To be held Nov. 6, 2009 at Tulsa Community College - Southeast Campus.

Go to the OKACRL site for complete details and the registration form.

Friday, July 17, 2009
Main Building, Auditorium
NSU’s Muskogee Campus, 2400 W. Shawnee, Muskogee, OK
9:00am - 3:30pm

More details and online regsitraton here.

• Nov. 6, 2009
• Libraries and marketing
• Tulsa
• More details coming soon!

We will have poster sessions, the call for posters will be out soon.

Congratulations to Misty Smith from OSU Stillwater - she won the drawing for a free conference registration!

The next 36 to 48 hours is critical to get millions, maybe billions, of dollars for libraries in the stimulus package.  We need every single library supporter to start sending messages and calling congressional offices so that we can keep important library provisions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). As you all know, public libraries are a key source of free Internet access to look for jobs and so much more. All types of libraries provide essential services that stimulate our local economies, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provides crucial funding for libraries to continue and build upon them. This week, the Senate and House versions of the economic stimulus package will go to conference to reconcile these pieces of legislation, and your calls and e-mails will help protect this funding. There are pros and cons of each version of the stimulus, and we need to protect the parts that benefit our communities.

In the coming days, you will receive a lot of e-mails from us, and your advocacy will be the key to our success. Last week, Senate Amendment 501 could have stripped broadband funding from their version of the bill but your calls and e-mails to your elected officials defeated this amendment and successfully protected this funding. Now, more than ever, your activism is needed. Over 1,250 calls went to our elected officials, and now we need even more.

Please call your elected officials in both the House and Senate and tell them to communicate with the conferees in support of the following parts in both the House and the Senate versions:

• Restore education construction funds eliminated from the Senate version of the ARRA. The House version of the ARRA would provide $14 billion for K-12 construction and $6 billion for higher education construction and specifically mention libraries as an allowable use of funds.  The K-12 construction funds would create 300,000 jobs.
• Restore the money cut from the State Stabilization Fund in the Senate bill to $79 billion to and restore the Governors ability to use a portion of the funds at his or her discretion.
• Maintain $8 billion for ‘Broadband Technology Opportunities Program’ for robust broadband to all of America including “fiber to the libraries for the 21st century.”
• No less than $200 million that shall be available for competitive grants for expanding public computer center capacity, including community colleges and public libraries.
• Open access of networks should be upheld and not include provisions allowing intrusive network management techniques. 

If your elected officials are one of the following, it is even more critical that you contact them, as they are conferees on this legislation and control what stays in and what will be taken out.  Please contact the following and use the same talking points, above:

Appropriations Chairman Obey (D-WI)

Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY)

Commerce Chairman Waxman (D-CA)

Appropriations Ranking Member Jerry Lewis (R-CA)

Ways and Means Ranking Member Dave Camp (R-MI)

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)

Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT)

Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-HI)

Finance Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-IA)

Appropriations Ranking Member Thad Cochran (R-MS)

Again, the only way our grassroots effort will be successful is with your calls and e-mails. Your efforts have resulted in a stay of implementation on the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act and a defeat of the amendment that would have cut broadband funding from the Senate version of the economic stimulus act. This is our most important ask yet; without your calls, libraries will be left out of this legislation.

On Friday, November 14, 2008, the Oklahoma Chapter held its Fall Conference at the new Training and Education Center on the Rose State College campus. The conference title was How Secure is Your Security? Library Security, Safety Planning and Policies.

Tragic headlines about violence on campuses cause everyone to wonder – could it happen here?  Security and disaster preparedness continues to be a major planning effort on college and university campuses.  Libraries may need to develop their own specialized plans.  To address this topic, we brought in two excellent speakers.  Miriam Kahn founded MBK Consulting in 1991, which specializes in preservation and disaster response for libraries, archives, historical societies, museums and other cultural institutions.  She has written a number of books on disaster response for libraries and archives.  Her most recent, The Library Security and Safety Guide to Prevention, Planning, and Response, was published by ALA in June.  David Dagg is Head of Security & Facility Operations at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman.  He has decades of experience in safety and security.  He has managed security for institutions with high public usage since 1989.

The conference opened with Miriam Kahn outlining measures to secure your library and its collections.  Some of her key points were to evaluate risks, develop a plan, put it in writing, and test the plan.  She stressed that a security or disaster plan is not something to be done once and filed away.  It must be reevaluated on a regular basis and stored in several locations for easy access.

When conference attendees returned from the lunch break, there were poster sessions to check out.  The posters featured a report on the state of information literacy instruction in Oklahoma, disaster planning at the Tulsa Community College Learning Resource Center, and a unique resource sharing service developed between a university library and a public library in Claremore, Oklahoma.

