About The Conference

This conference takes as its basic premise: 'a library service and its future are only as assured as the people offering that service'. The conference will examine the challenges and opportunities faced by academic library personnel in an ever faster moving and constantly changing academic and technological working environment. The consolidation, growth, and even survival of libraries within and without our university communities and beyond will depend on decisions being made now about what a future physical/virtual library may look like. More importantly in the context of this conference, how will integration and interdependency with external agencies dictate our collective futures? And, what kind of staff will be needed to offer the services our communities will find indispensable and fundamental for their teaching and research? In other words, our themes of discussion will move conceptually through:

  1. General pressures on us in the academic world;
  2. How we organise internally to respond to those pressures;
  3. How we sustain our response;
  4. How we get the right staff to do all this.

Major Themes

Theme 1 Theme 2
Academic Library Change Management
 Organizational Preparation and the Changing Workplace
What are we generally facing and are we making the right assumptions? For example:
  • Internationalization v local conditions;
  • Institutional traditions v modernity;
  • Library collaboration & partnerships;
  • Changing university curricula;
  • The learning organization & knowledge management.
How do we need to shape our organisational structures and physical environments to respond proactively to the new ways in which professors and students design their workflows? How do we 'bring them in' ? Do we need to develop new internal structures and career patterns to parallel such trends?
  • Interdependency & integration;
  • Breaking down of traditional barriers between professions (ICT, archivists, university instructors etc.)
  • Stresses on people and structures;
  • Full-time, fractional time and flexitime;
  • Contract, tenure/regularization.
Theme 3 Theme 4
The Librarian and the Faculty, Student Body, and the General Public
 The Right Staff?
In predicting, answering and providing what our communities of users will want and need, how do we ensure a sustained, active response? For example:
  • User demand & quality assessment;
  • Localising & customising services;
  • Beyond information literacy? Speaking the language of e-learning;
  • Embedding & integration of technical systems;
  • Commercialization of information? Aping the market-place: googling OPACs & library web pages;
  • Preserving the scholarly record.
In personnel management and in human terms, what kind of people are we looking for to be academic librarians and eventually to manage and build the academic libraries of the future? What is it that we librarians have to be? For example:
  • Quality training of library school graduates;
  • Recruitment;
  • Appraisals and performance assessment;
  • Staff development & training;
  • Promotions;
  • Job rotation v efficiency ...

In short, all four Conference themes will lead us towards a redefinition of the highly effective academic librarian.

 

Keynote Speakers

Professor Dai Longji Mr. Lorcan Dempsey
Director Vice President and Chief Strategist
Peking University Library OCLC, United States
  
Professor Peter Brophy Mr. Brian Schottlaender
Professor of Information Management University Librarian
Manchester Metropolitan University University of California, San Diego

Conference Organizer

University Library System, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Date

April 11-12, 2007

Venue

Cho Yiu Hall, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Conference Languages

Putonghua and English

 
Smoke-free Campus
Under the Smoking (Public Health) (Amendment) Ordinance (Cap.371), the entire campus of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (including indoor and outdoor areas) has been designated as no smoking area with effect from January 1, 2007. The Chinese University of Hong Kong is committed to maintaining a smoke-free campus. Thank you for your cooperation.

Last updated on 10 November, 2006

© University Library System, CUHK, 2006