moocs

Campus libraries embrace future with technology


From eBooks, to online card catalogs, to entirely digital collections, research libraries are shifting further and further away from the dusty old buildings many associate with their college years.

libraries
It’s time that librarians took an active role in creating the future of libraries, said Todd Kelley, Vice President for Library & Information Services at Carthage College.

In 2008, Virginia Tech offered just 157,000 eBooks to patrons. Today, that collection has grown to half a million, and the library spends 80 percent of its budget on its digital collection.

If that’s the difference that just five years can make, what will libraries look like in 20 years?

This summer, Carthage College aimed to answer that question with a new combination of technology they called a “course-ference.”

“We started thinking that if things change even as much in the next twenty years as they have in the past twenty for libraries, then holy cats, we’d better stop for a moment and get a bead on it,” said Todd Kelley, vice president for Library & Information Services at Carthage. “Otherwise we’re not going to be prepared.”

The course-ference combined an online course and a conference to discuss the future of libraries. Each week between July 1 and August 19, a new multi-media presentation was posted on the conference website.

Participants were able to watch the panels and then post questions and comments.

The panels featured a variety of guests including Bradford Lee Eden, dean of library services at Valparaiso University; Bryan Alexander, a senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education; Terry Reese, head of digital initiatives at Ohio State University; Suzanne Tapp, executive director of the Teaching, Learning and Professional Development Center at Texas Tech University; and Tim Ryan, director of author services at John Wiley & Sons.

See Page 2 for details on how some libraries are already making drastic changes to the way they work.

The presentations focused on the future of libraries, higher education, technology, student learning, and publishing, with an ultimate goal of looking at where libraries will be in the year 2033. The course-ference was powered by Jenzabar eLearning and Learning Objects.

More than 250 people from three continents participated in the course-ference.

“Our thinking of doing it this way was ‘let’s invent something fun, new, and wonderful as a way to think about what’s wonderful, new, and fun when it comes to next generation libraries,’” Kelley said.

Some universities have decided to get a jump start on building the “library of the future.” Marywood University in Scranton, Penn., obtained a $4 million grant this month from the Scranton Redevelopment Authority to help fund a $35 million “Learning Commons.”

The library won’t have typical stacks of books, the Scranton Times-Tribune reported, but an automated storage and retrieval a system in the center of the building and the ground level.

Kelley said the point of Carthage’s conference, however, was not so much to discuss libraries as buildings, but libraries as organizations. Though the college is small and hadn’t tackled a library event of this size before, Kelley said he and his staff think the effort was well-worth the trouble.

“All the changes like massive open online courses (MOOC), and challenges like globalization, access, and cost control, it seemed like the time to do something, rather than being passive,” he said. “Let’s take an active role in creating our futures instead of waiting on someone else to do it.”

Follow Jake New on Twitter at @eCN_Jake.

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