The document discusses the challenges librarians face in maintaining electronic resources with limited budgets. It notes that electronic resources now comprise a large portion of library budgets, so cuts in this area are unavoidable when budgets shrink. However, librarians are reluctant to cancel resources because they are passionate about supporting collections. The document argues that in times of major budget cuts, librarians must make decisions based on facts like usage, not emotions or hypothetical future needs, in order to justify maintaining expensive resources that are rarely used.
This are my speaking notes for the keynote presentation I gave at Evergreen International 2012. Here's a link to the Prezi Presentation: http://prezi.com/hdnwdkgqrd-7/evergreen-keynote-2012/
Slides from a presentation I did in May 2009 at the HTWK-Leipzig. Objective was to provide an overview of the state of academic libraries and offer a glimpse into some of the perspectives on the future.
Isla Kuhn JIBS User Group Resource Discovery event February 2013sherif user group
Summon – a game of two halves by Isla Kuhn, (University of Cambridge). Presentation at New Dawn: the Changing Resource Discovery Landscape - JIBS Event and AGM, Monday 25th February 2013 Brunei Gallery at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), London. Find out more about resource discovery at the HELibTech website: http://helibtech.com/Discovery
This are my speaking notes for the keynote presentation I gave at Evergreen International 2012. Here's a link to the Prezi Presentation: http://prezi.com/hdnwdkgqrd-7/evergreen-keynote-2012/
Slides from a presentation I did in May 2009 at the HTWK-Leipzig. Objective was to provide an overview of the state of academic libraries and offer a glimpse into some of the perspectives on the future.
Isla Kuhn JIBS User Group Resource Discovery event February 2013sherif user group
Summon – a game of two halves by Isla Kuhn, (University of Cambridge). Presentation at New Dawn: the Changing Resource Discovery Landscape - JIBS Event and AGM, Monday 25th February 2013 Brunei Gallery at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), London. Find out more about resource discovery at the HELibTech website: http://helibtech.com/Discovery
Library futures: converging and diverging directions for public and academic ...lisld
The major influence on library futures is the changing character of their user communities. As patterns of research, learning and personal development change in a network environment so library services need to change. At the same time, libraries are focused on engaging with their communities more strongly - getting into their work and learning flows. This means that libraries are becoming more unlike each other, they are diverging as they meet the specific needs of their communities. Research libraries diverge from academic libraries, and each is different from urban public libraries, and so on.
At the same time, at a broader level libraries are experiencing similar pressures. The need to engage more strongly with their communities. The need to assess what they do. The need to configure space around experiences rather than around collections. Libraries are converging around some of these issues.
This presentation will consider the future of libraries from the point of view of convergence and divergence between types of libraries.
The reader’s ghost. Books and libraries in teen’s imagination, by Beatrice El...Luisa Marquardt
The PPT Presentation concerns the videorecorderd speech by Beatrice Eleuteri, PhD Student at Roma Tre University in Rome, on "The reader’s ghost. Books and libraries in teen’s imagination".
Abstract (EN)
We often believe that a child, yet a young adult, only needs to be taught how to read and write for us to feel in the right to reproach him if he doesn’t actually do it or if he’s not really good at it.Well, knowing how to read is not enough to motivate reading. Reading is an “habitus”, a suit that could fit tight, or loose, that we need to try on a couple of times in the dressing room before choosing to buy it. The school library is a guest-house, a place in which kids, especially culturally deprived ones, must feel safe and welcome to talk about stories, experiences, opinions. A forum to meet books of course, but also readers. A workshop meant to sew our personal reader’s habitus, rejuvenating it from its old mousy image and preparing it for us to grow inside it.
The Punk Library: Developing Library Instruction in the Mobile AgeAmy Vecchione
Do you teach workshops at your public library? Do you teach middle school students who just want to use Google? Do you teach college level information literacy? If you said yes to any of those questions, this workshop is for you. The material presented in this workshop will help guide you towards new ideas for instruction that use active learning and constructivist principles, particularly how they apply to mobile devices and mobile learning. We’ll discuss how to adapt instruction to the new culture of learning.
1. The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0888-045X.htm
BL RUNNING ON EMPTY
24,2
The Yogi Berra school of library
science
138
Anthony McMullen
Baron-Forness Library, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, Edinboro,
Accepted May 2011
Pennsylvania, USA
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into issues encountered in maintaining
library technologies on a limited budget and with limited personnel.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses real world experiences to report on collection
development decisions as they relate to electronic resources in an era of shrinking budgets.
Findings – The percentage of library budgets allocated for the acquisition of electronic resources has
risen steadily in an online era. As state legislatures across the country cut funding, librarians must cut
expenditures accordingly. With electronic resources comprising a large segment of overall
expenditures, cuts in this area are unavoidable.
