Tuesday, March 31, 2009

LILAC Day 2: Lesley Burger

There were two keynotes today, from Patricia Iannuzzi, Dean of Libraries at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Leslie Burger, who has been director of the Princeton Public Library since 1999. I'll make some notes about Patricia's talk in another post. I missed some of Burger's talk, unfortunately, as I was testing things out for our Second Life session, but I did catch some of it. She was emphasising the role of public libraries, but also the need for school libraries and information literacy in schools. In the US this has been hindered by the closure of quite a number of school libraries, because of changes in education policy, pushing resources elsewhere.

She gave some examples of public libraries offering services supporting lifelong information literacy skills, including IT skills (Princeton have a Technology Center which offers a lot of training sessions). Burger highlighted that there is currently an enhanced role in helping the increased number of job seekers - for example people suddenly neding a job and out of touch with the need for online seeking and job application. In summary she emphasises monitoring trends in information consumption, Web 2.0 and so forth, the need to "market your heart out", making information seeking real fun, helping people solve real life problems (like helping people cope with the economic downturn and its impact on their lives), investing in technology, collaborating in the "village" (community you are in), and be in unexpected places (where people will be pleasantly surprised to see you).

Photo by Sheila Webber: haven't taken many in Cardiff yet, so this is another of Spring in Sheffield

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