ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries C&RL News ■ Se p tem b er 1998 / 569 C O N F E R E N C E C I R C U I T ACRL explores values in Washington, D.C. Highlights of ACRL programs at the ALA Annual Conference, Part 1 A CRL members made it through the swel­tering heat o f our nation’s capital during the ALA’s 117th Annual Conference, June 25-July 2, 1998. Total conference attendance was 24,884 members, exhibitors, and guests, including 11,799 paid registrants. (Ed. note: A special thanks to the ACRL members who made this report possible by writing these program sum­ maries. Their response to a request f o r reporters was so good that, due to space constraints, we will run Part 2 o f this report in October.) The v a lu e o f v a lu e s W. Lee Hisle, Austin Community College, welcomed an audience o f several hundred people to the Grand Hyatt Hotel on Monday afternoon for his ACRL President’s Program, “The Value o f Values: Changes and Continu­ ities as W e Face the New Millennium.” Hisle expressed his hope that, taken as a whole, the program would reinforce our commitment to the ideals o f our profession and would en­ gender confidence as w e practice that profes­ sion in the electronic information age. Next came a 20-minute videotape, “A Ques­ tion o f Values,” in which six academic librar­ ians responded to questions posed by Pro­ gram Chair Katherine Branch, Anne Arundel Community College, about their professional values. James Neal, Johns Hopkins University, recounted an instance o f a very difficult clash of values among members o f the ALA Execu­ tive Board, when the Board debated whether ALA should accept an award from the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Foundation, recog­ nizing ALA’s commitment to the free flow of information. In response to a question posed to interviewees, several of them identified “the faculty” as natural allies in our efforts to pre­ serve our values, but one o f them had a de­ cidedly different view: “The faculty are hope­ less as far as I’m concerned; w e’re never go­ ing to get anything out o f them.” A large laugh followed Lynda Logan’s, Prince George’s Com­ munity College, musing about the hypotheti­ cal question o f whether she would allow some­ one to put up in her library a display on the KKK: “I hope I would. I probably would. I probably wouldn’t.” “It’s my pleasure, o f course, to be among book people as well as books.” With these words, William H. Gass cast off from the pier and, through his keynote address, carried the audience on a voyage o f discovery. An award-winning essayist, critic, and philosopher, Gass is the David May Distinguished Univer­ sity Professor in the Humanities, director of the International Writers Center at Washing­ ton University in St. Louis, and in his youth he No fan of the Internet, Gass observed that " T h e in f o r m a t io n h ig h w a y has no d e stin atio n ," and th at "M isin form ation A lley" is an apt term f o r the Internet. 5 7 0 / C&RL News ■ Septem ber 1998 was a sailor and an officer in the U.S. Navy. In lyrical and well-delivered language he shared with us what books (not “information,” but the physical book) and libraries had meant and mean to him and other readers. A small sample: — “A library … extends the self; it is pure empowerment. ” — “Like most books, Discoveries is a library book; that is, it depends for its existence on other books, books within reach of one pair of hands and eyes, one mind.” — “The aim o f the library is a simple one— to unite writing with its reading. Yes, a simple stream, but a wide one when trying to cross.” — “In a library we are in a mind made of minds.” — “The work of the institution will often take place far from its doors at a kitchen table, … amid the clatter of a commuter train, even in a sophomore’s distracted head. … Who can predict the places where the encounter will occur? The discovery will be made. … In the library such epiphanies … are the stuff of every day.” — “The book is a great salvation for the lonely person. And it’s important to be lonely, espe­ cially in adolescence, so you’ll learn to read.” No fan o f the Internet, Gass observed that “The information highway has no destina- Rare book librarians prepare for the 19th century In three years the nineteenth century will be the “century before last.” Undoubtedly we will develop a new perspective on the period’s textual and graphic record as we gain distance from it. This thought inspired the theme of the 39th Annual Preconference of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of ACRL, “Getting Ready for the Nineteenth Cen­ tury: Strategies and Solutions for Rare Book and Special Collections Librarians,” which took place June 23-26, 1998, in Washington, D.C. More than 300 participants gathered to explore aspects o f the care and use o f pub­ lished and unpublished materials from the nineteenth century, which present issues and problems different in both nature and magnitude from those associated with ear­ lier books and manuscripts. Most American libraries acquired the bulk o f their earlier items retrospectively, and have since given them special housing and treatment. In contrast, many o f the older library collections in this country contain masses o f nineteenth-century material that were current at the time o f acquisition and have since resided in general collections. A