The Library at the Heart of the

Academy

Gary E. StrongUniversity LibrarianUCLALos Angeles, California USA

My Agenda

•UC and UCLA and its Library•What’s different about how we work•Creating social interaction with

information•Using technology to reach students/users•New applications to think about•The Library as Partner/Collaborator

The University of California

•Ten campuses•222,000 students•At UCLA

▫26,536 Undergraduates▫12,716 graduate and professional▫College of Letters and Sciences and 11

professional schools▫4,016 teaching faculty▫118 undergraduate and 200 graduate

degrees

UCLA Latin American Institute

•Interdepartmental degrees•Center for Argentina, Chile & Southern

Core•Center for Brazilian Studies•Center for Mexican Studies•Cuba and Caribbean Group

•http://www.international.ucla.edu/lai/

“To enter a library, no matter its kind or size, is to enter the heart of a whirlwind.”

--Lawrence Clark PowellUCLA Librarian, 1944-1961

The UCLA Library•One of the top ten research libraries in

North America•9 million volumes•40,000 current serial titles (8,217 electronic)•283,113 electronic resources•4 million visitors each year•4.4 million virtual visits to Library web pages•25,000 participants in instructional

programs•85 librarians, 246 staff, 427 student workers

The Library Strategic Plan

•Building and Enhancing Research Collections

•Enhancing Services •Focusing on Information Literacy •Targeting the Library as a Physical Place

Strategies

•Transform the Collection •Collaborate on Scholarly Publishing •Make Specialized Collections Accessible •Enrich Services •Improve Research Skills •Enhance Learning Spaces•Build a sustainable organization•Develop a library research agenda

A University in Transition

•Academic and Administrative Restructuring•The Library in Transition

▫Support traditional roles and services▫Engage in new partnerships that meet

students and faculty needs•Technology Challenges•The Student of this Generation

▫Undergraduate initiatives▫Preparing the next generation of faculty and

researchers

Relevancy

“Tomorrow's potential readers are using the Web in ways we can hardly imagine, and if we want to remain significant for them, we need to understand how. “ - Francis Pisani

What is different?

• Content focus• Tool based• Librarian led• Librarian controlled• Lecture style• Librarian focus• Discrete skills

• Learner focus• Concept based• Learner led• Collaborative• Interactive delivery• Information universe• Transferable and

flexible

What is different?

• Stand alone, compartmentalized

• Moment in Time

• Single contact with students

• Faculty/librarian convenience

• Integrated and relevant

• Embedded in the learning process

• Articulated throughout the curriculum

• Learner can access at time of need

Are your students able to:

• Articulate a research question and identify the types of information needed to investigate it?

• Locate scholarly sources of information instead of relying solely on Google results?

• Evaluate the information they find, whatever its source?

• Properly cite and attribute the information they use?

Librarians help by:

• Providing research instruction tailored to course topics and goals.

• Creating resource Web pages customized for course content.

• Collaborating with faculty to develop information-rich assignments.

• Teaching students about plagiarism and information ethics.

• Customizing and teaching research and information literacy courses to students.

Creating Social Interactions with Information

Where is the best seat in a UCLA Classroom?

• Front and center, where the professor can see you

• The acoustic sweet spot, where your digital recorder can pick-up the lecture

• The distant corner with the broken chair where the wireless Internet signal is the strongest

Would you be shocked to learn that many students:

• Think it is appropriate to put emoticons in essays. :-o

• Don’t know how 2 write w/o using texting shortcuts.

• Have never used a library for books. Ever

Gary Small, a psychologist and author as well as an academic,

worries that:

• Gen Y-the generation that never knew life without the Internet—is losing the ability to empathize and socialize.

• The instant gratification of multitasking—a new tweet, a blog update, a fresh search result—could impair Gen Y’s ability to complete projects that involve delayed gratification.

And that …

• The negative effects of Twittering, Googling and gaming will begin inspiring public health laws like the recent “no texting while driving” regulations.

Technologies

• Are changing the way organizations operate and communicate.

• May add efficiency and productivity to an organizations’ strategies, processes, workflows, and reward systems for people

Underpinning Forces

• Convergence between the web and mobile technologies

• Virtualized social influence and experience– Enhanced interaction and participation– Harnessing collective intelligence– Transparent communication

Vision for the Next Generation Web

“…Highly interactive, functionally rich, participatory, personalized, and social site for better facilitation of the discovery and delivery of the Library’s rich collections and services, through which promotes collective learning and mass collaboration between the Library and its users…”

Designing the Library’s Next Generation Website

• Take the role of the positive, power participator and influencer on the social web.

• Must focus on the users’ environment and capabilities rather than those of the Library.

• Must deliver user experience by combining style, function, web standards in the paradigm of Web 2.0 and eLearning 2.0 and beyond.

User Expectation and Experience

• Media, format and process agnostic

• Ubiquitous access and delivery

• User participation and contribution

• Richer media for learning and communication

• Productive user interface

Facebook “The Reveal” Factor

Visualization Techniques

Twitter“The Constant Reveal”

What Should We Design?

• Think about user-centered design– Tap into the perceptual expectations of the

audience– Understand the factors driving information

consumption for this audience– Determine how the library fits into their

lifestyle and needs

eLearning Profile

• The largest user population is the Undergraduate student

• They are time-crunched and gravitate toward efficient models an intuitive processes

• Multi-task driven and use tools and interfaces that are in time with this style of working and learning

eLearning Profile

• They are device centered and have expectations of portable formats and information access for an “immediacy of ideas”

• “Identity is mobile”

• Social online nature and expectation of social interaction, participation and seeing what others are doing online.

Virtual Workspace Oriented

• Students are used to having information available to consume, develop, or remix anywhere and within device range

• They are constantly involved with interfaces

• We need to understand this visual interaction

• They are “digital natives”

The digital native

• Characterized by a very fast information injest

• More intuitive than method driven

• Have grown up with online access

They are in “blink” mode

• Instant qualitative decision-making without much analytical processing

• Can we format concepts that students instantly grasp?

• “Engage me and don’t make me think”

• On the web students intuit information

Engagement Centered

• Learning as a result rather than an action

• Transparency of the interface (don’t make me think)

• Learner has needs met before they realize they even have a need

Biggest successes should be transparent

• library is the “middle-ware” in elearning equation—the means to an end

• Implicit pedagogy – not formalized training

Interactive Map Applications

Cell Phone Applications

SMS and Data Web Services Models

Cell Phone Applications

Other Cell Applications

* SMS Location/Call# from Online Catalog

* Simple Laptop Checkout Renewal

New Interfacesfor Article and Catalog Search

New Interfacesfor Image Navigation

“We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed; it is the same as it has always been since Callimachus administered the great library in Alexandria.”

-- Lawrence Clark Powell

Why the Library in the Future?

•Neutral•Collection•Programs•Social networking•Partnerships and collaborations•The library as place

C o l l a b o r a t i o n

t r an spar en cy Consumption

Production

Interaction Visualization

S ocial reveal Discovery

creativ ity

intrigue

Questions