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This morning, Wanda and I and a group of invited librarians traveled to visit our colleagues at UNCG. Their Dean, Rosann Bazirjian, invited us to attend in return for a similar visit to WFU a number of years ago. The attendee list may seem quite random: Lynn, Wanda, Susan, Erik, Derrik, Lauren C, Mary Beth, Roz, Molly, Carol, Steve, Carolyn, Megan and Leslie. Rosann sent us a list of librarians from UNCG who were interested in visiting with their counterparts, and we did our best to match people up from our side.
We started the morning at 9:30 in their conference center and spent an hour or so introducing ourselves and talking about our current projects and interests. Then we paired up and went to the library and spent another hour or so. By noon, we were packed up and ready to return, although the new joint Entrepreneurship group got together afterward to begin planning for the next conference.
If anyone wants to talk about their experience, feel free to add to this post. I’m thinking that next summer we may host a group made up of the ZSR librarians who didn’t get to take part in this one and their UNCG equivalents. Let me know if you like that idea!
7 Comments on ‘Field Trip to UNCG’
I got to meet my UNCG counterpart, Sha Li Zhang, for the first time. We talked mostly about experiments with e-books, approval plans, and internships.
I met with Stephen Dew, who is the Collections and Scholarly Resources Coordinator. Like me, Stephen exists as a one person “department,” and the plan he followed in launching UNCG’s scholarly communication awareness program is very similar to the plan being implemented here.
We had great conversation about faculty recruitment for the IR; the charge/focus of a campus-wide, Senate-based scholarly communication committee; the ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee and toolkit; and UNCG’s campus forum series that brings in external speakers on copyright/SC issues. We also kicked around ideas for possible publication or presentation collaboration.
I met with Christine Fischer, who is Head of Acquisitions. Two takeaways for me:
1)Their IR is much further along than ours with about 100 faculty participating. At that scale, they need **Technical Services staff to help with formatting and uploading the content**.
2)She gave me the names of specific approval plan vendors (Spanish-language, music scores) and an assessment of her experiences with the companies.
I’m game to participate if we host a group this summer!
I really enjoyed getting a chance to chat with many of the folks I’ve gotten to know over the years. I was “paired up” with Kathy Crowe who is Associate Dean for Public Services. I was particularly interested in the work she and her group are doing on assessment in regard to their information literacy program. Also, they are forming an Information Literacy Council which will have a membership that consists of representatives from different areas of the university.
Very interesting discussion in systems folks. As always, you find that you are dealing with many of the same issues! UNCG has some interesting projects going including an in-house developed institutional repository (http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/)
I’m interested in participating next time!