Michael Leach, Harvard: Whither the collections? Whither the librarian?
Mood:  caffeinated
Notes by Christina Pikas

Series of questions to the audience:
How many here work with S&T collections?
What % of collection development $ are serials?
What about the staff who had been employed to manage print collections?

To publishers, how do you want librarians to work with you?
Jan- free material needs to be cataloged, too. Role for librarians in financial setting - advocate open access to administrators who can pay for publication
Vivian- librarians discuss impact factor to administration, understand how the publishing industry works and work with publishers

Jan - q to librarians:
ARL used to derive status from the size of the budget -- librarians may not want the financial things taken away because it may impact status, is this an impact to you
a: yes... # of volumes (old school), budget collection vs. salary (ratio so that to lower collection budget but to hire librarians to manage free or less expensive eletronic resources would penalize you)

also to move money to other bugets to support authors publishing in oa from collection development budgets does take power away from the libraries -- we won't be selecting materials and providing access -- there will be universal access and all materials will be selected (maybe instruction)

BK: librarians have a key role in organizing information and new finding tools like folksonomies and other social software... especially with the proliferation of freely available information. Open access is a given. Tools to cross disciplines so physicists can see what biologists are saying... Librarians out of the stacks and into the world.

ML: he still sees a lot of his colleagues tied to their physical collections; but the e resources are so rich, so librarians need to be moving toward.
1) think beyond the traditional collections (even if e)
2) work closely with producers of materials (faculty, post-docs, etc), become a support mechanism for these researchers. Help them submit to journals. Help them submit to archives (oa, ir, etc).
3) teaching and advocating. more than information literacy... scholarly communication at all levels
4) google is a good thing. spend less money on OPACs and spend the money elsewhere
5) libraries as a whole do not put enough money into R&D: user needs analysis, develping user interfaces, marketing... this is left to third parties like vendors. (exception Rochester, has a staff anthropologist?!?) we are too passive, meek


audience:
BC: instruction... historically first course in cheminformatics included using the chemical literature but methods of presentation, ethics, intellectual property, knowledge of the prizes/awards... developing information fluency ...
"pardon me, is my eye hurting the end of your umbrella"
PW: library is not based on the physical space, we need to do value-added service, contextual support could be added to the repository... how about forming the citation for me?
T (from SPIRES): a lot of this is already going on, libraries have a tradition, being physically co-located with the library as a programmer is very important
P L-S: our library has already lost complete control of the budget. they are already there becase that's all they do, they don't manage collections


daser2005
Updated: 12/5 to add tag and picture