School of Information Resources and Library Science
Academic Libraries & Higher Education
IRLS 561
University of Arizona, Tucson
Fall Session 2006
Instructor: Tom Wilding, Associate Professor of Practice
Contact Information:
SIRLS Room 2-F
Campus Phone: (520)621-3565
Home Phone: (520) 229-3261
Email: wilding@uta.edu (until U of A address is available)
Office Hours: Monday, 4:30-6:30 PM; Thursday 12:00-3:00 PM. Virtual Office hours are yet to be determined.
Class Meeting Schedule – This is a virtual course. All materials will be available through D2L and all discussions will take place there as well. New materials will be available at the beginning of each week (Monday) with discussions to take place during that week.
Course Description: This course will provide an overview of the present context and organization of libraries in colleges and universities, merging current issues in academic library administration and practice with selected trends in higher education and the world of scholarship.
The course focuses on administrative principles and practices as applied to college and university libraries, including standards, services, materials, personnel, budget, space, reports, and statistics. It examines the problems, issues, and trends related to the organization and management of academic libraries within the context of higher education, information technology, and scholarly publishing. A particular emphasis will be on information literacy and the role of academic libraries in working with faculty to improve learning.
Course Objectives: By the end of the semester, students will have demonstrated knowledge and understanding of:
• Issues and trends in academia, especially those affecting academic libraries;
• The mission of colleges and universities and the role of academic libraries in enabling colleges and universities to achieve their missions;
• The relationship of academic libraries to their various environments (e.g., scholarly publishing, technology);
• Information literacy and library instruction, including the preparation and delivery of class related instruction sessions;
• Nature of and issues related to services provided by academic libraries;
• The resources available for the study of higher education and academic libraries.
Grading Policy: In order to receive a grade of B for the class, students will have to have completed all assignments for the class reflecting a good grasp of the topic. An A will signify that all work has been completed well and a substantial amount of the work has been completed excellently. In addition, to receive an A, students must be engaged actively in discussions throughout the semester. A C or lower will be given if some assignments are not completed or if a significant number of assignments are not completed acceptably.
Assignments will be given letter grades (A, A/B, B/A, B, etc.). An A should be considered to be in the middle to high 90s; an A/B in the low 90s; a B/A in the high 80s; a B in the middle 80s; a B/C in the low 80s; etc. The percentage that each assignment bears on the final grade is as noted on the assignments. Discussion and participation will be the final 10%. %. By discussion and participation I mean that students are expected to make substantive contributions to the discussions that help the learning process. This may be comments about interesting things they have read, questions about materials in the textbook or in the content materials, insights from their own experience that have a bearing on topics under discussion, etc.
The final grade will be determined by the overall grades accumulated over the semester:
90-100 A
80-89 B
70-79 C
Academic Code of Integrity: Students are expected to abide by The University of Arizona Code of Academic Integrity. That code states, 'The guiding principle of academic integrity is that a student's submitted work must be the student's own. If you have any questions or issues regarding what are acceptable practices under this Code, please ask me or another instructor.
Accommodating Disabilities
The University has a Disability Resource Center . If you anticipate the need for reasonable accommodations to meet the requirements of this course, you must register with the Disability Resource Center and request that the DRC send me, the Instructor, official notification of your accommodation needs as soon as possible. Please plan to meet with me by appointment or during office hours to discuss accommodations and how my course requirements and activities may impact your ability to fully participate.
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Course Requirements & Assignments: The effectiveness of this course will depend on the development of an active and engaged learning community in the online environment. It will require that students keep up with the content, readings, and assignments; and that they be active participants in the discussions related to the class. It will require that the instructor be actively engaged as well, meeting deadlines, communicating frequently; and providing feedback in a timely way. The assignments are described elsewhere. In addition to compliance with the code of integrity cited elsewhere, the instructor will expect that all assignments are completed on time, meet the specifications for that assignment, and are professional in appearance and grammatically correct.
Textbooks and Recommended Readings:
The required readings are listed on the course site. Most are available digitally either on the web or in the Library’s electronic offerings. A few will be scanned and available through electronic reserves.
