ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

BI liaison project update

By Carolyn Kirkendall Project LOEX Eastern Michigan University

This article reports the last of my activity as Program Officer for the Bibliographic Instruction Liaison Project while under contract with ACRL. At the ACRL Board of Directors meeting in Dallas during Annual Conference in June, the Board “instructed the ACRL staff to explore ways to provide office support for the activities outlined in the BILP Advisory Committee Report.” Sandy Whiteley will serve in that capacity on the ACRL staff.

This report included a number of recommendations on continuing some of the BI Liaison Project activities developed during the past few years. These include continuing the professional association liaison contacts, maintaining files of librarians and speakers, continuing the promotional activity for contact with other associations in higher education, investigating the possibility of creating a quality exhibit, and reviewing the professional literature to identify opportunities for ACRL and other associations to work together. Since the response to continuing requests in this column for assistance and information has been most gratifying, and since the potential for additional liaison interest exists, it’s good news to hear that the experimental efforts and initial attempts at establishing contacts with other associations will continue.

Recent publications

Articles of interest to academic librarians continue to be published in the professional literature of higher education and are good sources to emphasize when contacting teaching faculty in the appropriate disciplines. Some of these include:

Bruce E. Fleury, “Lectures, Textbooks and the College Librarian,” Improving College & University Teaching 32 (Spring 1984)-.103-106.

Thomas W. Conkling, “On-line Information Resources in Heat Transfer Engineering,” Heat Transfer Engineering 4 (April-June 1983):54-58.

Kathleen A. Hansen and Jean Ward, “Journalism and Library Research: Combining Methodologies in a New Search Model,” Research Strategies 1 (Fall 1983): 167-75.

Joyce C. Leopprich and Julie L. Smith, “Can Computers Solve Nursing Information’s Overload?” Imprint 30 (January 1984):48-58.

See these articles on “Historians and Using Tomorrow’s Research Library: Research Teaching and Training,” in The History Teacher 17 (May 1984):385-44:

Melvin J. Tucker, “Introduction.”

Jane A. Rosenberg, “New Ways to Find Books: Searching, Locating and Information Delivery.”

Robert P. Swierenga, “Bibliographic Instruction in Historical Methods Courses: Kent State University.”

Charles D’Aniello, “An Historical Bibliography and Methods Course: The SUNY at Buffalo Experience.”

Charles D’Aniello, “A Basic Bibliography of Readings and Course Materials for Bibliographic Instruction in Undergraduate and Graduate History Programs.”

See also the annual series of soft-cover monographs of the collected best papers on selected issues from AAHE. The 1983-84 Current Issues in Higher Education series includes Colleges Enter the Information Society, with articles by Russell Edgerton, Louis Robinson, George Gerner, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Patricia Battin, and Steven Muller.

ACRL exhibit

Displays from our RI Liaison Project were used at the Western Division meeting of te American Association for the Advancement of Science, at the National Women’s Studies Association conference, and for a faculty colloquium at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. In addition, our display and sample packets were exhibited in Dallas at the annual ALA conference. Thanks to all of you who volunteered and staffed the exhibit!

Liaison contacts and presentations

Connie Miller of the University of Illinois at Chicago is the new chair of the Librarians’ Task Force of the National Women’s Studies Association. At this summer’s NWS A conference, Ruth Dickstein of the University of Arizona participated on a panel with three teaching faculty on the role of the librarian in the curriculum integration project on mainstreaming women’s studies.

Mary Reichel at Georgia State University presented a paper, “The Impact of Online Bibliographic Databases on Research in International Studies,” at the Spring 1984 convention of the International Studies Association in Atlanta.

Arizona State University Library conducted a Conference on Library Instruction for Faculty and Graduate Students on their campus, sponsored by the Arizona Chapter of ACRL and the ALS A College and University Division. The librarians who attended learned techniques for developing programs of cooperation with teaching faculty.