library faced with such a situation must grapple with issues o f identification, reten­ tion, and storage. Additional problems re­ sult from the vast quantity o f surviving ma­ terial, the introduction of new formats dur­ ing the period (such as photography), and the physical instability o f much nineteenth- century paper. At the same time, scholarly interest in material culture, in graphic im­ ages, and in popular and ephemeral publi­ cations is on the u p sw in g. T h e preconference offered a mix o f plenary ad­ dresses, seminar sessions, research reports, and workshops designed to expand our understanding o f the forces that shaped our existing collections and to share strategies and techniques for their preservation and use. Sponsors for the preconference included: Antiquarian Booksellers Association o f America (ABAA); Center for the Book, Li­ brary o f Congress; and the Gelman Library. On June 24 the first plenary session speak­ ers—John Y. Cole, Center for the Book, and Nancy E. Gwinn, Smithsonian Libraries— pre­ sented a detailed study o f the historical devel­ opment o f the Library o f Congress and the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Cole and Gwinn delivered their remarks as a two-per son play in six acts, “National Pride and Preju­ dice: The Library o f Congress and the Smithsonian Institution." With accompanying slide illustrations, Cole and Gwinn traced the unique, inter­ twined, and complementary development o f these two institutions, as the United States struggled to create, operate, and manage a de facto “national library” system during the nineteenth century. Both speakers highlighted the important roles played by librarians, members o f the (continued on next page) C&RL News ■ S e p tem b er 1998 / 571 tion,” and that “Misinformation Alley” is an apt term for the Internet. And he reminded the audience o f the oft-overlooked fact that the book itself is a technology. Our voyage with Gass was followed first by prolonged applause and then by a panel o f four librarians, ably moderated by Ree De Donato, undergraduate librarian at Columbia University. She noted that values unite us as a profes­ sion o f librarians while distinguishing us as individuals, and she said that one value she holds dear is the ability both to be brought together and to be left apart as w e strive to do our work and live our lives. Panelist John (continued fro m previous page) U.S. Congress, scientists and academicians, and private citizens in the formation and development o f our nation’s first two gov­ ernment libraries. On Thursday, June 25, the Mumford Room o f the Library o f Congress served as the site for a plenary session that ex­ plored the crucial issue o f preservation o f library research materials in their original formats. “Common Cause: Collaborating to Preserve Printed and Primary Source Materials,” with Alice Schreyer, University o f Chicago, as moderator included three presentations: Paul Conway, Yale Univer­ sity Library, on “Preserving the 19th Cen­ tury: Challenges and Possibilities”; Sandria B. Freitag, American Historical Association, on “A Scholar's Reaction: Personal and Pro­ fessional Priorities”; and Abby Smith, Coun­ cil on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), on "Setting a National Agenda: A Col­ laborative Plan." Conway outlined the current status o f nineteenth-century materials in our library collections and proposed a multi-tiered model for evaluating and determining the preservation status o f these materials. Ad­ vances in preservation technology and sig­ nificant experience gained in the handling o f nineteenth-century materials allowed Conway to offer the opinion that sufficient time exists to meet this preservation im­ perative. Freitag and Smith offered per­ spectives on how to meet this imperative, with a powerful emphasis on the need for information professionals to engage schol- Ulmschneider, assistant director for Library Systems at North Carolina State University, predicted that in 50 years books will not exist in the form they do now, and he w on­ dered what our values would be when we no longer had to provide access to a collec­ tion. The “garbage” on the Web is actually beneficial, he observed, because it is gar­ bage that is free o f the constraints o f “the power structure in which w e work.” He and Gass exchanged friendly ripostes on the rela­ tive merits o f horses and automobiles, ma­ nure and carbon monoxide. The entire program was videotaped, and the President’s Program Planning Commit- ars in the process. Preliminary steps, in­ cluding the delineation o f means to en­ hance communication between librarians, scholars, and related professional organi­ zations followed. The final plenary session on Friday, June 26, included presentations by James Green, Library Company o f Philadelphia, on “The Nineteenth Century: Overrated or Under­ v a lu e d ” and James N eal, T h e Johns Hopkins University Library, “The Future o f the Nineteenth Century: Preparing the Research Library for a Renaissance in Cul­ tural and Historical Studies.” Green under­ scored recent successes and failures o f li­ brarians and repositories engaged in the collection and management o f significant nineteenth-century collections. Neal o f­ fered the perspective o f a university librar­ ian, one who must deal with this issue within the larger world o f academic re­ search libraries. As Green related individual and collabo­ rative responses to the challenges posed by large, expensive nineteenth-century col­ lections, Neal summarized the need for rare book librarians and archivists to inform their administrators o f the role nineteenth- century materials play in academic research and teaching, and to delineate the key is­ sues and challenges academic libraries must consider as they collect, manage, and house nineteenth-century materials.