ACRL Draws Record Crowd to Minneapolis

By Andrew Albanese, Rebecca Miller, & Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 5/15/2005

Good weather, an invigorating setting, and lively discussions characterized the Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) 12th National Conference, held April 7–10 in Minneapolis. The 3,959 total attendees eclipsed the 2003 conference in Charlotte, NC, by nearly 500. For exhibitors, the show floor ebbed and flowed, but most vendors reported decent traffic, helped by generous "no-conflict" periods that also featured popular poster sessions. Librarians most commonly complained that they were shut out of some panels.

In his entertaining opening address, William Mitchell, head of the media arts and sciences program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an architecture professor, put the race to change library space in perspective. He cited students with wireless laptops who are able to Google a topic during a lecture and interject their findings. In the future he concluded, "the most high-tech space will look the least high tech," freeing up designers to focus more on "human desires."

Hooking first-year students—many of them Millennials—was the buzz in poster sessions and programs. Most focused on how to integrate the library further into this critical year in a student's campus life, noting that Millennials are tech savvy, learn in groups, like to collaborate, and have the ability to multitask (see "Born with the Chip," LJ 5/1/04, p. 34–37).

Several speakers, though, urged librarians to look beyond this dominant group. Betsy Barefoot, codirector and senior scholar at the Policy Center for the First Year of College (Brevard Coll., NC), emphasized other student populations: adults, first-generation immigrants, and students from underrepresented groups. Those in this second grouping, unlike the assertive Millennials, can be hesitant, even afraid, and lack family support while in school.

Google product manager Adam Smith and University of Michigan (UM) associate university librarian John Price Wilkin discussed Google Print's ambitious effort to digitize millions of books from four university libraries and the New York Public Library (see News, LJ 1/05, p. 18ff.). Smith asserted Google's commitment "to building an international, multilingual product," even though he conceded it's still difficult to capture non-Western text. He said that Google does not seek a monopoly, intending to serve as a catalyst for more digitization and to include books from other digitization projects. Moreover, Smith said, Google has created a proprietary, nondestructive technology "that in a perfect world does no damage" to scanned books.

Wilkin said that UM will not simply rely on Google's presentation of the scanned materials—the university can provide more flexible displays and more powerful citation tools. He acknowledged that while libraries may be ceding some generalist roles to Google, this may free up resources for more specialized activities. Some feared that Google's project would deter funders of other digitization projects and reinforce the notion that everything's available on the web. "What better way to deal with that perception than to ensure that as much as possible is available on the web," replied Wilkin to mild applause.

Stanley Wilder, associate dean of the River Campus libraries at the University of Rochester (UR), NY, caused much consternation with an opinion article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, arguing that "information literacy remains the wrong solution to the wrong problem facing librarianship." Appearing before a somewhat skeptical crowd, Wilder elaborated: "Information literacy literature says students are information seekers and we give them skills. We believe students are apprentices in the disciplines they've chosen."

Rochester librarian Judi Briden said her colleagues interact significantly with faculty members. Still, UR librarian Ann Marshall readily acknowledged "a lot of similarities" with what others do: "Part of it is language—for my faculty, to talk about literacy won't cut it." On the library homepage, Briden observed, clear buttons help students find articles and more. "Nobody does subject guides right," added Wilder, noting that a

UR course page is "nothing more than a tailored subject page—it connects at the way students think."

A session examined the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) new access policy, which requests—but does not require—authors to deposit their papers into the PubMed Central repository within 12 months. In a videotaped presentation, NIH director Elias Zerhouni gamely called the policy a precedent-setter but skirted the central issue of whether authors will submit and how publisher contracts might keep authors from releasing their papers quickly. He implored librarians to help the NIH use the policy to "change the culture" of science.

At a session that looked at a putative open access world, Columbia University library head Jim Neal posited that librarians would serve roles ranging from aggregators to publishers, from educators to policy advocates, and from researchers to curators. Still, he warned that open access is a vision, not a business model, and noted that the "academy remains fundamentally unchanged."