The Greater New York Metropolitan Area Chapter of ACRL is soliciting presentation proposals for its December 1st 2017 Symposium.
The theme of this year’s Symposium is the definition and execution of the academic library mission in the twenty-first century information environment. The Planning Committee is soiliciting proposals for 20-minute presentations on the following three topics:
1) Ways in which librarians at institutions having limited acquisitions capacity can, through professional engagement beyond their institutions, contribute to the profession’s mission to ensure preservation, accessibility and discoverability of research-valuable information. The proposed presentations should discuss how librarians at these institutions can or do participate in larger inter-institutional efforts to build and maintain rich shared collections, and how they advocate on behalf of students and faculty at their home institutions to ensure accessibility of materials required for teaching, learning and research.
2) Benefits and challenges of research libraries’ collaboration with their commercial partners, the distinct complementary roles of both in the academic information ecosystem, and the harmonizing of the interests of profit-driven commercial entities with the mandate of the mission-driven not-for-profit research library sphere. Contemplations both of the status quo and of aspirational ideals in this area are of interest. The Committee is especially interested in presentations that propose frameworks for defining a complex of functions that are proper to the research library profession and distinguish them from those that can appropriately be fulfilled by commercial partners outside the profession.
3) Ways in which research libraries have adapted – or failed to adapt – to execute their mission to ensure preservation, accessibility and discoverability of research-valuable content in the twenty-first century information world. The Committee is interested in presentations that describe instances of libraries and librarians assuming responsibility for the preservation and accessibility of endangered research-valuable content, or discuss areas where the profession as a whole is failing to fulfill its mission to capture, preserve and organize content. Categories of endangered research-valuable material include (but are not limited to):
- materials in danger of disappearing because they are inconvenient for or hostile to a political regime or agenda
- genres of materials traditionally seen as not of research value and so outside the purview of academic and research libraries
- materials in formats not traditionally collected by academic and research libraries
Proposal submissions should be 250-500 words in length and should be received by May 5, 2017. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by mid May. Selected presenters must confirm presentations by May 31.
Abstracts for presentations should be submitted using this form:
The 2017 ACRL/NY Symposium will be held December 1st, 2017 at the Vertical Campus at Baruch College, City University of New York.
