‘Tis the Season to Discuss Our Future

Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian at Temple University, in his From the Bell Tower column for Library Journal, writes about the future of academic libraries.  In this first of a two-part article, “‘Tis the Season to Discuss Our Future,” he focuses on an article from the May 2009 issue of The Journal of Academic Librarianship, “Exploring the Future of Academic Libraries: A Definitional Approach.”  The article considers libraries from three perspectives: the building, the collection, and the staff, and Bell reflects on the trends for each.

For the second part of his article, Bell will look at what the MISO Survey has to say about the current status of academic libraries.  Bell attended Dave Consiglio’s June 1 NISO presentation.  We’ll have a link to the column when it’s posted.

2009 Workbooks Now Available

The 2009 MISO workbooks are now available.  These spreadsheets contain the means from each school for every question in the survey.

The workbooks are a great way to compare your school’s current results against earlier results.  You can also dynamically create a cohort of schools to compare against your most recent results.  Question type and service area filters allow you to quickly get to the information you’d like to study.  The worksheets calculate whether differences between the means are statistically significant, and cells are formatted to quickly show you higher and lower results, with the difference between the means also reported.

Workbooks for the faculty, student, and staff populations are available through the Survey Administration Page.  CIOs from any of our participating instititutions have access.