This Week in LIS - 10 June 2011

Headline of the Week: Summer Planning 2011: Valuing Information Service

This week, LIS held our annual summer planning day to spend some time thinking about the bigger picture of where we are and where we are headed for next year. Our agenda included a talk about value in information service, keying off of major reports by the Association of College and Research Libraries, OCLC’s Perceptions 2010 Report, and a survey published by Inside Higher Ed of college and university presidents on their perspectives and outlooks for higher education. We also spent time discussing multimedia services in the context of our facility vision planning, as well as sessions to determine our specific objectives for the 2011-12 academic year.

On the topic of value, I think we need to challenge ourselves to ask more critical questions about how provide the services we do and what value those services ultimately have for our users and the college generally. In a nutshell, the value of libraries is seen to be in decline, and according to college presidents, the value delivered by information technology organizations is also not seen as particularly effective. Libraries would seem to be living to some extent off of a reputation built on an era when they were the only game in town, while IT organizations benefit from the fact that we can’t operate without it, even if those in leadership don’t necessarily understand the value or services delivered (which ultimately means leadership cannot assess value at all).

There is no silver bullet to address this issue. I believe it is significantly more challenging to deliver quality information service in today’s environment than even five or ten years ago. Our marketplace is changing to rapidly to allow for professional standards and practices to catch up. I do not predict this will get any easier.

I have read arguments that those in information organizations need to do a better job articulating their value, which is undoubtedly true. What is self-evident to some, is certainly not to all. We can and should work to better tell the story of the value of our service. Yet, what I believe is much more important is focusing on delivering services and resources that themselves illustrate and demonstrate the value we deliver. We cannot afford to carry forward or prop up mediocre or increasingly outdated methods of providing service. We should hold fast to the core of what we do, while questioning everything about how we do it. Successfully accomplishing this I believe will be the hallmark of a thriving information organization well into the future.

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LIS Blog Highlights from the Week

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

• Library Plaques have been Refurbished
• Spam alert
• Innovative Services Librarian Hired [Luther Only]
• KBOX Help Desk Self Service Site Goes Live [Luther Only]
• LIS plans Datatel move to SQL Server database [Luther Only]
• Brandt Wireless Network has been upgraded to 802.11N
• World IPV6 Day is June 8, 2011
• Datatel web user interface 4.1 fixed
• Jenson Wireless Network has been upgraded to 802.11N
• Health Services using a new online immunization form
• Ebrary – over 50,000 academic ebooks – is here!

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Notes from LIS Council

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

• New Items
  • Elimination of 802.11B
    • We will be disabling 802.11B access to the Luther wireless network this summer. Exact timeline remains undetermined as we make sure all Luther equipment relying on this standard has been retired.
  • Equipment Disposal
    • Adam has some equipment for disposal and is wondering if there is other equipment in LIS as well.
  • Office for Norma Hervey
    • Norma will use an LIS office in Olin temporarily in August and September.
  • John Sabbatical Coverage
    • We reviewed contact people for technical services operations while John is on sabbatical.
  • Card Access System
    • Facilities is working to coordinate installation of card access for residence halls. They are still working on electrical contracting and exactly what will be complete this summer remains to be seen.
• Returning Items
  • Summer Planning
    • We reviewed the agenda for planning day.
  • Transition Document
    • We began discussing items on the transition document and assigning responsibility for some duties.
  • 2010-11 Budget
    • Budget adjustments need to be made by Friday. We discussed arrangements to transfer remaining funds to our SQL server fund.
  • KBOX / Track-It! Conversion
    • The conversion has gone well and we have now activated self-service with a soft launch. Work will continue to prepare for migration of software/inventory later this summer.
  • Annual Report
    • The annual report will be published in final form on June 24th. Everyone can continue to make updates until that time.
  • TG 150
    • No update.
  • Recruitment
    • The recruitment is now complete. Chris will be working on a plan of work for orientation for the fall.
  • Collaboration
    • DCSD Document
      • No update.

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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.

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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Quote(s) of the Week

• “The highest result of education is tolerance.” – Helen Keller

• “Mobile technology is pulling apart the centuries-old format of the article. News and analysis are getting a divorce.” – The News Article Is Breaking Up

• “The majority of the titles that were infringed upon were scholarly monographs,” Kiely explained. “It’s very hard to find a correlation between the appearance of these books on these sites, and lost sales. In some cases you can’t help but think that … obscurity might be our biggest problem, rather than piracy.” – News: Could Pirates Be Your Friends? – Inside Higher Ed

• “One panelist at the session, Michael Levine-Clark, collections librarian at the University of Denver, gave the audience a long list of features the e-book aggregations will have to include to satisfy libraries. “We need to be able to get whichever books we want on whatever platforms make sense for us,” he said. “We absolutely need flexible pricing.” E-books should be available at least as soon as any print edition is, he told the crowd, and they should also be easy to use and not tied down by too much rights-management software.” – Publishers Grapple With Thorny Issues of Protecting Property and Going Digital – Publishing – The Chronicle of Higher Education

• “Conventional wisdom has always held that the state with the largest military prevails, but in the information age of the 21st century, it may be the state (or nonstates) with the best story that wins. It is no longer clear how to measure the global balance of power, much less how to develop successful strategies to survive in this new world.” – The Future of Power – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

• “Privacy was a big issue a decade ago. Today, people are more worried about reputation. We tested people with future scenarios, such as if your smart television could update your Facebook page about what you’re watching. No one liked it. People said things like, “My girlfriend put the show on and left the room” or “I’ve only ever watched it once”.” – It’s Reputation, Not Privacy, That Really Matters to People – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic

• “As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.” – Benjamin Disraeli

• “The giant structure will physically lord over Silicon Valley as the unmistakable King of the Campuses. The image in the minds of the public about Google involves nerdy geeks playing with colorful toys scattered around. But the image of Apple will become this space-age, all-powerful Pentagon, but without the unsightly edges.” – How Apple’s ‘Spaceship’ Campus Reveals the Future of Technology – Datamation

• “Facebook presents far more danger than the cultivation of lowercase first-person “i”s and emoticons :). The real threat posed by Facebook is not that it ruins writers’ ability to punctuate or encourages them to replace words with pictures. The problem with Facebook is that it nurtures one of writing teachers’ greatest foes — the teenage fantasy that writers write only to themselves and to those who are just like them.” – Views: The Facebook Mirror – Inside Higher Ed

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Links of the Week

• New Model for British Higher Ed: [Inside Higher Ed]
• Is YouTube Killing Music Piracy? [TorrentFreak]
• Reading Revolutions: Online Digital Text and Implications for Reading in Academe [First Monday]
• Student Loans Found to Build Self-Esteem [Inside Higher Ed]
• Digital Textbooks Slow to Catch On [New York Times]
• Tenn. law bans posting images that ‘cause emotional distress’) [ars technica]
• Visualizing Historical Data, And The Rise Of ‘Digital Humanities’ [Fast Company]
• Google: Who cares where your data is? [SC Magazine]
• Google Says Yes, You Can Doodle In Our E-Books [ReadWriteWeb]
• Arguments in GSU E-Reserves Trial Conclude; Judge Deals Publishers a Quick Loss on One Count [Publishers Weekly]

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

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Next Issue

The next issue of TWILIS will be published on Friday, June 17, 2011.

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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 5, Number 28 (#195)

Content is made available under Creative Commons license.