“The Library as Knowledge Laboratory”

On Friday, December 6, 2013, ACRL/NY will hold its annual symposium, “The Library as Knowledge Laboratory,” at Baruch College. Makerspaces, mashups and big data are bringing radical change to higher education. Academic libraries are meeting the challenge of this new landscape with a culture of participation, innovation and collaboration. As librarians’ roles shift from a traditional service-and-support model to that of active project participant in support of digital scholarship, a new ethos of experimentation, learning, disruption, and creativity is evolving.

At ACRL/NY’s 2013 annual symposium we will explore the opportunities and challenges facing academic librarians in light of scholars’ increased demands for new formats, open-source tools, digital repositories, and innovative research methods in the new knowledge laboratory.  

Where: 

The William and Anita Newman Vertical Campus Conference Center,
Baruch College, CUNY
55 Lexington Avenue (at 24th Street) Room 14-220 (14th floor)
New York, NY

Website: http://acrlnysymp2013.wordpress.com/
Stay tuned for upcoming details and registration information!

For further information, contact 2013 Symposium Chair
Anice Mills, amills@columbia.edu

Dear Colleagues,

The Leonard Lief Library is pleased to announce the Spring 2013 issue of our newsletter, Biblio-Tech:

http://www.lehman.edu/library/documents/Biblio-Tech_Spring2013.pdf

The newsletter is a collaborative effort of library faculty and staff. This semester our theme is “Best Practices in the Library.” We also showcase important library initiatives that support the Lehman College community.

Rebecca Arzola and Jennifer Poggiali

Biblio-Tech Editors

Rebecca.Arzola@lehman.cuny.edu

Jennifer.Poggiali@lehman.cuny.edu

]]> http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/library-news/2013/06/07/leonard-lieft-librarys-spring-issue-of-biblio-tech/feed/ 0 http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/library-news/2013/05/31/slavery-anti-slavery-archive-and-nineteenth-century-collection-online-now-at-cuny/ http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/library-news/2013/05/31/slavery-anti-slavery-archive-and-nineteenth-century-collection-online-now-at-cuny/#comments Fri, 31 May 2013 20:42:50 +0000 igashurov http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/library-news/?p=1005

The Office of Library Services is proud to announce the purchase of two digital collections, Slavery & Anti-Slavery Archives and Nineteenth Century Collections Online.  Both acquisitions from GALE Digital Collections present primary source materials that will enhance the research of CUNY scholars and are immediately available for system-wide access.

The four-part Slavery & Anti-Slavery Archives began release in 2009 and were completed this year. The archives explore the history of slavery in America, providing a direct view into primary source documents from leading collections around the world. Each archive contains more than a million pages of full-text, fully searchable pages of first-person accounts, slave narratives, newspaper articles, contemporary art, photographs, government and legal documents. The collection is arranged along thematic lines that cover:  

Part I: Debates over Slavery and Abolition

Part II: Slave Trade in the Atlantic World

Part II: Institution of Slavery

Part IV: Age of Emancipation

The newly released Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) is a multi-year global digitization and publishing program focused on collections of primary sources from the nineteenth century. Each archive adds more than a million  full-text, fully searchable pages of monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, ephemera, maps, statistics and other kinds of documents in both Western and non-Western languages. CUNY purchased the eight archives which have been released to date:

Archive 1: British Politics and Society

Archive 2: Asia & West Diplomacy & Cultural Exchange

Archive 3: British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture

Archive 4: Corvey Collection of European Literature

Archive 5: History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, 1780-1925

Archive 6: Photography

Archive 7: Women – Transnational Networks

Archive 8: Europe & Africa: Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, and Conquest

The NCCO collections reside on a new platform that was designed with Digital Humanities research in mind.  It supports such features as textual analysis, user-generated tags and annotations, browser-based tools for collecting, citing and organizing

research, and an image viewer that enables zoom, highlighting, rotating, reverse and custom views. (see Gale’s website: http://mlr.com/DigitalCollections/products/slaveryantislavery/).

Both NCCO and Slavery & Anti-Slavery complement ECCO, the Eighteenth Century Collection Online, which CUNY purchased for system-wide use in 2008 and 2012, along with the Burney Newspaper Collection. 

In CUNY our University Faculty Senate has passed resolutions in support of open access and a CUNY Institutional Repository. This year several CUNY libraries have made statements of support for open access policies. On April 3 the faculty of the Library joined our colleagues at other CUNY libraries and passed the following resolution:

QCC Library Open Access Policy

The faculty of the Kurt R. Schmeller Library at Queensborough Community College is committed to disseminating research and scholarship as widely as possible. We believe that Open Access to scholarship is critical for scholarly communication and the future of libraries. Further, we assert this is central to CUNY’s mission of public education.

We acknowledge that Open Access publishing accrues value for a work. Accordingly, we advocate making our own research freely available whenever possible by seeking publishers who offer  Open Access publishing or self-archiving options.

When necessary and when possible, we will attempt to negotiate with publishers to improve Open Access terms. If feasible, we will deposit our publications in a CUNY institutional repository or a discipline specific repository.

Moreover, we will further support Open Access by contributing our reviewing and editing efforts to manuscripts destined for this format.

Passed unanimously by the Faculty of the Library, Queensborough Community College, April 3, 2013.

–Professor Jeanne Galvin, Chief Librarian

We’re particularly excited about our new feature, “Student Voices,” which showcases student poetry selected by a panel in a competitive process. This feature includes embedded audio of the author reading her poem, and continues the tradition of multimedia elements begun with our fall 2012 issue, which also included embedded audio and video. The PDF needs to be open in Adobe Reader (rather than a browser window) for the embedded audio to play. You can also listen to the poem at SoundCloud.

