LACUNY International Relations Roundtable
LACUNY International Relations Round Table (IRRT) meeting
March 2nd, 2012
Graduate Center (room C196) 2:00 -4:00 PM
Present:
Ewa Dzurak – ewa.dzurak@csi.cuny.edu
Songqian Lu – slu@citytech.cuny.edu
David Donabedian – ddonabed@hunter.cuny.edu
Carlos Arguelles – Carlos.Arguelles@KBCC.Cuny.Edu
Rachel Jirka – rachel.jirka@csi.cuny.edu
Sharon Swacker – sswacker@citytech.cuny.edu
John Carey – john.carey@hunter.cuny.edu
Suzanna Simor – suzanna.simor@qc.cuny.edu
Agenda:
- Welcome
- Introductions
Present members introduce themselves .
Ewa Dzurak introduced Stefanie Havelka who was absent but send a written message abotu her work in the planing committee for the next conference at ALA in Anaheim this year. The pre-conference is a half a day conference – more info here: http://www.ala.org/irrt/irrtcommittees/irrtce/continuingeducation
“Develops and hosts an annual preconference for international attendees”.
Our call for proposal this year can be found here: http://connect.ala.org/node/128117
Steafanie is currently I am working with committee members on the conference announcement, which will be available by mid March and then she will share it with the LACUNY IRRT.
- Spring event planning
- Future plans plannning
- Elections of a new chair
Spring event:
It was decided that IRRT Spring event will be held in May 18th at the Graduate Center – depending on possibility to reserve the room. Our presenters will be:
Beth Evans and Beth Posner – two participants of the Shanghai Exchange program;
David Donabedian and John Carey – reporting about their research on Academic libraries and free access to information resources in post Soviet Caucasus countries.
Tess Tobin who participates in IFLA committee trip to Egypt will (?) report about the trip. Tess Tobin was absent and thus not able to confirm her participation in the event.
The Committee will ask Jane Fitzpatrick to reserve the room for an event and closer to the date will publicize the event.
Future plans.
The Committee discussed ideas and plans for the future. The Committee members discussed how to stay better informed about our own research and activities related to the international librarianship?
How to attract more members and participants? How to better facilitate our mission of creating a platform for information sharing about issues in international librarianship? What kind of information on this platform might be especially useful to the larger CUNY community?
The Committee decided to follow John Carey proposal to create LACUNY IRRT discussion group on CUNY Commons portal that would provide forum for sharing ideas. John will create a group and other members will be able to join and post on the CUNY portal. This requires creating individual profiles on the Commons for those people who do not have one yet and will provide one more community of CUNY faculty that might be interested in the topic.
Committee decided to begin creating an annotated bibliography of articles and books related to the issues of international librarianship. Ideally bibliography entries will be posted on the LACUNY website for all library faculty and staff to use.
The work on this bibliography will start with inputting those titles that were written by IRRT members and those which they used in their research and hopefully bibliography would grow to be an important resource . Entries should be sent to Ewa Dzurak. The placement of those on the web would be decided later.
The Committee also considered to send out the call for papers out to the CUNY library community in preparation for Fall event containing questions of people international research interests and its results.
Carlos Arguelles voiced a need for information about library systems and library services in different countries. CUNY librarians serve a very diverse body of students who come to the States with sets of expectations and habits. Especially graduate students arrive with experience in library use which might differ from what they find here. Knowledge about what they are accustomed to might help CUNY librarians to serve them better. The informational session might be organized with people reporting about library services and library systems in other countries. Especially those librarians who used to work in foreign libraries would be a great source of information. Also graduate students talking about their experiences from user point of view would interesting source of information.
New Co-chairs were elected for coming year:
Jon Carey (Hunter College Libraries) and David Donabedian (Hunter College Libraries) (Congratulations!)