— Wil­ liam E. Brown Jr., University o f M iami, e- mail: wcbrown@miami.edu; Laura Stalker. H u n tin g to n Library, e -m a il: lstalker@ huntington.org mailto:ivcbroivn@miami.edu 572 / C&RL News ■ Septem ber 1998 tee expects to make “The Value o f Values,” including the videotape within the videotape, available to ACRL chapters and other groups via interlibrary loan from the ALA library. The committee has long considered this two-hour program as part o f a larger pro­ cess, including the structured forum at last Midwinter’s meeting and the several articles written by Hisle and certain committee mem­ bers for C&RL News in recent months. One values-related question that might be worth addressing in subsequent discus­ sions is the extent to which Gass was cor­ rect when he naturally assumed that he was among “b ook p e o p le .”— R ich a rd H um e Werking, U.S. Naval Academy, rwerking@ nadn.navy.mil E n g in e e rin g th e fu tu re “Engineering the Future: A New Look at Organi­ zational Thinking and Hyper-learning,” the 1998 program cosponsored by the Science and Tech­ nology Section and the University Libraries Sec­ tion of ACRL, was attended by over 400 people. It focused on adapting new organizational theo­ ries that center on constant learning and self­ organization to current practices in higher edu­ cation and academic libraries. The program featured Peter Denning, di­ rector, Center for the New Engineer (CNE) at News from the University Libraries Section E d . n o te : For a report on the ULS/STS p ro ­ gram, please see above. E x e c u tiv e co m m itte e The University Library Section (ULS) Ex­ ec u tiv e C om m ittee, ch aired by Lori Goetsch, met twice during Annual Con­ ference. The 1999 Annual Conference Pro­ gram Committee for ULS reported on plans for N ew Orleans. The committee is putting together an exciting program en­ titled “Bottomline Leadership: Communi­ cating Your Resource Needs for Success­ ful Services,” cosponsored by the ACRL Instruction Section. The Executive Committee approved the Organization/Bylaws Committee’s rec­ ommendation to form an Ad Hoc Mem­ bership Committee. This ad hoc commit­ tee w ill examine the impact o f the new ALA/ACRL fee structures on ULS mem­ bership, propose methods for recruiting and maintaining ULS members, and de­ termine whether a permanent ULS mem­ bership committee should be instituted. The ULS Communications Committee is working on a Web page that will be available on ALA's ACRL Sections site. This page will have current information on ULS committees, programs, and how one can get involved in ULS. D is c u s s io n g r o u p re p o rts The Librarians in Higher Education and Cam pus A dm inistration D iscussion Group is planning a discussion for the Mid­ winter Conference in Philadelphia on pub­ lic outreach and the social responsibility li­ braries have towards their communities, while the Current Topics Discussion Group plans to discuss “Education vs. Training: As­ sessing Student Learning Outcomes.” Both discussion groups welcome all librarians who are interested in these topics to attend their meetings this Midwinter. The ACRL/ULS Public Service Direc­ tors at Large Research Libraries Discus­ sion Group, chaired by Betsy Wilson, met to discuss the latest developments at ARL, assessment initiatives, and organizing for Web support. Mary Jackson o f ARL updated the group on the activities o f Scholarly Pub­ lishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), a project that encourages the de­ velopment o f competition in the scholarly publishing marketplace. (Ed. note: for more information about SPARC, see page 565.) She also summarized the new ARL publica­ tion Measuring the Performance o f Interli­ brary Loan Operations in North American Research and College Libraries. The group then discussed various assess­ ment initiatives that have been undertaken at the U n iversity o f Io w a (U I), University o f Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and the University o f Washington (UW ). Assessment initiatives are valuable for determining which information services (continued on next page) C&RL News ■ Septem ber 1998 / 573 George Mason University; Paula Kaufman, dean of Libraries at the University of Tennes­ see; and Kenneth Frazier, director o f the Uni­ versity o f Wisconsin Libraries. Kaufman’s introduction included mention o f management theories, such as quality circles, TQM, re-engineering, etc. Theorists such as Margaret W heatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers are taking the findings o f sci­ entists who now look at organizations as living organisms with values-based manage­ ment; values being defined as enduring be­ liefs that affect actions. Emphasis is shifted from task-driven management to manage­ ment defined by commonly shared ethical (continued fro m previous page) and resources library users are using and gauging library users’ understanding o f and ease with library services and resources. The libraries used various methods to obtain their data, such as Web questionnaires at UIUC, focus groups and usability testing at UW, and surveys sent to a random portion o f the student population at the UI. Finally, the group considered various so­ lutions for supporting Web services in their libraries. W hile many schools, such at Rutgers, have decided to advertise for Web masters/systems programmers to design and maintain library Web sites, others such as NYU, have brought in professional design teams to assist with their sites. Indiana University’s Pat Steele stressed that Web support demands a professional long-term approach.