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April 22, 2008
ALA's Core Competencies of Librarianship
Brian Kenney, at School Library Journal, has an editorial about ALA's Core Competencies of Librarianship, a document prepared by ALA's Presidential Task Force on Library Education. Apparently the guidelines were presented at a public meeting but the document doesn't appear to be widely available. I've searched for it, to no avail--I hope effective searching isn't one of the core competencies, otherwise my librarian credentials might be stripped from me. If you find a copy of the competencies, please share them. In the meantime, here's a copy of a draft statement of core competencies from July, 2005.
Posted by kfolger at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)
Upcoming Coffee Breaks
For those of you who like to plan ahead, here are the dates for the upcoming Forum Coffee Breaks:
Monday, May 12 @ 9am
Wednesday, May 14 @ 2pm
Friday, June 13 @ 9am
Monday, June 16 @ 3pm
All the coffees will be at Beanster's in the Michigan League.
Posted by kfolger at 11:14 PM | Comments (0)
April 07, 2008
Coffee Talk: Diversifying the Profession
An interesting topic that came up at last Friday's coffee break was the issue of diversity in the library profession. At the last Senior Managers' meeting there was a presentation from a UM committee called STRIDE, Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence, on faculty recruiting. Somebody asked about the presentation, which prompted a discussion about whether there were things we could do differently to improve diversity within the Library.
Are we doing all we can to recruit librarians of color?
Where do we advertise, do we send recruiters to relevant conferences, are we actively inviting candidates to apply for positions?
It was mentioned that one of the difficulties in hiring librarians of color is the relatively small number there are and, if we want a more diverse profession, library schools need to do a better job of recruiting diverse candidates.
Is librarianship as a profession appealing to people of color? Why or why not?
ALA has some statistics on credentialed librarians by race and ethnicity on its website.
88.3% of librarians are white, 4.8% are African-American, 3.3% are Asian/Pacific Islanders, 0.2% are Native American, 0.7% are two or more races, and 2.7% are Latino.
I don't remember what the percentages are at UM, I'll check with HR to get the numbers, but I do remember that Paul mentioned at the last Library Update that are numbers have been going down over the last few years.
What could we be doing differently to attract and retain more librarians of color, any suggestions?
Posted by kfolger at 11:23 PM | Comments (2)
Coffee Talk: POPLINE and Abortion
At the coffee break on Friday, the controversy over the POPLINE database blocking keyword searching of the term "abortion" was much on the minds of a couple of people in attendance. I was struck by a couple of things during the discussion: 1)those of us who were aware of the controversy had absolutely no idea what to do with our outrage, and 2) many of the posts on the subject on library blogs briefly expressed outrage but mainly focused on explaining how it was possible to work around the block. That was quite a contrast to Paul Courant's reaction. He wanted to immediately call the NY Times to shine light on the situation. I wonder if the contrasting reactions reflect some fundamental difference between how librarians and non-librarians think. There are some pretty crummy interfaces in the library world and, while we may complain or make suggestions for improvements, overall librarians tend to accept what we're offered and just figure out what we need to do to make it work. Some of us even take a perverse pride in our ability to create intricate search strategies. I still miss fashioning nested boolean searches in classic MIRLYN--search boxes are for lightweights ;-)
I've been following some of the discussion that David Fulmer and Shevon Desai have had as part of the SkillShare program. Seeing David's reactions to what are fairly typical reference interactions has been eye-opening. At the desk, we get so used to hitting roadblocks and figuring out ways around them, it's weird and kind of embarassing to see them described from a more novice perspective. When you're behind the desk, when an MGetIt link doesn't work, you try another one or figure out another way to determine whether we have an item or not. Maybe it's time we stopped being so accepting when our systems fail us.
Posted by kfolger at 10:10 PM | Comments (4)