For immediate release:
January 14, 2008
For more information, contact:
Crit Stuart
Association of Research Libraries
202-296-2296
crit@arl.org
Washington DC—Over 100 librarians, administrators, faculty, and others concerned about graduate education participated in the October 2007 forum “Enhancing Graduate Education: A Fresh Look at Library Engagement.” Sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the event promoted engagement in conceptualizing the library’s evolving role in graduate education, and it encouraged academic libraries to consider new ways of partnering with the broader graduate-studies community. To extend the reach of this important discussion, ARL has published a report on the forum by Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI Communications Coordinator.
Goldenberg-Hart captures the overall theme of the forum when she notes, “The library’s capacity to meet the challenge of continuously changing research priorities and needs will…support and shape the nature of scholarship through the 21st century.” The report goes on to cover each of the four distinct elements of the forum:
In a joint keynote, Suzanne Ortega, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School at University of Washington, and Carol Lynch, Senior Scholar in Residence and Director of the Professional Science Master’s Initiative at the Council of Graduate Schools, provided an overview of the current state of graduate education and highlighted recommendations from the Council of Graduate Schools 2007 report, Graduate Education: The Backbone of American Competitiveness and Innovation.
Library staff from University of Minnesota, New York University, and University of Washington discussed field studies they have conducted to examine the academic and research behaviors of graduate students. Goldenberg-Hart notes that the three different studies shared some strikingly similar findings.
Over lunch, three graduate students spoke about their library use. They all expressed heavy reliance on library or archival resources (including those outside of their home institutions), and on the expertise provided by librarians or archivists. Their experiences of the library as place, and the role that place played in their work, varied widely.
The afternoon consisted of three concurrent breakout sessions on Spaces & Communities of Scholars, Discovery & Access, and Interdisciplinarity. These sessions allowed participants to more deeply explore the findings of the field studies and to imagine implications for enhancing library space, services, and resources for graduate students.
The report concludes by summarizing the forum wrap-up provided by CNI Associate Executive Director Joan Lippincott, who emphasized that the library’s role is more than “discovery and access; we need to add production to the suite of services, and to our conceptual model of what the library is about,” to help support the new, iterative process in which users work. Students need the tools, software, equipment, and space to create new scholarship, and they need expert staff to help them use information resources and services effectively.
See the ARL Web site for a preprint version of the report, Diane Goldenberg-Hart, “Enhancing Graduate Education: A Fresh Look at Library Engagement,” ARL: A Bimonthly Report, no. 256 (February 2008): 1–8, http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/arl-br-256-grad.pdf. The final version will be in print and on the Web in late January.
The forum proceedings are also available on the ARL Web site at http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/fallforumproceedings/forum07proceedings.shtml.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 123 research libraries in North America. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is located on the Web at http://www.arl.org/.
The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization to promote the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. Some 200 institutions representing higher education, publishing, network and telecommunications, information technology, government agencies, foundations, and libraries and library organizations make up CNI’s members. The Coalition is sponsored by ARL and EDUCAUSE. CNI is located on the Web at http://www.cni.org/.