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Although a great deal has been written about the challenges and opportunities for collaboration between librarians and professors in higher education, most recommendations for faculty–library collaboration are written by librarians, published in librarian-oriented venues, and rely on second-hand accounts of professorial perceptions and experiences. Dialogue between librarians and professors is missing. In this chapter, the authors present a duoethnographic inquiry into a librarian–professor collaboration: the authors collaboratively examine their four years working together on the senior seminar course “Small Business Management” at Acadia University, Canada. In considering the evolution of their course and their collaboration, the authors reflect on six dimensions of their experiences: the way their collaboration has shaped the course learning outcomes, the value the authors have derived from collaboratively reflexive teaching, the workload tensions the authors have navigated, the challenge of “fitting in,” and the role of library champion. The authors then conclude with four insights from their professorial–librarian collaboration that might be transferable to other contexts of higher education: the importance of openness, collegiality, time for collaboration, and attention to the cultural gaps between professorship and librarianship.

This article examines the discourse of appointment, promotion, and tenure (APT) documents for academic librarians. Discourse analysis can illuminate the social role of language, social systems, and social practices.

This qualitative research analyzes the APT documents for librarians from a group of US universities (n = 50) whose librarians are tenured faculty (n = 35). Linguistic features were examined to identify genre (text type) and register (language variety) characteristics.

The documents showed strong relationships with other texts; vocabulary from the language of human resources (HR); grammatical characteristics such as nominalization; passive constructions; few pronouns; the “quasi-synonymy” of series of adjectives, nouns, or verbs; and expression of certainty and obligation. The documents have a sociolinguistic and social semiotic component. In using a faculty genre, librarians assert solidarity with other faculty, while the prominent discourse of librarians as practitioners detracts from faculty solidarity.

This research is limited to librarians at US land grant institutions. It has implications for other research institutions and other models of librarian status.

This research can help academic librarians fulfill their obligations by understanding how values encoded in these documents reflect positive and negative approaches.

Higher education and academic librarianship are in a state of flux. Understanding the discourse of these documents can help librarians encode appropriate goals and values. Little has been written on the discourse of librarianship. This is a contribution to the understanding of librarians as a discourse community and of significant communicative events.

Conventional wisdom has long held that senior staff in university libraries should have parity with their teaching colleagues not merely in salaries and general conditions of service but also in eligibility to participate in general university government through Senate, faculty boards and the like. The case for such participation and the benefits deriving to the university and to the library were well stated in the Parry Report twelve years ago; and in the US a whole monograph has been devoted to the topic of faculty status. That senior staff should also participate in the government of their libraries through departmental meetings, as their teaching colleagues do, is a proposition less frequently stated until more recently, in line with the increasing emphasis placed on the teaching side on participation at departmental level.

GUEST editor of this South African issue of THE LIBRARY WORLD is Hendrik M. Robinson, Director of Library Services, Transvaal Provincial Administration, Pretoria.

We are living in an electronic age, where everything that we want to know or are curious about is increasingly facilitated by the internet and search engines. Now, much of the world’s knowledge is at our fingertips. Students have unlimited access to information in the form of e-books, journals and other open sources. The value of a physical repository of knowledge is diminishing and the printing of material is becoming less compelling. It has been noted that college students spend as much time on the internet as they do while studying (Jones, 2002). The most pertinent question is whether the library is still considered an important source of information to students? Can we imagine a university without a library with just computers and a server room? The information highway is posing new challenges that the librarians have to deal with (Dunn, 2002; Rockman & Smith, 2002). In the past, gatekeepers like the librarian decided what a student should read, depending on their level of study and their comprehension power. The picture has altered and now students decide what exactly they should read with the click of their computers. Leaders in higher education institutions are skeptical as to how much they should actually invest in buying books, how many shelves to create to stack them and whether the collection of books is going to be an indicator of the academic quality of that institution. This book talks about a vital subject as to how much and in what ways a library can engage a student to create information literacy. Various interventions have been discussed as case studies in colleges and universities from Canada to India. Student-centered workshops have been designed along with university partnerships with a writing center as well as the role of a library as a source of socio-economic transformation in Africa. The experiences shared by the authors in this book will be a valuable resource for librarians across the world as they increase their collaborative efforts to promote the value of information literacy for students.

SIR ALAN HERBERT writing in The Spectator of 8th January, 1960, puts forward a point of view that librarians will find provocative, to say the least.

The creation of university institutions in the overseas territories connected with Great Britain has taken place very largely since the conclusion of the last war: already noteworthy achievement is an effective antidote to the depression that has overtaken us in more general matters. The need for such an impressive and timely step need scarcely be stated. With a new width of vision the rigidity of the colour bar in the countries involved has disappeared. Economically, the countries left in the relaxed ‘colonial’ system have gained in relative importance. Africa, the West Indies and South‐Eastern Asia must take the place of the great Asiatic countries which have so largely cut adrift. Yet Great Britain is hard put to it to find manpower sufficient to supply her own needs, although she must seek earnestly, even in her own interest, for the development of the immense but largely untapped resources of the overseas territories. Thus Africans, West Indians, Malayans and Chinese must find and train their own medical men and women, engineers, lawyers, school teachers, legislators, clergy, all hitherto sadly deficient in number. On a higher plane, our country has been a pioneer in the trustee policy that has taken so firm a hold on the imagination since the institution of the League of Nations in 1919: not only from relentless local pressure but as a result of real conviction we and our ‘Colonies’ are moving in nearly every case towards more and more complete self‐determination. We may be legitimately proud that in this matter and in the concurrent need for expansion in higher education we have gone far ahead of the other remaining ‘colonial’ powers.

For the Republic of Ireland, as for most European countries, the period since the Second World War has been one of growth and expansion in higher education. This has resulted partly from a growing population of young people and partly from the demand for trained manpower in response to increasing industrialisation and technological change. Total enrolment in all sectors of higher education trebled from 15,000 in 1950 to more than 45,000 in 1983, and during the same period the number of students in the universities rose from 8,000 to 27,000. The rapid increase in enrolments led to the appointment of a Commission on Higher Education which reported in 1967. Many of its recommendations have been overtaken by subsequent developments, but two central themes were that increased state investment in higher education was a precondition of social and economic progress, and that the growing demand for higher education was so large and so diverse that new institutions should be established to cope with it. Accordingly, in addition to expansion in virtually all the existing universities and colleges, two new national institutes of higher education have been established since 1970, together with nine regional technical colleges, in which the emphasis is on courses in the applied sciences and technological and business studies. As far as state investment in higher education is concerned, around 80% of the financial provision for almost all the institutions is derived from state funds. The distribution of these funds to the universities and national institutes of higher education is one of the functions of the Higher Education Authority, a body established in 1968 on the recommendation of the Commission, and whose other functions include the continuous review of the need for and provision of higher education, and the coordination of financial planning and development.

Discusses a recent amendment in Nigerian universities’ law that changed the appointments of university librarians, registrars and bursars from tenured to non‐tenured. Appointments to these posts which were formerly until retirement at 65 are now for a fixed period of five years in the first instance, renewable for another term of five years at the pleasure of the governing councils and no longer. The background to this development is given and its implications for leadership motivation, continuity of policy, issues of orderly succession and the fate of the former incumbents are explored. It concludes that in the present Nigerian context, the merit of the new order far out‐weighs its demerits in terms of the much desired attainment of full academic status for librarians and leadership motivation. However, care has to be taken to ensure the future of the former incumbents within the organisations if they are to perform selflessly during their limited tenure.