The New Technology and Competencies for "The Most Typical of the Activities of Libraries": Technical Services

At a library conference in 1940, William M. Randall called technical services the "most typical of the activities of libraries" "they are..." he said, "the things which librarians do that no one else does the secrets of the craft." 1 In those intervening forty-three years much has been written and uttered in defense and derision of these "secrets of the craft." These most typical of library activities have changed the name Randall used, technical processes, to technical services. They have moved from being sneeringly derided as "backroom," "basement" or other dreary location activities to being enthusiastically hailed today as "where the action is." They are, fortunately, no longer the "secrets" that they were in Randall's day. They have been moved into, moved around within and even moved out of the organizational charts. Regardless of all these attitudes and activities, the functions of acquiring, organizing and preserving library materials persist and the competencies necessary to carry out these three functions will be the focus of this paper. In the paper, reference will frequently be made to the "technical services librarian" meaning any librarian who works in that aspect of librarianship. The emphasis is on no particular type of library. The term library will be used as meaning also information center.published or submitted for publicatio

Reports Of Conferences, Institutes, And Seminars

This quarter\u27s column offers coverage of multiple sessions from the 2016 Electronic Resources & Libraries (ER&L) Conference, held April 3–6, 2016, in Austin, Texas. Topics in serials acquisitions dominate the column, including reports on altmetrics, cost per use, demand-driven acquisitions, and scholarly communications and the use of subscriptions agents; ERMS, access, and knowledgebases are also featured

Collaboration Enabling Internet Resource Collection-Building Software and Technologies

Over the last decade the Library of the University of California, Riverside and its collaborators have developed a number of systems, service designs, and projects that utilize innovative technologies to foster better Internet finding tools in libraries and more cooperative and efficient effort in Internet link and metadata collection building. The open-source software and projects discussed represent appropriate technologies and sustainable strategies that we believe will help Internet portals, digital libraries, virtual libraries, library catalogs-with-portal-like-capabilities (IPDVLCs), and related collection-building efforts in academia to better scale and more accurately anticipate and meet the needs of scholarly and educational users.published or submitted for publicatio

The Beginnings of a Small Ethiopian, Organizational Leadership Library Collaborative

An Azusa Pacific University Reference Librarian describes the logistical, cultural, and spiritual aspects of a library building journey to Ethiopia which brought the means for a successful implementation of a new small academic library to hundreds of university students in the African country. Discusses the positive impact of the Christian global community on the university’s global distributed learning programs, the academic program in Ethiopia included well-attended Organizational Leadership courses through the university’s Operation Impact Program supported by the new library

Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities; Supporting Discovery and Examination in Digital Cultural Landscapes

In this paper, the authors attempt to identify problematic issues for subject tagging in the humanities, particularly those associated with information objects in digital formats. In the third major section, the authors identify a number of assumptions that lie behind the current practice of subject classification that we think should be challenged. We move then to propose features of classification systems that could increase their effectiveness. These emerged as recurrent themes in many of the conversations with scholars, consultants, and colleagues. Finally, we suggest next steps that we believe will help scholars and librarians develop better subject classification systems to support research in the humanities.NEH Office of Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51166-10

Cleaning up the catalogue

The London School of Economics wanted to remove cataloguing inconsistencies but the scale of the task was huge, and outsourcing to a specialist bibliographic services company proved only a partial solution. Helen Williams explains why manual and automated processes were needed

Special Libraries, March 1968

Volume 59, Issue 3https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1968/1002/thumbnail.jp

Special Libraries, April 1969

Volume 60, Issue 4https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1969/1003/thumbnail.jp