Originality/value – This paper examines the decision-making process in the context of renewing or
canceling underused electronic resources in an era of shrinking library budgets. It takes a humorous
approach in suggesting that librarians need to look beyond emotions and base their decisions on facts.
Keywords Electronic resources, Budgets
Paper type Viewpoint
“We can’t cancel that! It’s a great resource! It’s just that nobody uses it!” This was the
opening salvo at a recent meeting I attended, fired off in support of an expensive but
rarely used database. It is a great resource – nobody uses it . . . Where had I heard that
before? It sounded vaguely familiar to me, reminiscent of something former New York
Yankees great Yogi Berra, a man as famous for his malapropisms as he was for his
skills on the ball field, may have said had he chosen a slightly different career path.
Yes! That is it! It is the juxtaposition of one of my all time favorite “Berraisms” – the
one where Yogi, in explaining why he no longer dined at a certain restaurant, stated,
“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
The meeting had only a single item on the agenda: identify a list of electronic
resources to cut in the likely scenario that the library’s budget is reduced in the
upcoming fiscal year. It was a painful gathering with negligible progress and
considerable contention. Looking backwards, and knowing what I know about
librarians’ personality types, I realize that I was foolish to believe we could ever come
to a consensus. Generally, librarians do not enjoy confrontation and go to great lengths
The Bottom Line: Managing Library to avoid it. Conversely, we are passionate people and vigorously defend our territories
Finances or our collections as is the case here, when we feel as though they are threatened. We
Vol. 24 No. 2, 2011
pp. 138-139 loathe letting go, as in, “Hey! Mrs Grimstead still uses those eight track tapes, Mister!”
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0888-045X
Our stacks are filled with volumes that have never been charged. We keep things
DOI 10.1108/08880451111169205 because somebody might potentially need them someday. We are all things to
2. everybody. Let’s face it; we are organized hoarders, holding fast to our principles of The Yogi Berra
every book his reader, every reader his book. Thus, we can stand proudly in the face of
unprecedented budget cuts and fight the good fight for the database that nobody ever
school of library
uses because somebody might need it someday. science
Perhaps that somebody is the Godfather of a certain academic department, the
revered professor who has been handing out the same assignment in the second week
of April for the past 34 years; the assignment that requires students to use a printed 139
index to locate and photocopy an article from microfilm. We certainly cannot tell the
Godfather that he must change his assignment; that we are no longer subscribing to
the film or the printed index; that both have been supplanted by electronic versions.
We are all things to everybody. We must not rock the boat. So we maintain redundant
hard-copy and electronic subscriptions with little concern for finances so that a single
instructor can continue to do what he has always done.
Or perhaps that somebody is nobody at all. This, seemingly, was precisely the point
of a respected colleague, who in her defense of a pricey but seldom used electronic
resource quoted the noted philosopher Thomas Carlyle. “The true university these
days,” she said, “is a collection of books,” to which she added triumphantly, “Note that
it says nothing at all about usage.” Well alright then. Let us keep another great
resource nobody uses based entirely upon the stale words of a Scottish philosopher,
cherry-picked from a passage in a 150 þ year old work that has absolutely nothing to
do with library collection development. Let us conveniently ignore the fact that Carlyle,
in the sentences leading up to his quote, clearly notes that it is not the books
themselves that comprise the university, but the reading of the books. Usage matters,
even in 1841.
The harsh reality is such that we cannot have our cake and eat it too. When the
Governor is proposing to slash our funding by 54 percent, we can no longer hang on to
expensive resources that nobody uses simply because we believe them to be quality
resources. We live and work in an era where we are held accountable for our decisions
and actions. We live and work in an era where we must not only do more with less, but
justify all that we do with that ever shrinking slice of the pie. In this setting, the notion
of standing on the carpet and explaining why we elected to renew for yet another year
a resource that costs hundreds of dollars per use is a highly unappealing one. In this
setting where, as Yogi once said, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore,” we need to
make decisions based upon timely and relevant evidence, not on our emotions, fears, or
even the words of a brilliant but long-gone philosopher. The Godfather and Mrs
Grimstead may be disappointed, but I have got to think that Yogi had exactly this type
of situation in mind when he told us, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
About the author
Anthony McMullen is Systems Librarian at the Baron-Forness Library, Edinboro University of
Pennsylvania, one of the 14 universities comprising the Pennsylvania State System of Higher
Education. Anthony earned his MSLS at Clarion University of Pennsylvania and has been in the
library profession for over 16 years. Anthony McMullen can be contacted at: amcmullen@
edinboro.edu
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