michalski@ucdavis.edu

Unlike our counterparts in the bookstores, corporate libraries and even some public libraries, education is central to our mission in the research university. The social promise of the university is to improve the society that supports it by making its members more knowledgeable, more inventive, more skilled, and wiser. As librarians we have a unique role in this mission. Our instruction differs from that of the lecturer or professor. Our teaching is at its core dialogical. Our pedagogy is based on a certain art of conversation.

There is no shortage of studies in the library literature on the “reference interview” or “reference transaction” as it is often called. The reference process has been meticulously analyzed by information scientists and planners who seek to break it into bits in the effort to locate the kernel, or coin of value passed from the librarian to the patron. The interview, however, is not like a vending machine. The student cannot simply pay for information and walk away. Our practice is better understood as a diagnostic one, one that assesses both the interpersonal and social context of each project, and leads to decisions, which attempt to enable not only access, but the incrementally improved ability of the patron to take possession of library as a tool and field in their quest to reorganize information as knowledge.


Librarians, who imagine their role reduced to the mechanics of information delivery, are often left with a sense of purposelessness. A symptom of this lack arises in the current anxiety about the future. It surfaces in a discourse that depicts a contemporary competition between the librarian and the machine. Such questions about the future, dismiss the historic impact librarians and scholars have had on information technology since the profession began. Librarians have had prominent roles working to marshal the efficiencies of technology in the service of our core values. Today, we must reaffirm these efforts by translating our values and pedagogic mission into the info-space of the digital environment, not positioning our values against the digital realm. In part, this means imbuing our machines with the conversational and dialogic skills nurtured by our human practice. We ought to ask: How can people leaving library interaction (whether online or in person) be better prepared to discover and understand the information environment? How can our tools, websites and our people, not only provide easy access to known documents, but teach discovery techniques and the diverse ways in which information is organized? As heuristic devices, how can our tools train better researchers? It is no more appropriate for a search engine or catalog to simply churn out singular responses to a question than it is for a reference librarian to act simply as a medium for the exchange of information. Our exchanges must be value-added. Our catalogs and search tools must facilitate the construction of better formed questions and more sophisticated thinking. It is not an easy task to develop such tools and sites, and it is made even more difficult by a growing gap between search tool designers and librarians, but it is our professional charge and it is worth the effort.

One alarming consequence of treating our tools as simply location devices is the impact this outlook has on our own service roles. When the digital reference experience is diminished to a mechanical transaction, our own interviewing, listening and questioning skills tend to atrophy. Without use ours skills can be forgotten, and as I mentioned in a previous post, our disconnection can make us lose track of our public. With so many databases marketed as automatic, simple and direct we can be tempted to forgo the hard work education demands. We can forget that even our most powerful tools for indexing information are inadequate surrogates for teaching the social life of information. In exchange for expediency and mass capacity they can treat Works as the inert products of remote labor, as objects detached from authors and readers alike, as removed from cause or argument. We ought not to replicate this disregard.

Undoubtedly, the disintermediation of the information world has positively transformed the way knowledge is distributed and produced. Information seekers have more direct access to information providers and the mundane middling tasks of the librarian have largely evaporated. The trend towards disintermediation, however, does not dissipate the mediation of the intellect, which takes form in the course of learning. Technological immediacy does not substitute for the work of critical thinking. In the best instances it may support it, but in the worst instances it can disguise its necessity.

One of the foremost roles of the reference librarian has always been to persuade the patron to think out-loud, to state and restate, to read and question, and to read, write and return with a deeper understanding. Unnecessary difficulties and formalities can not be tolerated, but where information is complex, it can not be represented as falsely simple. Instead, we ought to help our students acquire the skills appropriate to the challenges their projects face. At each stage, helping them see a little bit more by encouraging a deeper engagement with their topics.

Even when patrons come in demanding immediate results, my colleagues and I have discovered creative ways to widen their bibliographic imagination. I’ve met thousands of students over the years and no one approach can be applied uniformly. Not one reference conversation is the same as the next. Each takes on its own shape. Sometimes I am unsuccessful in my application of, what I like to call, ubiquitous non-invasive reference instruction. Some students cannot be bothered, sometime I become impatient, but with each encounter I try to improve. I try to learn more about the public I serve, and find better ways of providing the unique service reference librarians at a research university can provide. These include new ways of fostering critical thinking, information literacy, and new ways of expanding the potential of our collections.

By practicing and honing our unique form of pedagogy, in formal library classes, in the design of our online tools, and in our everyday interactions with our public we can renew our sense of purpose and positively support the educational mission of our university.

The Qualitative Place of the Reference Desk Today

From General Reference to Subject Specialty




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UCB Spring Assembly Discussion Topics

#1 – Reference

Various types of online reference are popular, reference by appointment is popular. Reference desk usage is declining but not dead. Ideas for staffing the latter include having students serve as front line staff who will refer to reference staff as needed, and combining circulation and reference desks.

There was a discussion of current reference models, including:

Ask a Librarian: 24/7 chat reference service via OCLC Questionpoint software
o UCB librarians currently staff 8 hours/week
o UCB students have access 24/7
o Questions run the gamut from directional to substantive
o Many questions can be answered using online resources (not all; and referral to subject specialists do take place)
o Discussion of differences – lack visual cues, but librarians feel they can/must ask user more questions; more followup than for in-person reference; challenge of answering questions from non-UC patrons; takes longer; does it reduce ageism and reverse-ageism?
o Will it lead to offshoring of reference? (or not: local information still very important)

Email reference
o Doe/Moffitt has a general e-mail reference service
o Many units and many individual librarians answer reference via e-mail

IM chat reference
o Done at some libraries on campus (including Gov Info, Sciences, Transportation, et al)
o Necessary at units like Transportation Studies with very dispersed clientele

Texting
o Engineering does texting, meebo chat and Lisa participates in Questionpoint
o Questionpoint will start implementing texting

Reference by appointment (in-person)
o Many libraries do this
o Doe/Moffitt: Research Advisory Service (by appointment for undergraduates) recently started online signups; use of the service has increased with relatively few no-shows; Law also has online signups for appointments

Reference desks
o Statistics down for most units; many units have cut staffing (1 person not 2) and/or hours
o Is the reference desk less about reference and more about marketing – our availability?
o Valuable for reference staff to be “out” in the library seeing how users use it
o Location of reference desk vis-à-vis users and vis-à-vis circulation desk makes a difference
o @ some units, students have first contact and refer when necessary; in the new Moffitt building, a similar tiered reference service is being considered, with trained students as first contact point
o combined desks also being considered at some units
o @ UC Merced, all reference is on call (student employees refer); NYU moving to something similar
o but: in surveys, library users say they like being able to talk face to face to someone

? Question: Anyone using Skype for reference? No one knew of any instances at UCB.

#2 – Scholarly Communication / Information Providers

Random discussion points on the topic of Relationship to Information
Providers at LAUC-B Assembly, April 13, 2010 (we decided to rename this
topic “Scholarly Communication.”)

** As librarians, our role is to support our faculty and to share with them information about alternative publishing options that are available. Sometimes that information is hard to find and not all librarians feel equipped to answer the question that we might get from a faculty member who asks, “If Elsevier journals are so expensive, can you
suggest another journal title that might be less expensive (but that is still has a high impact factor, etc.)?”

** Where do faculty publish? One member of our breakout session cited the recent Ithaka Faculty Survey 2009 (http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/faculty-surveys-2000-2009/Faculty%20Study%202009.pdf).

In this survey, respondents stated that being read by peers in their discipline is the most important consideration when deciding where to publish. The least important factor is whether the article is freely available on the web; this suggests that open access is not important to faculty.

** Reference to John Lewis, UL at Indiana University, who writes, “More precisely, libraries are the mechanism for providing the subsidy that is required if information is to be used efficiently in communities and organizations.” Within an online environment, perhaps it is time to transform this economic model. Lewis makes a number of interesting
(provocative) statements in this article “A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21^st Century” C&RL News, September 2007
(http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crljournal/2007/sep/Lewis07.pdf).


** Changing the scholarly communication landscape is difficult because we are fighting against a longstanding culture. Does this mean we should be targeting younger faculty and graduate students? (But they can’t take those kinds of risks until they have tenure.) Or, maybe it means we should be targeting the older faculty who already have tenure and,
therefore, are in a better position to take risks.

