Because it’s hard to fit all of my thoughts into the 140 characters of twitter, I’d like to make a few points here:

1. ARCs are not the sole purview of librarians and are distributed widely and freely by publishers. The raison d’etre for ARCs is to generate press, word-of-mouth, buzz, and publicity for the forthcoming book. Therefore publishers distribute ARCs to librarians, bookstores, bloggers, reviewers, magazines, book club gurus, Oprah, college faculty, your mom, and anyone else who the publisher thinks will provide “good press” for the book and cause more people to buy it when it comes out. Librarians do not have the market cornered on ARCs, and although it’s sad that ARCgate Librarian didn’t get an ARC of the books she was looking for at the ALA Conference, this could be resolved by contacting the publisher directly. There really isn’t a scarcity of ARCs.
2. Publishers do not care that “non-librarians were scarfing up ARCs at the ALA Conference”. See my point above. ARCs are meant to be distributed. Publishers do not care who they distribute them to, as long as they think you will read it, and inform others about it. Publishers give out ARCs at ALA because they know a lot of influential folks in the industry will be there, librarians and non-librarians alike, and it’s a great place to get your product in front of as many bibliophile eyeballs as possible. Publishers do not think to themselves “we’re keeping these ARCs for librarians because they are who we intend to reach at this conference”. Instead, they give them out on a first-come, first-served basis to anyone in the exhibit hall, which alleviates the need to pack it all back up and ship it back to the home office. Visit the exhibits hall on the final day of ALA. Publishers will practically beg you to take the inventory they have off their hands.
3. ALA is not the American Librarian Association and represents more than just the interests of professional librarians. As the American Library Association, it supports the interests of librarians and non-librarians with an interest in libraries and librarianship alike. Library board members, paraprofessionals, library consultants, publishers, vendors, bibliophiles, and many others attend ALA conferences and are even members of the association. During the ARCgate twitterstorm many called for limitations on exhibit passes or participation in the Annual Conference on non-librarians, which is patently wrong, in my humble opinion. ALA is a “big tent” organization and limiting participation, in even a small way, by a group or groups of individuals would be a very bad idea indeed!

I’m glad that people are passionate about this profession. It gives me hope for libraries and librarianship. I just wish we could take some of this passion and corral it for issues that really make a difference, instead of trotting out our sour grapes every time something doesn’t go our way.

Friday 6/22

Town Hall Meeting on Diversity
08:00am – 12:00pm
Hilton Anaheim – California B

Opening General Session featuring Rebecca MacKinnon
04:00pm – 05:15pm
Anaheim Convention Center – Ballroom A-E

Exhibits Opening / All Conference Reception
05:30pm – 07:30pm
Anaheim Convention Center – Exhibit Hall

Saturday 6/23

Leaders Wanted / LIS Doctoral Program Options Fair: Cultivating Diversity in LIS Education
10:30am – 12:00pm
Anaheim Marriott – Marquis South

President’s Program (LLAMA)
01:30pm – 03:30pm
Anaheim Marriott – Elite Ballrooms

ALA Council / Executive Board / Membership Information Session (ALA)
03:30pm – 05:00pm
Anaheim Marriott – Platinum 1-6

ALA Membership Meeting
05:00pm – 06:00pm
Anaheim Marriott – Platinum 1-6

ALA / Proquest Scholarship Bash
08:00pm – 10:00pm
Anaheim Convention Center – Ballroom A-E

Sunday 6/24

ALA Council I
09:00am – 12:00pm
Anaheim Marriott – Platinum 1-6

ALA-APA Council
12:00pm – 12:30pm
Anaheim Marriott – Platinum 1-6

ALA President’s Program
04:00pm – 05:30pm
Anaheim Convention Center – Ballroom CDE

ALA Awards/President’s Reception
05:30pm – 07:00pm
Anaheim Convention Center – California Terrace

GLBT RT Social
06:00pm – 08:00pm
Offsite Location – Toritlla Jo’s, 1510 Disneyland Drive, Building A

ALA Council Forum I
08:30pm – 10:00pm
Anaheim Marriott – Newport Beach/Rancho Las Palmas

Monday 6/25

ALA Council II
09:00am – 12:30pm
Anaheim Marriott – Platinum 1-6

Coming Out in Print: The LGBT Literary Landscape Today
04:00pm – 05:30pm
Anaheim Convention Center – 202B

Battledecks 2012
05:30pm – 07:00pm
Anaheim Convention Center – 201D

ALA Council Forum II
08:30pm – 10:00pm
Anaheim Marriott – Gold Key I/II

Tuesday 6/26

ALA Council III
07:45am – 09:15am
Anaheim Marriott – Platinum 1-6

Closing General Session and Inaugural Event featuring J.R. Martinez
09:30am – 11:00am
Anaheim Convention Center – Ballroom DE

ALA Inaugural Brunch
11:15am – 01:00pm
Anaheim Convention Center – Ballroom AB

I’m really looking forward to the conference and hope to see many of you there.

