Selecting Your Program Track and Theme

First consider into which track your proposal would fall, depending on its subject content.  Then consider what is the main theme of your proposal.  When submitting your proposal, please indicate both a track and a theme (descriptions are below).  As an example, if you have an idea for presentation on a collection development model that worked well in your library, it may be under the track "Content, Collections, and Access," and be marked with an icon for "Passport to Success," which means it's an effective practice.

Program Tracks

ATTRACTING AND THRIVING
What do the next ten years hold for libraries? How can we attract a diverse and energetic group of people to our libraries and help create an environment in which they will thrive?  Baby boomers will be retiring in increasing numbers, taking their many years of expertise with them, or will they? How are we rethinking our organizations, libraries, and services?  This track reflects planning, ideas, and useful practical approaches under these circumstances, for making the best use of human resources staff and funding, for re-envisioning the library’s organization.  How can you provide basic professional education and training for new library staff, continue professional education for new middle- and upper-level leaders and managers, and nurture and support those who will become the next middle managers and library leaders? How do we attract people to librarianship, capture baby boomer expertise, and re-engage retirees?  Possible presentation topics for this track include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Creating environments in which people with diverse backgrounds can thrive
• Self-selected/self-directed professional education
• Nurturing, mentoring, and training
• Boosting morale in new and changing staff environments
• Respecting and re-engaging retirees
• Attracting and supporting potential librarians
• New models of professional education for librarians at various levels
• Providing or modeling leadership guidance
• Management guidance
• Attracting potential librarians from diverse backgrounds
• The role of the librarian in a technology-focused world
• E-portfolios in staff development
• 360-degree staff evaluation
• Re-envisioning the organization

COLLABORATIONS
Collaboration has become a popular theme in the work of our libraries and across higher education. The theme suggests more than just working together on a committee or agreeing to support a particular idea. To collaborate, one moves beyond simply cooperating and agreeing to a higher level of engagement with others. Collaborators invest themselves and resources in the project to accomplish a mutual goal for mutual benefit. Academic and research librarians have proven themselves excellent collaborators, drawing on our professional ethos of resource sharing, service, and innovation. We may collaborate within our library, with another unit of the institution, or with another college or university. We may join forces with other types of libraries, archives, or government offices. In times of scarce resources and exciting possibilities for new services, we continue to explore options for joint projects and collaboration to achieve our goals. What collaborations have you been part of and what did you accomplish? What are the new arenas for exploring collaboration?  Share your stories, challenges, and opportunities on topics such as:

• Managing successful collaborative efforts
• Cross unit collaboration
• Resource sharing for joint projects
• Innovative partnerships
• Navigating governance issues in a collaborative project
• Training for successful collaboration
• Collaborations with outside individuals, groups, or organizations
• Working with vendors and businesses
• Cooperation among libraries
• Global connections
• Partnering with computing center staff
• Working with museums, archives, community organizations, and/or non-profits

CONTENT, COLLECTIONS, AND ACCESS
Change and technology are parallel forces that have significantly affected core functions of academic and research libraries such as collection development, collection evaluation, and access to information and to services. Innovations in technology have changed how patrons search and retrieve the library’s carefully selected and arranged information. The movement to examine and experiment with new modes of scholarly communication challenges traditional concepts of what information is, and how it can be transmitted, and raises new questions and perspectives about copyright in academia. How does this evolving paradigm intersect with current notions of collection development and with organizing information for retrieval? New library concepts and techniques have been born; new issues have materialized because of these parallel forces. To meet these challenges, new skills and training will re-educate current staff. In addition, newly hired staff may possess different skill sets. Work assignments and job responsibilities will evolve and, in some instances, be radically modified. How have technological changes affected library staff and structure? How have these changes influenced traditional concepts of library work and librarianship? How have library leaders embraced, modified, and reshaped primary library functions—searching and retrieval, collection access, collection development, and technical services activities—to foster and make the changes work within their environments? Topics for presentation should concern these themes and others that focus on issues central to collections, access, and content and how libraries organize staff to address change:

• Evolving collection assessment techniques
• Role and future of the subject specialist
• New models for scholarly communication
• Challenges arising from the intersection of digital and print collections
• Searching for and retrieving information
• New information containers
• Hiring or training today’s library staff for tomorrow’s library
• Digital collections and today’s academic library user
• Creative service solutions for diverse user communities (cultural, physical, linguistic, intellectual)