In addition to other readings, students will be expected to look at the Chronicle of Higher Education each week for materials that are relevant to class discussions. I will be pointing out some things and will be sending articles from the online version of the Chronicle when appropriate. A lot of the content of the Chronicle is included in some of the article databases that the Library provides, although some may not include articles from the last month. There is also a full text subscription available through the library, which includes access to the archived articles.
There are also many standards journals you should be aware of and become familiar with. These include, but are not limited to: Educause Review, Educause Quarterly, College and Research Libraries, College and Research Libraries News, and the Journal of Academic Librarianship.
There is a textbook (Budd, John M. The Changing Academic Library: Operations, Culture, Environments. Chicago: ALA, 2005). The decision whether to buy it or not is up to you. There are no required readings from it, but it can be useful as background reading.
Assignment 1 (10%): Due September 5
An effective mission statement should be enduring and memorable; should differentiate an organization from others in some way, for instance, in its implied values; and should state what the organization does, for whom, and how that makes a difference. The mission statement of an academic institution may be used to recruit students, promote the institution to external constituencies, fulfill accrediting agency or other regulatory agency requirements, or guide policy and decisions within the institution.With this in mind, spend some time on the web searching for the mission statements of academic institutions and for their libraries. Note that the mission statement may not call itself a mission statement! How hard were these to find these? Does it appear that the mission statements are being used externally (in other words, is it very prominent) as they might be for recruitment or do they appear to be for internal use only (buried somewhere in the website)? As mission statements do they distinguish this institution or this library from other institutions or libraries? How?
Find the mission statement for of each of the following types of institutions and the institutions’ corresponding library:
• A community college or junior college
• A four-year private college
• A four-year public college
• A private research university
• A public research university
• A specialized institution (e.g., seminary, military academy, medical school)
In other words you will end up with twelve mission statements, six for the institutions and six for each of their libraries.
Be prepared to discuss the results of this assignment on the discussion board in Week 2 and 3. How do the mission statements of different types of institutions and their libraries differ...or do they? What is unique about them? Do they reflect different values? How well does the mission of the library relate to the mission of the university?
Write a brief (no more than two page) summary of your findings and reactions. If you were a consultant, what advice would you give these institutions on improving their mission statements? Your summary is due 5 September 2006.
In order not to waste a lot of time on this assignment, make sure you look for both the institution and the library mission statements before you begin to analyze a mission statement. If one or the other is missing (that is, the institution's or the library's), do not use this institution. Find another, since you will need to be able to compare the two.
The Carnegie Foundation website includes guides to various kinds of academic institutions. If you follow the link from the reading list, follow the drop down menu from “Classifications” and click on “Lookup & Listings.” Find “Standard Listings” on another drop down list. Click on “Basic Classification” near the bottom of the page. That will open a list long list of categories of institutions. Community and junior colleges are under “Assoc/Pub/” and “Assoc/Priv/” and then subdivided into sing campus, multiple campus systems, suburban, urban, etc. Choose any that you fancy.
You’ll find four-year colleges (some of which also grant masters’ degrees in limited numbers) under “Bac/” or “Masters/.” Research universities will be under “RU/” or “DRU/.” There is also a category for Special or Tribal institutions. These listings will help you get the right institutions into the right categories.
Assignment 2: Discussion and paper (25%). Due 17 October.
I have identified six issue areas for Assignment 2, each covering a broad topic within higher education, all of which have or could have some implication for academic libraries. These are:
• The role of higher education in society
• Learner-centeredness
• Technology and its role in the academy
• Role of faculty
• Curriculum
• Scholarly communication
Choose a problem, trend, or emerging issue within one of these. While your topic should not focus on academic libraries, it should be one that you feel has an impact on or offers opportunities for academic libraries. Your topic may be general to all of higher education, or may focus on one type of institution (e.g., community colleges). For instance, you might want to pursue the fact that higher education is expected to be increasingly consumer-oriented, or on the changing nature of the curriculum in community colleges. For this assignment, your focus is higher education, but you should consider how the issue might affect academic libraries and whether academic libraries might have opportunities to address the issue.
