Ten Questions for the Near Future

By Prof. Darrow Wood, Chief Librarian
1. We have not become obsolete. Over the past twenty-five years, we have made continuous improvements to better serve the college. We carved out a full-fledged electronic classroom and two smaller areas for student or faculty classes, workshops, and meetings. But the question still remains for us, how will we reconfigure our existing spaces to better meet theindividual and group research and study requirements and habits of our students?
2. Dependent as we are on CUNY Central offices for support, and as our students and faculty
deserve an up-to-datediscovery system that allows database searches across library holdings in all media, when will City Tech and all CUNY students and faculty have first-class access to CUNY library resources upon which funds in the multimillions are spent annually?
3. Our library faculty and staff work with and are supported by one technician and part-time support. In the future, will we work more closely with administrative or technical professional staff who are not librarians, who are not faculty?
4. Interdisciplinary courses are on the horizon at the college. Will the Library Department be a partner in new curricular offerings? With which disciplines and courses will information
literacy be a natural fit?
5. How do we entice, lure, cajole, encourage, persuade, browbeat or otherwise force students to take advantage of what we have to offer? How do we build some of that necessity or urgency into the curriculum, perhaps via the so-called flipped classroom?
6. To what extent will we move from classroom teaching about accessing databases or other resources to workshops or tutorials on best uses of the devices and platforms on which access takes place?
7. The mind/body problem: how do we best build our physical library and our virtual library into a cohesive structure?
8. How do we develop a new “sabermetrics” which instead of bean counting brings meaning and results to our “return on investment”? Will we develop that ourselves or will it be imposed by others?
9. How do we keep up with new technologies best suited to the needs of academic libraries?
10. A question for all: Five years from now the printed book will be dead; Google will do research for you on your hand-held; and the library will have no physical presence save for a website (think of the Cheshire Cat). True or false?
For our faculty this discussion never ends and never will.
Special thanks to Prof. Ian Beilin for a lively discussion which helped focus my
thinking.