— Anne Garrison, Georgia Institute o f Technology, anne.garrison@ibid.library. gatech.edu The Undergraduate Librarians Dis­ cussion Group focused on library services to undergraduate students in research uni­ versities that have no separate undergradu­ ate library. The discussion began with descriptions of recent initiatives in service to undergradu­ ates at the University of Maryland (UM) and the University o f Toronto (UT). Speakers were Charles Lowry, dean o f libraries from (UM ), librarians Sue Baughman, Diane Harvey, and Desider Viko, and Rea Devakos made the presentations for UT. values. They have also observed that living systems learn constantly and are self-orga nizing; that life is attracted to order, but uses chaos to get there; and that because w e are living systems, most people are intelligent, creative, adaptive, and self-organizing. Denning’s research and scholarship at CNE recognizes the implications o f these findings and is using their premises to trans­ form organizational structures within uni­ versities and particularly engineering pro­ grams. Denning asserts that the new market and commercial forces are profoundly affecting the university educational system. These The libraries at UM merged the infor­ mation and reference services o f the McKeldin and Hornbake Libraries at the McKeldin Library. At the same time the li­ braries initiated a new model, Service Plus. Service Plus provides welcoming, teach­ ing services to library users, especially new users, and at all service points in the li­ braries. A report on the library’s study o f un­ dergraduate users’ needs, “Undergraduate Library Services in the 21st Century,” as well as the “Service Task Force Report and Recommendations” and the “Libraries Stra­ tegic Plan,” are available at http://www. lib.umd.edu/UMCP/PUB/Publications. html. At UT, as at UM, a number o f factors led to a reorganization o f services for un­ dergraduate students. At UT these included campus geography and budget pressures. The library’s report on undergraduate ser­ vices is available at http://utll.library. utoronto.ca/www/undergrad_services/ report/index.htm. The presentations sparked a discussion that ranged from service philosophy to bud­ get issues and implications to some o f the details o f day-to-day operations. The meeting concluded with the elec­ tion o f Mark Watson, o f Southern Illinois University, as chair o f the discussion group for 1999-2000. He succeeds David Taylor o f the University o f North Carolina at Chapel Hill.-—Linda K. TerHaar, Univer­ sity o f Michigan, terhaar@umich.edu http://www http://utll.library mailto:terhaar@umich.edu 5 7 4 / C&RL News ■ Septem ber 1998 R ela xin g at the Rare Books & M anuscripts S ectio n P re co n fe re n ce are: (I to r) Laura Stalker, Mary Ellen Davis, Gary M enges, and Pat B ozem an. forces include employers’ expectations re­ garding job competence and students’ de­ mands that they be treated as customers, as well as the inevitable political forces affect­ ing funding and support. In particular, Denning stressed the impact of the development o f “hyper-learning” as represented by the use o f the Internet in dis­ tance education. Gestated on the Internet, hyper-learning involves a nonlinear, decen­ tralized system in which the path one takes to attain knowledge and the time it takes one to achieve it will vary. By contrast, the traditional classroom model o f teaching is linear and centralized, occurring within a fixed path and a fixed time period, yet en­ tailing variable outcomes in the form of grades. Together these forces mandate structural Order Annual Conference audiocassettes Audiocassettes of selected ACRL programs from the 1998 ALA Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. are now available. Each program consists o f two cassettes and sells for $24, unless otherwise noted. Library Services to Distant Students: Values, Ethics and Cooperation (ACRL/ Distance Learning Section, Community and Junior College Libraries Section, Copyright Committee), 1 cassette, $12. Order no. ALA 806 Fair Use— A Value in the Digital Age (ACRL Copyright Committee). Order no. ALA 813 Engineering the Future: A New Look at Organizational Thinking and Hyper- Learning (ACRL University Library Sec­ tion, Science & Technology Section). Order no. ALA 814 Research 2001: Learned Societies Fa­ cilitating Information Awareness and Dissemination in Sociology and Anthro­ pology (ACRL Anthropology & Sociol­ ogy Section). Order no. ALA 830 W h en Education Becomes A Busi­ ness, What Happens to Traditional Li­ brary Values (ACRL College Libraries Section), 1 cassette, $12. Order no. ALA 831 Re-Imag(in)ing the Text: The Literacy