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Professional Development Week

The Committee on Professional Development’s seventh annual Professional Development Week (PDW), held on May 23, 25, and 26, showcased a slate of engaging presentations on the research and projects of several CUL staff.

The changing realities of libraries, staffing, and organization were major themes this year. On the micro level, in their presentation on creating an integrated public service desk, staff from the Engineering Library (Jill Powell, Zsuzsa Koltay, and Mary Patterson) and Linda Bryan discussed the challenges of changing service models and team dynamics and the facilitation that Human Resources can provide. At the macro level, Karen Calhoun advocated for a broad and visionary conception of twenty-first-century librarianship, challenging us to reconsider our traditional boundaries and mindsets through creative and collaborative approaches such as those used in the Technical Services reintegration process.

Other presenters asked how we as individual librarians can chart our own changing courses. Thad Dickinson’s research on new (and not-so-new) librarians’ “five-year itch” to change roles and institutions sparked lively discussion on the differences and similarities between generations of librarians and the need for increased job opportunities and flexibility at all levels. David Corson, Tony Cosgrave, Anne Kenney, Deb Lamb-Deans, and Susan Markowitz helped allay anxieties and passed on useful advice about the promotion process.

In the digital realm, change and collaboration were also watchwords. In two presentations, Digital Consulting and Production Services (DCAPS) members Oya Rieger, Marcy Rosenkrantz, Marty Kurth, David Ruddy, Fiona Patrick, and Danielle Mericle explained the work and collaborative staffing model of their “virtual” department, which includes project teams from core interdisciplinary service areas working with a wide variety of partners. Whether it’s digitizing text and creating images, metadata, Web sites and platforms for sites like the Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library (KMODDL) or the journal Indonesia, or moving Professor Billie Jean Isbell’s forty-year collection of slides on Peru from her barn to a rich online visual collection through the Faculty Grants program, DCAPS projects are moving toward a sustainable and flexible program model. In a similar manner, Anne Kenney and Nancy McGovern’s research charted the stages of CUL’s pioneering and rapidly institutionalizing digital preservation program in their “five stages” model and pointed to growing national and international collaboration.

Other areas of the library are also changing and reaching out to the wider world. Blaine Friedlander and Simeon Moss, from the reorganized university Press Relations office, and Mary Beth Bunge, of the new Library Communications office, explained how the communications teams can help us tell our stories, whether they’re about ivory-billed woodpeckers or citation studies. Kari Smith took the story of the Rare and Manuscript Collections out to the community and brought a taste of the community (locally made grape juice) back to the library during her talk about her survey of local winemakers and grape growers in her records survey for the Eastern Wine and Grape Archive.

For those who missed the sessions, notes and recordings are online.

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