Leadership

The library of the future—based on new relationships with many other campus units—calls for a new kind of leadership. CLIR, in collaboration with other organizations, continues to emphasize leadership-development programs that equip librarians to work in partnership with other managers of information resources.

Frye Leadership Institute

The first Frye Leadership Institute, sponsored by CLIR, EDUCAUSE, and Emory University, was held at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, June 4–16, 2000. Forty-three librarians, information technologists, and faculty members took part in the sessions, which were led by Richard Detweiler and Deanna Marcum, deans of the Institute. Thirty-one faculty members conducted sessions on topics such as scholarly communication, intellectual property and copyright, public policy, technological developments, university governance, student life, teaching and learning, and management. College and university presidents, provosts, faculty, and financial officers offered personal perspectives on the changing landscape of higher education and on meeting the challenges it offers.

The participants came from community colleges, liberal arts colleges, and comprehensive and research universities. Without exception, they rated the Institute as uniformly excellent. Following the Institute, the participants are engaged in a yearlong practicum project on their home campuses, and they continue to communicate with one another through a listserv.

The Frye Leadership Institute is a 10-year project. The second session will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, June 3–15, 2001. The Institute is funded principally by the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation. The Institute for Museum and Library Services and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provided supplemental fellowship funds to encourage participants from liberal arts colleges and diverse cultural backgrounds to attend.

College Libraries Committee

When the College Libraries Committee met in March 2000, the group expanded its charge and its membership. Formed originally to advise the Commission on Preservation and Access on preservation problems confronting liberal arts colleges, the group has now broadened its role to cover all CLIR’s areas of interest.

Following the publication of Innovative Use of Information Technology by Colleges in August 1999, the College Libraries Committee identified the four topics that are of greatest concern to the institutions they represent:

Technology: defining the library’s role in supporting course-management software and in addressing institution-wide concerns about authorization and authentication; identifying the kinds of rights management systems that best serve the needs of college and midsize university libraries.

Special collections: evaluating organizational models for special collections; identifying ways to manage special collections more effectively, including selection criteria and economic models for digitization projects.

Collections: understanding the meaning of “core collections” in the digital environment and the role of off-site storage in collection management; addressing the development of cooperative collections.

Leadership: communicating library issues to administrators; studying requirements for leadership in the profession; and analyzing staffing and recruitment patterns and problems.

Recognizing that these topics are not specific to college libraries, the Committee concluded that it should broaden its membership to include representatives from midsize universities, and it extended an invitation to Nicholas Burckel, director of Marquette University Libraries. The name of the committee will be changed to reflect its broader advisory role.

Following in-depth discussions about the most pressing needs of college and midsize university libraries, the Committee chose four projects for its immediate agenda:

• Determine best practices for libraries working with Web-based or Web-assisted courses. Offer guidance on the role of the library in such courses.
• Conduct a study of outsourcing to determine what activities small and midsize libraries are outsourcing to vendors and to suggest areas where outsourcing would be helpful.
• Develop a position paper on staffing that considers what types of skills are needed for small and midsize institutions. Speculate about where the best-qualified people can be found.
• Develop a strategy for communicating library issues to college and university administrators.

Patricia Battin Scholarship Endowment

Friends and family of Patricia Battin, former president of the Commission on Preservation and Access, established a scholarship endowment in Ms. Battin’s name in June 1999. The fund provides financial assistance for promising participants in the Frye Leadership Institute whose institutions cannot afford to support their attendance. The first award was made in June 2000 to Rita Gulstad, associate professor and director of libraries and user services at Smiley Library, Central Methodist College.

Zipf Fellowship

Al Zipf, a pioneer in information management systems for whom the Fellowship was named, died on January 1, 2000. Having taken part in the selection process the first three years of the Fellowship program, he had firsthand knowledge of the high caliber of applicants for this award.

The fourth Zipf Fellowship was awarded to Rich Gazan, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Mr. Gazan’s research interests are information retrieval, database design, and content integration. The selection committee, chaired by Martin Cummings, also includes Christine Borgman, Billy Frye, Deanna Marcum, and Rena Zipf.