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Sunette Steynberg
Weekly report no. 1, 20 February 2011
Place: Mortenson Center, Univ. of Illinois, Champaigne,
Ill.
Main impressions:
I am very impressed by the professionalism and
friendliness of the Mortenson Center personnel, but
also that of all library personnel I have met. The
personnel that we get to meet, are mainly people with
faculty status. They are on a completely different
level as we are. Their work seems to be more on the
level of the staff in our Information science
department. They make use of students to do the work
that we mostly do at our institutions. In lots of
instances their personnel consist of 20% personnel with
faculty status and 80% students and normal staff. Their
students are off course all post graduates. Library
science is a course one can only study as a masters
degree.
Library directors spend a lot of their time to raise
funds and grants, about a third of their time.
The tendency in the three academic libraries we have
visited during this week, Undergraduate and graduate
libraries of Illinois univ, , the Ames library in
Bloomsbury and the University of Purdue libraries, is to
move their book and journals collections to a central
storage space, which can very much be off campus.
This is to make more seating space for students in the
libraries and provide wireless internet connections for
their laptops. In all these instances the student
bodies requested more space to sit. They are even
allowed to sleep in the library if they need a rest.
All these libraries have info stalls where they keep
pamphlets on everything from copyright and plagiarism,
how to write a good paper, how to do interlending, how
to choose a topic, evaluating internet resources, etc.
Highlights of the week:
The two library visits were really very very good.
The Ames library, Illinois Wesleyan University was
small, but beautiful and full of an old time grace. It
was build in 2002 only, but has the most beautiful
reading room with lots of woodwork and all reward
winning books in all subject areas. The collection is
organized by year of reward and not Dewey. There are
also beautiful glass stained windows and granite and
wood stair cases. The personnel really went to a lot of
trouble to present a very well planned program for us
through the day.
They make use of the program Moodle to train all
their student library workers. This is a content
management tool. The course consist of 18 modules,
which student workers can work through in their own
time. I wanted to know whether we could have or buy a
copy of their program. They said that it was very
specific and suggested that we rather go to Youtube for
free training programs.
ERIAL:
ethnographic research of Illinois academic libraries./
Sue Stroyan. They did an ethnographic study of how
students use library resources by just watching them in
what they do. The outcome of this research, was that
students have little knowledge of information literacy
and little understanding of information organization.
Their recommendation is that we should rather teach
students searching techniques than give them database
training. We should also look at how an abstract should
be read.
Fortunately I will be attending a pre-conference session
by Sue at the ACRL on this
Chris Sweet
is the library instruction manager. He suggests
that one always give a handout that students can take
with them. Send out an electronic questionnaire 3 weeks
after the instruction. Only then will the students know
if the instruction was useful or not.
Linda Duke
spoke about outreach. They do not talk about Marketing,
rather outreach and then they promote their services,
not the library space. They have also done away with
the word ‘Reference’ and rather talk about ‘research
help’. They find these terms more common to students.
Sue Wilson, IT Director,
spoke about their Digital commons (here
everything is a commons). This is similar to our
Institutional repositories. This is an
undergraduate university only. They upload all their
honors projects and unpublished reports and papers by
staff. They do not have a mandate to make it mandatory.
This whole library is both wired and wireless.
Students have the choice in what way they would like to
work. They prefer the wired way, because it is much
faster.
This library receive a great deal of book gifts.
Fortunately they have a very clear policy that states
exactly what should be included in their collection and
what not . I was thinking that this is something that
we needed and would make it much easier to deal with
gifts in general.
Visit to Purdue University libraries
This was really impressive, especially their newly
refurbished Management and Economics library.
Everything is really state of the art there. They still
follow a decentralized library model and about every
department has their own library. I will therefore be
working both in the Engineering and the Chemistry
libraries when I go there.
James Mullins,
Dean of Purdue Libraries, talked to us at length. I was
impressed by his visionary outlook and leadership. One
of the things I took from him, is that we should not
only tell people what we do and can do, but also what we
know, and that would be the ability to listen and try
and make sense of things, in order to organize it.
Sharon Weiner Information literacy
Helping people to be lifelong learners – promote
critical thinking – help with information gathering and
organization skills.
One of the best days at the Mortenson Center self, was
the day where Lisa Hichliffe and Beth Woodard presented
on Information Literacy. It really linked in so
well with the report that I wrote for the academy. We
have learned that people learn in different ways and
therefore one should try to include all these ways to
keep the attention of the whole class. This is a
mindset I will have to work on.
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Report: Mortenson Center International Library Programs
– week 1
by Marguerite Nel
The aim of this programme
is to get an understanding of how librarians in the
United States interact with researchers in order to
support their research and information needs. After a
week I can report that I was overwhelmed by what I
already have learned and realised that we are on a
totally different level. In the following report I first
want to address the academic part of the programme, then
I want to give a short discussion on the social part and
lastly I want to touch on some general and more
concluding issues.
The Academic programme
The programme kicked off
on Monday morning with an introduction by Paula Kaufman,
the Dean of Libraries. She discussed the Higher
education system in the United States. I already
realised with this discussion that there is a huge
difference between the USA and South Africa. Later that
day Alfred Kagan, African Studies Bibliographer and
Professor of Library Administration discussed how he
supports faculty information needs.