The afternoon session was started by David Dagg.  He discussed basic tenets of personal security and safety.  His description of a safety pyramid was interesting: building on a foundation of understanding criminals and taking basic safety measures, a person builds their way up to knowledge of self-worth and boundaries.  Dagg also provided us with tips for dealing with difficult people and handling threatening situations.

After a break, Miriam Kahn came back to discuss disaster planning.  When developing a disaster plan, you must form a chain of command and give members the authority they need to act in the event of a disaster.  Some of her interesting suggestions were to:

• designate one spokesperson for the library who will keep all media positive
• if you solicit donations after a disaster, always ask for money – never for books
• keep in mind your library’s mission and services when developing your disaster plan
• crisis counseling for your staff should be built in to the plan.

Librarians shared stories about plans they had developed and incidents that had happened in their libraries.  Attendants varied from library administrators to front line staff, academic and public institutions.  It was a varied and interesting group.

In February 2008, the COIL group conducted a survey of college and university instruction librarians and library instruction programs throughout the state. This session will highlight the results gleaned from the 74 librarian respondents and 37 institutions that
provided program input.

Community of Oklahoma Instruction Librarians, various members

What Will Your Library do When Disaster Strikes? Tulsa Community College Learning Resource Center’s Odyssey Through Disaster Planning

Armed with a disaster planning book and a committee, the Metro Campus Learning Resources Center at Tulsa Community College embarked on the development of a comprehensive plan in case of disaster.  This poster session seeks to inform other libraries of the process that the committee experienced and the lessons learned. The session focuses on the reality of planning, the kinds of questions/challenges that arise while planning, and the interaction between the LRC and other departments in the college.

Adam Brennan, LRC Assistant II, Tulsa Community College
Casey Ashe, LRC Supervisor Metro Campus, Tulsa Community College
Jan Riggs, LRC Assistant Supervisor and Reference Librarian, Tulsa Community College

Two Libraries, University and Public, Better Serving the Communities of Claremore and Rogers County.

A unique resource sharing service that began in January 2007 between Rogers State University Stratton Taylor Library and Will Rogers Library in Claremore provides patrons timely access to the resources of both libraries.

The service allows patrons to submit Interlibrary Loan requests at their primary library and pick up the material at the partner library. 

The program makes resource sharing between the libraries simple, seamless and pleasant.   When users pick up their ILL requests, they are encouraged to enjoy the surroundings of their partner library, browse the collection, and meet the staff.

The resource sharing agreement also benefits collection development by allowing the libraries to donate materials more suitable to their partner library.

Janice Ferris, Public Services Librarian, Stratton Taylor Library, Rogers State University
Charles Chessher, Library Assistant, Stratton Taylor Library, Rogers State University

If you haven’t already seen this, a librarian named Yohannes Gebregeorgis has been named one of CNN’s Top 10 Heroes.  This puts him him in the running for the CNN Hero of the Year.  You can check out Yohannes’ story and vote for him here: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2008/cnn.heroes/index.html.  He’s fantastic!  Check it out.

Rates for registration are as follows:
$50 for OK-ACRL members (paid 2008 membership dues in ACRL or OK-ACRL)
$65 for non-members
$20 for students

A note about membership: national ACRL members are automatically members of OK-ACRL.  If you are not a national ACRL member, OK-ACRL membership dues are $15, valid for a calendar year, January 1 through December 31. 

This raises an issue that has long faced university and college libraries: to what extent should they offer popular books and media, and how should they balance their collections between scholarly titles and not-so-scholarly titles. Should academic libraries stock bestsellers? Should we encourage our patrons to come to us both for their academic or professional information needs AND their recreational needs? These matters directly affect the mission and the vision of academic libraries. Indeed, such questions are especially pressing in hard economic times when materials budgets are shrinking and there seems to be no end to the increases in the price of serials and databases and scholarly monographs.

As a literature and film studies selector, I have to make some tough decisions all the time when I get book requests. Should I buy genre fiction when our students are asking it or should I save my book budget exclusively for “serious” tomes that faculty and graduate students would use? Should I just turn them away when they ask if we can buy the latest installment in a science fiction series, or Would drawing in more students because we have the latest Stephanie Meyer book help to make those students more comfortable with the library and more open to turning to us for help? Should we be taking advantage of the increased traffic in libraries today to help build a support base for our future survival?

I know many who regard university and college libraries as cold ivory towers, but love their local public library as their “third place” when not at home and work. Perhaps it is time for academic libraries to try to be more inviting, as many in this state already have. We must support the educational and research missions of our institutions first and foremost, but perhaps by trying to broaden our collections a bit we can some new supporters.