Family Man Librarian

Yesterday I was able to go to UIUC GSLIS at the invitation of Kathie and Bill Henderson to speak to their Technical Services Functions class. (This is the same class that I teach in online form in UIUC GSLIS’s LEEP curriculum.) They’ve invited me every year for the past 14 years. Each time I go, I thoroughly enjoy the time with their students.

The topic of my talk was “The Times, They Are a Changin…or, How to Thrive in an Age of Chaos and Opportunity in Technical Services Librarianship.” What I try to do is give a quick overview of my career path thus far, and then focus on electronic resources as the “hot” area. We usually spend a lot of time talking about user expectations in this era of the Google Mindset, and how libraries are coping with the demand for online full-text while simultaneously struggling to manage the “traditional” collection. I demo’d the ERM system that we developed at Taylor, known as the Taylor Periodical Administration System (TPAS), and also talked quite a bit about OpenURL and metasearching technologies.

There are about 14 students in this class. Some years the students really get into a good discussion, while other times, they seem content just to listen to a lecture. I prefer interaction and was pleased that this year there were a lot of questions. Especially in recent years, students have expressed some apprehension about the future of technical services librarianship, or uncertainty about job prospects in this specialty. This topic came up tangentially in yesterday’s session. One student asked, given what we had been talking about in terms of the predominance of e-resources and vendor tools that libraries are stuck with, what is stopping vendors from selling or marketing directly to researchers? (We had also been talking quite a bit about Google Scholar.) I thought this was an excellent question. It really asks the question, are libraries relevant anymore? Why should libraries assume they are even part of the equation for information consumers? Have libraries given up way too much ground, ground that they can never expect to recover? Very interesting questions. We spoke about the decision made by libraries about 100 years ago to stop trying to do article-level analytics in their cataloging practice, and how that resulted in the whole development of vendor solutions in the form of abstracting and indexing tools. Those tools have then developed into online form in the last 20 years or so, and then have been developed further to provide aggregated full-text content. We have lost control (if we ever had it) of the means of access to our resources.

Overall it was a very stimulating time and I ran out of time trying to cover everything. I wish we had had all day!

The Henderson’s had made lunch and invited Linda Smith, Associate Dean and one of my former professors, to eat with us. It was nice to chat with them about various things. One of the things I noticed this time in my campus visit was that development of various areas of the campus continues at a rapid pace. Some areas are hardly recognizable anymore, they have changed so much since I was a student there.