** Everyone agreed that Tenure and Promotion is the elephant in the room. We didn’t want to go there.

** How do we change things? Librarians don’t have much influence. Faculty have some, but they are caught up in a deeply embedded culture that doesn’t give them much room to change their behavior. Maybe we should be targeting administrators who control the purse strings and would support libraries when we walk away from expensive journal packets.

** We have mixed feelings about eScholarship. Not much uptake from faculty. On the other hand, it is a great place for publishing so-called grey literature and eScholarship is very good at surfacing its contents in Google.

** We all have to understand that while some of us may be excited about Open Access, it is not free. Many question whether it is even a sustainable model. On the other hand, just because there are questions about its sustainability we should not discount it (as many faculty and publishers do). Most importantly, we need scholars to understand that
open access IS peer reviewed; it is not vanity publishing!

** The good news: some in-roads have been made in the health and medical sciences. The NIH Mandate requires all recipients of NIH funding to submit an electronic version of their final, peer reviewed manuscript to PubMed Central. Now anyone with NIH funding knows about open access and the fact that research in traditional journals creates a barrier to accessing their findings.

** More good news: there is starting to be a buzz about textbook affordability. Maybe this is a good way to get attention from the academy about the sustainability (or lack thereof) of the current publishing industry.

#3 – Library Personnel

Hiring of library personnel depends not only on the amount of staff
needed, but also the training required. What is missing is succession planning. Right now, there is nothing formal in place for succession
planning (moving into a new job, leadership training, management
training, etc). Potential reasons for the lack of succession planning
could be that supervisors are not used to thinking about it.

When replacing library personnel, things to consider are what skills to
advertise for, the person’s strengths, and also what is required and
desired. It all depends on the individual. Even if you find someone who
has all of the necessary skills, is that person someone you want to work with? On the other hand, how much time/energy can we put into getting people trained and up to speed? What we need for job descriptions is the core elements/values of what makes a library employee.

With reduced staffing and large workloads, people need to be realistic.
How can you provide the same amount of services with fewer people? It
feels bad to cut public services, but if funding for collections is
protected, then only thing to cut is public service.

Student employees are so important to the Library. They work late shifts and some even do higher-level technical processing work. There are some interns, who can work on special projects, but these interns do not typically help with daily workloads.

The MLS or MLIS is a degree that is important to the field of librarianship. Obtaining the degree is key, because there is something
you learn when you’re in the program that makes librarians different
from library staff.

#4 – Technology
Bolded, top-level bullet items are the “conversation starters” we started with, and there are very loosely thrown summaries of the comments into each category, even though we did not address the topics strictly or in any particular order.

Are we leveraging technology as best we can?
o We need to be more cutting edge - leaders, not followers … Berkeley was more so in the 90s - what happened? So much happens off campus now (e.g., CDL). Fracturing of technical support offices makes for a confusing system to navigate and slows innovation.
o Flexibility - many library changes require many layers of committees etc. - need to be able to make decisions faster

o Some changes libraries have made have been by going rogue, against advice of IST - too often the response is simply "oh we don't support that"… (e.g., metasearching/federated searching - resistance to trying).

o Affiliates and institutes as drivers of and experimenters with new technology
o Get rid of bureaucracy - need to move quickly, need to trust staff to try out new techs and capture their innovations

o Importance of staff re: training and time to play with new technologies. Librarians testing new products – raising awareness of resources, but also able to evaluate quality

o We need a dedicated position to proactively seek out new technologies. Current model is systemically more passive and reactive, relying on individuals with other responsibilities to innovate

o How about a Library Office of Technology [or Innovation] (maybe a library committee?) - Library Systems Office is focused on (overworked) keeping existing systems working. A lot of universities have an emerging techs office - Duke Digital Initiatives (developed to foster use of digital repository) -

o changed structure to make Digital Initiatives report directly to university president - freed from university layers of bureaucracy

o can direct IT, Libraries, teaching/learning, Academic Senate, etc.

o situated in the library (powerful symbolic meaning).

o Responsible to interpret and facilitate; three groups (IT, Library, Teaching/learning) sitting together, working together as functional group.

o Need a librarian in the systems office; lack of structured liaison with IST and Library Systems Office Is also a barrier to innovation

o Difficult/expensive to do video conferencing from this campus. It saves money but there seems to be resistance/barriers

o Working remotely … using Skype for videoconferencing, pushing webpages … A lot of ways to do things cheaply, on the fly (even if deemed "not supported"?)

o using iChat to run remote discussion for distance learning interesting experience. (But is there a resistance about distance education?)

o Looking towards the future - the students who will be here 5 years from now - comfort level in using technology. We need to be there, and just as flexible, adaptive and curious as they are with technologies and change.

Technology for technology's sake?

o Talk about tech is often outside the context of library values …

o Tech should be a tool for where we want to go, not the driver. It is important for librarians to determine for themselves where to go based on our goals & mission (quality, authority, etc.) rather than tech for its own sake.

o Tech changes so quickly - We can't let tech guide us blindly, but at the same time we have to be flexible to be able to explore the ways it can support librarians’ core values

o Library values - Focus on end-user support: don't conceptualize based on traditional functional groups like buying, maintenance, etc., but supporting teaching/learning, research

o why try to reinvent Google when Google already exists? Instead, focus on what librarians can contribute that is a value-add –

o e.g., Open Gov Initiatives is coming (datasets, etc., from all federally funded research must be uploaded) … Libraries can contribute by creating standards for data structure for access across different possible future platforms

o Ebook readers - should libraries lend these? We don't even have laptop checkout. But what about the Amazon experiment with Kindles for textbooks at Princeton – wildly unpopular because readers wanted to be able to highlight, take notes, use easily ….

Letting patrons (undergrads) lead the way

o Being reactive versus leading and planning – UCB tends [too much] toward the former mode

o Stuff that works on mobile devices are what users want …. - SFSU model, a couple of people developed their library enhancements to make “mobile friendly”

o We often move in reaction to what we think students want
o making video tutorials …Has anyone had any reactions or done assessment of user reaction to this? –

o there are barriers: Not thinking outside the box (e.g. instance where selector was told Schoolhouse Rock "I'm Just a Bill" was not academic enough) means not being able to take advantage (quickly) of things that our students find useful

What about Google?

o We can't reinvent Google, but we can improve on it

o No one wants Local Worldcat – always want to search everywhere

o Google as model - experimentation with new technologies, trying to change

o Don't tell an engineer to design a bridge, tell her to design a way to get from here to there

Open Source, Digital Rights Management

o Can we reclaim from CDL control over tech initiative? (e.g. CDL’s digital archiving – several Affiliated Libraries pay for outside service for DRM). CDL is great for managing shared collections, negotiating contracts, and similar functions – but by ceding to CDL control over so much tech innovation, de facto it becomes a work of centralizing. Centralization of so much from all 10 campuses slows things down too much to be able to keep up with technology.

Staff Training/keeping up-to-date
o coexistence of people who somewhat resist change and those who are early adopters

o A good combination?

o control issues - feels better to have rigid controls, but may not be able to keep up, given pace of change

o Duke model – sometimes a top-down model is needed to force and encourage change

o innovations at low level need to bubble up quickly and then be propagated back down

#5 – Collections

Are librarians wizards for their ability to find information, as Marilyn Johnson suggests in This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, or lizards, changing colors and losing their tails while adapting to danger and varying environments?

The recent CDC report "University of California Library Collection: Content for the 21st Century and Beyond" maps out changes in library roles without ever mentioning the word librarian but rather using "library staff" and "curatorial role." Librarians provide vital services to our users not only in collecting research materials but also at reference desks, in classroom and in myriad other ways.

Next Generation Tech Services groups are changing the way we manage
collections. The "CDL Shared Print Steering Task Force Findings and
Recommendations Report to CDC" is an attempt to find ways to make similar changes to how UC collects materials and take current collaborative projects to new levels. UCB refuses to shed its insular attitudes toward ownership.
Another viewpoint is that UC librarians have worked out many ooperative
agreements in the UC system, with Stanford and other research libraries, and this report might make honoring the terms of those agreements difficult or impossible. UCB has successful arrangements covering Latin America, Africa and other areas. These agreements define collection areas for sharing ofacquisition and processing. For years UC has had informal arrangements such as buying two copies of some research materials, one in the north and one in the south. Many research materials are at RLFs and meant to be shared in the UC system.

