RASD at the Long Island Library Conference
The Future of Reference Services
Speaker(s): Ellen Firer, Director of Merrick Library
Trina Reed, Director of Levittown Library
Caroline Ashby, Assistant Director of Nassau Library System
Sponsored by: SCLA & NCLA RASD
Arranged by: Cynthia HoSang and Rose Marut
Location: Salons 1, 2, 3 Upper Level Session I (9am-10am)
The Member Library Directors’ Reinvention Committee was established in 2012 as a follow up to a program on Reinventing the Library. Currently, the Reinvention Committee, after attending a variety of conferences, particularly the “Library Leaders’ Summit” at Computers in Libraries, decided to focus on the future of Reference librarianship.
To begin with, we created surveys for staffs of representative libraries to gather data on what is currently being done at Reference desks. Roundtable groups will follow, to discuss what Reference librarians see as their job, and what direction they see it going in the future. These roundtable groups will be composed of either volunteers from the libraries in one group, recommendations by Directors of innovative and forward thinking librarians in another group, and then each member of the committee will have a group at their own library. At the end of the project, we will compile results, and the methodology and results of this project will be in our presentation.