THE ENVIRONMENT FOR LIBRARIES
Now, more than ever, we understand how much the external environment in which libraries exist impacts the work that we do and the services and collections we are able to offer.  Understanding and influencing our environment has become crucial to our efforts to continue the work we do and to grow in new directions. One way we influence our external environment is through advocacy, both for resources and for public policy that supports libraries. In terms of employing all the avenues we have for financial support, libraries are engaging a wide range of public relations activities, including fundraising and development, writing grants for external funding, and creating new revenue streams. Beyond resource management, our advocacy efforts also must focus on shaping policies that create the best environment for learning, teaching, and thinking. Advocacy and activism on issues such as privacy and intellectual freedom is as important to the future of our work as advocacy for resources. This track examines how we can influence and effect change in our environment through a wide scope of activities from marketing and public relations, to advocacy, to winning grants, to shaping public policy. All these endeavors help us sculpt a future where academic and research libraries can thrive. Examples of presentation topics might include:

• Advocacy
• External relations and advancement
• Grantwriting, grants, and revenue
• Budgeting and finance
• Influencing or advocating for public policy
• Issues in the campus, statewide, or national political environment affecting libraries
• Creating an environment representative of our values, including intellectual freedom and privacy
• Successful strategies for marketing, publicity, and promotion
• Fundraising
• The librarian’s role in campus development and governance
• Libraries and lobbying
• Legislative issues including the USA PATRIOT Act, copyright and intellectual property law, and legislation affecting issues in higher education

LIBRARIES AND THE IMAGINATION
Imagination and creativity are the most valuable tools we have to approach our challenges and our work. Our experiences with everything from developments in technology to the shifting nature of higher education and the changing needs of students lead us to think creatively about what the library is and what the library can offer in this new world. What do revolutions in technology mean for the library as place? In a wireless world, are our traditional understandings of space still appropriate? What are the needs for the library as a space on campus with regard to the needs for the library to serve as a network of services and content transcending our walls? In addition to thinking about our spaces, those of us working in libraries continue to push the traditional conceptions of what library services are.  Having moved a long way from providing books and a quiet place to study, libraries are offering an incredible breadth of services we can offer the campus based on our core competencies. This track aims to investigate these issues with a creative mind and a forward-thinking perspective. Thinking about strategies for creating the ideal library, proposals may come from a range of topics, which might include:

• Library as place
• Libraries beyond place
• Public services for the 21st-century campus 
• New roles for the library on campus
• Wireless environments and designing new space
• Architecture and usability
• The future of studying, the future of reading
• Creating cultural and learning spaces
• The dynamics of mixing traditional with new and potential library uses
• Books and bytes
• Reaching learners in their environment

TEACHING AND LEARNING
Q: Where do academic librarians need to be in 2007—besides Baltimore? A: In the classroom, be it physical, virtual, or hybrid!  Keeping academic and research libraries vital and relevant in the Google era, and keeping academic librarianship vital and relevant to our user communities transcends merely taking on an instructional role. Our future may well depend on what we enable students to learn, which in turn depends on our ability to integrate ourselves, what we do, and our vast resources into the teaching and learning process. Doing so requires that we create connections and achieve collaboration with individual faculty, departments and colleges, as well as our fellow academic support professionals. It will require that academic librarians ratchet up their knowledge of and expertise in pedagogy and the application of technology for enhanced learning. Programs offered in this track will demonstrate how academic and research librarians can effectively integrate into the teaching and learning process to achieve information literacy for their students, and help their institutions identify, achieve, and assess student-learning outcomes. Possible topics for presentation include:

• The role of instruction in the digital library
• Electronic/online learning
• Integrating libraries into course management systems and portals
• Evaluation and assessment of program effectiveness
• Innovative collaborative ventures with faculty, departments, and colleges
• Learning spaces within and beyond the library
• Information literacy theories and practices
• Effective use of new instructional technology in the classroom
• Instructional design and technology applications
• K-12 outreach and collaboration
• Continuing education for instructional librarians
• Instruction in a Google world
• Social networking and collaborative software for library education
• Teaching and learning geared to the Millennials
• Nimbleness in a rapidly evolving technological world

Program Themes

	Deep Waters (Challenges)		Getting Your Sea Legs (Early Career Issues)
	Hoisting the Sails (Leadership)		Lifelines (Values)
	Passport to Success (Effective Practices)		Rocking the Boat (Innovations)
	Squalls (Controversies)

Return to Call for Presentation home.