The Rev. Paul L. Locatelli, longtime president of Santa Clara University, has said he will step down next year to take a job with the Society of Jesus in Rome, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
G. Wayne Clough, president of the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been tapped to head the Smithsonian Institution, Andrew Mytelka reports on The Chronicle’s News Blog. See an article in The New York Times for more details.
The University of California at Berkeley has built up a $1.1-billion kitty to keep rivals like Harvard and Yale Universities from raiding its faculty, Paula Wasley reports elsewhere on the News Blog. She notes that Berkeley has already “lost at least 30 faculty members” in the last five years to its higher-paying rivals, “chief among them Harvard.” Full professors at Berkeley made $134,672 on average in 2006, which is 15 percent less than the average salary paid to their peers at competing universities, Wasley writes. See an article on Bloomberg.com for more information.
Youngstown State University and its faculty members have come to a tentative three-year contract agreement, The Vindicator, a newspaper in Youngstown, Ohio, reports.
Larry K. Olsen, associate dean of the College of Health and Social Services at New Mexico State University, quit last week following accusations that he sent e-mail messages containing pornography to one of two faculty members who were recently denied tenure, Robin Wilson reports on the News Blog. John Moraros — who is Hispanic and from Greece — and Yelena Bird — who hails from England and is black — claim they were denied tenure because of their race. James Robinson, head of the health-science department in which the academic couple worked, has also temporarily stepped down pending a university inquiry into the tenure cases and the pornography allegations, Wilson writes. See a report in the Las Cruces Sun-News for more details.
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Gene Fant
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9 Responses to Hiring News Shorts
not4nothin - February 3, 2012 at 4:46 pm
How about the Hooter’s system? Librarians (waitresses) tie a bright colored helium balloon to their belt. Need help with the OED (more wings and Bud Lite)? Look for the balloon to find your information server.
rgvonhorn - February 3, 2012 at 6:55 pm
Now and then over the many years I was an active reference librarian I was tempted to use the term
“my students” ala classroom teachers and reminded myself they were not mine. It was important to me to keep in mind that they were often honest with me because they knew I didn’t give out grades.
As for seeing who needed help even if they had no particular inclination to trust librarians and often didn’t actively want help, I walked arouond a lot and looked for people who didn’t seem to know what
they were looking or didn’t know how to do it and asked them “What are you looking for?” for I respond better to direct than indirect questions (“Can I help you?” etc) and found lots of others did too. And I didn’t dress like or come on like those people who gave out grades.
rghorn
mbelvadi - February 4, 2012 at 11:14 am
“when you’re calling someone (an authority figure) over to your space, it could perhaps make the others around you feel odd or intruded upon” – wow! Is there any evidence that patrons actually feel this way? Do you realize the implications of such a speculation are that the library staff should not feel free to move around the public areas of the library? If you’re right, then we need to start radically redesigning the physical layout of study areas, turn everything into cul-de-sac’ish individual study “rooms”. Given the movement of the last many years to increase the amount of study space designed for collaborative rather than private work, I really hope you’re wrong because otherwise a lot of libraries have been wasting a lot of renovation money.
mbelvadi - February 4, 2012 at 11:18 am
We already offer a virtual reference “chat” service, but we mostly designed/marketed it with out-of-library students in mind. It could easily be used in-library as a paging system like you describe, but we’d need to provide prominent labels on each workstation so the user could describe quickly to the “operator” which workstation they’re sitting at. Interesting idea….
Aaron W. Dobbs - February 6, 2012 at 11:17 am
“The problem I could foresee, in a sociological sense, is that when you’re calling someone (an authority figure) over to your space, it could perhaps make the others around you feel odd or intruded upon. But… ”
This was a funny line; I have anecdata demonstrating that the people around the person calling an ‘authority’ figure over are appreciated. Basically the people I help after being called over by someone else lead in with “Ssince you are over here anyway, could you help me…” I generally end up helping one or two “extra” people after responding to a “Could you come help me?” question.
Otoh, when I’m doing the roving reference thing, the looks from people generally seem to indicate more of a “why is that scary old dude wandering around looking at us” feeling :)
librfun - February 6, 2012 at 11:45 am
Spot on…in fact I have to be careful because I can end out of the sight line for reference and won’t know if I am needed there.
Ellen Ramsey - February 6, 2012 at 2:39 pm
We have had a paging system like this in place for questions in our library for several years, via a chat tool on all computer desktops that says “Get Help” and connects to a library staff person on call. In fact, we based it on the VT Empo model and a similar service at NC State. It doesn’t work as perfectly as we would like, but it has been effective in getting experts right to the patron without the patron having to walk away from their work in progress.
Excellent_Librarian - February 6, 2012 at 5:01 pm
A bold new approach to helping students is not anything new in a librarians thought process. Librarians always take learning into consideration. We savor the word, evolution. Librarians don’t unpack their brains from boxes of mothballs before starting their day. Librarians are always mass marketing the concept of how to capture the needs and wants of students. With that said, respectfully ALA needs to beat the drum just as loud as we do. Students come to post-secondary education with various learning styles hungry to learn and improve their learning…
“I Need Some Help Over Here”. Red cups upside down or right sign up, tokens of various colors or calisthenics wearing the latest MBT’s footwear or the high heel stilettos, in my opinion, only paints a small picture. How do librarians successfully help students…..Co-Education with faculty, placing the library as one of the core values “information science”, marketing the college or university library and funding is what I think the answer needs to be. These are just a few quick thoughts, this is not the gospel according to EMC!
Rhonda Kay - February 7, 2012 at 3:37 pm
the stats on my instant chat show that students are already using it from our computers…no red solo cups needed.