Opportunities Knocking

Today I have two off campus events to attend. The morning event is a workshop about how college libraries can collaborate with high schools to help transition students from one world to another. The featured speakers are from SUNY Geneseo where they started such a program with grant money over 28 years ago.

By their own admission, the program has pretty much rolled along on its own with some decline in numbers and needs to be reinvestigated and updated. Nonetheless, students who take the instruction do much better in college than students who have not had the benefit of visiting a college library as part of their high school experience. I can see all sorts of possibilities for us, and in fact connected with a high school librarian seeking a higher education institution to partner with. She will come tour our facility tomorrow.

In the afternoon, I met some of my colleagues at a local digitization business called Kirtas to see their equipment in action. We brought along three items from our collection published in the 1700s to see how they might be digitized and what that would cost us. I would love to have one of their machines, but that will take more money and more work than I can currently commit to. So we ask to join as a member library and will put a few hundred of our records out for other places to consider digitizing. If someone else is willing to pay to have anything digitized, we end up with an electronic copy for ourselves without the expense solely in our court.

Nice plan. I see all sorts of application here as well. I guess what I really need is a clone to carry through with these peripheral programs while I focus on the upcoming semester and the new First Year Seminar instruction and the new LibAnswers software development and other initiatives that come first in the queue. Ah, well. The economic pendulum swings in both directions, and at some point, perhaps we can take advantage of all the potential opportunities that present themselves.