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Today was a busy one, full of educational sessions, vendor meetings, and poster sessions. My day started with a breakfast session about “Leveraging the Institutional Repository to support the institution’s strategic mission.” An interesting resource that was mentioned during the presentation was ROAR: Registry of Open Asccess Repositories that monitors the growth of eprint archives (current total is 1295). Some have languished, some have thrived. The presentation content was not new, but reinforced the things we have learned thus far about how to improve the chances for a successful IR. The presenter was Richard Clement, Dean of Libraries, from Utah State. He talked about the importance for the mandate for an IR to come from the top down. If the Provost deems it to be a priority, it is much more likely that the deans will agree. It is helpful to bring in an outside expert to help make your case.

I met with my ALA Editions editor to talk about the “next generation” of my web-based instruction book. So much has changed since the last edition, it is time for a major update and perhaps time for other organizational changes, including placing some of the content on an accompanying web site. One thing for sure, it will be a busy summer since I’ve committed to getting the draft done by September.

Wanda and I attended a Counting Opinions users meeting over lunch. We’ve been beta testers for the a good part of the past year (have you seen the survey that is available from our main site home page?). The company has the product ready to offer to other institutions and wanted last minute feedback from the beta testing libraries.

I attended the afternoon round of poster sessions. It was a lively area, with lots of people attending. Topics were wide ranging: from writing grants, to information literacy, library partnerships, research commons and “exploring effective typography” (Mary Beth and Craig, I was thinking of you all during this one!).

The last session I made it to was a debate: “Resolved: the Master’s Degree in library science is Not Relevant to the Future of Academic Libraries. Arnold Hirshon took the affirmative (they are NOT relevant) and made 10 minutes of good point at a rapid clip. His reasons included that library school curriculum is devoid of content unique to libraries, that they lack good predictive admittance criteria and they are teaching the wrong things . The negative side was addressed by Liz Bishoff, and to be honest, her points were less than compelling. I almost felt sorry for her because she sounded like she didn’t really believe what she was saying……It seemed to be a slam-dunk for the Affirmative side.

After that, I let Roz talk me into supporting the Deacs by watching the WFU-Maryland game for the ACC tournament. She had done her research and we found a nearby sports bar with enough big screens that they let us turn on the game. Too bad the outcome of this activity was as disappointing as the library education debate 🙂