TAIGA forum 2010 notes
Absolutely worthwhile to attend-- and shows me I'm in the right place as AUL. A lot of synergy in the group, with a somewhat jarring exception from the point of view of library education, which seemed very 20th century.
Some quotes:
- We told faculty we'd buy anything they wanted if it's less than $150 one time cost-- and we haven't run out of money yet.
- Build a "lightbox studio" in the library for a learning space testbed for the campus-- hold back 10% for endowment because you won't get it right at first, do in phases
- Check the functional difference between your best work and your second best-- could be negligible (so maximize shelf-ready receipt, etc.)
- Patrons know best-- move rapidly towards patron driven acquisition
- The purpose of "control" isn't control-- it's access
- Google looks at the universe (chaos), lets you search it, and organizes the results for you. Libraries take a subset of the universe (what we've purchased here), organize it laboriously before you search, and then display in a-z fashion
- Reference is like throwing starfish in the ocean one at a time-- yes, you may have made a difference for the individual starfish you have thrown, but are you going to get the job accomplished that way?
Group question: What will still be important to you and your library once services go to the cloud? (Very little overlap here in answers, many other tables had talked themselves out of items that others left on the list):
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- most groups agreed on special collections
- collaboration
- enhancing faculty productivity
- scholarly communication
- manage access $$ for university
- confidentiality/privacy of user info
- student learning
- subject specialists (but can't we share their expertise between institutions?)
- facilitating linkages
- user centeredness
- support for university mission
- collect intellectual output of institution and make accessible
- preparing for future needs
- "intellectual crossroads" of the campus, neutral ground between disciplines
- advocacy for intellectual freedom
- reserves/circ/location-bound service delivery (but maybe think beyond that-- can we deliver instead of having people come to us?)
- What do we need to give up? More similarity here than in the previous question.
- lab management
- discovery layer for each individual library
- physical reference (view it as "point of failure"-- many questions people ask point out how we should organize signage, web site, discovery systems, etc. better instead of answering over and over; it is simply not scalable; ready reference has already gone to the cloud; you need a place with a person where people can get help with whatever they need-- but is the library that place?; in depth consultations are expensive but important so need to do cost/benefit analysis for your institution; can we at least tier services?).
- instruction: beware of vendors who say they will come and train you on their product-- that means it isn't easy enough to use!; are faculty better positioned to do this? Cornell/Berkeley/Temple work with faculty to build assignments to help students with research skills, have faculty teach, librarians support (one had "twitter librarian" for course)
- servers/storage
- bib data: creation, management, storage
It was pointed out that for similar functions, we can move to the cloud because we're all alike there. But the values may differ between institutions.
Should have "service level agreements", make things broader: don't "work at the reference desk", you "meet community reference needs"-- and that makes the job and solutions different. Leverage the web to ensure broadest reach of services as staffing decreases.
What do faculty need help with?: textbooks; legal help; data organization and storage?; help publishing open access journals? (could one institution in a consortium specialize in this?, can we use expertise where it exists?; in fact will there be experts in the cloud, and if not, why?)
Organizational development: we need an outside perspective; managers need to be willing to have difficult conversations as jobs change, you need to listen to people cry, and then ask what you can do to help with their transition.
