Wednesday, September 02, 2009

IFLA Reports: Poster on faculty cooperation

I'm resuming reports on last week's IFLA/ World Library and Information Conference that took place in Milan, Italy. There was a large and interesting poster area in the exhibition. One of the posters was by Tayo Nagasawa (Higher Education Development Centre, Mie University, Japan). Her poster was Factors in developing partnerships between faculty members and librarians in higher education. She had studied the situation at two institutions in the USA (Earlham College and the University of Michigan) and categorised successful approaches in developing good relationships with academics. She lists them under two headings: Proactive approaches and Customised support. A nice touch was that she left a space on the poster for people to add comments on things that did and didn’t work for them, on post it notes that she provided.

A few people had some kind of interactive element on their posters and this was referred to in the IFLA closing ceremony as evidence of “Posters 2.0”!
You can see, above, Ms Nagasawa talking to someone by her poster and, below, the "post it" area of her poster. I was positive I had taken a picture of the whole poster, but I can't find it - sorry about that. I'll therefore add a bit more detail. The proactive approaches she listed were; librarians as facilitators, needs-oriented support for the community; support for faculty members, and informal comunication. The Customised support was: research assignments (librarians concentrate on support for classes with assignments involving research or problem solving); support regarding specific topics, and support at teachable moment.

No comments: