ACRL Draws Record Crowd

Baltimore hosts lively assessment of libraries’ future

By Andrew Albanese, Rebecca Miller, & Norman Oder -- Library Journal, 5/1/2007

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) shattered records at its 13th National Conference, drawing 3,069 registrants—and 4,784 attendees in all—to Baltimore over the final weekend in March. Seasonal spring weather made it a pleasant walk from the Baltimore Convention Center—where librarians shared the facility with gatherings of Mary Kay salesfolk and preteen cheerleaders—to the city’s Inner Harbor attractions.

Several sessions were standing room only, addressing ongoing and emerging themes. Traffic was spotty on the show floor, heavy during no-conflict periods but slow at other times. The twice-daily poster sessions and the Cyber Zed Shed (see InfoTech, p. 23), which offered 20-minute poster sessions on emerging tech topics, drew large crowds to the edge of the exhibits area.

Mary Reichel, chair, ACRL conference committee, said that webcasts of the show would be available for at least one year. At the Opening General Session, University of Pennsylvania professor/author Michael Eric Dyson praised librarians for defending information and promoting learning. “You change lives as arbiters of enlightenment for the future of American civilization,” he declared.

Filmmaker, writer, and all-around provocateur John Waters, a Baltimore native, is hardly known for decorum, so librarians should have known they wouldn’t be getting a typical ACRL luncheon keynote presentation. Indeed, Waters’s rollicking and often blue talk had librarians rolling in the aisles—and, in a few cases, walking out of the room. “I know you belie the fuddy-duddy perception of librarians,” Waters said, opening his push-the-boundaries performance. “You’ve read too much, you’re twisted people.”

Waters also offered advice for making libraries cool again: highlight the dirty parts in books, urge librarians to go nude for a day or pretend they’re on drugs, and suggest people sleep only with librarians for a year. “Everybody has been thanking us for having such an engaging speaker,” said ACRL president Pamela Snelson afterward. “It’s all about freedom of speech. We have to walk the walk.” (For an ACRL podcast of a Waters interview, click here.)

During the conference, the ACRL Research Committee unveiled its top ten assumptions for the future of academic libraries. “These assumptions underscore the dominant roles that technology and consumer expectations are increasingly playing in libraries,” said Snelson. Among the assumptions: an increased emphasis on digitizing collections, librarians’ skill set will continue to evolve, students and faculty will want faster and greater access to services, and higher education will increasingly view the institution as a business.

At a panel reacting to the assumptions, Sherrie Schmidt, dean of university libraries at Arizona State University, Tempe, commented, “I was really puzzled that the issue of learning outcomes was not present.” She noted that such outcomes are an important part of accreditation reviews. Also missing, Schmidt said, were statements “about massive amounts of born-digital data.” Libraries will have to “parse” the privacy issue carefully, she said, because librarians will want to push personalized information.

Julie Todaro, dean of library services at Austin Community College, TX, said she’d ask her staff to translate the assumptions into “a people statement.” Then, she said, she’d flip them into outcome statements, part of an internal dialog. Doug Lederman, an editor at Inside Higher Ed, pointed to the issue of information literacy, which is not explicitly mentioned in the assumptions but implied in several of them. Librarians, he said, are increasingly asked “to educate students how to filter.”

Wikipedia may be an anonymously created online encyclopedia vulnerable to criticism, but a not inconsiderable number of librarians are willing to take it seriously—and so are their constituents. That was the message from a lively session on Wikipedia organized by Dan Ream of Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries, Richmond, and Lucretia McCulley of the University of Richmond Library.

They began by asking the crowd if they had used Wikipedia in the past week. More than 50 percent said yes. About one-third said they’d recommend it to library users, and about the same number said they preferred Wikipedia to a traditional encyclopedia. About one-quarter of the crowd thought librarians should have an active role in editing Wikipedia. Still, at least half the attendees indicated they had told students not to use it. (Later, one librarian commented that credibility wasn’t the reason his colleagues don’t recommend Wikipedia; rather, students are insulted because they automatically check that source and want librarians to go beyond that.)

That set the stage for some fascinating excerpts from video interviews with faculty members, staffers, and students at the presenters’ two universities. A large number of those interviewed said they used Wikipedia, with various degrees of skepticism, with acceptance greater among those in the younger cohort. Some said they found it a good source of links; others said the self-policing function made for better results and fostered critical thinking.

Afterward, Jill McKinstry of the University of Washington commented that her colleagues have begun to populate Wikipedia entries with links to the university library’s previously underused collections of digitized photographs. “Needless to say, our usage skyrocketed.”

After new guidelines for e-reserve use, touted as a joint effort of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Cornell University, were released last year, e-reserve has fallen a staggering 70 percent, according to Cornell’s Tracy Mitrano, director of IT policy and computer policy and law programs for the Office of Information Technologies. The steep drop suggests that, after two letters to faculty from the provost, faculty members at Cornell are now too concerned to test the copyright waters.

The new rules note that “permission of the copyright owner must be secured to place on electronic reserve any items that have been used by the same faculty for the same course in the past or if more than an article or chapter from any one item is to be included (assuming that the material is not found in an electronic resource that has been licensed by the Library)” and point out that it may take six weeks to secure permission and the faculty member (or the academic department) likely will have to pay permission fees.

Mitrano said that Cornell was threatened with litigation by AAP over its e-reserves and that the sheer cost of defending itself and the potential liability for infringement landed the university in a tight spot. AAP first went after the University of California–San Diego, Mitrano reminded attendees, but that school, as a state institution, had immunity from prosecution under federal copyright laws.

What does your administration’s financial officer want to see from your library? Data that shows good return on considerable investment, according to Leigh Estabrook, dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) program at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of the Library Research Center.

Estabrook interviewed over 20 chief academic officers (CAO) about their library perceptions, noting that administrators are less concerned with cost than the quality of the campus library, how central it is to faculty and students, and how much demand it gets. That’s not to say that money doesn’t matter. Administrators are aware of rising costs and the need to respond to them, Estabrook reported, provided that librarians have the right answers to their questions.

Among things administrators want from their librarians: “collaboration with departments” (especially IT), not complaints; benchmarking of library quality and use; demonstrated interest in cost savings via collaboration and creative ideas; and a proactive, problem-solving attitude. Of course, librarians should have a good answer to the question, “Why do we need a library when we have Google?”