This Week in LIS - 11 June 2010

Headline of the Week: On Our Radar

This week, LIS gathered for our annual strategic planning day where we look forward to shaping our agenda for the coming academic year while working to view where the winding path of information service will be leading us in the future. This year, as part of our 2009-10 annual report to be published later this month, we’ll include a “Predictive and Guiding Vision for Library and Information Service” designed to gather a series of statements forecasting where we will be moving as an organization and a profession in the coming years. The series of statements is broken down into four sections, Information Resources, Information Services, Information Infrastructure, and Information Professionals.

This list has been in incubation for a while and draws heavily from planning work done by LIS in 2009. It will be regularly reviewed and updated and will likely become a regular part of our future forecasting and planning. There is little dispute that the evolution and change in the area of information service is broad and foundational. With the landscape changing rapidly, it is important that we continue to maintain a high awareness around us in order to position our service most appropriately in service to the mission of the College.

The statements are available graphically, which include a relative assessment of imminence and focus for the organization. The full text of the statements also appear below. These are currently in draft form, and a final version will be published June 25th. We’ll include more from our planning days in this space in the coming weeks. Stay tuned …

Information Resources

• Collaborative partnerships for acquisition of information resources will rise in priority and importance.
• Physical research collections will shrink over time focusing on the “classics” and core titles.
• Large packaged digital collections (monographic and serialistic) will increasingly form the backbone of academic research collections.
• The focus of Library and Archives curation and collection operations will increasingly focus on digital content management, with emphasis on local unique materials.
• Collection development activities will migrate from “just-in-case” to “just-in-time” with expansion of print-on-demand capabilities.
• The Internet will be the primary method of delivery for multimedia content.
• Users will continue to quickly adopt ebooks and ereaders.
• The importance of metrics on resource use (particularly in-facility physical and virtual use) will increase.
• Storage of research materials will not be seen as a significant priority for library space.
• A higher value will be placed on more flexible physical spaces for information interaction with emphasis on both private/quiet study and social/collaborative engagement.

Information Services

• Building effective virtual service points and service capabilities is an increasing priority.
• Users will increasingly seek physical and virtual self-service opportunities.
• Users will increasingly seek delivery of ubiquitous mobile services.
• Geographical independence of mobile and non-mobile services will rise in importance.
• Use, scope, and size of circulating collections of creative, interpretive, and consumptive information devices will increase.
• Processes will improve to easily publish and maintain locally-created content (text, audio, video).
• Integration of information fluency within the curriculum will be the centerpiece of academic research services.
• It will be an increasing priority to cultivate and maintain quality communication channels with constituents.
• Collaborative partnerships for information service will expand.

Information Infrastructure

• There will be increasing opportunity and reason to form collaborative partnerships for information infrastructure.
• Classroom/lab infrastructure will be reduced.
• We will experience a continued and somewhat heightened migration to mobile hardware for employees.
• Data networks will expand to a large number of devices over next-generation IPv6 networks.
• Voice communications will migrate to data networks with unified messaging.
• Redundancy and availability will be benchmarks of infrastructure service.
• Open source, cloud-based enterprise systems will emerge as viable alternatives to current vendor systems.
• We will trend toward virtually-based infrastructure (cloud computing).

Information Professionals

• Information support personnel will increasingly focus on public service and information fluency.
• Comfort with and acclimation to change and evolution of information service will remain a priority.
• Information professionals will increasingly work on local value-added tasks.
• There will be an increased expectation of flexibility and broadening of skillsets.
• Information professionals will increasingly focus on relationships with constituents and increasingly defocus on collections in daily activities.
• Information professionals will increasingly locate and originate services from embedded positions within functional work teams.
• Geographic consolidation of information support staff in more collaborative work environments will remain a priority.