Collections are fluid since faculty retire and faculty with new research interests join the institution. Librarians must decide whether to maintain historical strengths or concentrate on current needs, especially difficult as budgets shrink.

All libraries are concerned with ownership, historically important in
determining ARL rankings and in attracting top faculty and graduate
students. Shared ownership might not be as problematic for the sciences and health fields since so much is online, although copyright and lending are issues. Eastern Europe is increasingly turning to digital only; digitization is supported by grants, leading to crucial questions of sustainability and preservation.

CDL cancellations lead to other issues since campuses cancel the paper and rely on the CDL licenses for digital only to have the CDL cancel the title. For example, one paper journal was held by 5 campuses, all of which canceled when the CDL subscribed to the online version. Now that CDL has canceled, no UC library has the journal. The paper journal was cheap but necessary to a small number of scholars; the e-journal was expensive and had low usage so didn't meet the metric to retain. This pattern is not unusual in the humanities. UC needs more coordination between CDL cancellations and campus cancellations and also between bibliographer group request priorities and what CDL licenses.

Preservation is a key issue. Many research libraries, including those in UC, are canceling foreign newspapers and relying on digital versions. What will happen in 100 years when scholars will have to travel to other countries to see these newspapers? What if the local country has not preserved them or a disaster has destroyed them? Digitized newspapers often do not contain all the content, such as ads and editorials. We are increasingly relying on the digital without a (secure) backup.

Key to collections is coping with current problems in collections-funding, preservation, etc.-while still striving to keep in mind the needs of future scholars. We must consider what they will need in the centuries to come and how to deliver it.

UCLA and UCB have long been the campus of last resort for expensive research material. We must address the questions of how much duplication is too much and how catalogs serve as discovery tools. For decades UC has encouraged the acquisition of duplicate materials. Each campus has an engineering program, necessitating an engineering collection. Should the system cut programs to save money? Campus planning needs to consider library funding when adding new programs; the library should be at the table when decisions to add are made. Departments/schools should involve the library when interviewing candidates for new positions; their research needs may not be
met by the collection, and they should be encouraged to make
collection funding part of their start up funding. Archival units are
making fundraising arrangements with donors before accepting their papers. Librarians must be aware of shifts in departmental programs and faculty research.

Library funding brings quality collections; quality collections attract the best faculty and students. As State support for UCB decreases, so will the number of Nobel prizes and the ability to retain the best faculty will wither. At what point will the public notice?

Archivists live with the reality that not every item can be cataloged and that rapid digitization, such as done by Google, is not possible with their fragile and unique materials. Creating metadata is costly. Standards change rapidly, and turnover of personnel is a factor in deterring priorities. Large digital collections, which draw from many places, can be frustrating because the collection managers massage interfaces/metadata to funnel material from different libraries into one collection. Individual collections may not operate in the way the owning library intended.

Library silos are problematic; users must have a way to discover material and a vigorous interlibrary loan to obtain.

We must take care not to embrace mediocrity but continue the tradition of excellence.

#6 – Library Buildings “Back to the Future: space planning”

Library Space NEEDS: We thought these were desirable for all patrons particularly students and faculty -
group study, quiet study, presentation rooms, instruction rooms, wireless internet, wireless printing, copying, printing, scanning, computer software on library pc’s, include a café, allow food, longer hours.

Space GRABS: when the departments or campus want to acquire library space for teaching or academic purposes, be clear about the impact on students, in order to engender a positive outcome for all concerned. Work with the university and the departments to create tradeoffs that will benefit the library. When this comes up, present it to library committees, and donors; supporters who have an interest.

UC wide: collections increasingly electronic move more to storage.

Look FORWARD and be prepared – as print collections change to electronic, down size, and go to storage, have a plan, be ready to repurpose exiting space in older buildings – upgrade physical environment, wiring.

Look for OPPORTUNITIES to upgrade facilities, improve furniture and work areas,
change presentations in the library, keep the environment fresh. The library can look more current by adding displays, new technology, promoting online – blog, wikis, facebook, rss feeds from your own blog.

Topics for discussion.
• Staying relevant in an online
• Campus space grabs
• Space for computers and computer labs
• Quiet study and group study
• Social gathering: cafes, programs, meeting friends


# 7 - Technical Services

1. NextGen Melvyl

Many people, in both technical and public services, are unhappy with Next Gen Melvyl. We at the Law Library don’t like it because it continues to regard us as unaffiliated with UC Berkeley. Anyone wanting to find books in Melvyl has to know to click the button for libraries in the rest of the world. This will apparently be fixed, but for the moment it’s not good.

Other complaints include the screen display – unnecessarily cluttered; the fact that you cannot limit by campus – something essential for cooperative book selection, or indeed any book selection; the inclusion of some articles in some search results – it seems to patrons that they are getting back all available articles on a topic, which is not true. The advanced search possibilities should be a lot better.

We all agreed that LAUC could play a role in providing feedback on NextGen Melyvl. Having a good catalog is too important to continue with the current status.

We considered how we would go about providing feedback.

Another problem is that it’s really not “NextGen” enough (see below).

2. Local vs. universal needs

We then discussed the problem of local needs vs. a centralized technical services department. There are times when a branch librarian has the subject knowledge to know when a book will be looked for under a certain subject. Debbie offered the example of books about local places. The local place may not be included as a subject heading, but that heading would be very useful to the patrons at Environmental Design. Presently, the branches do not have the ability to add subject headings, even in a very restricted way, and Technical Services does not have the manpower to handle requests in a timely way. Another issue is dissertations, which are hugely backed up. We wondered if there was not some way of using the abstract which is presumably available electronically in California Hall to automatically create a catalog record. This seems like a great idea, but of course, does technical Services have the staffing to be able to figure out how to do something like this. There is also the question of social tagging, which apparently is being done at Penn State. Again, this would require a capacity that Oskicat may or may not have, plus the staffing to develop and then maintain it.

3. Cooperative technical services

We also considered the idea of cooperative technical services – for example, what if one campus hired an Armenian cataloger. All Armenian books ordered at UC would be delivered to her/him for cataloging and then shipped off to wherever they belonged. Could we centralize all cataloging? All selection? All ordering? There may be a savings, but it might also make it harder for Debbie to get her local subject headings added – or maybe it wouldn’t. Something to consider.

UCI South Regional Assembly- Why You Should Attend

Register today for the
LAUC Southern California Regional Meeting

We all know that LAUC is a self-determining and planning body, and that we are all interested in future of our profession and in our own professional development at the University of California. That’s a given. But you should attend this region’s meeting because the responsibility and value of participation isn’t all that different from that of a vote in an election. You are a part of a solution and can contribute to a plan to improve as a group. You provide the impetus for change, and understand how decisions are made and why. You get to choose based on your priorities and values and the priorities and values of your UC.

But some people ask, why should I, as a (insert your departmental or divisional affiliation here) librarian come to the LAUC Southern Regional Meeting? All of these agenda items look like they’re related to someone else’s job. But, all of these agenda items are also intertwined with what we do. They affect one another. They are not truly separate. Take a look at SOPAG , HOTS , HOPS and the UC Commission on the Future. It’s pretty clear by looking at the reports, initiatives, proposed policies and actions, that communication and collaboration are required across many areas. They do affect you and they do require your consideration.

Don’t reference services change if students of all stripes don’t have to come to a desk to get reference assistance or resources because professors have changed their delivery of education, their assignments, or their research (Topic 1)? They do. Library instruction changes. Acquisitions changes. Collections change. Processing changes. Licensing changes. Access services changes. Personnel changes. Where people work changes (home, department, you name it). Skills change. The technology changes. Space needs change. The amount of money needed and how it’s controlled changes. Unique collections change. Archival curation changes. This is only one example of the ripples that radiate from a single set of actions.

This still, however, doesn’t get to the heart of what we can do in a regional meeting. We already have answers to what we might do in the form of reports and initiatives in play, but we need to decide where to place our energies as a group because our work is increasingly distributed across all UC libraries. So, decide. What solutions of those offered here on this blog and in our own campus assemblies work best for all of us? How will we know if we have succeeded? How can we minimize risk and maximize benefits to everyone through testing and evaluation? What are you able to commit to? What can we achieve and when?

