Following up on my interest in map librarianship, I decided to head on over to the DeLaMare Library at the University of Nevada Reno, my undergraduate university. They have the largest map collection in Nevada, so I decided to talk with the head librarian there to see what they were up to. Two years ago, the library at UNR shut down and was replaced with the new Knowledge Center (as I have mentioned in a previous post), which has placed UNR in the company of other well-known cutting edge libraries. In fact, in 2009 the Knowledge Center won, along with Temple University, the “Best Education AV Project” in the country Spotlight Award. With all of these recent changes to UNR’s main library, I wanted to see how the much smaller DeLaMare library would be effected.
Tod Colegrove, the head of the DeLaMare library, was nice enough to show me around the map room and the new Knowledge Center. He was excited at the prospects of “updating” the map library and transforming it by adding on a GIS center. After speaking with him, I began to fully appreciate the use of social media and collaborative efforts for projects such as these. For starters, he introduced to me to librarians from different library departments on campus, and the first thing that struck me was that traditional barriers of skills and roles were broken down. For instance, Tod was very quick to note that he did not like the standard divide between IT personnel and library faculty. I saw, first hand, how the applications development librarian, IT staff, catalogers, GIS specialists, and the data librarian (all in different sections of the library “department”) were working with Tod to make his vision of an updated map library come to fruition. What I witnessed here was not so much the details or “guts” of one small project, but a collaboration of skills and roles that are shaping the restructuring of an entire library.
I spoke extensively with Will Kurt, the applications development librarian, who stressed the need to keep up on current social media trends such as Twitter feeds, blogs, and social media tools that libraries could incorporate into their catalogs or homepages. He is currently working on a project at UNR called the Book Finder – an application that, after a searcher types in a keyword, author, or title of a book, displays the book information with thumbnails of the covers and an exact location of where to find the book (i.e. – in the library itself, online, or through one of UNR’s consortium libraries). His skills, and knowledge of social media, have helped him understand how and why the Book Finder will be a successful and useful tool. Will then shares his knowledge with other librarians and they incorporate their ideas with his. Although the Book Finder will not be of much use for the map library, this is just one example of how social media, librarians, and collaboration go hand in hand. From what I learned after speaking with Tod, Will and the others, is that this type of collaboration is essential in order for a library transformation to take place.