This article is more than 5 years old.

Sunday morning has started off with a bang. I didn’t get up quite as early as Susan who signed up for Bill’s Alibris 5K race in Grant Park, but my day started with the Sirsi-Dynix ALA-APA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Promoting Salaries and Status for Library Workers. Wanda and Ellen M. were there for moral support and Susan came directly from the race to take official photos. Fresh from that ZSR success story, I went to another at the convention center where Lauren P. was signing copies of her new book So You Want to Be a Librarian. Way to go, Lauren!

Now to re-cap yesterday. i ran into Debbie Nolan at the Convention Center and we had a nice long chat for the first time in several years. She is doing well accomplishing great things at Towson and sends her love to all ZSR friends. I also ran into my former Dean at Wayne State and a few other colleagues and we all mourned our dear departed friend Lothar. I went to a session called “Who are these Millennial Grad Students” and I was reminded how I miss having lots of graduate students around, as no one uses more library resources and services than doctoral students writing dissertations. I was again impressed with the work at the University of Rochester. They first used anthropological research to study their faculty and why thy were ignoring their institutional repository (ahem); next they studied undergraduates and how they found information and did research, which resulted in the famous Studying Students book. This time, they studied graduate students’ needs and preferences. Much of what was said rang true and I thought that our decision to designate the Johnson Room as a graduate student lounge was well-timed, because separate space from undergraduates to work alone but surrounded by peers was their #1 desire. The last session I attended yesterday was the annual SPARC Forum, where much of the time was spent bemoaning the lack of money in the research library market. The best speaker was an editor from the Rockefeller University Press who told librarians that they and faculty authors hold all the power as creators and consumers of scholarly information, so they (we) should get some guts and use it!