Bronfield’s excellent analysis places two questions in my mind: 1) Why isn’t the ALA or some other organization crunching these numbers and reporting on trends in library employment on a regular basis? and 2) Why don’t we as librarians currently holding a position care more about this issue? I look forward to further analysis (will there be a Part 2?) on this important topic.

Is the United States Training Too Many Librarians or Too Few? (Part 1) | In the Library with the Lead Pipe.

Some highlights are:

• Smaller borrowing limits for unlimited time periods

• Front line staff will become much more highly skilled

• Library will offer a wide range of “non-library” programming

Skip to the end! Library futures, now… « thewikiman.

Sense and Reference: Reorganizing literacy.

“In essence, the project “proposes a model for a national distributed project to develop marketing plans for electronic resources while collaboratively building benchmarks for the marketing of electronic resources in college and university settings.” [from the poster session] By participating in the collaborative working group you can learn how to employ a typical marketing plan at your library, complete one marketing campaign from start to finish, and contribute to a national project that will determine if collaborative benchmarking for marketing electronic resources is feasible.”

Join the Collaborative Marketing for e-Resources Project « E-Views.

Thanks for sticking with me, those of you who subscribe. I promise I’ll be a little more forthcoming in the future.

1. Organizational structures flatten

I already see this happening in academia in general, and particularly in academic libraries. Budget pressures, shifting demographics, and the necessity to examine new organizational and management styles will mean that a lot of what academicians have taken for granted as the “way it has always been done” will end up changing. Changing the grinding bureaucracy of the university is something we should all welcome and celebrate. I disagree, however with Taiga’s notion that “libraries will have less autonomy and librarian roles will have been subsumed into other parts of the university.” I see libraries in general, and librarians in particular, taking on increasingly more central roles in the university as areas like IT, instructional support, university presses, and the like are consolidated under the aegis of the university library. I also feel that academic librarians will be called upon more frequently to take administrative roles in the university as teaching faculty become more research focused and averse to roles in administration.

2. Radical cooperation

This is another area in which we are already seeing movement in academia. Libraries are not only cooperating with each other across the divides of institutions, but libraries are cooperating with other departments and entities on campus and within universities and colleges as well. And cooperation buys libraries a greater voice and stronger participation when working with vendors, publishers, and suppliers, and elevates the status of the organization within an institution when done in conjunction with academic or administrative departments. Which leads to statement number 3.

3. Collaborative space partners

This is a “no-brainer” that I think has been taking place for years. Many libraries (mine included) have spaces devoted to information technology, food service, instructional support, or other “non-library” use. And I think this trend will continue into the future.

4. Books as decor

I’m not quite sure how to respond to this one. On the one hand, Taiga states “within five years, graduate students and faculty will fill all their information needs online, never coming into the library”, which I think is a fairly accurate statement. Faculty and grad students, unless they are in a “book intensive” field like the humanities, haven’t stepped into the library for years, if ever. Taiga then goes on to state “yet they [faculty and grad students] will continue to idealize the library as a sacred place to commune with books. Libraries will respond by flipping their stacks into designer reading rooms that use books as decor.”

I see the library being used less as a “place to commune with books” than as an adjunct student union, makeshift conference center, or general hangout place for friends to converse, collaboratively study, and get together for all types of reasons. And libraries have always been used as such, in addition to being a repository of books. As the print collections dwindle, in size and in number, the other uses of the academic library will take on more prominence. I think the momentum for this has already reached a pretty heady clip.

5. No more collection building

Ah, the shift from “library as repository for knowledge” to “just-in-time collection development” and “patron driven acquisitions”. Nothing really new or provocative here. This has been happening in public libraries for years (decades even), and the time is ripe for it to take place in academic librarianship.

6. New model of liaison librarianship

I’m not really sure what Taiga is suggesting here when they posit “efforts to develop research data management and curation services will have led to a wholly new model of liaison librarianship that is focused on institutional content.” Are they saying that liaisons will focus more on institutional research and resources in a given field?  If that’s the case, I think they are right on track. If they intended something else, your guess is as good as mine.

