This was an informal session by John Dupuis (York U.) and Janice Mutz (Lakehead U.). They presented provocative statements/questions on the screen and asked participants to respond and interact. Here are some of the questions put forward by the presenters, as well as comments made by the participants:
- the core of the library’s offerings has to be the educational mission of the institution; our first loyalty must be to the patron
- What is our relationship to stuff?
- What value does our physical space have?
- What is our expertise on a campus full of experts?
- Everyone thinks they know what a library is...
- We should be thinking of ourselves as being in the reputation and attention business
- We have to get better at finding free stuff, not just what’s in our collection
- We’re living in an on-demand world; librarians have to be much more available than ever before (there was some discussion about Meebo widgets, answering reference questions in the evening from home, creating personal relationships with students and researchers, etc.)
- RefWorks is on its way out
- What happens when GoogleBooks starts charging? Do we pay? Will it affect our ability to buy other material? Do we not pay and risk being completely circumvented? (there was discussion about how librarians should become even more active in the GoogleBooks settlement debate)
- Discussed with Sonny Banerjee, librarian at Ryerson, about the fact that some faculty members are showing audiovisual material without even consulting the library about rights – that all the work we do with public performance rights might be for naught
Somewhat unrelated: In this session I also learned that a disproportionate number of librarians are Buffy fans.
No comments:
Post a Comment