Tag: librarians

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More Small Colleges Go with CIO to Oversee Libraries and IT

More than a tenth of college chief information technology officers are also in charge of campus libraries, a sign of the rapid digitization of scholarship and the desire of small colleges to consolidate administrative functions.About 12 percent of CIOs oversee libraries, according to annual surveys by the Center for Higher Education Chief Information Officer Studies. The surveys suggest the arrangement is appealing mostly to smaller colleges at this point. “You get smaller institutions and a good percentage are community colleges,” said Wayne Brown, the centers founder.

via Small colleges are putting the same administrator in charge of IT and libraries | Inside Higher Ed.

As this trend continues, I wonder if we’ll see it spread to law schools? Many law school IT operations live inside the library as it is, so it would make some sense. Of course it also raises the possibility of having the law library ultimately run by a non-librarian.

 

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David Lankes on “Killing Librarianship”

For my librarian friends out there (you know who you are). This is the keynote from the New England Library Association Annual Conference, delivered October 2, 2011. He has a lot of interesting and provocative ideas about the future of librarianship that are well delivered in this talk. He even manages to get a shout out to law librarians. Should give you something to think about on things like dealing with the folks who come through the front door and librarians’ role is society (hint: is shouldn’t be passive). Well worth the hour.

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U of IL Library Project Archives Computer Games

Sometime this August, librarians at the University of Illinois will finish archiving over a dozen famous computer games, then step back to consider where to go next with their project. These programs go back over four decades, and include a 1993 version of Doom, various editions of Warcraft, and even MIT’s Spacewar! circa 1962.

Ars Technica – Saving “virtual worlds” from extinction.

Now this is the sort of digital preservation I could get into. It will interesting to see how they solve all the issues around hardware dependency that comes with these old games, “[W]hat we’re trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game.” Big job for librarians. Seems like figuring out how to keep copies of digital texts around should be a walk in the park after this.