LISNews: Librarian News

Jenica Rogers, on her blog Attempting Elegance, has a compelling essay today entitled "Killing Fear, Part 1: The Problem." After discussing the changing expectations of students, the changing attitudes of librarians, and the undeniable policy and service shifts in academic libraries, she discusses revealing findings about what faculty still think it is a library should be doing. It boils down to teaching and facilitating information seeking behavior vs buying and archiving materials. 

Her conclusion:

Put simply, there’s a contradiction between these faculty expectations and emergent and clearly evident trends in information, libraries, and our future. This particular stakeholder group seems to want the very traditional services and roles that others are pointing out are now part of a legacy model.

An interesting read, and I look forward to the presumed Part 2.

 (Updated to fix link to original article. - aw)

"There are no first-rate universities in the world without a first-rate
library," 110 faculty members declared in a petition asking the university
for an extra year to find other ways of keeping Cal libraries not just
afloat, but great.
"We are in a crisis, and we have to kind of breathe a bit more deeply,"
said engineering Professor Panos Papadopoulos, who signed the petition.
"We need to think more strategically."

Read the entire story, from the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Infidelity in the Library" ooooh, another story about people fooling around in the stacks! No? Oh, it's about books? huh. OK, fine, I'll post it anyways.

"So my books, you see, need some attention. And I just can’t give it to them right now. Fortunately, I am a librarian, and so I know a thing or two about loaning books. So come on over sometime. I’ll set you up with a borrower’s card and you can check out a few books and take them home with you, while I hide in the spare bedroom tenderly opening up tomes on current copyright trends, or sit in my car out in the driveway to steal delicate glimpses into the latest interlibrary loan initiatives."

At the University of New Hampshire, this is evidently an old tradtion- to scream at the library in order to reduce stress.
See it in action at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSdAqjq7LrE&feature=youtu.be