Monday, September 20, 2010

CALA 21st Century Librarian Seminar Series, Shanxi University III





Many database and ILS vendors have made their products available on mobile devices, such as EBSCOhost, WilsonWeb, IEEEXplore, WorldCat, SerialsSolution Summon, Innovative AirPac, and RefWorks have provided mobile search interface. Libraries try to offer easier access to information at the tip of user's finger. The participants have shown a great interest in the application of mobile technology in libraries.

Many participants commented that their libraries also face the challenge of managing diversified resources and try to keep the balance of print and electronic resources. In the USA, the collection development is based on curriculum and program requirements, as well as user needs. Each library has its own policy to acquire print and electronic resources. There is no standard to evaluate the appropriate proportion of different types of collections. But we noticed that ACRL started to collect data of new e-books and e-theses in digital repository a few years ago. So we suggested that libraries in China should share resources in a certain way to relieve the burden of fund shortness. For instance, the California state universities share database subscription fees among the libraries in the state system with appropriate proportion of money based on the potential users at each school. For small libraries, a consortium will be the group to join and share those skyrocketing journal prices.

Chinese librarians were also eager to know about library fundraising. Most libraries are funded by the central government through their parent institutions. However, most libraries want to explore new projects, for example, digitizing a puppetry collection. A library has to find a way to initiate the project. While library fundraising is very common in the USA, especially for independent schools. Our American colleague gave a great talk on this topic and answered their questions on how to possibly raise money for their projects.

Three-days forum is never enough for those young Chinese professionals to seek solutions for their work or satisfy their thirst for knowledge, but it is a good start. With the development of new technology, scholarly communication finds its way across countries. People learn from each other when they start to communicate, this is what we are doing now and what we will do in the future.

Monday, August 30, 2010

CALA 21st Century Librarian Seminar Series, Shanxi University II










I was so surprised to see many young librarians and library directors in the seminar. It is normal to see many senior librarians in the United States, but, definitely, not in China. Once you were in that atmosphere, you would be deeply moved by those young professionals' curiosities.

Young Chinese librarians are specially interested in emerging technologies, new library services and electronic collection development. Only state university libraries have developed institutional repositories, and also run into the challenge of recruiting high quality contents. Some science librarians offer patent search to their senior undergraduate and graduate students, but not intensively and systematically teach patent search skills. It was unexpected to get a few good questions on patent search, e.g. how to use patent classification to search and how scientific information literacy is taught in the USA.

Currently, there four billions mobile subscribers in the world and two-thirds of them live in the developing countries. China is a huge market for mobile service. Mobile computing is a hot topic, although the service hasn't been offered to students in China yet. My American colleague gave a great overview on the application of mobile computing in American academic libraries. Young Chinese librarians were so excited about the current practices in the USA, such as, provide library services through mobile devices; access e-resources via iphone, smartphone and ipad.

Monday, August 9, 2010

CALA 21st Century Librarian Seminar Series, Shanxi University I




Chinese American Librarians Association and Shanxi University held the seminar at Shanxi University on May 24-26 2010. In an effort to address emerging issues in the 21st century libraries, speakers introduced their best practices and discussed the most appropriate solutions for these issues.

The team was made up of experienced librarians from seven different public and private academic libraries in the United States including the president of American Library Association, Dr. Camila Alire. Topics included current trends in American academic libraries, digital libraries, cooperative collection development, information literacy and electronic resources management. Librarians and library directors from Dalian, Hangzhou, Beijing, Qingdao, Taiyuan etc. participated the forum.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Scholarly Communication

I haven't been in my blog for a while. My travel abroad and several projects have taken most of my time. On one side, I feel so grateful to those who consistently read my blog and give me suggestions; on the other side, I need to figure out how to best communicate with readers and expand what we are interested as an information professional, as well as a librarian.

I will talk about my recent China trip and scholarly communication with young Chinese academic librarians in my next few sessions. Hopefully, my experience can lead us to think about how librarians do things differently in U.S. and China.