ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


3 3 4 /C&RL News

In the News
Downsizing is often viewed as a negative 

term and a negative event, but in this month’s 
issue Cheryl LaGuardia’s conference report “The 
upside of downsizing” points out a positive side 
of downsizing: “it forces us to work smarter, 
one way or another.”

The ACRL leaders and staff certainly want to 
work smarter to bring ACRL members the kind 
of programs and services they need and want. 
To that end, ACRL regularly conducts a survey 
of its members. Last month in this space I re­
ferred to a few of the survey’s results. It is inter­
esting to note that when asked to identify key 
issues of interest to members, a majority of re­
spondents identified as “very critical” keeping 
current with technology, assisting faculty and 
students in making use of information resourc­
es, and using electronic communications effec­
tively. A full report prepared by ACRL’s execu­
tive director, Althea H. Jenkins, is on page 368.

Everyone benefits when we find ways to 
work smarter and this issue contains a number 
of reports and articles that we hope will help 
you do just that.

Barbara DeLon suggests that we can make 
better use of our job descriptions in a variety of 
ways to maximize performance (p. 339). Paul 
Frisch and John Small describe how voice mail 
helped the reference librarians at the Universi­
ty of Illinois work smarter (p. 343). Elizabeth 
Byrne, Ralph Moon, and Gary Peete share the 
results of their work developing criteria for con­
solidating branch libraries that may help other 
librarians faced with this task (p. 348). Julie Page 
and George Soete provide us with an outline 
for a staff training session on preservation that 
can serve as a model for other librarians (p. 
358). Jennii Ramirez shares with us her experi­
ence in working smarter as a “roving reference 
librarian” (p. 354)— an idea her supervisor got 
from reading an article in C&RL News.

We all want to increase our knowledge of 
the Internet. In this issue, Thomas Dowling con­
tributes to this end with a resource list of engi­
neering topics- on the Internet (p. 352).

—Mary Ellen K. Davis
Editor & Publisher

mary.ellen.davis@ala.org

mailto:mary.ellen.davis@ala.org