Two recent NY Times articles on how the economic downturn has had a direct impact on library use.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/nyregion/26libraries.html
It Has Computers, Gives Advice and Is Free
By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN
Published: March 26, 2009
Out-of-work professionals are crowding the computers at New York’s public libraries, and books on résumé writing are hard to keep on the shelves.

For those of you who may not have seen this excellent New York Times series, below are permalinks to both the articles and the accompanying online video.

In Web Age, Library Job Gets Update
By MOTOKO RICH
Published: February 16, 2009
School librarians are increasingly teaching digital skills, but they often become the first casualties of budget crunches.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/books/16libr.html

As a newbie librarian and a freshman attendee of the conference, I have to say that I have very few complaints. The scope of the subject matter of the sessions was staggering. The content quality of the sessions that I personally attended varied quite a bit, but much of that had to do with the dynamism of the panelist(s).

One aspect of the conference that was critical to me as a recent grad was the Career Development Day. This was by far the most beneficial aspect of the conference. My only small critique was that these short 30 min sessions were very rushed and, because of their popularity, there was very little time for Q & A. Also, there was a employer display going on concurrently and it was impossible to attend many crucial career-related sessions and have time to meet with reps from the various institutions. If I could recommend anything, it would be to make these session 45 mins to an hour in duration.

For folks who can not afford to attend, can't take all the time off, or are too far away, I think it would be great if there were sessions that allowed real-time remote online access to sessions across the various areas of interest.

Does anyone have any OPAC solutions or examples for collecting together LGBT-themed fiction? I'm specifically interested in solutions that link LGBT resources to the catalog by various tags, such as age group, lesbian, gay, bi, etc.

I was thinking back to my undergraduate days the other day and came to the realization that although I had worked as a library assistant during those days and spent an enormous amount of my time (as I'm sure most of us did!) at various on-campus libraries, that I was hard-pressed to remember approaching Reference with any questions. If I did use reference services back then it could not have been very frequently and obviously they are not memorable experiences if I now have no recollection. I certainly do not chalk this up to my superior search skills at the time. No, most likely I was too intimidated to approach the desk or could not be bothered so just used typical workarounds to find suitable information.

I worked for a medium-sized organization once that had, within the org structure, IT staff working and seated within each operational department. I can't tell you how useful it was to have IT working right there, side-by-side, with staff in the department. They understood the work processes much better than when they were seated together, knew much more of the tacit knowledge of the department, knew the ongoing projects, answered staff queries directly, and were a part of all ongoing departmental communications, meetings and a events.

I'm curious what academic librarians are thinking regarding a potentially not-to-distant trend that would require a degree beyond your MISt and perhaps a second Master's in order to be truly competitive in academic librarianship?

At Super Conference 09 I attended a session on the future of academic librarianship. Interestingly, during the Q & A, an attendee who had a doctorate was considering academic librarianship. The panelists said that she would be highly competitive, and that the nature of her specialized knowledge was exactly what is going to be most favoured going forward in working directly with faculty.