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Getting to Know You: Our Most Important Task
Paul Kobulnicky
Director, University Libraries
The focus of this issue of UConn Libraries is the Library Liaison Program, the partnering of individual library staff members with specific academic programs. The library works most successfully through effective partnerships with its primary clients--university faculty, staff, and students. The Liaison Program builds those partnerships. No single effort that we are currently undertaking is more important to the provision of excellent library service than the expansion and enhancement of this program.
Libraries are in the midst of enormous change. The rapid development of technology is challenging our ability to integrate established patterns of collection building and library use with new, network-based methods for providing access to information. Unrelenting inflation in the cost of scholarly publications, particularly journals, is forcing us to consider more carefully than ever how much information we can afford to collect locally and how to provide access to what we cannot own. The emergence of networks and associated distribution media has renewed publishers' interests in restricting the rights of educational communities to fair use of copyrighted materials.
Academic programs also face powerful pressures for change. Many government and community leaders appear to have lost confidence in the university's relevance to societal challenges. Budgets are being cut and tuition cannot be increased to cover costs. Research funding is declining. The costs of implementing and sustaining technology compete with the availability of salary funds in schools and departments. Faculty are working hard to adjust their research and instructional programs to this changing social climate.
The Liaison Program is critical to our ability to meet these challenges successfully, in the library and in the academic departments. If we are to continue to serve the university community effectively, we must understand and be involved in the changes that are taking place within academic programs, and we must communicate the library's changing patterns of collections and services to faculty and students. To this end, we must be increasingly visible and physically present within academic departments, expanding our one-on-one contacts with faculty, our instructional sessions with students, and our consulting "office" hours in the departments. Most importantly, we must seek to partner with faculty in the development of innovative and successful ways to integrate new information-seeking patterns into instruction and learning.
Our goal is to strengthen the confidence that faculty and students have in our ability to provide services that make a significant, positive impact on the quality of their academic pursuits. We realize that confidence comes from "delivering the goods," and that can only happen if we understand exactly what information or service is needed. We also know that the value of the library's services can only be realized when they are implemented effectively and information about them is communicated clearly. The Library Liaison Program is the cornerstone of our effort to understand your information needs and to communicate our plans to meet them. You can help us serve you better by getting to know your Library Liaison, making sure that he or she understands your information requirements, and taking full advantage of the library's effort to meet your needs.
Contact Paul Kobulnicky
knicky@lib.uconn.edu
486-2219
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