With the visit to Illinois
Wesleyan we got the opportunity to learn how researchers
and students are supported in a private university with
larger budgets. The programme was effectively planned in
order to give us a clear overview on all the activities
and services the library provides for the users who are
mainly undergraduates. The following were discussed in
detail: user services and e-books; the research project
they were involved in, ERIAL (Ethnographic Research
Illinois Academic Libraries); e-books; e-journals;
library instruction and information literacy; library
marketing and outreach services and digital
repositories. This is a rather small university with 21
permanent employees and 75 students who work in the
library. It is interesting that all the libraries we
have visited use students to work in the library – even
to work at the reference desk and to do cataloguing. The
students also bring in fresh and creative ideas to apply
in the services to users. In Illinois Wesleyan students
are also involved in making posters and marketing
material, preparing tutorials, using Moodle and handling
all enquiries before referring them to the librarians
(if needed). Services are focussed on user needs. After
user studies showed that there is no need any more for a
reference collection (due to electronic reference
works), the reference collection was incorporated into
the open collection and the space is used to create an
information commons where students can sit and work
individually or collaborating in groups. There is also
wireless access, computer workstations, enough plugs to
recharge electronic equipment and a variety of
multimedia are available for the students to use.
Day three was devoted to a
workshop on Information literacy in a library setting,
and also how it is done at the University of Illinois.
This was presented by Lisa Janicke Hincliffe and Beth
Woodard. The workshop provided an overview on how
information literacy training can be incorporated into
research support services. We also learned about
different learning styles and how to incorporate the
needs and preferences of each style when designing
training courses.
Current library and
information science graduate students shared their
perspectives on current trends and challenges in the
profession on day four. Some of these included: a key
paradigm shift to make archived records available for
everybody; data curation became very important and
libraries, as information managers, have a role to play
here; collaborative online learning and the development
of supportive online courses are important (Moodle);
e-Governments; corporate information support (knowledge
management) and youth services in the public library. We
also met three African Studies Dual Degree student who
discussed their research involvement and interest in
Africa.
Emily Love discussed
responsible scholarship practices, plagiarism and
academic integrity at Illinois. Like in South Africa,
plagiarism is a big issue. On this subject, I think we
are more or less on the same level – it seems that there
is no easy solution for this problem!
Friday we went to Purdue
University in Indiana. Here we were welcomed by their
Dean of Libraries, James Mullins, who discussed the
vision and rethinking of structures of the library in
order to identify it with the academic programmes of the
university. He also, amongst other things, suggested
that the library needs to define itself by what the
university is.
Tamalee Doan discussed the
implementation of the LearnLab and how book stacks were
eliminated to make space for a research and learning
commons. After user studies indicated that users prefer
digital and desktop information delivery, the books were
weeded, evaluated and moved to compact storage. They now
have excellent facilities for individual, collaborative
and group study and learning.
Information literacy
programmes of the library can contribute to creative
thinking and lifelong learning of the university. The
different initiatives of the information literacy
programmes and problem based learning projects were
discussed by Sharon Weiner.
Scott Brandt discussed
e-science and data management at Perdue. He highlighted
the need that data can be accessed and shared and said
that librarians have a role to play in data management
and digital repositories. Megan Sapp Nelson then
discussed the libraries’ faculty research projects and
Africa projects she is involved in.
The social part of the programme
Our first opportunity to
meet the people of the Mortenson Centre and U of I
Library was last Sunday at the reception at Barbara
Ford’s home. It was a pleasant evening with very tasty
Mexican food, South African wine and a relaxed
atmosphere for networking and getting to know the people
from Champaign.
All the lunch sessions
were relaxed and good opportunities to discussed
questions and ideas more informal. Monday some of us had
lunch in the student centre and the box lunches of
Wednesday were also very interesting. The pizzas with
the students were great and the less informal lunches at
the visited universities just as nice with lots of
networking opportunity.
It wasn’t part of the
programme, but a few of us joined Barbara Ford Thursday
afternoon at the Krannert Center for a Jazz performance
and wine tasting event. This was an opportunity to get
involve with campus life at the University.
I learned a lot on the
visit to the Amish community near Arthur, IL and the
interesting discussion by Alice Cisna of the Arthur
Public Library. Apart from learning more about the
beliefs and life of this community, I also realised what
an important component technology is in our lifes.
Although their lifes are much less complicated, I prefer
my complicated life dependant of technology.
General remarks
Taking the above programme
into account, I want to summarise my findings as follow:
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There is a large
difference between the USA Higher education system
and the South African Higher education system
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The Library and
Information Science qualification presented to train
librarians are different. Students need a Masters
degree in a different discipline. The LIS programme
is a post graduate qualification. Thus a trained
librarian will then has two masters degrees.
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Librarians have faculty
status (due to their more developed training
programme). When entering the academic library they
are an associate professor and need to be involved
with research projects and also need to publish and
present at conferences in order to get tenure status
– according to your performance you can get full
professorship. Technical staff is not called
librarians and the director is called “Dean of
Libraries”.
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Libraries employ many
students to do the day to day activities. In some
libraries students are also doing cataloguing and
they also handles reference questions. This makes it
possible for the librarians to focus on support
services for the departments and faculty. They also
have time to do research.
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Libraries in the USA take
the needs of users very seriously. They always do
user studies and usability studies before making
decisions.
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They have a different
approach to collection development. It is more about
access than actual owns.
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They are involved in
seeking for funds and grants.
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They have a more
interdisciplinary approach.
I am looking forward to week two of the programme. It is
thoughtfully designed to provide us with a holistic
overview of librarianship in the USA. Thank you.
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