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LIS Blog Highlights from the Week

The following articles are sampled from those available on the LIS Blog:

• User Services Meeting – 6/2/10
• Spring 2010 GoPrint Stats Available
• Wikipedia FAQ for Librarians
• Magnus Unavailable, Wednesday, June 9
• Real-Time Lab Availability Service Added to LIS Website
• Library OPACs Receive a Facelift
• Magnus, Encore Available – 6/9/2010
• Digital Initiatives Update – 6/11/10
• IUG, IPAL and ILA/ACRL 2010

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Notes from LIS Council

LIS Council is the leadership team within LIS. Among the topics discussed this past week were:

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NITLE Opportunities

As a member of NITLE (National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education), Luther has the opportunity to participate in a wide variety of developmental and training programs intended for faculty, librarians, and information technologists. Events listed at the link below are currently open for registration by Luther participants. LIS Staff who are interested in participating in an event should speak with Christopher Barth. Faculty who are interested in participating should speak with Lori Stanley. Participation is contingent upon available funding and program acceptance.

Upcoming NITLE events:

A full list of events (sortable by registration deadline) is available at http://www.nitle.org/events/calendar.php

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Upcoming LIS Training, Instruction, and Professional Development Opportunities

Click on the event below for specific information and for a link to register. More information on training and development events is available.

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Internet Resource of the Week: Copyc.at

Copyc.at is a website that will apply a series of readability tests on a given web page and return the approximate grade level of writing that appears on the page. It also provides basic statistics like the number of sentences, words, and average words per sentence. You can then compare your content with other sites. Running the last edition of TWILIS through the site yields an average grade level of 13.6 (which given that we’re a college doesn’t appear to be too far off-base). Though it is high when compared to the New York Times (8.74), The Onion (9.5), or BBC News (13).

On the web at http://copyc.at/

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Quote(s) of the Week:

• “To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.” – Steve Jobs

• “For me, news websites often seem optimised to distract the bored, not to inform the healthily curious. A rapid news cycle coupled with perceived demand for breaking stories only encourages reporting of half-truths about live events, or coverage of items that aren’t really news at all, like snow in mid winter, or learning that Sarah Beeny is pregnant.” – The Curse of the 30-Second News Cycle | Modern Nerd

• “The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox’s Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability.” – Yale Law School fellow Christina Mulligan in a post on Balkinization, outlining the difference between Glee-world, where kids remix and perform songs in a care-free utopia, and the dystopic world we live in, where entertainment corporations could sue you into bankruptcy if you tried that kind of nonsense

• “I saw a two-year old kid (in diapers, in a stroller), using an iPod Touch today. Not just looking at it, but browsing menus and interacting. This is a revolution, guys.” – Seth Godin

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Links of the Week

• RIAA asks court to close down LimeWire [CNET News]
• Colleges Extend the Welcome Mat to Students’ Pets [New York Times]
• Do Libraries Still Matter? Ohio State U. Has a Clear Answer [Chronicle of Higher Education]
• Calif. mom finds missing children using Facebook [Yahoo! News]
• Nature Publisher Aims To Save Planet by Democratizing Science [Wired]
• Office Web Apps Now Live [WebWorkerDaily]
• Banks Paying Colleges For Students Who Rack Up Credit Card Debt [Huffington Post]
• Our new search index: Caffeine [Official Google Blog]
• California libraries gearing up for fight against Nature [ars technica]
• Embedded Librarians [Inside Higher Ed]
• Moody’s Sees Continued Financial Challenges for Private Colleges [Chronicle of Higher Education]
• Journal liberation: A primer [Everybody’s Libraries]
• Luther College Close to Putting Up Wind Turbine [Chronicle of Higher Education]

The links and media above are selected from material posted to pulse.infoneer.net, which gathers links and comment on the worlds of libraries, technology, higher education, culture, intellectual property, copyright, information, ethics, design, professional identity, leadership, and the future. The full content feed is available by Daily Email Digest or “RSS“:http://feeds.feedburner.com/infoneer

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Next Issue

The next issue of TWILIS will be published on Friday, June 18th.

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This Week in LIS is published most Fridays by Christopher Barth, Executive Director of Library and Information Services at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.

This issue is Volume 4, Number 32 (#159)

Content is made available under Creative Commons license.