With an economy in a downward spiral…

Citizens all over the United States are turning to their public libraries for books, computers, and children’s programming.

Take a look at this MSNBC story here.

As a land grant institution, the UA Libraries also serves our local Tucson community. In these tough times it’s more important than ever that we remember our land grant mission. We provide our community users with access to computers, books, cultural events & exhibits, and electronic information resources that can not only enrich their lives, but can get them the information they need to be successful even in these tough economic times…

Living the Future – We Did It!

Last week the Living the Future 7 conference took place, and it was fantastic! Much of my time was dedicated to logistics, staffing the registration table, coordinating the volunteers, and communicating with the hotel reps, but I did get to squeeze in some great sessions and have some inspiring conversations with participants from around the world (yes – we had attendees from Canada, Hawaii, and Africa!).

First I’d like to share the key points I walked away with:

• From Peter Senge’s keynote speech: Aspiration, Vision, and Purpose. Sustainability. We are born to learn. We need to spread knowledge.
• From the CoLAB Planning Session: we share commonalities, we share ideas; if we make connections and take the time to learn about one another’s assets, we can make true collaborative projects successful.
• From the receptions: librarians are fun and inspiring (as if there was any doubt).
• From the breakout sessions: virtual presentations can be successful! But more importantly… we need to work closer with our faculty. And form closer relationship with our students and campus partners. We need to get out there in our campus community. Successful partnerships are the key to our future.
• From the closing session: talk with each other, and then go back and do something.

As far as the planning goes, we received a lot of positive feedback from participants, speakers, and former members of the planning group. So that’s a very good thing, especially with all us newbies. Here’s a review:

• Only one member of the planning group had done this before, all the rest of us were brand new to the experience. Yet we had more participants registered than in any year past!
• We had a world-renowned keynote speaker, Dr. Peter Senge, who is very difficult to get. We had about 40 people register just to see him speak. He was inspiring.
• We coordinated the first “virtual presentation” to be held at Living the Future – John Shank presented through Elluminate from his office at Penn State. Despite a small audio glitch half-way through, it went smoothly.
• The conference was dedicated to Shelley Phipps, our recently-retired Associate Dean who participated in all previous planning groups to make this happen. She was surprised to see her face on our welcome poster!
• At closing we specially recognized Liz Bezanson, who has also worked on all previous LTF conferences, including this one. She retires at the end of this month and it was a pleasure to work with her. She will be missed throughout our organization.

Yesterday we set up a Google Group to faciliatate continued discussions now the conference has ended. I hope you join us: http://groups.google.com/group/living-the-future.

The Amazing Library Race

Recently I participated in the UA Library’s 2nd Annual Amazing Library Race. It was even bigger and better than last year, with somewhere around 300 participants, mostly new UA students. The event is held the Friday before classes begin, and is aimed to be an orientation to the library and its services for new students. It’s loosely based on the Amazing Race reality show, and we call ours the “Desert Edition” so many of the questions along the way relate to “surviving & thriving in a desert university.”

I staffed the first station along with a couple other staff members, including Chris from our Undergraduate Services Team (UST), Sam from External Relations, and Yvonne, a library student who was a former intern for UST. This station was the entrance to the race, right outside the Main Library. I was absolutely astounded when I arrived at two minutes before the race was due to start, and there was a line of students stretching around the side of the building. Incredible! Unfortunately we were so swamped at that point no one thought to take a picture, but we have several witnesses

We gave incomers their maps, carabiners (transcribed with the “UA Libraries” logo), and their first “passport” stamp proving they completed the first station. About every ten or so people would win a free gift bag with goodies including a library t-shirt, free slice of pizza (donated by our local Magpies), and earplugs.

There were 12 stations total, located on every floor of the library and in our Special Collections nextdoor. Tasks included checking-in and out material using our Express Check machines, finding information from an article on microfilm, visiting our new Presentation Rooms, and even making ice cream! The ice cream was at the Science-Engineering Library (SEL) station. Rather than make the students travel around campus in the heat to our other locations, SEL and Fine Arts (FA), we just made stations for them at the Main Library. Students learned about the specialty software located at SEL and the selection of music and architecture material located at FA. They learned about the streaming video we now offer, the exhibits in Special Collections, the photocopying and scanning services, our government documents and area studies collections, and of course our reference services. This year we introduced a Pima County Public Library (PCPL) station, staffed by PCPL librarians who marketed their own services and signed people up for library cards.

The participants could go to stations in any order they chose; this prevented stations from getting swamped all at once. Each station required the participant answer a question to receive a stamp. Once receiving four stamps, they could go to the “Desert Oasis” and receive a free water bottle. Once receiving 8 stamps, they could go to the final stop and get free pizza, eegees, and enter a raffle. We received fantastic sponsorship this year and had a ton of raffle prizes, including an Ipod, TV with DVD player, and giftcards to all over the place.

The race lasted two hours, and while exhausting was a fantastic experience and a really great event for the library. The students loved it. Some actual feedback I heard from participants included:

“This is fabulous! Just fabulous!”

“I’ve been to the library before but learned a lot more about its services I never knew!”

“This is great that you guys do this. Cool!”

I hope this continues as an annual orientation event, while it’s a lot of work it is definitely worthwhile.

Google: The stench of big brother?

Here’s an interesting story about Google’s plans to not only organize all the
information in the world, but organize people’s lives:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/c3e49548-088e-11dc-b11e-000b5df10621.html

It’s interesting because this service could be seen as promoting convenience &
customization, but at the same time could it be violating privacy?

Just thought I’d share this for others to think about. Might this be going
too far? My reaction is, “heck yes it’s going to far.” I can’t imagine a library ever doing something like this. But Google’s the new international electronic library. And from my experience the general public doesn’t see this an an invasion of privacy. It’s convenient. It’s cool. It’s useful. But it’s also control. Would you want your big life decisions to be determined by Google? If libraries do disappear, is this the sort of thing we’re left with?