The annual Third World Studies Conference held in Omaha, Nebraska, offers an excellent opportunity for librarian participation, according to Carole Larson at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, who has chaired a panel on research and teaching in the past. Details for participation are available from ACRL.

The Nursing Information Consortium of Orange County, California (NICOC), is an association of libraries and voluntary agencies whose goals are to acquire and promote access to nursing-related library materials and to provide library education programs for the nurses of Orange County. A NICOC brochure is on file at ACRL.

The 25th Annual Association for Institutional Research Forum will be held in Portland, Oregon, April 28-May 1, 1985. The theme is “Promoting Excellence through Information and Technology.” Information on calls for contributed papers, panels, demonstrations, and workshops for the Forum are also on file at ACRL for those interested.

In June a group of overseas counselors, supported by the National Association for Foreign Student Affairs and the National Liaison Committee on Foreign Students Admissions (NAFSA), visited the University of California at Davis, and the Library was asked to participate in the one-day orientation. Irene Hoffman reports that a comprehensive orientation program for international students at Davis has been implemented. The program is designed to promote an understanding of the problems of the international student, to share this understanding with library staff and public service personnel, to teach the international student how to make better use of the library and to teach library personnel how better to assist the international student.

Liaison with associations dealing with international students has been an area in which several librarians have reported involvement. These contacts would also like to hear from others who are interested in instruction for library users from foreign countries. They are Melba Jesudason, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Stephanie Perrin, Appalachian State University; and Molly Mahony, University of Michigan.

The Chemical Information Division of the American Chemical Society established an Education Committee last year to help chemistry departments and academic librarians improve their information programs, aid industrial chemical information specialists in their efforts to conduct instruction programs, and promote continuing education activities. At the August ACS conference in Philadelphia the Division of Chemical Information’s Symposium on “Individual Computer Searching by Academic Chemists” included participation by Arleen N. Somerville at the University of Rochester, GaryD. Wiggins at Indiana University, Joan Lippincott of Cornell University, and two faculty members, Jerry A. Jenkins from Otterbein College, and Robert Harmon from Eastern Michigan University.

Kathleen Hansen from the University of Minnesota recently presented a program on “Scenarios On Line: Computer Games for Teaching Information Strategies” at the Florida conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications.

And finally, Susan Swords Steffen from St. Xavier College Library in Chicago is interested in hearing from any librarians who are involved with the College Theology Society.

Press kits

The supply of press kits designed and published by our project has been exhausted. Plans to reprint the packets are in the works and details will be announced. Originally designed to distribute to association offices, these kits have proven popular with librarians who use the packets on their own campuses. Over 400 press kits have been sold to date.

A word of thanks

Serving as the ACRL BI Liaison Project program officer has been a rewarding yet frustrating experience. There seems to be much potential in continuing professional liaisons on an ongoing and intensive basis to form cooperative friendships. Communicating activities of the project through this column has proved to be the best way for librarians to learn about potentials for involvement, and your response to requests for information and volunteers is much appreciated. There has not been time to communicate personally with all the individual contact names that our project has collected, but as the liaison emphasis grows a followup can be made.

It seems that the most direct route for librarians to participate on the programs of other professional associations in higher education is the logical one of starting at the local, state, and regional levels. Librarians who have taken membership in these associations, who have volunteered to serve on committees relating to teaching and research, who suggest ideas for joint panels and presentations and who work on their local campuses with teaching faculty to promote the academic library’s rcle in assisting the teaching/learning process, are providing the kinds of liaisons necessary for success with this kind of project. It has been much more difficult to try to place librarians as speakers on tth national level at other organizations’ conference Probably the most visible means toward havh teaching faculty develop an awareness of the brary’s potential is for them to read about our pr grams in the professional literature of higher ed cation. Therefore, our project continues encourage librarians to prepare articles for pub cation outside the library field.

Many opportunities exist for those libraria who realize that talking to each other about vit library services is not enough. Thanks to the cont butions and support from so many of you involve in our BI Liaison Project, promotion of our missi‹ has been firmly established.