Develop your specific topic through outside readings and your independent judgement and analysis in preparation for leading a discussion on your topic during the week of 2-8 October. For these discussions, we will set up a number of fora with four to six people to a forum. Each forum is focused one of the major topics listed above. Each person in the group will be expected to post to this discussion regularly. Each participant will have his or her own thread for his or her specific topic within the forum and should begin by posting a summary of the issues or findings from his or her research and readings (about a page of text, that may be in bullet form). Each participant is expected to lead his or her own discussion as well as participate in the others within the broad topic area. You will need to use skills in leading discussions (we’ll talk about this in a session).
Write a six-to-eight page paper on your topic. Incorporate the discussion into your paper. This means that, while you may have drafted your paper in advance, you should not be ready to hand in a final version until your discussion session has ended. The final version of the paper will be due on 17 October. Please see “Assignments” on the syllabus for remarks that have a bearing on your written assignment.
Note: The grade for this project will reflect your preparation, your report, your discussion leadership, and the final product.
Assignment 3: Subject guide (15%). Due 31 October.
You have been assigned to be the subject librarian for an academic department of your choosing (e.g., education, nursing, accounting). You have been asked to develop a web-based subject guide for undergraduate students beginning their departmental majors. To do this, you will need to ask yourself a number of questions: how this discipline is structured as far as the specific academic department is concerned; what courses are taught; what degree programs are offered; etc. With the answers to those and other questions in mind, choose some significant resources that cover databases, reference books, major journals, web resources, etc. Design a webpage for these with sufficient annotations to allow a person using it to choose among the resources you offer. You might want to suggest major subject terms to use in searching the catalog or the various databases and indices. Please keep this fairly simple and straightforward, but follow good design principles as well. A few good starter resources will be more valuable than a long list that a user will find confusing.
For this assignment, it is not necessary to actually execute a webpage. You may choose to do a mock up of it using Word. Briefly, in a separate document, explain your choices and some of the decisions you made along the way. This assignment is due 31 October.
Assignment 4: Instruction assignment (15%). Due 14 November.
Locate an actual class syllabus that includes an assignment requiring library research. Assume that this class is being taught online and so your interaction with students will be through the web, and they will be doing their research via the web, as well. Prepare a webpage providing students targeted instruction in how to carry out one research element of this assignment. For instance, you may decide that a particular database is the one they should use. Provide enough information to help them understand why that database is important and how to carry out research in it. What are the important features? What does it contain and what does it not contain (e.g., journal articles but not books)? What are some useful searching tips or pitfalls to avoid?
Before you begin, develop a set of learning objectives (what is it that students are expected to learn from your page) and then focus your instructional site on those learning objectives. At the same time, however, bear in mind the information literacy principles we will have discussed before you start this, and integrate them as appropriate – but don’t get sidetracked by them. This is an instruction assignment, not an information literacy assignment!
I’d like to see the syllabus before you start your work to make sure it is suitable. This assignment is due 14 November.
Assignment 5: Discussion and paper (25%). Due 21 November.
This assignment is the companion piece to Assignment 2. I have identified six issue areas for Assignment 2, each covering a broad topic within academic libraries. These are:
• The changing role of the academic library
• The changing face of academic library services
• Information resource management in the 21st century
• The academic librarian in an ever changing environment
• Planning and the assessment of the library’s impact
• Funding the academic library
2. Choose a problem, trend, or emerging issue within one of these. Your topic may be general to all academic libraries, or may focus on one type of library (e.g., community college libraries). The focus here in Assignment 5, however, is not higher education as a whole, but the libraries within it. These topics do overlap. For instance, you might be interested in scholarly communication as a part of the changing role of the library, or from the standpoint of the changes scholarly communication has brought to information resource management. The changing face of services could produce a topic that is focused on a specific service, or on the fact that all services are moving from place-bound to virtual or look at a service within a specific type of library such as a community college library.
