Mensaje Actividad Reconocimiento

UNIVERSIDAD DE PUERTO RICO

Speech on the Occasion of a Recognition Ceremony for the Libraries of the University of Puerto Rico By Stanley Portela Valentín, President Board of Library Directors of the University of Puerto Rico Friday, November 17, 2008 Good afternoon to everyone; Attorney Antonio García Padilla, President of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), Dr. Celeste Freytes, Vice-President of Academic Affairs, Chancellors of the UPR, Deans of Academic Affairs, our distinguished guests from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), Mary Ellen Davis its Executive Director, Dr. Lance Query Dean of Libraries, Tulane University, and Mrs. Kathryn Deiss, Content Strategist, ACRL; Dr. Consuelo Figueras VicePresident for Accreditation and Dr. Julia Vélez Library Evaluation Coordinator; my fellow Library Directors and Evaluation Committee Coordinators. I´m Stanley Portela, Library Director of the UPR at Carolina and President of the Board of Library of Directors (BLD) of the UPR, and as such I come to you today. The BLD has been an active body conducting monthly meetings for over the last 15 years. At the beginning budget issues brought us together. Then came technology and library automation, which also brought us together, but there is much more than. Our main driving force is a common desire to enable the progress of our libraries in a way that benefits the entire University System. Some of the principles that have guided our work through all these years are sharing,

cooperation, collaboration, teamwork, union, solidarity, and of course, evaluation; all of these have made us see our 14 libraries as one Big Library. And speaking about evaluation, today, we can say that this process has strengthened our ties and rendered us benefits such as the following: i.

Recognition: The importance of the library in academic life and work has been acknowledged, strengthened, and increased. Libraries have become well known and taken into consideration for Institutional academic endeavors. As an example, at the beginning of this academic year the President sent a letter to the entire university community solely dedicated to libraries, emphasizing their importance and their bright future and developments, as well as celebrating this evaluation effort. In my approximate 15-17 years of work at the UPR it is the first time that I see a President who takes the time to write about libraries in such a magnificent way. We library directors were thrilled with that letter and we thank you Mr. President. So feel free to write as many of those as you want in the future.

ii.

Communication: It has improved our communication with academic departments and faculty members: for example, it has helped collection development processes, weeding and recommendations from professors for the acquisition of

information resources in all formats. Faculty participation in library life and library participation in faculty life have solidly met. iii.

Evidence: Now libraries are better prepared to provide evidence that supports and justifies our statements, petitions, and general positions to the administration. And this is possible thanks to the development of documentation like strategic plans, action plans, assessment plans, and achievement reports. Some of us had no version of these documents, some found old ones, but now we have either brand new or updated versions of them. And this has lead libraries to develop a culture of constant and ongoing evaluation.

iv.

Accreditations: Professional accreditation agencies have reacted very positively and surprised when they see library evaluations. And allow me to share with you a couple of experiences from my own campus at Carolina. The Library evaluation was in 2007. In June 2008, we received a team from the Accreditation Commission for Programs in Hospitality Administration, which as you may notice, is the accreditation agency for the Department of Hotel and Restaurant Administration. The day after the evaluators left the campus the evaluation coordinator and I just passed by,

casually, and he, I didn´t ask, told me that the evaluators expressed to them that in their entire history as an accreditation agency they had never visited an institution whose library had undergone an evaluation process like ours. They were very impressed. And he went on and mentioned how convenient this was for their process. I also recall that during that visit I was interviewed as library director. It was a three-to-five minute interview. That gentleman told me that he had very few questions because most had already been answered after his reading of the evaluation report he found on the library web page. These were two very short conversations, but I tell you that they remain among the most satisfying ones that I have ever had as a UPR employee. And they were so because I could see, feel, and almost even taste the positive results of all the hard and long hours of work that our staff at the Carolina library put into this. Results not just for the library, results beyond the library, for the University. This experience, these results, can become a reality in every campus through its libraries, through that Big Library I mentioned at the beginning of my statement. v.

