CPA Annual Report: 1997 – 1998

s more information has become available in electronic format, formerly distinct organizational responsibilities on university campuses have overlapped and blurred. At the same time, the instructional and scholarly uses of technology have altered pedagogical and research methodologies. Thus, digital information and communications technologies are shaping new relationships among librarians, their information technology counterparts, and faculty members. But universities are not yet organized and staffed to cope with the consequences of these remarkable changes.

The Institute will provide continuing-education opportunities for individuals who currently hold, or will one day assume, positions that make them responsible for transforming the management of scholarly information in the higher education community. Over the next five years, the Institute will train a cadre of several hundred professionals&3151;most of them in midcareer and drawn from library and administrative staffs, computer centers and faculties. These will be the leaders who can preside over this transformation on the nation’s campuses and comprehend its broad implications for educational mission and the allocation of financial resources. Participants in the Institute will progress through a training experience that begins with a two-week seminar on the university campus, continues with a year-long practicum on the home campus (or another setting appropriate to the individual’s goals), and concludes with a summary session back at the university. The Institute should produce professionals with a sophisticated understanding of the changes digital technology is bringing to traditional academic management.

In partnership with the Association of American Universities, CLIR prepared for publication a volume of essays entitled The Mirage of Continuity: Managing Academic Information Resources in the 21st Century. The book has two contributing editors: Brian L. Hawkins, the first president of EDUCAUSE, who served previously as the senior vice president for academic planning and administrative affairs at Brown University; and Patricia Battin, one of the nation’s most distinguished librarians, who was vice president for information services and university librarian at Columbia University and the first president of the Commission on Preservation and Access.

Hawkins and Battin are joined by 15 additional contributors who share their conviction that the traditional conceptions of “library” and “information technology division” no longer serve institutions and may even be debilitating them. They argue that universities must conceive anew how instruction, learning, research, management, and finances are to be conducted in the global digital society. The transformative powers of the technology cannot be confined to libraries. Instead, they invite the fundamental reorganization of entire institutions.

As part of the Human Resources in Information Systems Management (HRISM) program, CLIR has helped bring together disparate professional and governmental organizations to consider the social policies and strategies for providing information resources needed by a community. We asked how technology can be harnessed to provide better and greater access to information for all who need it and what policies must be in place to assure that the potential benefits are realized. CLIR continued to work with other HRISM grantees to assemble their reports and other grant products into a forthcoming Web-based curriculum that schools of library and information science and training divisions of libraries can use.

CLIR awarded its second A.R. Zipf Fellowship to Maureen Mackenzie, a Ph.D. candidate in the Palmer School of Library and Information Science at Long Island University’s C.W. Post campus. Ms. Mackenzie entered Long Island University’s doctoral program after 14 years of experience in the insurance industry. Her research interests include the information-seeking behavior of middle- and top-level managers and the effects of information on business.

The A.R. Zipf Fellowship was established in 1997 in honor of Mr. Al Zipf, a pioneer in information management systems and a guiding force in many of the dramatic technological changes that occurred in the banking industry during his forty-year career with the Bank of America.

Each year, CLIR awards the fellowship to the student judged to have the greatest promise in the areas of information management in which Mr. Zipf was involved. The fellowship is endowed by Mr. Zipf’s family and professional colleagues.