Text in the Electronic Age (ACRL En­ glish and Am erican Literature, Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, Elec­ tronic Text Centers Discussion Group. Order no. ALA 836 The Future o f A re a Studies Librarianship (ACRL Slavic and East Eu­ ropean Section). Order no. ALA 837 A World in Motion: Refugees and Re­ sources (ACRL Asian, African & Middle Eastern Section, ACRL Women’s Studies Section, International Relations Com­ mittee). Order no. ALA 853 Diversity and Demographics: Are We Ready for the 21st Century? (ACRL Ra­ cial & Ethnic Diversity). Order no. ALA 854 Digitizing a Continent: National-Level Planning for European Libraries (ACRL W estern European Specialists, Arts). Order no. ALA 855 The Value o f Values: Changes and Continuities as We Face the New Millen­ nium (ACRL President’s Program). Or­ der no. ALA 862 Audiocassettes for other ALA programs are also available. Call, write, or fax your order form to: Teach ’Em, 160 E. Illinois St., Suite 300, Chicago, IL 60611; (800) 225-3775; fax: (312) 467-9271, credit cards only; e- mail:teach'em@bonus-books.com; Web site: http://www.bonus-books.com. You may pay by check (payable to Team'em) or credit card (Visa, MC, AMEX). mailto:em@bonus-books.com http://www.bonus-books.com C&RL News ■ Septem b er 1998 / 575 changes in the curriculum and in the ways we teach and learn. Denning’s work concentrates on redefin­ ing engineering curricula, but it also has rel­ evance for universities and libraries as a whole. He feels that in the past engineers have been trained to be primarily problem solvers. In the future, engineers will need to do more than solve problems to satisfy the new forces at work. For example, they will need to be good listeners and effective facilitators o f their cli­ ents’ projects. Denning’s solution to this situation is called Sense 21, which he defines as “a new engi­ neering common sense for the 21st century.” In order to discover and adjust to the new common sense, Denning believes we must first discuss how our current common sense is constituted. This means evaluating shared sets of beliefs, values, suppositions, myths, and habits that are usually taken for granted. In teaching his experimental classes at CNE, Denning seeks to put the vision and values of new organizational theories into practice by pursuing what he terms a “hermeneutical prag­ matics.” One aspect o f this approach involves asking his students to attempt an “ontological mapping” o f their lives. Ontological mapping is the ability to map out one’s domain of ac­ tion by his or her background assumptions; or, more simply, to know how one compre­ hends the world. Since this is a complicated multileveled procedure, Denning’s students must go through several skill levels as they dissect and define their ontological maps. Among other skills, they must learn to iden­ tify and control their individual identities by managing the human tendency towards storytelling and (auto)biography. Once this is achieved, they can move to managing and mo­ bilizing others. Those who can attain the highest herme­ neutic skill levels, Denning notes, gain the ability to centralize practices that were for­ merly anomalous. Denning points to the Internet as a prime example o f an arena that those skilled in hermeneutical pragmatics have managed to normalize. Ken Frazier, director of libraries at the Uni­ versity o f Wisconsin-Madison, and Paula Kaufman followed Denning’s talk with some observations on how his work and theories can be applied to academic libraries, since the emphasis is on the joy of learning and solu­ tions to seemingly intractable problems. Work­ ing together on trust and commitment to col­ laboration are valued by librarians. In an en­ vironment that may not be favorable for li­ braries, opportunities are there to apply new organizational practices, which will require shifts in librarians’ attitudes. Accountability must be to a shared organizational mission. Frazier commented that while many people fear the influence o f market forces on academia, he sees reason to be optimistic. He avows that libraries are accepting the chal­ lenge issued by market forces by increasingly embracing collaborative projects. An example is the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Re­ sources Coalition (SPARC), a partnership project o f the Association o f Research Librar­ ies (ARL) and other educational and research organizations whose mission is to create a more competitive marketplace for research in­ formation. Kaufman also senses that libraries are well placed to embrace the challenges o f values- based organizational thinking. She points to the shifting interpretations o f once conven­ tional wisdom with regard to organizational leadership and planning. Where before we tended to lead by declaration, she noted, we Michigan was well represented at ACRL meetings. Here are (left to right) Elaine Didier, Barbara MacAdam, and Patricia Breivik. now tend to lead by example. And where before w e would chose five to six goals to pursue, today we recognize that goals are con­ stantly shifting and that we must constantly plan and evaluate our goals,— Anne Garrison, G eorgia In stitu te o f Technology, anne. garrison@ibid.library.gatech.edu and Lois M. Pausch, University o f Illinois, l-pausch@ uiuc.edu ■ mailto:garrison@ibid.library.gatech.edu 5 7 6 / C&RL News ■ Septem ber 1998