Empowerment: You may already know that, in what I consider an excellent exercise of analysis, the Central

Administration (CA) came up with five or six main areas that stand out as common issues ACRL reports. To work with them, practice communities were established. And even though I don´t have time to explain in detail what these are, I do want to emphasize just one of their main characteristics: participation is voluntary. We send an invitation to librarians and they respond if they want to participate. Responses have been so positive that in my campus I had to remember to them that the library had to remain opened. As I said, we started with about four or five and now there are about seven or eight, and still growing, being the more recent ones on virtual reference and second life, a new Internet technology. The point here is that these communities have put the results and recommendations of library evaluators in the hands of the people who daily offer services to students and faculty. Like we say here, in the people who are “in the field doing the hard work”. This is important because the library evaluation has reached its target. From the presidency to every employee in libraries. Professional librarians, assistant librarians, and who knows if in the future even students assistants may get their share. That´s empowerment!

The evaluation process has also had a positive impact on specific library initiatives. I´ll just mention one… a very important one. Library directors have agreed that we need to switch our print subscriptions into electronic subscriptions. We are realistic and do not expect to achieve this in a short period of time, nor we pretend to entirely “delete” our print collections; we may have to make some choices. But we do know, everyone knows, that the world is going paperless, the academic world is going paperless, most research is being done paperless, therefore, the library world is already becoming paperless. So we have to update. We have to make that change. And we have started that change. As a collection development issue it was also part the ACRL message and we want to move it forward. It has been a process full of challenges. It is like entering a new world, and not just for us, but also for non-librarians. The people on the CA already know about this, especially in the legal division, and the budget office too. Success has already been achieved. A lot of effort was put into this and I want to acknowledge it, we are grateful for it, we appreciate your help. But it is not over yet. There will be more, there will be more contracts, more negotiations, long hours of work. More funds will be needed, funds that our libraries currently do not have. Even though money is always an issue, or many times the issue, I am very confident that library directors and the Systemic Executive Committee that was created for this task can and will work together to reach this goal. It will be worth the effort, because I´m sure that a successful

conversion process will project the UPR as a solid research institution around the world. This is necessary; it is the right thing to do. And it is perfectly compatible with The Ten for the Decade document, our agenda for planning. It contains ten challenges and many goals, and I will quote some of them. From Challenge 1: Sustained ties to the student body To optimize pre-registration, registration, and the provision of services, including library services, to the point at which they are fundamentally on-line systems. And To promote competitive research, investigation, and creative work in all disciplines at a level which conforms to international standards of excellence. Please Chancellors and Deans, please, think of the library as a synonym of research. It´s like a marriage that works well and must last forever and ever. From Challenge 2: An Academic Culture of Currency, Experimentation, and Renewal; To foster more efficient connections between library systems and academic systems; in order to do this, to develop clear and workable policies on collections development and to formulate more effective protocols for communication, consultation, the utilization and circulation of information resources, acquisitions, and inter-library loans. From Challenge 5: Technological Currency; To provide students, alumni/ae, and faculty with effective access to the internet and to technologies and equipment, and to provide training to strengthen their information competencies.

And To expand and update the technology and equipment in research centers, group study areas, meeting rooms, amphitheaters, theaters, classrooms, libraries, and laboratories. Words like group study areas, meeting rooms, amphitheaters, etc. remind me about something called Learning Commons. Another project for the very near future. To end my words, and on behalf of all librarians, I would like to thank our Administration for granting me the opportunity to address this audience and leave you with two messages: To our administration: You have the full support of every library director to achieve the goals of our Institution. We share the same interest and desire to advance our University and make of it the best possible house of studies and research for Puerto Rico and the world. To our evaluators from ACRL: We encourage you to repeat this process through the rest of the Nation. Make of these standards something that every academic library wants to comply with and abide by. As they stand as synonyms of excellence, efficiency, and distinction, make proposals to other colleges and universities, present to them what was done in Puerto Rico, it is a hard to reject offer. Think big. And from the UPR libraries remember this phrase in the future: We want you back! Thank you very much!