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NEWS FROM THE FIELD
C&RL News, February 1999
Vol. 60, No. 2
by Mary Ellen Davis
Endowed chair established at Berkeley
An anonymous donor established an
endowed chair to honor Anthropology Professor Emeritus and Andean Scholar John
H. Rowe for his foresight in establishing an Anthropology Library at the
University of California, Berkeley. The first recipient of the endowed chair is
Suzanne H. Calpestri, head of the George and Mary Foster Anthropology Library.
The endowment recognizes the importance of the librarian in a scholarly
community by providing the recipient discretionary money for resources and
professional development thereby ensuring that the librarian will be able to
provide outstanding support to faculty and students and continue Berkeley’s
strong ranking in anthropology.
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ACRL/Harvard Leadership Institute
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ACRL and the Harvard Institutes for Higher Education are offering the first ACRL/Harvard Leadership Institute July 5-10, 1999, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Developed for directors of libraries and those who report directly to them, the institute is designed to increase your capacity to lead and manage. The program prepares you to answer two key questions: 1) How well-positioned is my organization to meet current and future challenges? and 2) How effective is my own leadership? Topics covered include: leadership, organizational strategy, financial management, transformational learning, and planning.
Registrations for the intensive residential program will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. The $1,160 fee covers tuition, all program and instructional materials, refreshment breaks, lunch each day, a reception, and social events.
Details are on the Web at http://hugse1.harvard.edu/~ppe.
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HighWire Press and ISI Collaborate on hypertext links
The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) is collaborating with Stanford University Libraries’ HighWire Press to build hypertext links between their electronic resources. Part of the ISI Links initiative, the collaboration provides the technology to permit users to navigate from the ISI Web of Science, a multidisciplinary bibliographic database tool, to participating HighWire publishers’ full text journal content. The HighWire produced journals include more than 100 life science and biomedical titles published by a core group of professional and scholarly societies such as Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
For details about ISI products, visit its Web page http://www.isinet.com. For more information about HighWire, visit its Web site at http://highwire.stanford.edu.
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One-stop shopping for college rankings
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The Education and Social Science Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers one-stop shopping for Web-based college ranking sites.
Found at http://www.library.uiuc.edu/edx/rankings.htm, the College and University Rankings page provides links to ranking services for various areas of higher education including undergraduate, graduate, business, law, and international programs. One can also find a link-filled discourse concerning the ongoing controversy surrounding reputation-based rankings and a lengthy bibliography on the topic.
The Rankings page tries to emphasize caution in the use of college ranking services and urges users to investigate the methodology of any service under consideration. Toward that end, a lengthy section dealing with the ongoing controversy over rankings is provided. The page’s cautionary section is a guide to some very interesting networked information on the college ranking process. Users will find this information helpful when trying to evaluate individual ranking services and when trying to decide how much weight rankings deserve in the college selection process.
The College and University Rankings page was created by the authors. It debuted in October 1997 and gathered a small amount of hits during it first half year of existence. In March and April 1998, the page was submitted to various search engines including Alta Vista, Northern Light, and InfoSeek. Following the site’s listing in Yahoo! in May, its use skyrocketed. The page continues to grow in popularity and is now receiving between 25 and 30,000 hits per month.
Over 99% of the page’s users are from outside the immediate University of Illinois community and these users generate a steady stream of e-mail concerning rankings. In making special efforts to assist this new group of patrons, the librarians of the Education and Social Science Library discovered the power of the Web in reaching out to nontraditional users. Bringing some organization to a small corner of the Internet and serving an entirely new audience have been two very satisfying outcomes made possible by the creation and maintenance of the College and University Rankings Page.—Daniel Burgard, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, dburgard@uiuc.edu; Stephanie R. Davis, University of Southern California, srdavis@usc.edu
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Librarians score on Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
Librarians are featured in the chapter on careers in the newly revised MBTI Manual. Quotations from librarians representing each of the 16 MBTI types are used to illustrate diversity of type and the differences in how the types approach their jobs. The chapter explains that individuals with various MBTI preferences tend to choose divergent specialties within a profession, enjoy particular aspects of the job, and go about completing tasks in distinct ways. Individuals with different preferences create special niches within a specific occupation where the likelihood of using their type preferences is higher. Data for the chapter was taken from Mary Jane Scherdin’s 1992 national study of 1,600 librarians, which was cosponsored by ACRL and Consulting Psychologists Press. The ACRL 1994 publication Discovering Librarians: Profiles of a Profession presents further information about the study.
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Support Library Legislative Day!
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This year marks the 25th anniversary of National Library Legislative Day to be held in Washington, D.C. on May 3-4, 1999. These two days are of significant consequence to librarians in general—and academic librarians in particular—because they provide a venue for librarians to make acquaintance with their congressional representatives and to explain how their actions and policy decisions can affect your library. Considering the rapid changes that are occurring in our libraries due to evolving information technology, we must keep our representatives informed and educated more than ever concerning the implications of information policy on academic libraries.
On the first day, Monday, you will be briefed on general legislative issues important to libraries such as copyright, government information dissemination, appropriations, education funding, and discounted telecom rates. Also on Monday, ACRL will sponsor an activity designed to brief you on issues particularly important to academic librarians. You may caucus with your state delegation later in the day. On Tuesday, you will join your state delegation and visit your congressional representatives, delivering your messages about library issues. Past experience of other academic librarians indicates that you may want arrive in D.C. on Sunday to be ready for the full day of activities on Monday.
The registration fee for Legislative Day is $8. ALA has set aside a block of rooms at the Holiday Inn on The Hill [415 New Jersey Ave., N. W., phone: (202) 638-1616] at a special rate; ask for the ALA Rate of $129 (single) and $139 (double).
For more information and a registration form access the Legislative Day Web site at http://www.ala.org/washoff/legday.html. Check with your state association legislative committee about teaming with them for visits to the congressional offices.
If you plan to attend please let Michael Godow know.—Michael Godow, ACRL program officer, mgodow@ala.org.
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Call for papers for off-campus conference
Proposals for presentations are sought for the ninth conference on Off-Campus Library Services sponsored by the Central Michigan University (CMS) Libraries and the CMU College of Extended Learning. The conference will be held in Portland, Oregon, April 26–28, 2000. Proposal abstracts of not more than 500 words are due by March 12, 1999. A copy of the Call for Presentations and details about the conference are on the Web at http://http://www.lib.cmich.edu/ocls. Click on “Resources for Off-Campus Librarians.” Or contact Connie Hildebrand at CMU: voice: (517) 774-6080; toll-free fax: (877) 329-6257; e-mail: connie.hildebrand@cmich.edu.
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