The heart of your participation in a regional meeting is a focus on solutions-based concepts associated with concrete actions. Not the specific issues or technologies that you dislike or champion, but a careful consideration and articulation of the factors that will facilitate positive actions and ways to overcome impediments. So, how can you do this? It seems overwhelming, but preparation will make it less so.

*Look at the questions that Esther Grassian posted for the meeting and take a specific note how you rank and articulate your responses. Post your thoughts in the comments or apply to post to the blog via Phoebe Ayers. Your ranking of these questions forms the basis of your values and will help you decide what’s really important.

*Take a look at the discussion group notes and decide how to address the notes that were taken. Change the questions you see into propositions and try some on for size. Choose a couple. What are the elements that will allow a proposal to work? How will we test and/or evaluate the substantial success of a proposal to determine what is of highest value to our clients? If you can’t evaluate it, it’s not a proposal that can be addressed. What do we need to change to implement those ideas? How much money? What kinds of technologies? How much time would it take? How much disruption or training would it involve? What are the easy wins (things everyone can do)?

*Take a look at this (admittedly incomplete) mapping of the nine topics onto the five prepared for the LAUC Southern Regional meeting agenda:

Topic 1: The consequences of changing university pedagogy.
See Campus roles ; Relationship to Information Providers ; Reference ; Technology ; Library Buildings

Topic 2: Preparing the current and future generations to work in 21st century settings.
See Personnel ; Reference ; Relationship to Information Providers ; Technology ; Organizational Culture


Topic 3: Acquiring unique materials assuming a UC one copy universe – challenges and justifications.
See Collections ; Technology ; Library Buildings ; Campus roles ; Relationship to Information Providers

Topic 4: Evaluating ourselves for promotion. What should count in the future?
Relationship to Information Providers ; Reference ; Technology ; Campus roles

Topic 5: Getting stuff where it needs to go: Discovery and delivery.
Technology ; Reference ; Campus roles; Relationship to Information Providers

Here’s what will we do at this meeting after you have done your homework:
We will gather your proposals, write them down and synthesize them and vote on them. Once we have compiled your votes, we will communicate them to everyone.

What are your comments?

Register today for the
LAUC Southern California Regional Meeting

From General Reference to Subject Specialty

David Michalski
Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian
University of California, Davis
michalski@ucdavis.edu

Libraries and librarians have made great strides over the years to simplify access to resources by promoting to the general public good practices in the use and construction of databases and search engines. The society we serve has changed too. Information navigation skills are widely held, acquired by children at an early age, and mastered by adults who are compelled to learn the latest technologies to conduct the business of their everyday lives. Large databases are omnipresent and following inter-text citations is routine. More than ever, our social lives and social networks our influenced by our management and manipulation of digital social networks. Most new university students are no longer unfamiliar with things like Boolean searching, tags, faceted browsing, or the once arcane structures of databases. Great ‘world-cataloging’ initiatives like, WorldCat, Google, and Youtube, are no longer sublime. They are the commonplace, practical and personal instruments of an expansive cognitive world.

These transformations have important implications for reference service. One positive effect of the diminished aura associated with database technology has been to liberate the librarian from some aspects of repetitive general instruction. The orientation work on the basic operation of information technology is less necessary. Rather than explaining how to construct search strings or how to combine or filter result lists with subject headings/tags or other limits, more attention can be paid to information literacy, on teaching patrons how to analyze and evaluate the content of search results, and to deciphering their relation within the topic of inquiry. Thanks to the popularity of database experience, time spent on teaching ‘how to search’, can now be devoted to teaching patrons ‘how best to search’ in respect to the particular research project at hand.

Too be sure, reference communication still requires both general and specialized knowledge. General skills are not universally mastered. In fact, the populations we serve are diverse, both culturally and in terms of research experience. With popular information skills more widely distributed, however, it has been somewhat easier to teach people how to interact with our search tools, how to expand and contract results and how to discovery unforeseen links to like-documents. The emerging popular familiarity with relational databases makes it easier for patrons to transition from one interface to another. With such general skills in place, I can now concentrate on showing patrons how to trace a document’s authority, provenance, and how one might uncover future citations or link to common vocabulary terms in related datasets. I still meet many patrons who are new to both academic research and complex database searching, but even in such meetings, these patrons increasingly demand both advice on how to use information technological and advice about the intellectual content of their results. The more difficult part for the reference librarian at a university has always been to situate the patron in the social life of information.

Even as general librarianship is made easier by the popularity of library/database skills, this later challenge has been made more difficult by the kind of tools emerging today. Many of the vast fulltext aggregator databases shield the scope of their contents from their users. Others offer seemingly arbitrary sets of documents based on publishers or unseen publisher agreements. The coherent subject orientated index and abstracting tool takes on new importance in such an environment, but even many of these have become unwieldy. Today the reference librarian needs to have a handle on the discourse, and better, a foot in the intellectual world she or he is charged to serve. Knowledge of a subject’s own language or jargon, its intra-disciplinary fragmentation, the distribution and repudiation of its publishers is increasingly necessary. The librarian must position the research question within the diverse cultures of inquiry that make up today’s university. If in years past, the librarian had concerned her or his self the mastery of information science alone, the interrelation of information content with information structures no longer makes such an approach viable. Librarians are now often enlisted in the construction of literature reviews.

Today’s researcher, undergraduate or professor, must confront vast displays of initial search results and from these make crucial decisions. The flatness of their representation lends the results the illusion of exchangeability and makes their use values harder to decipher. In this environment the subject grounded librarian is called upon to guide and interpret results, to provide context and relief in the horizontal displays of equivalency. For the advanced researcher or inquisitive undergraduate, the subject specialist librarian can serve as a cross disciplinary translator, one who can help lead the researcher who endeavors to enter new areas of exploration. The subject specialist/bibliographer, trained both formally and through ongoing collection development work, can make connections between schools, publishers, and intellectual movements. Librarians are often called upon to orient researchers in rapidly hybridizing fields of study.

The undergraduate especially benefits from this contextualization. After meeting with subject specialists, and walking the contours of their topic of inquiry, after situating their question within their field of study, and then situating their field within the larger information landscape, the student can engage their projects from firmer ground. She or he can then return with more thoughtful, intellectually informed questions and a better understanding of the history of ideas, the value of citations, and a more cogent understanding of the social organization of knowledge and how it relates to her or his project. In other words, the subject librarian can facilitate the progressive intellectual development of the student by helping the student to avoid repeating the same entry level queries.

Today’s researchers want to speak with people who understand their complex language, projects and ideas. They like to meet with people who know the general authors, theories, tenets, and controversies which occupy them. This not only gives them the confidence that the library is acting as a powerful partner in their own mission. It allows them to interconnect to wider or related discourses.

To maximize quality reference service the Librarian needs to work in partnership with teaching faculty. She or he must have a familiarity with the work of the professors, an understanding of what their assignments are designed to teach, and how the class project fits into the course’s wider disciplinary context. By reiterating course teachings in the context of the information environment a practical knowledge of information is fostered.

The rise in programs and departments on our campuses combined with the level of staffing currently supported by our budgets makes an ideal symmetry between subject expertise and academic programs impossible to obtain. At the University of California at Davis, I am responsible to no less than ten programs across the Humanities and Social Sciences. I can not master the knowledge of all these areas, and the idea that I am a specialist in all of them diminishes the authority such a status ought to convey. Yet, to these programs, and to the work of the professors and students in them, I remain devoted, doing the best I can, based on the research, training, and reading I do to perform as a knowledgeable guide to the available resources and literatures. I know my colleagues across the University do the same. But there is no doubt, the need for subject specialty is growing just as our resources are being reduced.

In our challenging times, however, we ought not coil back from this responsibility, and concern ourselves only with generalities of research. Instead we need to restructure the library so that it becomes more effective at meeting this growing need. Posturing as if all information were of equal value, as if libraries were only responsible for the management of interchangeable info-widgets is to distort the complexity of the information landscape today. Instead, we must work at finding the best ways to teach and promote the contextual value of information, and do our best to support the practices and policies which add knowledge based assistance to the research process.

See also...

The Qualitative Place of the Reference Desk Today

On Ubiquitous Instruction


.

