One Desk? One Department.

On Tuesday our candidate mentioned some future trends for Access Services and suggested that we were considering merging the Circulation and Reference desks here at Bobst. Although I don't disagree with the utility of this, and certainly think it makes sense in some organizations, we have no plans for merging Circ and Reference here at Bobst. She must have been thinking about our plans to merge the Business & Documents Center with the Science Reference Center, or perhaps she was thinking about another library altogether.

I have been spending a lot of time writing the 2008-2009 annual report lately and I'm struck by how much crossover we have between Access Services units. I'm very proud that it is now impossible to list our accomplishments in terms of individual units as so much of what we have done crosses the boundaries of our units. Great examples of this include:

• Stacks now pulls material for both Reserve and ILL
• Eileen has leadership responsibility for 3 Circ, Reserve and LP in the evenings
• Collaborations between Stacks and Offsite Prep, (setting priorities and reballancing)
• Quick Check machines, which were investigated by Pat, implemented by Sydney and operationalized by Eric.
• LP uses circulation data to determine patron eligibility for lockers and carrels
  

Over the past 5 years we have worked really hard to unify Access Services and this year's annual report is the first opportunity I have had to pause and notice how far we have come. Together we share our successes and together we learn from our mistakes.

So, while we aren't planning to merge Circ and Reference any time soon, we have successfully merged Circ, Reserves, ILL, LP, Stacks and Offsite Prep into an interrelated group of units collectively known as Access Services.

The Future of Libraries

So, here's quite a topic for our first Blog entry: The future of libraries. I'd like to thank whomever suggested it for making me think about it and do a little research. Thinking about the future of libraries can be scary. After all, will we still have jobs? Will we want those jobs? My one day of thought and research on the subject by no means makes me an expert, but it does make me a little clearer on the topic.

A few years ago a colleague who was working for NYU's Digital Library department explained that in the future, the digital library would be run in a way analogous to the non-digital library, and that Access Services would handle access to the digital library. At the time I liked this explanation, because it gave me some small sense of what I might be doing in the future. Now I'm not so sure. I'm not sure it's what we'll be doing in Access Services, and if it is, I'm not sure I like it.

I found this 10 minute video on the future of libraries that I thought speculated on our future as well as anyone possibly can.


After all, things are moving so quickly it's hard to predict what technology might offer next year, let alone 5 to 10 years down the line.