QQML 2014

I just got back from the 6^th QQML conference in Istanbul. As always, it’s a fruitful trip. What I particularly liked this year was Cornell University Librarian Anne Kenney’s keynote talk “Defining 21^st Century Research Libraries to Implementing 21^st Century Research Universities”, where she talked about the paradigm shift among academic libraries that are focusing less on measuring what libraries are doing and more on developing metrics that measure how well they are enabling research universities to thrive in the 21^st century. Her talk gave me a lot to think about, particularly for the research methods course I intend to develop that focuses on academic librarianship.

I also enjoyed the LibQUAL-related presentations at the conference, which not only included presentations sharing results of LibQUAL surveys in libraries in different countries, but also one interesting presentation that described translating LibQUAL in other languages ( the historical context, the functionality of the current web interface in handling different languages and a reliability and validity analysis for selected language versions). LibQUAL is a great example of conducting survey research in LIS, and in the fall I will be teaching a course about survey research. So these presentations were timely and beneficial.

During the conference I spent quite a bit of time talking to a group of scholars from Taiwan. Two of them got their master’s in LIS and PhD in education. Their students are school teachers, and they are developing information literacy standards and instruction strategies at K-12 level. In Taiwan, teachers are responsible for information literacy instruction in addition to subject teaching, and now the increasing workload has made it necessary to have special teacher positions that exclusively focus on information literacy. This is quite different from the US, there the trend is reversed and school librarian positions are getting cut everywhere because of budget problems. Another Taiwanese Professor comes from National Chengchi University and they have the only online LIS master’s program in Taiwan. We talked a lot about online education and I invited her to share the experience of their online program at the Library 2.014 conference. It’s always nice to learn about online education from the international perspective.

Finally, another highlight of this conference was seeing my old friends Songphan and Cristina. I saw them last year in Rome but didn’t get to talk much because of our different schedules. It’s just wonderful to see them again and catch up with them.