You can look through this report from the American Library Association to get all kinds of useful details about the state of libraries in the country today. Information on all sorts of libraries is shared, along with trends and issues important across the profession.
The results are in, and we have all kinds of information on strategies you can use in your library to strengthen your connection with your community!
This is a free report, from the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Not all of it will be relevant to everyone; but it would be worth taking a few minutes to flip through this file to see what kinds of ideas you might get to help you in your library. And, as an advocacy note: this is just the kind of thing you can be showing to your administration to demonstrate the value a library can bring to you!
The report can be found here.
More information is available here: Continue reading Strengthening Networks, Sparking Change: Museums and Libraries as Community Catalysts
Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) released a post online pertaining to a recent study exploring the various interactions librarians have with students. The article discusses what specific skills, knowledge and experience the librarian used to assist each individual student. This study evaluated the effectiveness of working with a librarian from the student’s perspective. General areas discussed included;
A summary of the findings can be found online: http://tinyurl.com/okxowtn
“What students need from reference librarians: Exploring the complexity of the individual consultation,” College & Research Libraries, 74, no 6 (June 2013): 288-29; full text article.
Renaissance Learning has recently released the fifth edition of What Kids Are Reading: The Book Reading Habits of Students in American Schools. This information was gathered from students in grades 1-12. Results from this research have been made available online in both a summary format, as well as the full report.
In addition, the website provides a host of other resources including:
And, much more. Click here to enter the Renaissance Learning website to view the report findings and additional resources.
The following post was submitted by CMLE scholarship recipient David Wuolu, Collection Development Librarian, Clemens Library & Alcuin Library, College of St. Benedict’s/St. John’s University.
What were your favorite takeaways or new things learned?
I was hoping to learn more about best practices with ebooks for academic libraries. There were several poster sessions which dealt with ebooks, and demand-driven acquisition experiences, and I was able to visit with the librarians who had implemented these programs. I also attended the Collection Development of Academic Libraries meeting which included two vendors (JSTOR and EBL) and a librarian who shared their thoughts on the next significant ebook development, which included issues important to ebook suppliers such as preservation policy, discoverability, harnessing big data, evolution of lending models, as well as the ongoing issues important to librarians such as ILL, multi-user access, and DRM-free ebooks. Interestingly, JSTOR indicated a little wiggle room on fair use, which is a change from their earlier stance on this topic.
Another session I attended was the Digital Preservation Interest Group. Aside from learning how complicated digital preservation is, and how some institutions working with preservation of digital content, I did take away a model that has been developed by the Library of Congress, NDSA program, which is called the NDSA levels of preservation, a simple 1-page guide used to describe digital preservation (http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/activities/levels.html).
As a result of attending this event, can you identify and explain a few things you can use/apply to your work or practice?
I learned more about ebooks, and more about digital preservation, both of which can be applied to my work. The future is becoming increasingly digital, and increasingly clearer to me as a result of attending this meeting. Still, there were a few interesting comments in the collection development meeting about an increase in print usage coinciding with ebooks, so I don’t think we’re done with print quite yet.