Building on the successful professional development model found in programs like the ACRL/Harvard Leadership Institute and the Institute for Information Literacy Immersion program, ACRL will be teaming up with ARL to provide an Institute on Scholarly Communication in July 2006. From the brochure:
“As a participant in this 2.5 day immersion program, you will become fluent with scholarly communication issues and trends so that you are positioned to educate others on your library staff, engage in campus communications programs and other advocacy efforts, and work collaboratively with other participants to begin developing an outreach plan for your campus.”
No information yet on program faculty, but applications aren’t due until April 1, 2006, so there’s time for much more content to be delivered. Mark your calendars!
This sounds valuable. I do think, however, librarians should educate themselves about other forms of communication as well. The political economy of scholarly publishing is nothing like trade book publishing or newspaper publishing or broadcast or cable news – and those all provide important channels of information, too. This is obviously focused on a two-pronged approach: learning the issues and advocacy. What I’m talking about is more along the lines of helping students understand where inforamtion comes from and what political and economic issues affect it. There’s an interesting thread on ILI-L as I write about this issue.