The Qualitative Place of the Reference Desk Today

David Michalski
Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian
University of California, Davis
michalski@ucdavis.edu



Even as we reach and serve more and more patrons remotely through new forms of tele-presence, the properly equipped and staffed Reference Desk remains an important part of both the 21st Century library and university. It not only serves as the symbolic center for our activities, it continues as the physical embodiment our mission to the campus. It is, of course, not our only point of contact. The Reference Desk is a site in a wider network of reference interactions made through both static and interactive online tools, virtual meetings and face-to-face meetings in offices and in class instruction, as well as in other public forums. Yet the Reference Desk, by virtue of its very immobility and permanence, is a central hinge between the library and its users. It serves as the anchor and dispatch center for all our flexible and mobile initiatives. It is our office and our laboratory, an open and public node where we can engage the climate of our researchers and the hub from which we embark in service of the university’s educational and research missions. Both history and current events show space and materiality are still important in the construct of our social world, in fact, no less so in today’s fast and liquid information environment. Ultimately, we occupy this space so that we are accountable to our public.

Spatially, the Reference Desk serves as an invitation to our users. It shows that we are employed in their interest. In my experience at Peter J. Shields Library at the University of California, Davis, I find patrons approaching the Reference Desk on which I serve for many reasons, for orientation, for resource discovery, and for conversations about the distribution and context of information. Situated at the center of campus, our Reference Desk is often busy. Every quarter, I meet new faculty and researchers, help new students with old problems and new assignments, and meet continuing students who have progressed from the academic novice to the intellectually engaged scholar. It is a mutually rewarding and challenging space from which to serve the campus and community.

New powerful tools and burgeoning resources in print and online have allowed the information environment to flourish. New possibilities, truly await today’s scholars, but these advances also make the information landscape increasingly complex. In this environment, the Reference Desk is used increasingly to ameliorate the confusion encountered online. The opportunity to speak directly with the librarian offers patrons a clear and direct communication of their needs and their challenges. The Reference Desk provides the much needed space and time to listen and provide information and advice in a relatively unmediated way. Time and again I’ve seen the reference desk, staffed by knowledgeable people turn frustrated users back into hopeful researchers. Undoubtedly, this commitment to our users contains costs, and its value is, like most knowledge, difficult to account, but beside counting the papers saved, insights sparked, or careers changed because of the fruitful interplay between librarians and researchers, the Reference Desk must also be recognized as a place to communicate our ethical responsibility to our users.

The rapport created there not only translates into future good will towards the library and university, but better research skills for the patron. Even when the patron approaches the desk to ask for known items or to access sets of pre-conceived information, the contact with the librarian often leads to new, more complex, questions, and sometimes, new research endeavors. New questions develop and new ways to organize projects take form, because reference is a more than a place of questions and answers. It is a space of translation, interpretation, and knowledge formation.

Face-to-face researcher-librarian interaction allows researchers to engage in embodied conversations in concert with the information world. Researchers can walk through their search results with the librarian as an interpretive guide or docent. It is a form of interaction that benefits both the researcher and the library as an institution. In the anthropological terms, it is a rich site for the transfer of cultures and skills. The librarian uses this interaction to impart search techniques, and convey the peculiarities of a discourse’s publication and distribution. Pertinent information about the scope and coverage of available resources is also taught, all with a consciousness of, and reciprocity to the researcher’s disposition. With an eye and ear to the situation at hand, to the patron’s level of skill, the signs and postures of time and attention allow for in-situ adjustments. Communication strategy can be altered by assessing the value and comprehension of communication and instruction imparted. Information is not simply dispensed at the Reference Desk, but communicated in a humane manner. In the best circumstances, knowledge about the fuller social life of information can be discussed. The librarian can work to put the researcher’s project in context with the wider intellectual environment. The new perspective built through conversations can lead to new paths of discovery.

Being there, being present, helps the library work in concert with faculty and students. In our large and complex Universities, perhaps uniquely, the librarian at the Reference Desk is there to listen, to put a face in front of the machine. We perform as information consultants and counselors and the Reference Desk becomes the safe place for such communication. It is a confidential place away from the judgment of professors, a place to inquire, explore, learn and grow. It is where we teach novices not to be intimidated by the languages of scholarship. It is where we hear problems, and in the best cases, where we offer solutions and build confidence.

The librarian at the Reference Desk is also uniquely positioned to convey the institution’s message and mission. She or he wears the University’s public face, offering the best attributes of what is too often dismissed as mere customer service. In the University today we must strengthen our engagement with the public. This node is where the library as an institution can best learn from the populations it serves. It is a prime and unfiltered information gathering point for the library in its efforts to remain relevant to the University. Each conversation there informs collection development decisions, instructional needs, and outreach methods. The librarian on the Reference Desk records the core concerns and trends of our faculty and students. As such, the Reference Desk is generative of library and librarian expertise. It enables us as an institution to react, adjust, and think. A librarian confronted with the assignments and research projects learns the challenges of the engaged student or advanced scholar, and develops creative problem solving techniques as well as information that can be used to enhance the library and better support the University’s mission.

The Reference desk is only one node in the overall provision of reference services, but it is unique in its extensibility, flexibility, and power. It creates conversations that build sustained relationships under the partnership of mutual inquiry and concern for the information experience. It is also the place where our commitment to our public is judged. And rightfully so, for if we can not be bothered to engage the public here, what faith will the public have in us across the screen?



See also...

From General Reference to Subject Specialty

On Ubiquitous Instruction


.

Questions for the UCI South Regional Assembly

1. Reference and Instruction
Which aspects of reference and instruction do you see as ongoing functions of librarians?
Which aspects do you see fading away?
Which aspects do you see evolving, and how?
What are some practical approaches librarians should consider in relation to reference and instruction?
Please rank each on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being lowest & 5 being highest.

Possible article of interest for this discussion: Beck, Clare. 1991. "Reference Services: a Handmaid's Tale." Library Journal 116 (7):32-38.

Contrast the Beck article with the item cited in the UCSF blog posting (2/10/10) on the LAUC blog: Kaufman, Paula. 2009. "Carpe Diem: Transforming Services in Academic Libraries"
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/12032

2. Relationship to information providers
What differences do you see now between librarians and non-librarian information providers?
In what ways do you see these differences evolving?
In what practical ways can librarians draw attention to and demonstrate these differences?
Please rank each on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being lowest & 5 being highest.

3. Library Personnel
What do you see, generally, as the current functions of library personnel?
How do you see these functions and responsibility for them evolving?
In what practical ways can librarians demonstrate their value in analyzing and making recommendations regarding the roles and functions of library personnel?
Please rank each on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being lowest & 5 being highest.

4. Technology
Which aspects of technology do you see as ongoing functions of librarians?
Which aspects do you see fading away?
Which aspects do you see evolving, and how?
What are some practical approaches librarians should consider in relation to technology functions?
Please rank each on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being lowest & 5 being highest.

5. Collections
Which aspects of collections do you see as ongoing functions of librarians?
Which aspects do you see fading away?
Which aspects do you see evolving, and how?
What are some practical approaches librarians should consider in relation to collections functions?
Please rank each on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being lowest & 5 being highest.

6. Library Buildings
In which ways are librarians and physical library spaces linked, currently?
In which ways do you see this evolving?
What are some practical approaches librarians should consider regarding physical library spaces?
Please rank each on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being lowest & 5 being highest.

7. Campus Roles
How does your campus view the role of librarians, currently?
In which ways do you see this evolving?
What are some practical approaches librarians should consider regarding their campus roles?
Please rank each on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being lowest & 5 being highest.

8. Library Networks
What do you see as the current role of librarians at your institution regarding library networks?
In which ways do you see this evolving?
What are some practical approaches librarians should consider regarding their campus roles?
Please rank each on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being lowest & 5 being highest.

9. Organizational Culture
Librarians:
Which aspects of organizational culture at your institution affect your work directly?
Which aspects are supportive?
Which aspects are obstacles?
In what practical ways should the organization change to meet your evolving professional needs?
Please rank each on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being lowest & 5 being highest.

