Berry Picker

Steve and I decided to have a joint blog so that's where I'll be mostly, blog-wise.

Please go to: Suli, a corner of the world, a span of time.

OK, I give myself an F in MOOCs. At best, I still do a good L (lurker, that is). But I want to make that L into a better librarian instead.

I've been thinking about how to serve up ebooks and ereaders to my library's users so am looking around what other libraries are doing. Somebody brought up a similar question on a LinkedIn group called 'ebooks for libraries' to which I've responded with a few that I've found online.

I remember in 2008 when my book vendor employer did an extensive business analyis of the ebook market in academic libraries and yet has sold their North American operations to a competitor two years later. Five years on and it looks like academic libraries are still exploring the best approaches to purchasing/subscribing and making available these ebooks.The Southeast Florida Library Information Network just held a one-day virtual conference on 'eBooks: Benefits, Challenges, and the Future' - wasn't able to join but am hoping to hear soon from other AMICAL members who were able to.

I'm trying to make global connections to librarians I've worked with or met in the U.S. and other countries and almost all are under pressure to prove the value of libraries in the digital age. It is instructive to hear that one of my mentors during a peek into the MIT and Harvard libraries in 2008 was one of the Harvard librarians who had to take early retirement as part of the Harvard Library's change management or transition to a new model of service as illustrated in this animated story of how Harvard users envision their new library to be. Though my mentor at MIT has moved on to the media/entertainment industry, there seems to be no similar upheaval in staffing at the MIT Libraries.

Well, those are huge, complex, established libraries out there in the developed West. Here, I must see the particular opportunities that I can work with to develop a library that can be what it can be.

Going into the third week of the academic year in this developing university [as in developing country] where I am the librarian...If one were to lay out the functions of an academic library [along a line, in a matrix, in a cycle?], what is the most efficient way of allocating the librarian's time at this point?

As I’m now back working in an academic library, I’ve been following trends in higher education, especially those related to the provision and use of information resources and information technology in support of research, teaching and learning in universities.

This past summer, my attention was especially drawn to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) as it was reported to have been a factor in the ouster (but reinstated later) of Teresa Sullivan, president of the U of Virginia. [See What’s the Matter with MOOCs?]. This tension between business models and pedagogical approaches as new technologies are introduced is not new, of course, and its resolution is not always pretty.