The second day of the joint conference between the American Library Association (ALA) and Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) opened with a keynote address by James Neal, University Librarian Emeritus, Columbia University, New York, who outlined the issues and future of academic libraries as he envisioned it.Neal has served as the Vice President for Information Services providing leadership for a system of twenty-two libraries. His numerous awards include the ACRL ‘Academic Librarian of the Year’ and ALA’s Lippincott Award for "distinguished service to the profession of librarianship."He said that it was very difficult to predict how important libraries would be to academic institutions in five or ten years. Particularly as the role of the library and librarian had already changed so much in past years and that this period of transition was ongoing.
However, he said, “We need to radicalize the way we do things. All libraries doing everything in exactly the same way everywhere won’t serve our academic institutions moving forward in a dramatically changing landscape. There are constant new trends we need to stay ahead of and standardization across every library is not the best way to do this.” Neal added that digital materials were a very important factor for libraries moving forward and as curators of digital material, librarians had a responsibility to identify, locate and collect relevant digital resources for their faculty and staff. “Who is taking care of the tens of thousands e-books published every year, or the hundreds of thousands self-published books? We need to find out if they are worthy and should be collected as a resource. When our researchers publish work citing several digital resources and websites, who is ensuring these can be found years later, because if it can’t be located this causes our researchers’ work to be questioned. Think about the electronic environment because you cannot organize what you have not collected. There is a chaos in this digital sphere and it is librarians who need organize it.” Neal also said that the perception of librarians needs to change to that of partners in the new digital arena that learning is taking place in.
Working closely with faculty to improve the library service was the subject of one of three lectures taking place in the morning. In the “Liaison Librarian Program – Meeting Faculty Needs?” session, Daphne Flanagan, the American University of Sharjah University Librarian outlined a collaborative project which saw library staff working closely with faculty to assess their needs. “Each librarian was asked to identity faculty members to liaise with and see how we could support them and the faculty member could suggest titles or ask for certain resources. We shared regular emails, had meetings and provided a newsletter. In 2010 we surveyed how this was working and how else we could help faculty, explaining the purpose was to improve library resources and to help them as a teacher and a researcher.” said Flanagan.
“The survey results found that faculty felt under pressure to produce research; they wanted to produce locally focused research; they preferred to use resources they had used in past; they knew exactly what resources they needed; they used a lot of their own resources and they were largely divided on the use e-book and print books.” Flanagan said this project helped them to provide for faculty better, improve library/faculty relations and was modeled on programs used in New York at the time. Another session called “Linked Data Practices to Improve Resource Discoverability” took place in parallel to this session and looked at how linked data practices have helped improve discoverability and access. Magda El-Sherbini, head of The Ohio State University Libraries, Collection Description and Access Department, Columbus, Ohio explained how standardizing subject headings in different languages such as Arabic and Japanese helps to store, identify and find resources.
The third parallel session looked at “Digital Literacy Teachers” and demonstrated how to teach students to become information literate in a world flooded with information, presented by Kathy Burnette, Media Center Director at The Stanley Clark School, South Bend, Indiana who suggested to delegates technology tools to help students navigate the data stream.Approximately 330 librarians from 18 countries were hosted at the conference taking place alongside the Sharjah International Book Fair 2015 with expert speakers from libraries across the globe discussing concepts such as Big Data, Mobile Library, libraries as a cultural hub, linked data practices, digital literacy and LIS development in the region at different sessions during the conference. For more information visit www.sharjahbookfair.com.