Summary of the 2012 Columbia University Libraries Symposium

It was the last day of spring break as I went to the 9th Columbia University Libraries symposium whose theme was “New Models of Academic Collaboration.” This blog entry is not meant to be an exhaustive review of the meeting. Jim Neal, Vice President for Information Services & University Librarian gave the opening remarks. I heard Jim speak a year ago at the 2011 VALE Annual Meeting. He is certainly an excellent speaker, but he covers a lot of subjects in a short period of time causing his comments to be cursory. He repeated his remark “Information literacy- stop the madness.” This time he followed it up by saying that librarians should have a more robust role in the classroom.


I certainly don’t interpret his remarks as being against information literacy. I feel that his opinion is that some librarians exaggerate its importance in the academic world. If you see the disclaimer at the header of this blog, I say that these opinions are my own which I don’t necessarily share with anyone else at NJIT.

He gave the following chronology:

1950-1970 – Period of Popularization

1970-1990 – Period of discord in higher education and libraries. There were much higher prices of serials and tension in libraries.

1990 – 2010 – Period of decadence and self-indulgence. I must disagree with this statement. I would describe this as a period of great technological change caused by the explosion of the internet. During this period there was an explosion in content, mass digitization, mobile technologies, and open access. During this time frame there was more information transmitted to more people in more ways.

2011 – period of polygamy. Librarians must mature in collaborative relations to increase productivity in a deep service capacity. There should be a national program of book digitization while libraries should no longer be book warehouses. Academic spaces should be redeployed for collaboration. We need to move to parabiosis, an age of radical collaboration with centers of excellence around the world.



The first talk described an archival collaboration between NYU and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The speakers described how NYU doctoral students in African American studies worked with archivists and curators at NYPL’s Schomburg Center.

The second talk described a small part of the 2CUL, a new cooperative model between Cornell and Columbia. Robert H. Davis described collaborative collection development initiatives for South Asian, Southeast Asian, Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies. The most important goal is to broaden the range of materials available to both universities by avoiding duplication. This is only a small part of the 2CUL initiative. Much more information can be found at http://2cul.org/ .

The next talk was titled Smithsonian Institution Libraries: Facilitating Knowledge Sharing & Collaboration. The library asked two graduate student interns to conduct a survey of the Libraries and the Smithsonian at large to ascertain what initiatives in the field of Knowledge Management could best benefit them. They discovered that traditional models such as document management were poor matches for such a large organization. Expertise location was identified as a likely catalyst for cross institutional collaboration. For more information you can access http://research.si.edu/  .

The next talk was given by Eric Wakin of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Columbia. He described the Community Service Society Photographs Digitization project which attempts to make available to the public over 1400 photographs which offer representations of pressing social issues in New York City in the late 19th and early 20th century. It is a collaborative endeavor of 4 department in the Columbia University Libraries.

Since I am liaison to environmental science at NJIT, I was especially interested in The Art and Environment of Embedded Librarianship. Ryan Taylor, an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Purchase College – SUNY described collaboration with Art Librarian Heather Saunders. They co-taught a course titled Art and the Environment. More information can be found at http://openscholar.purchase.edu/ryan_taylor/classes/env-2260-art-and-environment  .

There were breakout sessions at the end of the day. I attended one titled Collaborating for Health Information Literacy in the Community: Three Case Studies.

I also was given a tour of the Digital Science Center by Chemistry Librarian Song Yu. This was created by a consolidation of several small science/engineering libraries a few years ago. It is a beautiful facility with no print books or journals. Everything is online as the printed resources were sent to a storage facility.

It was certainly a worthwhile meeting to learn about collaborative efforts in academic libraries.

This report is certainly not exhaustive. Comments by attendees may be found on Twitter using the hashtag #culsymp

Videos of the symposium may be found at:
http://www.infodocket.com/2012/04/06/now-available-video-of-9th-columbia-university-libraries-symposium/

http://youtu.be/8FvyaUTGQDE