Towards a New Alexandria

I can't believe that this is the last week of class. It seems like we just started on our journey to learn about academic libraries and now it's almost over. And to partly reflect back, I wanted to touch on the New Alexandria.

In the beginning of this semester, we were asked to discuss the similarities between the Alexandria libraries and current academic libraries. A few days ago when I was reading the online version of Library Journal, I came across an article about a blogger's summary of The New Republic's article "Towards a New Alexandra: Imagining the Future of Libraries".

Author Lisbet Rausing discussed how copyright and the high fees of journals and online databases can cause the downfall of academic libraries as we know it. Because of these issues, scholars are unable to pass around and share information like scholars did during the time period when the Alexandria libraries were around.

But, Rausing says there is some hope. Many journals are open accessed and peer reviewed. Some academic libraries, like Harvard, are putting some of their collection in a public domain Website. Rausing would like to see academic libraries, universities and other institutes to find ways to open up their research to the general public so researchers' works will not be lost forever because they were not used.

So how do academic libraries open up information so everyone can use it? It is something that will have to be looked at over the next few years. For academic libraries to be new Alexandrias, they must find a way to open up their information to the public. It will be interesting to see how academic libraries will evolve in the future and see if they will become 21st Century Alexandrias.

Using Wikis at Academic Libraries

For those who have been following this blog knows that my library has been working to drag our university faculty into the 21st Century. On Thursday, my coworkers and I met with several professors on the use of Wikis. They want to learn how to use Wikis to communicate with each other (and students) and share note and ideas. One of my coworkers gave them examples on how Wikis are used in other departments at MUSC and how it has helped them.

The MUSC Library also has a staff Wiki, where we post information about our departments, events and future plans. It is a good way to keep track of what is happening in our departments and keep all of the information that we have in one place.

I came across a journal article a few days ago called "Using Wikis in Academic Libraries" by Samuel Kai-Wah Chu, a professor at the University of Hong Kong. In his study, where he interviewed librarians at 48 universities around the world, only 33% (16) of them were using Wikis for work and 8% (4) were planning to use them in the near future. Since it looked like many of the university libraries were not using Wikis and/or had no plans to use them, many of them used blogs and other ways to share information.

I think Wikis can be beneficial to academic libraries because staff members can share information among each other without sending out a lot of emails back and forth. And if they have a question or needed to find some information that happened at a meeting, they can refer back to the Wiki to find that answer.

Another reason that Wikis can be beneficial is because librarians and other staff members can promote Wikis to faculty, staff and students. They can show them that sharing and discussing information among each other can benefit everyone involved. Academic libraries should embrace Wikis, not only to benefit themselves, but the university or college as a whole.

Author's note: The journal article can be found in the March 2009 edition of The Journal of Academic Librarianship.

Are Academic Libraries Changing Too Slow?

Earlier this week, I've read two articles about a recent study done by the nonprofit group Ithica S+R. The results show that many college faculty are not using academic libraries as much as they used to. Some rather use general search engines and electronic resources/computer databases than go to the library. These articles were featured in Library Journal and Inside Higher Education.

So if college faculty are not going to their libraries and are depending on Google, what should academic libraries do? Academic libraries should reach out to staff as much as they reach out to students. They should go to departments heads and deans to advertise their services. They should also reach out to other faculty members by visiting their offices and classes to spread the message of the library. They can even try an open house or a library fair where all of the services are featured. And hopefully, this will also help promote the services to the students because the professors will be promoting the library.

A suggestion that the study gave was for libraries to move away from print materials and go towards electronic resources and databases. There is a double-edged sword about getting rid of print materials. It's good not to have print materials because that will allow more room in the libraries for other things. But it's also good to have print materials in case the databases break down or students can't find what they are looking for in the databases. There are also several materials that only come in print form. It is up to the individual library to decided what is best for them as in terms of their collection.

Some academic librarians feel that the study was to promote "the end of academic libraries". Of course, we don't want academic libraries to be obsolete. What is needed is for academic libraries to reach out to all the people that they serve and to be on the forefront in the evolution of materials and information.

The Kindles are Jealous: A Tech Fair at an Academic Library

For the last few weeks of my life from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., I have been working on my library's Tech Fair. We did one last year, mostly focusing on Digital-e, our program in which students and faculty can check out items such as Amazon Kindles and Flip video cameras. This year, we decided to go all out and invited vendors to the event. We also opened it up to staff and other area colleges to present what they are doing with technology.

The event, which was yesterday, was a big success. We had classes on the first and fourth floors that discusses the different technologies that the university or the company they represented offers. Some of the demonstrations included how dentists can make crowns, how to use Endnote, and how to use Tegrity. A demonstration about our new digital library was on the third floor.

We also had a number of well-known vendors on the first floor, including Dell, Apple, Verizon, Sprint and AT&T. One of my coworkers recently got an iPad, but the Apple representative did not have one. Luckily, my coworker was willing to show it off to help out Apple and it was a hit among those who visited the booth. Next to the Apple booth was our Digital-e booth and because of the iPad, not many people looked at the Kindles (hence the title of this post).

It took a lot of hard work to put the tech fair together. Many of our staff members worked long hours to make this event a success. We were able to give out door prizes at each class and we also had a Dell netbook donated to us for the grand prize. Most importantly, we were able to give faculty, staff and students technology information that they may would have never heard of. We hope that they use the information that was provided to help make their education a little bit easier.

We plan to do this event again next year (with more money) and hope this will help us with promoting new technologies to the university. See you next year, Artie.