Committee on Diversity at the UCDavis Libraries

Last week, I attended the first meeting of the UCDavis Libraries Committee on Diversity, and this proved to be an illuminating look at two of the nine topics that have defined our discussion of the future of UC librarianship. The meeting was based on a presentation by Associate Executive Vice Chancellor for the Office of Campus Community Relations Rahim Reed. He reiterated throughout his talk his respect for the Library Diversity committee which has a history of contributing to the campus, he said. This contribution has largely taken the form of support for a centerpiece of the campus's diversity programming which is the campus community book project. Every year, a committee selects a campus book related to the theme of diversity. Previous designees include The Kite Runner and Mountains Beyond Mountains. This year's book is The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World. Each year, there is ongoing programming on campus surrounding the book that consists of exhibits and discussions. The author is always invited for a series of high-profile talks at the campus's main performance venue, The Mondavi Center. With the focus on a book, such a project is a natural for the library. In previous years, the library has always obtained the campus book and hosted exhibits and discussions.

At this time, the diversity office is facing a particularly urgent concern in the form of a rash of acts of discrimination. These include swastikas painted on the doors of Jewish students, defacement of the LBGT office and harassment of African-American students. Here we are in the 21st century! Some people are slow to get the message. As was pointed out at the meeting, these incidents are so far beyond the pale and at such an opposite pole from discussions on diversity, that, at first glance it is hard to know how to begin to deal with this. It's like teaching people to add and subtract. One is not sure where to start. Rahim admitted that no place can be guaranteed to be safe against everything, but he offered a comprehensive vision. In part, security will be stepped up around campus. But the main effort will be a version of "draining the swamp" that discriminators live in through education and training of staff, and this is the centerpiece, too, of the conversations that the diversity office plans to hold around campus. New ideas are always welcome. With this challenge to the Library's diversity committee, Rahim ended his presentation. Not only does the library have an opportunity to intervene in the life of the campus, but it has a history of doing so which was news to me as a relatively new member of the campus. In anything to do with cross-disciplinary education, it makes sense that the library should be at the forefront of such an effort, and it will be interesting to see what unique contributions that the library can make in the upcoming year.

For its first action, the committee decided to look internally at the library before looking outward to the campus. There have been a spate of troubles within the last few months. One was an incident in which a self-appointed group delivered letters to certain individuals claiming that they were not doing their share of the work. Another was a series of angry emails regarding the timing and nature of communications about layoffs that the library may be forced to implement in the near future. All incidents did not reflect the Principles of Community that the UC Davis campus prides itself on--to say the least. Some of have speculated that these incidents reflect the tension surrounding the budget crisis that afflicts the entire UC system, and, from that perspective, they are understandable. However, the themes of inequality and that certain classes of staff within the library are more privileged than others are ones that I, for one, have seen elsewhere and seem to be general in library culture. So, the committee's first move will be to address this aspect of the organizational culture of libraries. One of the features of diversity programming, mentioned by Rahim, is a series of workshops and courses on the campus on different aspects of diversity. Rather than sending individuals to this training, the committee is considering a special session tailored to library concerns to focus on healing divisions and increasing communication and effectiveness to face the challenges that lie ahead. The UC Davis Library Committee on Diversity will be a place to watch with regards to both library campus roles and organizational cultures.

Matt

UC Commission on the Future First Recommendations

Here is a summary of the first round of recommendations of the UC Commission on the Future. Links to expanded documents are appended. The big picture might be useful to see where libraries can insert themselves. The last heading "Educating Tomorrow's Innovators" seems to me like the likeliest entry point.

Matt

Vision for the future

The UC Commission on the Future just released the first round of recommendations from its five working groups. Some recommendations you likely won't find controversial. Others represent changes that we probably would not be talking about if it weren't for the fiscal crisis that inspired the birth of this commission. This is just a first step and by no means the end of the commission's work. We expect lively debate over some of these recommendations.

During the next two months, the commission is gathering feedback before presenting prioritized recommendations to the regents in July. The commission will continue working and will present final recommendations in the fall.

As a UC advocate, your voice is important to this process. You can read the first round of recommendations and submit your feedback online .

As you can see, despite our budget challenges, UC is not standing still. Here are just a few of the recent efforts to serve our students and the people of California.
Campus Climate


University leaders are taking a hard look at the issues of intolerance that have come to light on some of our campuses in recent weeks. You may have read about these incidents .

Campus leaders reported to the UC Regents (Watch video) on the steps they have taken to address those incidents. Regents also heard from students about their experiences with bigotry and about UC's need to increase diversity on all of its campuses.

As President Mark Yudof said at the meeting, "We do not shy away from examining our own problems, from acting decisively and with dispatch to address them."

We want you to know that work continues to investigate the campus incidents and appropriately discipline those responsible whenever possible. At the same time, UC Regents have pledged to take responsibility for monitoring campus climate throughout the system and for increasing the diversity of our students, faculty, staff and curriculum to better reflect the rich, multicultural environment of California.

We are confident that together we can move forward and reaffirm our commitment to tolerance, civility and inclusiveness. Those are values we embrace and that underpin the great work accomplished at the University of California.


Public service

At the governor's request, UC is exploring what role it can play in helping the state save millions of dollars in prison health costs.

Green research

Our annual sustainability report highlights all the ways we're cutting the carbon footprint of our campuses and saving money at the same time. In the growing field of green technology, UC is a national leader, and we practice what we teach.

Educating tomorrow's innovators

Our students continue to learn and apply their knowledge to the real world. Check out some of the research projects our undergrads are working on and see why it's so important that we keep advocating for UC's future. http://undergrads.universityofcalifornia.edu/

Your support makes our successes possible.

Thank you for standing with us.

Please visit http://www.ucforcalifornia.org/uc4ca/home/ if you'd like to learn more about our advocacy efforts and take action.

Visit UC Newsroom for the latest systemwide news.
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/

Sincerely,

UC Advocacy Team

The recommendations can be found at:
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/23070
full report at:
http://ucfuture.universityofcalifornia.edu/presentations/cotf_wg_first_recs.pdf

SOPAG Reports on Collection Space Planning

Here are links to the SOPAG reports:

Final report: http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sopag/spaceplantf/collspace-report-mar24_final.pdf

• Appendices A-D: http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sopag/spaceplantf/collspaceAPPENDIX-A-D-mar24-rev.pdf
• Appendix E: http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sopag/spaceplantf/collSpaceAPPENDIX-E-growth-mar24-rev.pdf

UC Budget and Libraries

In times of severe budget crisis as we are surely in, it makes sense to consider all points of view and, as librarians, it behooves us to consider as well the alternative press. So, here is a short review of an article that summarizes well one extreme view of the UC Budget crisis.

Parrish, Will, and Darwin Bond-Graham. "Disaster Capitalist University." Anderson Valley Advertiser 58.7(2010).

The article is listed on the LAUC Futures bibliography on the LAUC wiki with an active link.

The article starts with the decision of last July by the California State Legislature to remove $813 million from the University of California's budget for the next fiscal year. In response, the university's Board of Regents declared a "state of emergency" accompanied by special "emergency powers" for UC President Mark Yudof with which he has implemented cost-cutting measures that have been the subject of controversy. The article generalizes this incident to a general trend which it calls "disaster capitalism" based on a 2007 book called The Shock Doctrine by journalist Naomi Klein. The theory is that major players in a capitalist society will fabricate crises in order to suspend the freedom of the people, suppress their spirit of inquiry and arrogate special powers to themselves (players) for their own advancement. This notion has had currency elsewhere. In George Orwell's iconic novel 1984, societies are kept united and oppressed by remote wars created for this purpose. More recently, Michael Crichton's novel, State of Fear, postulated that the entire of issue of global warming is the fabrication of environmentalist groups and corrupt elements of government for their own hidden agendas.

Applied to the UCs, the "shock doctrine" introduces numbers, similar to those heard already, to show that the university is not facing a crisis that is beyond the resources it has available. The article goes on to build a complex web of political and financial connections, including Yudof. This network, allegedly, is using the current financial crisis to gain unprecedented control of university money and invest it in large corporations for personal profit.

I've selected this article for review partly because it appeared in a library listserve, so it is a specimen of the discourses that we are exposed to. It also, rather articulately, gives voice to some of the most extreme objections to the current handling of the budget crisis as well as the misgivings and dissatisfaction that one could hardly avoid feeling in the midst of these events.

