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Yesterday Wake Forest hosted the fall meeting of the North Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities (NCICU). NCICU is the statewide organization of North Carolina’s 36 non-profit, private colleges and universities accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Attendees from each of the schools came to represent varying campus departments such as admissions, student services, financial aid, IT, institutional research and library services.

ZSR was pleased to host the 23 librarians, most of whom were the library deans/directors. We began the day with introductions and a round robin report of the what’s new and cool at each library. This was followed by an NC LIVE update from Tim Rogers. NC LIVE had a subscription renewal package that added up to 4.8 million. With a budget of only 3.4 million, cuts were unavoidable. The one most noted was the cutting of Pscyh Info. The impact of this cut and the cost of each library having to pay individually out of library resources was very significant to most of the libraries in attendance.

Running well ahead of schedule, we had 45 minutes of free time. Now most of the librarians opted in when I offered to give a tour of the library. Realizing that the group was way to large, I enlisted the help of Mary Beth and we divided the group in half. Many thanks to those who pitched in at the last minute.

After lunch we listened to Monkia Rhue of Johnson C. Smith University, as she shared how her library tied its strategic principles to those of the university as outlined by their new president. Our own Lynn, shared ZSR examples of embedded librarianship. Through Lynn’s examples, some of the Libraries realized that they had actually embedded librarians in projects, but had never though of it that way. It was a wonderful day of sharing and networking.