Other articles in this issue include:

• QCC Library Faculty Endorses Open Access
• Making History: Honors Students Visit QCC Archives
• Free people Read Freely
• Muslim Journeys Programs
• Cloud Storage
• First Year QCC Student Publishes Book
• And more . . .

Curtis Kendrick, University Dean for Libraries and Information Resources at CUNY, will speak at the Society for College and University Planners Conference next week on the libraries and learning environment for the digital age.

The conference, “Academic Relevance—Is Higher Education Still the Gateway for Opportunity in America?” at Georgetown University in DC, is designed as working sessions for higher education leaders who are responsible for, or involved in, the integration of planning on their campuses and for the professionals who support them.

Dean Kendrick will present in the session called “Next Generation Student Learning Centers,” which examines the role of academic learning centers in strengthening students’ aptitudes in problem-solving, collaboration, and communication.  The next generation will face a world that is the most complex, dynamic, and fast-moving in history.  According to a survey of 500 senior managers and C-suite executives, recent college graduates are unprepared to meet these 21st-century demands. Drawing upon this research, the session will explore how libraries and learning environments can be recast for the digital age by reconsidering their function, the spaces devoted to them, and their role as “gateways of opportunity.”  The panel will also explore strategies for re-imagined student learning center spaces, with content, technology, environment, and services that respond directly to the needs of digitally savvy millennials; and discuss innovative spatial solutions for collaborative learning within the context of repurposing an existing building.

The panel will feature other participants, including:  Jeffrey Holmes (Principal, Woods Bagot Architects); Jeffrey Pollock (President, Global Strategy Group); and Steven J. Orlansky ( Associate Principal, Newman Architects, PC).

Association of College and Research Libraries Conference (April 10-13, 2013)

Later that week, Curtis Kendrick will speak at Association of College and Research Libraries Conference, in Indianapolis, on “Collaborating for College Readiness: Curriculum Reform as Opportunity for Innovative Partnership.”

The panel will focus on“high school to college” transition issues and the new community of practice model that addresses barriers to college success. Panelists will also discuss Common Core school reform and share viewpoints on college readiness that have emerged from a pilot project that brought together college and school librarians, professors, and teachers across three disciplines for discussion, relationship building, and collaborative curricular revision.

Presenters include CUNY and New York City school librarians: Robert Farrell  (Assistant Professor, Coordinator of Information Literacy & Assessment, Lehman College, CUNY);  Meghann Walk (Library Director and social studies professor, Bard High School Early College); and Leann Ellis (Coordinator, Office of Library Services, the New York City Department of Education).

The meeting began with presentations from CUNY librarians on emerging trends in information literacy instruction at CUNY. Stefanie Havelka (Lehman College) spoke about the success of the Mobile Information Literacy course that she teaches at Lehman College. She said that “M” learning is transforming the social role of teaching and learning, and making learning more collaborative. “M” learning is effective in engaging students because it is attuned to students’ attitudes and behaviors. “This generation of users is hyperconnected,” she said, “and we as educators need to be where the students are.”

Scott Sheidlower (York College) asserted that the medium for transmitting learning is less important than the skills students learn. “I’m not sure this adds to the students’ knowledge database,” he said. “Professions and media change. In five year, you might need to transfer these skills. We must teach students to be independent learners.” Robin Brown (Borough of Manhattan Community College) said that both online and onsite learning delivery systems are needed in higher education.  “I am passionate about e-books, but they tend to be mainstream.  If you have written anything radical, left-of-center, published before 2001, it is not an e-book.”

The subject was one of interest to the Georgian librarians. In Georgia there is no information literacy instruction in the American sense of the term, in which a librarian has instructional responsibility for a course or a workshop. Rather, students learn research skills from subject faculty in the classroom and by consulting librarians and conducting research.

Professional education for librarians was another topic of discussion. One of the reasons for the trip, said Teona Kavelashvili, director of the Ilia State University Library, was to explore the possibility of establishing a library science degree program or major in Georgia. Georgia does not yet offer a library science degree or courses in library education. All of the library directors visiting CUNY hold advanced degrees in other subject areas.

The Georgian delegation’s visit to CUNY was part of a strenuous 20-day tour of the United States included visits to libraries in Utah, Minnesota, DC and New York City. The group was travelling under the auspices of the U.S. Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program. Besides Ms. Kavelashvili, the Georgian delegation included Giorgi Chichinadze (Akaki Tsereteli State University Library); Lela Turmanidze (Shota Rustaveli Batumi State University Library); Nana Karaulashvili (Telavi State University Library); and Zurab Gaiparashvili (Tbilisi State University Library).

Curtis Kendrick, university dean for libraries and information resources at CUNY, noted that while visits from foreign librarians contribute to the shared store of knowledge, “the emphasis is on cultural exchange,” he said, “and that helps us learn from one another.”

Among the highlights: a redesigned main floor of Wexler Library, Hunter College’s main library on 68th Street, re-opens in late Spring 2013. The renovation is part of the Hunter College’s $45 million campaign to modernize its campus facilities. Other Hunter College libraries discussed are the Zabar Art Library, which was created in 2008 with a gift from Judith and Stanley Zabar to the Department of Art. The Brookdale Health Professions Library on 25th Street supports the needs of the campus’s nursing and other health programs. The newest branch, the Schools of Social Work and Public Health Library, on East 119th Street, serves both the Silberman School of Social Work and the CUNY School of Public Health. The new health campus was built with the help of $40 million of the proceeds from the sale of the building for the School of Social Work on East 79th, the largest gift ever to the University.

Irene Gashurov and Ann Matsuuchi (February 2013). “CUNY’s Critical Thinking Skills Initiative: Redesigning Workforce Education Through Information Literacy Learning,” College & Research Library News, 74(2), 70-73.