GENERAL NEWS: ALISE, South Carolina Book Festival, 5 Things to Do

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

You would have been so proud to see us at ALISE. It was like the conference was designed just for us! Attached is a list of faculty presentations that just wowed everyone. In addition, for the ALA Midwinter meeting Drs. Donna Shannon, Virginia Wallace and Nancy Zimmerman all had governance and leadership roles. We rock!

The major changes proposed to the ALA COA standards are mostly about measurement and semantics. I don't think there is anything substantive to worry about. Of course, we begin our accreditation push again this fall with our visit coming in fall 2009. To help with the process, our National Advisory Council completed their contributions to our school's working plan last Friday at a great meeting. I will take the suggestions for each standard now and add objectives and budget implications then I'll send it back for their approval. When I have the final okay, we'll post the plan to the website and you all can make suggestions and revisions.

NEWBERY & CALDECOTT WINNERS: The writer of a novel about a 10-year-old girl named Lucky who lives in the California desert with her French guardian and the illustrator of a story about the images in a magical camera that washes up on a beach were named respective winners of the ALA’s Newbery and Caldecott medals honoring children’s literature. Susan Patron earned the John Newbery Medal for _The Higher Power of Lucky_, published by Atheneum. David Wiesner took the Randolph Caldecott prize for his masterful watercolors and ingeniously layered marinescapes in _Flotsam_, published by Clarion Books.

I'll be in Virginia recruiting the end of this week and I'm really looking forward to meeting all the good people there. Please don't let it snow. . .

Mark your calendars for February 23 for the start of the South Carolina Book Festival www.scbookfestival.org
and Ms. Helen Fellers assures me that it is the best in the world!

I still haven't see any essays on how libraries transform lives so will give it up for now but I'll be back to it and checking to see if you have posted to the blog! http://fridaymatters.blogspot.com but in the meantime below are 5 things to read, or do or act upon:

1. Toobin, Jeffrey. Google's Moon Shot: The quest for the universal library. The New Yorker. February 5, 2007. Good history of Google and some of the science behind the scanning project. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070205fa_fact_toobin

2. Today's leaders juggle e-mails, blogs and integrity [CNN]. "Leaders don't just talk . . .They go out and take action." http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/07/pysk.overview/index.html

3. Bibliomania - books as therapy [DailyBulletin.com] * Dr. Walling will like this one!
http://www.dailybulletin.com/entertainment/ci_5101280

4. During the Fall 2006 Dr. John Richardson’s UCLA DIS 245 "Information Access" class created an
Encyclopedia of Reference Services at http://ucla245.pbwiki.com/ quoting: "Our overarching mission was to establish generally accepted referenceprinciples (GARP). Ideally, these pages provide a sense of evidence and showa critical spirit of inquiry. Our audience extends to anyone interested in reference services in the United States and includes practitioners as well as researchers, but especially beginning graduate students in information studies programs who are interested in the research front in this field." What do you think?

5. Libraries struggle with child overload [The Monitor]
http://www.themonitor.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&
StoryID=17517&Section=Local


always yours,

sam

GENERAL NEWS: Happy New Year, ALA, Donations

Happy New Year Dear Friends and Colleagues,

2007! Here we come! This is our year for all things bright and
beautiful at SLIS. We have our new programs coming online but we also
have two great advisory boards to help us develop a working plan for our
school and a diversity plan. Both our National Advisory Council and the
African American Leadership Group will be meeting in the next month to
continue their work and I look forward to their advise and support.

I will be in Seattle next week for the Association of Library and
Information Science Education meeting. Dean Bierbauer will also be
there on Monday and Tuesday. In addition to the Deans and Directors
meeting, there will be an education forum to discuss the proposed
changes to the ALA Standards for Accreditation. The proposed standards
are at http://www.ala.org/ala/accreditation/accredstandards/index.htm
and I encourage you to take a look. You can send your thoughts and
concerns directly to me or to the email link on the webpage. For
background reading I suggest the following article about the changing
roles of librarians
http://www.careerjournal.com/salaryhiring/industries/librarians/20070103-carmichael.html


These are interesting times for us. On one day I see a link at US News
and World Report saying that librarianship and information science are
two of the "hot" careers in 2007 and then I read about libraries closing
or weeding collections to leave only popular fiction or being unable to
provide services for the throng of after-school children. So, the
revisions of the standards that govern our professional education and
produce tomorrow's best and brightest should be of interest to us all.
I will let you know what I learn at ALISE.

Did you write your essay on how libraries transform lives over the
holidays? ;-} You can post them on the blog at
http://fridaymatters.blogspot.com. I will return to your five things
to think about next update.

In the meantime, remember us as you plan your giving and donations for
the year. We have several scholarships that often mean the difference
in a student being able to start or finish their degrees(
http://www.libsci.sc.edu/program/handbook/scholarshipslist.htm ) and
you can make your gift online at
https://giftsonline.sc.edu/contribute.asp. Thank you to all of you
that have given your help and support over the years. We couldn't be the
best without you!

yours,

sam