Inquiry among graduating seniors in my EAS190 course reveals that most of their courses over the 4 years were textbook-based, and only about 1/3 of their courses seem to have involved them in even the simplest Library activities. It's at least worth entertaining the grim idea that if we think we're reaching students or faculty, we're deluding ourselves. Of course there are exceptions, but the most common experience of a course is not an adventure amongst information resources. The key is probably closer liaison with faculty, more collaborative projects, more siezing the initiative, less waiting to be invited.Those graduating seniors were unanimous in advising that W&L require something like the "technology seminar" that all students at Wake Forest are involved in (taught by regular faculty, evidently, and taken seriously by all according to the one senior who had taken it before transferring to W&L). Most say that they had very little knowledge as freshmen about W&L's information resources, in library and computing areas, and that most of what they have learned since has been from peers.
We really need to study what our users do and don't do, what they need and think they need, how they use the resources and services we think we're providing, and what they're doing with information media that we define as outside our responsibilities and mandate. That means that we need to combine ethnographic inquiry and data mining and comparative research in peer libraries and literatures. It also means addressing information modalities outside the traditional academic library contexts, such as peer-to-peer technologies and the leading edges of wireless use.
Effective relationships with ITG and University Computing and TMC are a practical necessity, Commons or not, and at the moment we really don't have them. We also need to immerse ourselves in what other libraries are doing in the Information Commons realm, so as to make sensible choices among competing models. The various literatures and compilations (see my collections of links and add to them) have things to teach us, but we need to develop an environment that serves the unique needs of our users.
Over the next decade we'll be called upon to incorporate more and more digital resources into library resources, many of them via local collection building. We need to make time to explore what others are doing, and to experiment with media and organization. Developments like NSDL and MIT's DSpace are important indicators of future directions, and we should at the very least be more aware of what they are doing. Projects undertaken with pedagogical goals in mind, like the Art Department image collections, ACS collections of spatial data, and my R.E. Lee Civil War project (to cite three that I know something about at the moment) will eventually find their way into Library workspace, and will inevitably be joined by others.
GIS reaches into most disciplines and is widely recognized as growing demand. Teaching, collection management, support... all are issues I'm trying to work out solutions to, for the sciences and beyond. It is likely that I'll be involved in teaching GIS skills courses, in addition to being the primary support contact for the campus until demand rises to the point that a specialist is hired to cover those functions.
The pieces of these Top Five which I've chosen to work on are centered in the last two, via an ACS workshop in June (a continuation of my consultation on Frank Settle's Alsos Project), this summer's R.E. Lee work, and a variety of GIS projects, some of which will be augmented by what I learn at the ESRI User Conference in July.
The big question for me, which all of these 'important issues' address facets of, is: what are students (and for that matter faculty) to do with the digital riches that flood into every cranny of academia, and who is going to sort that out if we in the Library world don't? In practical terms, do we invest our time in this, or sit back and wait for somebody else to solve the problems?
Work I was doing with Skip was exploring practicalities in these realms, but without such assistance I feel pretty helpless. Specific cases in point: to develop the next stage of data access for GIS, I need access to SQL Server, which UC isn't supporting yet; similarly, the work Skip began with Microsoft's .NET environment is now orphaned, also unsupported, and there's nobody to turn to.
I'm not sure how to solve the problem of how to develop or otherwise acquire the necessary support for the tasks implied in the five points above. Our general stance toward technology has been to rely upon vendors (Innovative in particular) to develop and provide what we need, and we have usually defined ourselves as not equipped and not inclined to even consider in-house development of the wherewithal to handle new demands and potentials (two prominent exceptions that I've been involved with have been the evolution of W&L's Web presence, and the database for the serials review). It seems to me quite clear that we need our own in-house technical expertise to deal with the database and server issues that are so clearly on the horizon of Library services. In the absence of a redeployment of services and functions, we cannot depend upon University Computing to provide programming and development services for the evolution of our Information systems: UC (1) is simply too busy with support/maintenance issues, (2) has minimal interest in experimentation, and (3) is understaffed for its mandated work, to attend to Library-defined priorities.
On the subject of my own agenda for the next few years: I anticipate that half of my time is going to be formally allocated to extra-Library teaching (Anthropology of East Asia, Human Geography, GIS, and University Scholars courses), though the details of that reassignment are still being worked out. I'll continue to be Science Librarian and to teach Biology 182 and East Asian Studies 190 as part of that role.