Over Spring Break, Davidson’s library hosted the annual seminar of the College Library Director Mentoring Program. This program, meant to provide new college library directors with mentors and a cohort, brought 17 new directors and three seminar leaders to campus. I also serve as a seminar leader. The curriculum over two-and-a-half days was intense, focusing on leadership development and big-picture thinking but also meeting participants’ needs for nitty-gritty management advice, too. The … [Read more...]
To Boston and Back: Reporting on ALA Midwinter 2016
A few weeks ago, I attended ALA Midwinter in Boston. As part of the conference pre-workshops, I took part in the in-person meetings of the Assessment in Action program, which has been written about in this blog previously. To give a quick refresher, Assessment in Action is a program run by the Association of College and Research Libraries which supports academic libraries’ budding assessment projects by uniting library assessment teams with other teams across the nation. Seeing as the program … [Read more...]
Inside Looking Out or Outside Looking In
As our library continues our strategic planning process, one topic that has been raised is the value of effort spent on external professional activities since they take time away from activities that directly impact Davidson. This topic resonates with me as I’ve significantly increased my external professional activities in the last year. So, it is worthwhile to examine what value, if any, publishing, presenting, and service activities bring to individuals and Davidson. Davidson librarians … [Read more...]