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| Format: | Recurso educativo Open Access |
| Language: | en |
| Published: |
2007
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ842906 |
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Table of Contents:
- Culture Morph Heid, Susan D. Higher Education Cooperation Departments Academic Libraries Librarians Information Technology Organizational Culture Organizational Change Perspective Taking Library Role Historically, it's been an unavoidable truth: IT people and library people have not been inclined to come to the concept of service with the same view. For IT, it's been all about keeping the servers and systems up, the websites going, and the help desk calls and their turnaround times to a minimum. For library professionals, service has meant keeping multimedia information and reference accessible; books, tapes, CDs, and other sources in order; and the environment primed for research and study. Yet, in higher education today, the term "library" no longer denotes just a physical place, nor does "IT" denote a job so behind the academic scene that students are unaware it exists on campus. The fact is, when these two essential campus areas work together well, magic happens--and that is especially true in small, private institutions of higher education. At Rhodes College, Bob Johnson's merged IT/librarian team undergoes training to provide a single point of contact for most customer service issues--research or technical. At Earlham College (Indiana), there's a solid appreciation for the impact the librarian viewpoint can have on IT; in fact, it trickles down from the top, where both IT and library leadership reside in the same person--Thomas Kirk. When Immaculata University (Pennsylvania)--formerly an all-girls Catholic school--redesigned its Gabriele Library in 1994, administrators went for the "state-of-the-art" facility of the day, and provided a computer lab, a digital card catalog, and 10 electronic databases. Today, the university boasts a resource center that's the perfect melding of library and IT--and nothing like the hushed study centers of yesteryear.