ACRL College & Research Libraries News

Association of College & Research Libraries

Continuing education update

By James W. Hart Instruction Librarian University of Cincinnati

During 1983 librarians from across the United States—New England to Hawaii—were able to attend the ACRL Bibliographic Instruction Section’s continuing education workshops in their own states or regions. Eight state and regional library associations won grants of $625 each from the ACRL/BIS Continuing Education Committee to help pay workshop expenses. The Committee itself had won the money the previous year in the J. Morris Jones World Book Encyclopedia ALA Goals Award competition.

The BIS Continuing Education Committee divided the $5,000 award into eight equal grants and held its own contest. Forty library associations from 36 states applied for the grants. The applications were judged on the evidence of need for the workshops and geographic distribution. The Committee wanted to enable those people who had been least able to attend a national ALA conference to reach a workshop locally. The winners, titles of the workshops, and the workshop leaders were as follows:

•ACRL New England Chapter, “Can Bibliographic Instruction Teach Students to Think?”, Cerise Oberman and Mark Schlesinger.

•District of Columbia Library Association and Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area, “Library Instruction for Faculty and Graduate Students,” Anne Lipow.

•Tennessee Library Association, “Teaching Librarians to Teach,” Joan Ormondroyd.

•Kentucky Library Association and the KLA Library Instruction Roundtable, “Teaching Librarians to Teach,” Joan Ormondroyd.

•Arizona State Library Association, “Conceptual Frameworks for Bibliographic Instruction,” Mary Reichel, Mary Ann Ramey, Gemma DeVinney.

•New Mexico Library Association, “Teaching Librarians to Teach,” Joan Ormondroyd.

•Pacific Northwest Library Association, “The One Hour Stand,” Sharon Hogan, Anne Beaubien, Mary George.

•Hawaii Library Association, “Library Instruction for Faculty and Graduate Students,” Anne Lipow.

The Committee provided the $625 grants, descriptions of available workshops, publicity at the national level for the workshops, and a liaison to assist with the planning for each workshop. Host library associations were responsible for publicity at the local or regional level, any extra funds needed to cover workshop expenses, local arrangements for the workshops, and an evaluation report for their workshop. Now that all the workshops have been completed, the last task left is for the Committee to complete a final evaluation report for the ALA Goal Awards Committee.

Evaluations showed that the workshops were very successful. Attendance ranged from 15 to 100. One workshop drew 11 attendees from neighboring states. Based on the evaluations received to date, at least 5 of the workshops were considered to have met their stated objectives completely by over 75% of those who responded to the evaluation questionnaire. Workshop leaders were rated equally highly. In fact the most common response on evaluations applauded the high quality of the presentations and commented that the information presented was new and professionally stimulating.

The project as a whole was equally successful. Several state associations that did not win grants decided to pay for an entire workshop themselves, thus further extending the service to the membership and impact of the grant. The grants paid 24 % -84 % of the total expenses of each workshop and an average of 55 % of the expenses of all the workshops. The clearest expression of the value of this project comes from the final report of the New Mexico Library Association: “An ambitious undertaking. . .involving such high speaker costs.. .would not have been attempted without ALA financial assistance…. We hope that the Bibliographic Instruction Section will find justification in the evaluation reports from all the grant recipients to enable this grant program to be repeated.”