New Roles for the Road Ahead: Essays Commissioned for ACRL’s 75th Anniversary
By Steven Bell, Lorcan Dempsey, and Barbara Fister
Edited by Nancy Allen
Welcome to the CommentPress site for “New Roles for the Road Ahead,” a collection of essays commissioned for the 75th Anniversary of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).
Use the table of contents menu, or the navigational arrows at the top and bottom of each page, to browse the essays.
To comment on the essays, click the “leave a comment” icon to the right of each paragraph.
November 12 Update: Due to a rash of comment spam, site registration and log in is now required to leave comments. Click on the register link to create a username for the site. A password will be emailed to you which can be changed. Following registration, simply log in to comment. The authors apologize for any inconvenience.
The authors encourage and look forward to your feedback. Comments on the draft version will help shape the authors’ final work, with a final version expected in February 2015.
December 5 Update: The comment period is now closed. The authors appreciate your feedback.
The complete draft document is also available as a downloadable PDF.
There are also archived webinars available on demand from several library-specific training venues such as OCLC WebJunction, Infopeople, and Florida Library.
Definitely agree, Scott. There are many advanced degrees and certificates in important fields which complement our LIS work … you’ve mentioned a few … and there are others including management, research and assessment, mentoring, instruction.
It may be a useful service for ACRL (or one of the sections) to collate the various professional development opportunities … possibly in an online calendar. I’ve been trying to do that (as I’m able) with my blog Learning Beyond (http://beyondlearning-md.blogspot.com/) and disseminating opportunities both monthly and weekly to all our employees. You write: “Despite whatever efforts administrators may make to facilitate and support professional development, it is ultimately up to each academic librarian to make a personal commitment to their own lifelong learning and professional development.” — this is the important message, and it applies to all library staff.
I would like to see more emphasis on learning how to conduct an interactive webinar, as so many of them are lecture-based, which we all know is not the best way to learn/retain info. Our librarians are becoming jaded on the webinar format even as the topics become deeper and broader and more applicable to our learning needs. This is a skill many librarians would find useful, now and in the future.
As one who has the incredible honor of being a Learning Organization Librarian responsible for developing professional development programs for our librarians, staff, and student employees, I highly value your insights on this Steven. I mentioned this article at a regional prof dev event (along with providing the Five Knowledge and Skill Areas for Assessment Librarians from the Library Assessment Conference) and it was joyfully gobbled up. The most difficult aspect of this is for librarians to ‘find the time’. I believe that it’s important to CARVE out the time because it doesn’t just magically appear. Michael Stephens has written/spoken frequently on the importance of learning always, learning everywhere. I agree with other comments that developing a ‘curriculum’ or ‘path’ for growth in major areas of librarianship might be extremely helpful.
That’s a good point – perhaps it’s wrong to characterize it was lack of trust when it really is lack of a sense that they take it as seriously as we do – or think about it apart from other forms of critical thinking, analysis, and communication. But, you know? I may stick to what I’ve said because I think we try to own information literacy in ways that sometimes disenfranchises and disrespects work that is happening in courses every day. So much of the learning that happens around context, interpretation, judgement, recognzing the various forms sources take and why they take those forms – isn’t being done under the tutalage of librarians. We have been saying for decades that we need to collaborate but often that’s framed as a kind of power relationship rather than actually pooling our knowledgebases and experiences. As you point out, the first year experience is a place where faculty have to step back and retool and often they discover – holy cow! I had no idea we had these resources or that students confronted by 1,000 scholarly articles found in a search can’t use the strategies faculty use to zero in on the good stuff because they simply haven’t got the background knowledge or the sensitivity to contextual cues. Anyway, thanks for the comment and I’ll give this further thought…
“professional development is deeply embedded into our practice” — and, indeed, is one way we as a profession embody and enact the “lifelong learning” we encourage in those we teach.
I’m not sure the claim “we don’t entirely trust faculty” toward the end of this paragraph is 100% accurate, though I suppose it is a statement based in personal observation making “accuracy” less useful in this context. In a recent Twitter convo about librarians’ self-claimed expertise in IL, I proposed that it was more that the library department/information literacy program on any given campus is likely to be the only academic unit on campus that is *prioritizing* in a deliberate, intentional manner the development in students of what we know as IL knowledge, skills, and dispositions, with the only other contender in my mind being the First-Year Writing program. I don’t think a lack of trust is the issue so much as librarians having the resources (time and in some ways training–I shocked myself in a recent meeting with a faculty collaborater by having meaningful, useful ideas about how to improve a rubric we were developing together to assess IL in student work, ideas which were both new to and welcomed by my collaborator) that faculty in the disciplines don’t have to highlight for students and faculty alike how IL is woven into the work they are often already doing within a given course.
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