a different performance indicator for libraries?

Maybe a better qualitative measure for libraries and standard of success is to record the extent of a library's pervasiveness within the electronic or digital environment in conjunction with standard resource and service based statistics? We are discovering that quantitative measures for resources have their use but their actual relevance and thus a library's relevance is increasingly dependent on users finding and easily accessing these resources. This assumes as you add a presence AND PROMOTE it in an electronic environment, the stats for resources and services should increase.

Thus a library should perhaps document the different places and ways they make their resources and services available electronically - the learning management system, the student portal and the faculty portal, the document management process at a university, the library website, faculty and departmental websites, google scholar, facebook, second life - you get the idea. They should also develop a program of promoting these resources. The stats would then reflect a collated measure of success in that environment and thus the library's success. I suspect I'm stating the obvious.

preprints, email, blogs...as more conducive to research

Charles Henry states:

Recent work also suggests that the scholarly article, especially in science, is less and less relevant to the progress of research and the evolution of our knowledge. The article is more of a token, or totem, of promotion and tenure with less intellectual value or influence than commonly believed.

The traditional models of scholarly communication appear increasingly less efficacious. In their place, the rise of less formal, more conversational methods of communication—preprints, email, blogs, Web postings—appear to be more influential and conducive to research advancement and community building.

This excerpt is from an article titled Can Universities Dream of Electric Sheepskin?: Systemic Transformations in Higher Education Organizational Models in the Journal of Electronic Publishing, v. 11(1), 2008, accessed February 10, 2008: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0011.101 .

I found the statement above fascinating as this blog contains a record of my research process, a working out or through of the questions that arose, the issues I tackled, and the relevant or interesting tidbits not directly related to my research question but an outcome nonetheless of this process. As such this blog is an accompaniment to the outcomes we call articles, and is to me intrinsically more interesting than the articles themselves. The article describes a single outcome or product of research, the blog describes multiple by-products of that same research and reflects the process. And the blog is more reflective and representative of the joy (and angst) of discovery than the article will ever be.

Also of interest is the question this generates: how do librarians "collect" these new containers for information?

a cardinal rule for research?

I've started to dance with the devil (wrestle with research) again, at least in a more meaningful way than the previous flirting allowed by my restrictive schedule. One of the first things I've realized is that I have made assumptions about what constitutes the parameters of a definition of academic librarian competency. Why? Or perhaps, how did I come to this conclusion? I forgot something I should perhaps consider a cardinal rule: sometimes what isn't there is more revealing than what is present. Competency is defined in much of the literature as knowledge or education, skills and experience or ability. Not all authors provide definitions that include all these aspects, whether on purpose or by chance. What does this say about the authors who don't provide definitions, or provide "partial" definitions, assuming the presence of all three facets is the most common definition? And what about those who don't formulate competency using these facets and/or use a completely different approach I haven't yet comprehended? I don't know but at least I have realized I need to expand my initial search set (the results used in my first article on this topic) to incorporate any article from my initial literature search that doesn't assume competency (and luckily, there aren't many).

share your experience and volunteer

It is amazing what information resides in the brain that you have assimilated to the point you don't think about it, and yet it is so incredibly useful to other people. I'm back from OLA Super Conference 2008 where I made myself available as a volunteer, spending time over two days at the mentoring booth. I spoke with people interested in career shifts, those moving from the US and those who have moved back to Canada from other locations, among others, all looking for tips. I discovered over this time interesting tidbits of information like: the fact that faculties are for the most part unionized in Canada is unusual as compared to the USA, that the process I went through researching to prepare for business library interviews has a shelf life or reuse I didn't anticipate, and my experience as a solo librarian learning how to benchmark myself in comparison to my peers is relevant in other contexts. It can also be as simple as, you have a perspective someone else lacks and can help them gain distance. So do your colleagues a favour and volunteer when the opportunities arise, or create opportunities to volunteer. It is surprising what we know.