Colloquium 2009
Welcome to our fourth annual SCELC Colloquium! This year’s Colloquium will feature sessions on how SCELC libraries are coping with the recession, a dialog between an industry veteran and two SCELC librarians about the future of librarianship, an innovative new consortial model for resource sharing, and a session on working with generational differences among library staff.
Schedule
SCELC wants to plan ahead for the possible impact the recession might have on our libraries and explore consortial solutions that might help ameliorate the situation. This session is an opportunity to strategize various scenarios, and share with your colleagues what strategies might work best in dealing with the current economic situation. Four library directors from four different types of SCELC libraries will provide background on this issue: USC, our largest institution; Claremont, one of our most active SCELC members; Loma Linda, a major health sciences library; and Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, emblematic of our smaller psychology graduate institutions. The second hour will be for Q&A and open discussion of what your libraries and institutions are doing in this rapidly changing environment—so put on your thinking caps and join the conversation!
The past decade has provided librarians with innumerable opportunities, changes, and, indeed, anxieties. From rapid technological changes to generational conflicts in the workplace to the current fiscal crisis, many librarians feel increasingly powerless to address the issues that confront their day-to-day challenges. In this presentation, two SCELC librarians from Generations X & Y will interview two industry veterans to reflect upon ten “difficult” realities that our profession will have to address in the coming decade if our profession is to continue to make a difference.
This session will describe the implementation of OCLC WorldCat Navigator, a new consortial borrowing solution that provides seamless resource sharing within library consortia and beyond. The service manages returnable and nonreturnable items, and integrates with circulation systems to create a discovery-to-delivery tool that saves time for library users and increases efficiency for library staff. Orbis Cascade Alliance is the first major consortium to implement a WorldCat Navigator-based solution. In this time of recession, where libraries may have to scale back local acquisitions, SCELC wants to explore the possibility of a lower-cost patron initiated borrowing system among SCELC libraries, and the Orbis Cascade Alliance experience is a valuable model.
This session has been changed due to a last minute cancellation of our original speaker, Marla Peppers, due to a scheduling difficulty. But, the topic remains the same—adapting to generational differences in library staff. This is a conversation between a Boomer and a Millennial who are also colleagues and friends (two librarians from Occidental College). No one is right or wrong here, and we do not claim to be representative of our generations, but we find that many in our generations agree with us. At issue is how do we learn to listen to each other and work productively in areas where our worldviews may be different. The audience will be expected to participate in the conversation as well. We will be touching on two to three topics that illustrate the differences.