Congratulations to the new LAUC-B and LAUC officers for 2009-2010:

LAUC-B Offices

• Vice Chair/Chair-Elect: Susan Koskinen
• Treasurer: I-Wei Wang
• Secretary: Judy Bolstad
• Library Representatives: Michaelyn Burnette and Sandy Tao
• Affiliated Libraries Affairs Vice Chair/Chair-Elect: Linda Vida

LAUC Statewide Offices

• Vice President/President-Elect: Michael Yonezawa from UCR
• Secretary: Gayatri Singh from UCSD

Thanks to the Nominations and Elections committee: Marlene Harmon and Bette Anton (co-chairs), Myrtis Cochran, Jason Schultz, who ran not one but two elections and to LAUC-B secretary Paul Atwood. And thanks to all of you who voted!

Things I learned from the Spring Assembly:

• You’re really supposed to say the whole title: Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost
• If you agonize over suggestions for your speaker, he’ll ignore them all and come up with something much better on his own
• Is it good news that almost all Universities are hurting so they’re not raiding our faculty as fast as usual?
• START, VSOP and the hiring freeze all together will only save us $8.7 million. You have to go for revenue enhancements ($30 million) and restructuring to eliminate duplication in IT, HR, Business Services, etc. (tens of millions) and, maybe, furloughs (2.1 million a DAY) to get the big savings
• We are not refueling the plane in mid-flight; we’re replacing the engine in mid-flight!
• The EVCP trusts the Library staff to make the best of a bad situation. He said that comprehensive collecting for every university is a thing of the past.
• Student advising will probably move to the “ATM model” vs. the “teller model”. Ouch.
• All that Stimulus money universities are hoping for? 2 year quick infusion only.
• The Chancellor’s pay is 40th among national research universities, although our ranking is much higher.
• 40% of the staff workforce (not sure if this is UCB or UC) are within 5 years of retirement
• In the business world there’s the feeling you should “invest opportunistically” during downturns; there are 10 proposals at the Office
• of the President for new schools or colleges within the UCs, though none from UCB. Breslauer feels opportunistic investment can’t be used as an excuse not to bite the bullet.
• Being an EVCP means being able to deliver bad news clearly, calmly, and give straightforward answers to unhappy staff. Ouch!

Submitted by: Corliss Lee

• The theme of the day was Next Generation Technical Services?  Who should care? If you work in public service, you should care.  If you work in collections, you should care. If you work in the Library, in otherwords, you should care. It will affect you.
• What is Next Generation Technical Services?  “stepping away from the purely local” – simultaneously global, collective and local; user driven; social; efficient; what the users want as a center for design; eliminating the duplicative effort of different libraries maintaining bib records separately
• “Synchronization, syndication, sharing”
• For more, go to the LAUC Statewide blog for liveblogging and the Power Point presentation.

LOEX is a small (~250 attendees) conference all about information literacy, but I prefer to think of it as an instruction conference.

There are usually six concurrent sessions every hour, for four hours a day, total of almost 50 sessions. Unless you're one of those rude people who leave sessions in the middle, you can only go to eight of those sessions. I'm one of those rude people, however.

If weren't there, and I know you weren't, you'll be able to watch six of the sessions for free in the comfort of Berkeley on May 12, 14, 19, 20 and 21, when we present videos of them for group viewing. I'll be posting more details on the IDP wiki, but in the meantime, go to: http://www.loexconference.org/virtualsessions.html

Best thing I saw today was a presentation on teaching in large lecture classes by Joanna Szurmak, University of Toronto Mississauga. She was a compelling presenter, with a firm grasp of assessment, and a charmingly frank description of the challenges of collaborating with faculty. I was impressed with the rigor of her instructional design (yes, someone who actually mapped the ACRL IL standards AND Bloom's taxonomy onto the curriculum of the Psych 100 class she teaches.) Inspired me to try harder in my instructional design, and isn't that why we come to these kinds of things anyway?

Best idea I heard today -- libraries should have lockers for students with electrical outlets so students can park their laptops and recharge them while they go to class or have lunch. That was courtesy of Stephen Abrams, keynote speaker, whose talk was otherwise a really cursory skimming of a thousand cool apps we should all be using -- the kind of exhortatory speech that leaves me feeling techno-backwards and hopeless to catch up.

At this web site: http://library.stmarys-ca.edu/services/faculty-staff/projects/topicdevelopment/index.html, you can find documents related to the following research study that was the subject of a poster at ACRL. Here is the description that appears at the site:

The Topic Developed Phase of Research Study focuses on one class of freshmen composition students at Saint Mary's College. The researchers looked at how students developed their topics over a two week period, from the time they received the assignment, which was to explore the impact of an American Icon or product on another country, to the time they turned in a proposal outlining their topic with a bibliography of several sources. The researchers collected structured journal entries recording work students did in developing and researching their topics. A beginning free-write and the final proposals were also collected and focus groups were held after the proposals had been turned in. Researchers had six volunteers who also completed three "think alouds" over the two weeks, saying their thoughts aloud and recording them for a one hour periods as they worked on their topics. All this data was then analyzed and recommendations were made about instruction, faculty-librarian collaboration and further research

The presenters of the ACRL National Conference poster, Teaching the Faculty New Tricks: Collaborating Across Campus to Provide Professional Development Opportunities, have created a wiki, http://lib-workshops.pbwiki.com, where you can see the poster, and other materials about the faculty and staff sessions they conducted on social networking tools.

They hope the wiki will serve as a tool to share information so all are welcome to give feedback and provide examples from your own experience through the comments field.

Presenters: Carrie Eastman, Susanne Markgren, Leah Massar Bloom of Purchase College, SUNY

Submitted by: John Shepard