Social media platforms serve as a virtual complaint window for angry consumers. Higher ed is no different when community members share concerns and voice anger in online public spaces. Academic librarians need to know how to handle these situations.
During a trip to New Zealand in January 2018, I was invited to visit with several of my counterparts at five different universities there to discuss the changing role of university libraries in the 21st century.
To solve the student debt crisis, higher education will need some serious change. So far there is limited effort in that direction, and those who can least afford high tuition will continue to bear the brunt of student debt, too often with little to show for it.
Utter the phrase “student experience” to a higher education audience and the reaction, depending on the crowd, could be visceral—as in, “education, not experience.” Yet academic librarians could benefit from and contribute to the growing interest in student experience.
Librarians having been talking about design thinking for at least ten years. With growing interest surfacing in higher education and libraries, will we see broader adoption in academic libraries?
During the week of March 19–23 MIT Libraries convened experts from across disciplines and domains to identify and address grand challenges in the scholarly communication and information science landscape.
Today, access to born-digital federal government information is relatively easy. Most of it is even available for free. But there are few legal guarantees to ensure that the information published today will be available tomorrow. Now, the GPO Reform Act of 2018 about to be introduced in Congress, pitched as a modernization of the Government Publishing Office (GPO) and the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), will actually endanger long-term free public access to government information.
As more academic librarians seek to engage with open education resources (OER) and textbook affordability initiatives, there are naturally concerns about the impact on the campus bookstore. Start by considering how to build a better relationship.
To library staff, cataloging can seem to consist entirely of complex and impenetrable rules. Overworked catalogers, besieged by staff reductions and constantly changing standards and systems, can feel that other staff aren’t interested in what they do. But in my experience, other librarians are keen to learn more about what shapes the catalog records they use every day. I set out to bridge this knowledge gap with a website that would allow all library staff to more fully understand (and potentially make changes to) one of the most essential parts of a catalog record—subject headings.