3. Develop your specific topic through outside readings and your independent judgement and analysis in preparation for leading a discussion on your topic during the week of 6-12 November. For these discussions, we will set up a number of fora with four to six people to a forum. Each forum is focused one of the major topics listed above. Each person in the group will be expected to post to this discussion regularly. Each participant will have his or her own thread for his or her specific topic within the forum and should begin by posting a summary of the issues or findings from his or her research and readings (about a page of text, that may be in bullet form). Each participant is expected to lead his or her own discussion as well as participate in the others within the broad topic area. You will need to use skills in leading discussions.
4. Write an eight-to-ten page paper on your topic. Incorporate the discussion into your paper. This means that, while you may have drafted your paper in advance, you should not be ready to hand in a final version until your discussion session has ended. The final version of the paper will be due on 28 November. Please see “Assignments” on the syllabus for remarks that have a bearing on your written assignment.
Note: The grade for this project will reflect your preparation, your report, your discussion leadership, and the final product.
Assignment 6 (ungraded). Due 6 December
You should be looking at the Chronicle of Higher Education throughout the semester. We’ll be mentioning articles that are interesting or pertinent throughout the semester and talking about how they relate to academic librarianship.One of the most valuable uses for the Chronicle, however, is the position announcements section. Almost all academic library professional positions are advertised in the Chronicle, and because of the short lead-time, appear there frequently before they do in other print sources. They are also available electronically.
From some issue of the Chronicle, or from another source, select an academic library position that you find attractive and that you might see yourself in after graduation (i.e., an entry level position). Develop a resume and a cover letter as you would if you were really applying and send them to me electronically along with position announcement by 6 December. I’ll critique your resume and letter and send some feedback and suggestions for strengthening it. I won’t grade this assignment, but it is required.
School of Information Resources and Library Science
Academic Libraries & Higher Education
IRLS 561
University of Arizona , Tucson
Fall Session 2006
Schedule
Class materials will be available beginning on the Monday of each week and be available through the following Sunday. Discussion forums will close at the end of that week. We will try to follow this schedule but some adjustments may be necessary as the semester progresses.
Week 1: 21 August – 27 August
Introductions:
A bit about Tom Wilding
Review of the syllabus
Review of assignments
Week 2: 28 August – 3 September
Topic 1: Types of academic institutions
Topic 2: The mission of higher education
Assignment 1: Due 5 September
Week 3: 4 September – 10 September
Topic 3: A short history of higher education in the United States
Topic 4: Higher education, its environments and trends
Week 4: 11 September – 17 September
Topic 5: Organization and governance
Topic 6: Funding issues
Week 5: 18 September – 24 September
Topic 7: Role and condition of faculty
Topic 8: Academic freedom and tenure
Week 6: 25 September – 1 October
Topic 9: Distance education
Topic 10: Accreditation
Topic 11: Standards
Week 7: 2 October – 8 October
Group discussions for Assignment 2
Week 8: 9 October – 15 October
Topic 12: Role of the academic library: trends and issues
Topic 13: Academic library services and organizations
Topic 14: Financing academic libraries
Week 9: 16 October – 22 October
Topic 15: Information literacy and instruction
Topic 16: The library as an instructional partner
Topic 17: Standards for instructional services
Assignment 2 Papers due 17 October
Week 10: 23 October – 29 October
Topic 18: Marketing, quality, planning and assessment
Week 11: 30 October – 5 November
Topic 19: Information services and reference
Topic 20: New service models
Assignment 3 due 31 October
Week 12: 6 November – 12 November
Group discussions for Assignment 4
Week 13: 13 November – 19 November
Topic 21: Collection management
Topic 22: New models for access
Topic 23: Scholarly communications
Assignment 4 due 14 November
Week 14: 20 November – 26 November
Topic 24: Technology
Topic 25: Technical services and information organization
Topic 26: Academic libraries as physical and virtual spaces
Week 15: 27 November – 3 December
Topic 27: Staffing the academic library
Topic 28: The search process in academic libraries
Topic 29: Faculty status
Assignment 5 papers due 28 November
Week 16: 4 December – 6 December
Topic 30: Academic library communities and networking
Assignment 6 due 6 December