7. Staff reallocation, elimination, and retraining

Again, not a very provocative statement. Many college and university libraries are overstaffed or undertrained. Others have the opposite problem. It’s a shame, but I think this statement may be the one that generates all the heat. No one likes to be told that their job is being eliminated. At least they didn’t suggest that MLS-holding librarians should be replaced by post-docs.

8. Library in the cloud

Oh, cloud computing! Such enormous promise, yet so elusive. Anecdotally, I remember about 15 years ago when Citrix was hawking the “Internet workstation” that would not have a hard drive and retrieve everything from remote servers. It’s too bad the bandwidth and computing power destroyed that dream. We’re a little closer to that reality now, but I’m not quite sure if we will see “all library collections, systems, and services will be driven into the cloud” in the next 5 years. I’d love to be proven wrong.

9. Boutique services

Taiga suggests that “libraries will be forced to acknowledge that our boutique services have been collecting “in the basement.” To clean house, libraries will implement planned abandonment.” But why planned abandonment? In the contemporary world of niche marketing and personalization, why doesn’t the academic library market, promote, and celebrate “boutique services”? Unless, like most crap bought anywhere with the name boutique, it’s not worth keeping. I’m not really sure what Taiga is referring to here, so I’ll avoid commenting further.

10. Oversupply of MLSs

Well, I never thought I’d see it, but someone has finally and publicly challenged the widely-held notion that there is an unlimited number of positions out there for MLS-holders. I remember being told, 15 years ago, that because of the mass retirement of the Baby Boomers, my generation wold see limitless numbers of positions for folks with an MLS degree. Well, it never happened, and probably never will. I’m glad someone finally had the chutzpah to put that rumor to bed.

Additionally, I think the MLS degree was “sold” to thousands of people who had no interest in libraries, librarianship, or the like. This is the real reason that , according to Taiga, ” library programs will have overproduced MLSs at a rate greater even than humanities PhDs and glutted a permanently diminished market”. Coupled with the fact that an MLS is an easy-to-obtain degree and the coursework can be completed in a year (or less!), makes the current “perfect storm” scenario. But this is really nothing new to the field.

All in all, I found these provocative statements to be much less provocative than those offered 5 years ago. I’m not sure if Taiga is shying away from the provocateur role or if there is just not as much to get excited about in the world of librarianship that is currently seeing massive budget cuts and the non-stop barrage of constant change.

So how do you feel about these statements? Are they provocative? Are they already happening? What does this mean for academic libraries? I look forward to the discussion.

I no longer consider myself only a librarian, however. I recently heard the term “librarian-scholar” at a promotion and tenure retreat, and feel that this term truly captures the type of work that I am doing now. And I would argue that all librarians, no matter the position, are also called to be librarian-scholars. Librarianship needs scholars to keep the profession alive, seek out new methods, procedures, and theories, and to add to the value and worth of what we do as librarians.

But research and scholarship is not areas in which librarians are regularly trained. The Master in Library (and Information) Science degree does not typically require a thesis process or other “capstone” research for graduation and very few research methods courses, if any, are offered, let alone required, as part of the ML(I)S degree. Librarians receive much training in supporting the processes of research and scholarship, but very little practice or experience in performing research and scholarship of their own.

One change I would advocate in library and information science education is a greater focus on turning out librarian-scholars, including a required course in research methods and the requirement of a thesis or capstone paper as a requisite for graduation. Many other professional degrees, including the MBA and MSW, have similar requirements and I believe that this contributes to better scholarship in these fields. Scholarship and research was never much of a concern before my current position, but now I as I have taken on the role of a librarian-scholar, I cannot see any way that one can be a librarian without scholarship.

Neiburger does concede “the fact that a trained librarian can bring value to a reference interaction”, but argues that armed with Google and an internet connection, the need for reference librarians has diminished. “Travel agents were outmoded because people felt they had better access to the information than they could get from the travel agents”, he said, and just as travel agents have become a thing of the past, so will the anachronistic reference librarian. With everything on Google, who needs them?

The problem with this kind of reasoning is that it becomes a “chicken-and-egg” argument about the future of our profession. Are patrons abandoning reference services because they are finding what they need elsewhere? Or are we as librarians not responding to the true needs of the patrons and transforming reference services and proving their value and worth to patrons?

I am all for finding new ways of thinking about the services, collections, programming, and support that we provide to our patrons. The ever-changing world in which we find ourselves demands this. But instead of declaring reference services dead and a thing to be put in the history books, I think we need to reexamine reference service and transform it into something that has real value for our patrons. What this “new reference paradigm” looks like or how it works is up to us as librarians. Let’s not give it over to the geeks and the techies. Good reference service is not technical support.