ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

In the News

Partnering with other organizations and associations of higher education is an important goal in ACRL’s strategic plan. In this issue, Althea Jenkins, Laverne Simoneaux, and Bill Miller share information about ACRL’s work toward this goal with their respective reports on the meetings of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) and the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE) (page 420).

At CNI, Miller reports that the keynote speaker emphasized how vast an array of information we are creating (Dialog’s databases contain 9.2 terabytes and the Library of Congress contains 20 terabytes worth of books—3,000 when graphics are included), and how it is more important than ever to attempt to organize it since the average human has a memory of about 200 megabytes and can take in about two gigabytes of information during a lifetime. Librarians have an important role to play in helping people organize and use this vast and ever-growing array of information.

Partnering is also important on our own campuses. David Nutty relates the story of how George Washington University’s library and computer center teamed up to quickly turn an underused reading room in the library's basement into an inviting computer lab with 24-hour access to respond to an important campus need (page 414).

Mark McManus also urges librarians to become partners in developing distance education courses in “Neither Pandora nor Cassandra" (page 432). He fears if we don’t become involved, large conglomerates could easily dominate the distance education field, with students paying $20 per course to the university and $400 to a company like Time- Warner.

Finally, have fun planning your next vacation with the help of the myriad Web sites related to travel that are listed in this month’s “Internet Resources” column (page 427).

—Mary Ellen K. Davis Editor-in-chief, medavis@ala.org