How are librarians to respond to this line of reasoning? First, one can hardly deny that this is a specimen of conspiracy theories that have appeared in many contexts. This does not mean that they are to be dismissed out of hand, and it seems undeniable to me that there is some degree of truth in the claims. However as part of the conspiracy genre, this article is liable to a lot of concerns with others of its type. First of all, the claims tend to be long on suggestiveness and insinuations but hard to prove. In this category is another issue that deserves to be singled out. There is a practice of throwing out numbers here and there to support a picture of injustice by the university policy. Maybe these numbers are correct. Yet, it is undeniable that the whole financial picture is far, far more complicated to the point where it is very likely impossible to summarize by a few numbers as has been done. Is it even possible to communicate the essence of the university's finacial situation to the populace at large? I don't know. But it seems to me futile for proponents of both sides to quote a few numbers here or there and claim that their side is right. This just doesn't convince anyone.

In any case, what are librarians to do? Sadly, not a great deal that I can see. We certainly are not in a position to do investigative reporting to expose the truth of large conspiracy theories. It seems like the best we can do is to keep on doing our job and advocating wherever possible the importance of libraries and librarians for the public good against which uses of the public money, even by conspirators, will, ultimately, be held accountable.

For these seeking to explore the actual financial state of the university in all its details and communicate this to constituents, it's important to develop a picture that persuasively shows the complexity of the finances rather than what looks like soundbites and partisan data.

Matt

International Digital Library Research & Development Meeting

The UC's efforts at digitizing library material in cooperation with Google and the HathiTrust are being paralleled by other cooperative efforts as described in a report called "International Digital Library Research & Development Meeting" which describes an international meeting at Stanford University on library cooperatives. The report can be found in full at (http://www.clir.org/globaldigitallibraries/INTL_LIB_R&D_Partic_FinalA.pdf) .

The report claims that "in an era of retrenchment, [senior administrators and senior technologists] are seeking to extend the reach of their institutions through unprecedented integration of their digital collections with others' in the international library community." In other words, crisis is opportunity and in a time of budgetary challenges, library leaders hope not only to reduce costs but expand service at the same time. These twin imperatives lead to a sense of urgency. "We need to be positively impatient," according to one of the participants.

Progress, however, has foundered or at least been held up by an irresolvable "tension" between two different points of view. On the one hand, "The piece-by-piece maturation of the digital library, growing as it has from separately funded initiatives that are often redundant, is neither efficient nor sustainable." On the other, "Striving to achieve widespread agreement on priorities for digital library development" is slow and even "counter-productive." In other words, neither a top-down nor bottom-top method serves the purpose and no procedural compromise has been discovered. Yet, the report elsewhere describes this tension as "fertile" and productive. Specific initiatives include:

1. Repository Architectural Review
2. Data Curation and Preservation
3. Digital Manuscripts
4. Digital Forensics
5. Semantic Web
6. Hydra/Blacklight - tools for building an environment for hosting and managing digital assets (http://www.fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/hydra/The+Hydra+Project)
7. PLANETS - a European-based initiative for building tools, codifying best practices, and fostering a community around digital preservation (http://www.planets-project.edu/).

and many more.

Collection Preservation and Budget Issues at UCDavis

The UC Davis Binding Services Section hosted a workshop on their services on Monday, February 22, 2010. The Binding Services Section is part of the Margaret B. Harrison Preservation Department which is housed in the Technical Services Department of the Peter J. Shields Library. The talk was presented by Charlotte Payne, supervisor of the Binding Services Section and Wendy Jones, supervisor of the Conservation Treatment and In-House Binding Sub-Section.

The services of the Binding Section take place against a backdrop of shrinking budgets and offer not only ingenious techniques for doing the job with less money but also a portrait of how the budget-crisis of the UCs is affecting every aspect of libraries. The binding budget has dropped by almost 40% in the last two years from $106,868 to $77,376. Charlotte said that the first consideration is mandatory requirements. All monographs and monographic series housed at the Physical Sciences Library (PSE) are bound, amounting to $4,000 of the buddget. This is partly because space is so compact there that the binding is necessary to squeeze everything in although it was noted that binding also increases the size of a book by a small amount. Gift books are generally not bound or repaired, however, those in need of serious repair will be bound. Otherwise, in order to allot the limited resources of the binding department, Charlotte gathers as much information as possible on the usage level and value of the book. She checks circulation levels of old copies and provdes slips to collection developers asking for their expectations of usage. One librarian mentioned that he had been told not to use these slips, but Charlotte said that, from the point-of-view of the binding department, information was always helpful. Active involvement of the bibliographers is an important element in successful cost reduction.

Among the binding materials available for paperback books, mylar is the champion: it is sturdier than plastic boook jackets, has superior openability, retains front and back covers, and is cheaper than buckram binding with almost equivalent durability. Buckram is reserved for books of significant size and weight. Use of the fastback machine has now been discontinued as the machinery had so much downtime that it was cost-effective to send the jobs to the UC bindery instead. In addition, in-house fastbacking was impacted by cuts in the budget for student assistants. In response to a question, Charlotte said that she was not aware of any "green binding" yet in existence other than the use of acid-free board in binding. What cannot be repaired in-house or at the UC bindery is sent to collection developers with a list of options, including replacement or discard.

Wendy discussed the repair processes of the preservattion department. Books arrive from all branches and departmeents in the Library but the bulk, 270 per month, come from the Circulation department. About 100 per month are sent to the UC bindery, a much smaller number than previously since books are increasingly repaired on-site to save money. An average of 170 books per month have conservattion treatment including rebacking and treatmeent for a bindery new case. Categories of problems include books with sugar and coffee stains or any other kind of stain that could attract insects and threaten the collection. Wendy observed that the quantity of damaged books has increased significantly. There is also an increased incidence of ink markings in books. Asian language books often arrive with very fragile bindings that need to be replaced. The preservattion department works hard to do conservation work that can reduce the costs of UC biinding which, for rebinding or a new case, costs $16. However, the student staff has been cut from 10 to six because of budget cuts, and the preservation departmeent has become significantly backlogged. Repair options include tack binding, velo binding, pam binding and custom-made boxes for books, and full conservation treatments, including resewing. Sometimes books are sent to NRLF where they will be handled less. Wendy reiterated that she works very closely with Charlotte and both check the Melvyl catalog to formulate the most cost-effective repair choices. Wendy added that you cannot always predict which items will be used. GRE Prrep books from 2003 have been borrowed many times already in 2010. Those people are desperate....

Matt

Hurtling Toward the Finish Line: Should the Google Books Settlement Be Approved?: California Digital Library

Hurtling Toward the Finish Line: Should the Google Books Settlement Be Approved?
February 16, 2010

Ivy Anderson, Director of Collections
California Digital Library

"Late last week, Google and the plaintiffs filed their final briefs in defense of the Google Books Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA) that is before the New York Southern Federal District Court. As the rhetoric around the Settlement heats up to white-hot intensity in the final days before the Fairness Hearing on February 18th, I’d like to offer a few personal thoughts from my vantage point at the California Digital Library."

UCSF Discussion of the Future of UC Libraries

On Monday, February 8, LAUC-SF hosted a local discussion about the future of UC libraries and the evolving roles of librarians. Members of LAUC-SF attended, as well as senior library leadership including university librarian Karen Butter. We invited the entire library staff to attend, and a few interested staff members (including a circulation assistant who recently earned his MLIS) were also in attendance.

Prompted by the table reports from the December Assembly in Berkeley, as well as the CDC concept paper on the 21st century collection, a healthy discussion ensued. There remains a gap in conceptions of whether we have a UC "collection" or "collections," and continued discussions are needed about how to balance a campus's rightful ownership with more widespread access. There was a general consensus that our roles needed to evolve in order for librarians to remain relevant, but into what is less clear.

At UCSF we've taken a somewhat different approach to the concept of "library as place," with the Library's active involvement in the development of the Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) to open in 2011. The TLC will replace a floor that used to be devoted, in part, to more traditional functions such as housing bound journals. Although there were initial concerns about "losing space," most library staff now see the TLC as a positive development that will cause us to develop new services and ways of teaching. We are not advocating clinging to the building for the building's sake, but rather converting our physical assets into more vital space that benefits the aims of the Library in tandem with those of the University.

Space, mission, roles--all of these are in flux right now. Following the meeting, our UL pointed us to a useful paper by Paula Kaufman of the University of Illinois that addresses similar themes: "Carpe Diem: Transforming Services in Academic Libraries." The gathering at UCSF led to a productive discussion, and I hope many more follow.

