ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

BI Liaison Update

Carolyn Kirkendall Project LOEX

It is gratifying at this time to report on a number of potential opportunities for librarians’ involvement with other associations and their meetings.

Valdosta State College recently issued a call for papers for its Fourth Annual Conference on the Improvement of Freshman-Level Instruction. Librarians might want to think about potential appropriate opportunities for involvement at the Fifth Annual meeting. These conferences present suggestions and models for practical classroom techniques to address common teaching problems in English Composition and other courses. Presentations are based on informal papers designed to convey practical information for use in the classroom—papers of abstract theories and philosophies are excluded.

Steve Marquardt, director of libraries at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, contacted the ACRL BI Liaison Project to suggest that a good opportunity to carry our message to another audience of interested classroom faculty might be to look at the regional meetings of the National Association of Foreign Student Advisors. The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire campus foreign student advisor spoke on “Designing a Successful Orientation Program for International Students.” Librarians who have considered involvement in this area are encouraged to contact me.

At the August 1984 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Antonio, a two-hour workshop on Library User Skills has been scheduled. The workshop is free. Leaders include Richard Werking, library director at Trinity University, Vaughan Grisham, sociologist at the University of Mississippi, and Mark Sandler of the University of Michigan’s School of Library Science.

An informal, walk-in information clinic will be held in March at the Academy of Criminal Justice meeting in Chicago. Several criminal justice librarians will be in attendance to offer help on specific research problems that participants might have. Other librarians who have sponsored a similar session at discipline organizations’ conferences should send details to the ACRL BI Liaison Project Program Officer.

“Is the Cost of Your Library Justified?” is the title of a session proposed by our Project for the Denver 1984 meeting of the American Council on Education. Participants include Alan Guskin, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Patricia Breivik, director of Auraria Libraries, and Colonel Carl W. Reddel, professor and head of the Department of History at the United States Air Force Academy. If accepted, the panel will address problems of campuses utilizing library services to their greatest potential. We’re hoping this important opportunity for academic librarians to broaden an awareness of our services will become a reality.

Discussion and cooperation with the American Political Science Association continues. While our Project was not successful in locating a librarian who was willing to prepare a formal paper for the 1984 APSA meeting, we are continuing to investigate the possibility of our Project coordinating a column on using appropriate library materials in the APSA newsletter, News for Teachers of Political Science, with Terry Link of Michigan State University editing the articles. Work also continues in arranging a jointly-sponsored meeting, with Terry and Jane Rosenberg currently investigating this option.

Our Project is not able to repeat last year’s display at the American Association of Higher Education’s annual meeting, as this Idea Exchange exhibit format has been cancelled. Librarians attending the March AAHE meeting from the Chicago area are encouraged to report back on the presentations relating to school/college partnerships, to ways information technology can increase the effectiveness of instruction, and the March 15 Position-Based Roundtable session scheduled for deans and directors of libraries.

Last November’s issue of the English Journal published an announcement that the March 1984 Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, to be held in New York City, includes a number of sessions dealing with the concerns of high school teachers: writing programs for non-traditional students, ways of working with unskilled “basic” writers, and helping students to bridge the gap between high school and college. The announcement says that “the new interest” in fostering cooperation across levels of education to improve teaching and learning makes it important for all teachers to seek opportunities to talk with their counterparts at other levels of education.” Certainly librarians involved in user education could qualify as counterparts! Please let me know if any of you will be attending any of these CCCC sessions.

Joan Lippincott of Cornell University has submitted an application for a sponsored poster session at the 1984 American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. We hope she will be successful!

Whittier College is sponsoring a March workshop: Bibliographic Instruction Based on the Earlham Model: A Workshop for Librarians and Faculty. As the West Coast has had limited opportunity to attend the annual Earlham workshop held in Indiana, this session should be a valuable chance for teaching faculty to hear about the value of BI services from other faculty members.

We are tentatively working with the Society for Applied Anthropology, holding their March meeting in Toronto, to have a librarian participate on the program. Bob Logan from the University of Guelph has agreed to explore opportunities for a presentation.

Our Project has revised information about the forthcoming ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Research Report on academic libraries. The working title now is “Academic Libraries—Today and Tomorrow,” being authored by Barbara Moran of the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill’s School of Library Science.

Chair of the Librarians’ Task Force of the National Women’s Studies Association is Luisa Paster of Princeton University. The 1984 Program Coor-

dinator for the June NWS A meeting at Rutgers University is Françcoise Puniello.

Readers of this column have been enthusiastically contacting me with additional suggestions of articles relating to library instructional services. Some of these papers include:

•“In Search of History: The Bibliographic Databases,” by Joyce Duncan Falk in The History Teacher 15 (August 1982): 523-44.

•“The New Technology for Research in European Women’s History: ‘Online’ Bibliographies,” also by Joyce, in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 9 (1983): 120-33.

•“Team Teaching and Bibliographic Instruction,” by Sheila R. Herstein in The Bookmark 38 (Fall 1979):225-27.

Thanks to your continuing enthusiasm and input, our Project is able to keep abreast of a wide variety of opportunities for librarians to become involved in other organizations’ activity in the field of higher education. It’s become apparent that participation on the state and regional levels of these groups is a most effective means of obtaining a toehold for broader future involvement. While our Project continues to concentrate on the national organizations, we also encourage those of you with BI expertise to consider membership and participation at more local levels.