Marcus Banks
Chair, LAUC-SF

Library Buildings -- UCDavis Sleep-In

This past weekend February 5-7, the Peter J. Shields Library was the site of a "sleep-in" to protest the rise of student fees and budget cuts throughout the UC system. Students remained in the library throughout the weekend, holding talks on the progress of the budget, hanging posters, operating coffee stands, and, of course, studying.

The event represents another turn in a string of creative protests at UCDavis. In the fall quarter, Davis students staged a rally on the central quad clad in their underwear to protest fee hikes. At a later date, demonstrators occupied Mrak Hall, the site of the Registrar's office and refused to leave. Some were forcibly removed and there were arrests on-site. When I told my Dad about the library sleep-in, his response was "Why a library?" I said that this is in the tradition of activism from the 1960s where our very own UC Berkeley helped to make history with occupations of university buildings. "I know all that," he said. "But those were symbols of power. Usually people take over administrative buildings. What do they plan to do with a library?"

Why indeed? It appears that what transpired did not quite follow anyone's original vision but was more of an evolution. Earlier in the week, the library and the Chancellor's office received notice that the library would be occupied by students over the weekend. Since, as we know, the library closes for part of that time, in the case of the Shields Library at 6pm on Friday to reopen at noon on Saturday, this announcement was distinctly challenging with the threat of conflict. Linda Katehi, newly appointed Chancellor of UCDavis responded with an announcement that the university recognizes the difficulties upon students imposed by the budget crisis and hopes to assist them by holding extra library hours. So, indeed the library remained open all weekend. Library AULs and acting co-ULs staffed the circulation desk through both Friday and Saturday night. The scene that unfolded was a benign one. Friday evening began with a series of talks on the budget crisis during which the only disruption was when a union speaker was asked to cut his remarks short to make room for student speakers. There were workshops on self-defense and various crafts, coffee stations provided and run by the students, and motivational posters hung up throughout the building. In addition to quoting the likes of Oscar Wilde and Dr. Seuss on various metaphysical truths were several thanking "our wonderful librarians and staff." Mostly students did indeed study and occupied their usual niches throughout the building.

In answer to "why a library building?" this episode, I think has, potentially, much to say about the physical space of the library building in the context of change in education. Players which have sometimes been potentially at odds--the administration, the library, and the users--through political strategy, flexibility, and a spirit of cooperation managed to turn an event that could have been ugly and full of conflict (police dragging people out of a library would be much more inflammatory than dragging people out of the registrar's building as has been replayed on UCDavis TV monitors for weeks) into one that was not only benign but productive. Lo and behold, the mythical library coffee shop, which is often discussed but seldom realized, materialized on its own along with other activities and an "information commons." Perhaps this merging and temperate harmonizing of elements is what the library can offer to campuses in a period of change.

Futures Discussion

Below is the online discussion growing out of the Fall 2009 LAUC Assembly. The broad topic of the future of librarianship in California has been divided into nine topics labeled below. The post for each topic summarizes the work of the group assigned to that topic at the assembly. Please add comments to particular topics via the "comments" link at the bottom of each post.

Discussion group 9: organizational culture

• Org culture – how we do business, may be overt or covert
o how slow change occurs, attachment to how we currently do things, resistance to change
o many impediments to change
o culture is rarely questioned & smothers new ideas

• LAUC’s relevance – is it? need to make ourselves more visible
o lots of librarians not outward looking, only focused
o Librarians not viewed as essential to research, teaching
o disconnection between with services we deliver & perception of who makes these available
o Not effective at telling our story

• We don’t know what to let go of, what to take on
• Who else is equipped to handle UC’s research needs
• Strike balance between just in time and just in case
• Great faith and belief in our systems – this attitude works against new ideas and approaches – fear of unknown, of looking bad, huge problem of how to deal with everything that’s gone on before (retro catalog?) – how much to our students care about this?


• Just in time vs just in case
• quick vs slow
• innovation vs tradition
• experimenting vs inertia
• empowerment vs micro-management
• willing to take a risk vs fear of punishment for mistakes/looking bad

Discussion group 8: library networks

Recorder name and email: Lisa Sibert

Focused on UC Library Networks

Addressed issue off timelines, i.e. 5y, 10y; short-term v. long-term
Networks in place:
Springer e-boooks
YBP approval, plans are linked
NGM—networked across UCs collaboration with outside entity
Shared print
Networks under development and/or consideration:
NGTS efforts
Western states coordinated plan for managing
Permanent retrospective print collections (issue: how will this affect stats for ARL libraries?)
Collaborative approval plans (print & electronic)
Collaborative e-book purchasing

Discussion group 7: campus roles

Campus Roles - Where does the library fit in on campus?
Recorded by Susan Mikkelsen and Ann Frenkel

What is your first order of business?

Library space, services and collections are integral part of every UC Campus. As librarians we understand that we are critical to the academic success of students and faculty. But we don’t always do a very good job at self-promotion or educating our campus communities about the value of our services. We need to find new ways to communicate to others on our campuses about what librarians have to offer, and make library spaces and services an indispensible component of research and study on every UC campus.

DISCUSSION POINTS (Note: There was not consensus in the group on all points)

Library Spaces
As collections move to the online environment, library spaces must be repurposed to meet the needs of the learning community. The creation of the Information Commons is a growing trend in academic libraries that has developed in response to the need for a more user-centered approach to resources and services. The Information Commons supports and enhances student learning and research by providing state of the art technology and resources in an academic environment that promotes collaborative work. The new Teaching & Learning Center at UCSF is a tailored version of an Information Commons that includes a simulation and clinical skills education center, technology-enhanced active-learning classrooms and computing labs. Other possible models for future Information Commons include creating spaces for students to play with and receive instruction with technology (video-editing, presentation software, poster production, etc).

Instruction
Information literacy skills need to be integrated into the academic curriculum. A for-credit library course would be desirable in some ways, but this is unlikely to be accepted by the University as librarians do not have faculty status. A better approach may be to work with academic departments to get information literacy objectives written into course outcomes. Although librarians across campuses have been fairly successful in collaborating with individual faculty members, faculty and librarian turnover make these partnerships tenuous. Programmatic collaboration provides a more stable platform for continuity in library instruction. Librarians need to advocate with department chairs and other key stakeholders to get information literacy standards integrated into course curriculums.

Academic Senate
If librarians want a voice in the in the academic senate, they will need to fight for faculty status.

Campus Consultants
Librarians need to be willing to act as research consultants for other units on campus. This means that we may have to say yes when asked to be involved in some projects that we previously would not have accepted. Ann Frenkel (AUL - UCR) gave two examples from her campus. (1)An academic committee at UCR asked for librarian assistance using ISI for impact factor/citation analysis. Their librarians wrote searches for citation information in response to this request. (2)The photography museum approached the library with a request to catalog images and place them in the library collection. Though this request was not feasible, Ann saw this as a great opportunity. Opportunities like these exist on all campuses, particularly with the Office of Research (impact factor questions can lead to opportunities to inform about other research metrics) and the Office of Development (research on potential donors).

Talking Points for the Library
Librarians need to be equipped with talking points about the library to effectively communicate with faculty and other key stakeholders about libraries services/resources/initiatives.

Publish outside the Library Literature
Publishing outside the library literature and attending conferences in other disciplines has the potential to make library services more visible to campus stakeholders. For example, Josephine Tan UCSF librarian recently published an article in an academic medical journal with several UCSF faculty members.* We are aware that some social science librarians have also published outside of the library literature, but these efforts need to be encouraged and expanded.

Communicate the Message “Use It or Lose It”
We need to send the message that library resources are costly to acquire and maintain. None of the resources that students and faculty use on a routine basis would be available without librarian expertise. Instruction librarians should deliver this message during instruction sessions to help raise awareness of all the behind-the-scenes work done by librarians. As an additional awareness raising event, the group proposed a “day without resources” when access to library resources would be completely turned off. Along with restricted access, users would receive a message about the cost of the resources.

*Chen HC, Tan JPG, O’Sullivan P, Boscardin C, Li A, Muller J. Impact of an Information Retrieval and Management Curriculum on Medical Student Citations. Acad Med 2009 84 (10 Supp): S38-S41.