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Our First Chat: November 30, 2000 
 Nearly
all who had RSVP’d to participate in this initial chat session
of CSUL-South interest group actually "showed up" to take
part. A group of slightly less than twenty (all but a handful entirely
new to the online chatroom experience) held a fast-paced and sometimes
exhilarating exchange on a number of topics. As with face-to-face
discussions involving a large group, participants occasionally "talked
past" one another, and a couple of ventured topics failed to
spark wide interest among the competing streams of "conversation."
But the process proved to be engaging for the participants, as most
expressed enthusiasm for the chat experiment.An
exchange on a perceived downsizing trend among the faculty bodies
of the CSU Libraries held sway through much of the chat. Observations
from several chatters made it apparent that there was not a uniform
trend among all campuses. While some were experiencing a strain in
public service, with remaining faculty absorbing workload that had
historically been covered by a larger group, others believed there
was a more pronounced trend among technical services faculty (though
in one person’s experience a campus had actually expanded the
number of technical services faculty members recently). As a corollary
to possible diminishing of approved positions, search committees were
seeing fewer qualified applicants (and sometimes just fewer applicants)
showing up in candidate pools. One suggested remedy to this was for
CSUL-South to recommend some kind of scholarship or other cooperative
support for promising CSU Library staff persons to attend the one
library school of the Southern campuses. The group generally agreed
on a recommendation to CSUL-South to develop a single chart of the
ratios of students-to-library faculty and students-to-instructional
faculty for all campuses, so as to have a basis for further discussion
of workforce and workload issues.Another
major thread of the initial chat was the upcoming one-year CSU eBook
Pilot Project. At least one participant had been involved in the selection
of digitized books for one of the subject areas. Each library will
have to make decisions (fairly quickly) regarding use of the MARC
record sets provided by netLibrary, how to display in the OPAC, etc.
There will also be the issues of training both staff and users, and
promoting the new service. Participants felt that the evolving function
or role of ebooks would be interesting to observe, both in the culture
at large and within libraries."Instant
feedback" on the chat experience--during the chat session itself--was
positive. Participants felt that the hour and fifteen minutes of the
chat had been quite productive, and that the savings in commute time
over a face-to-face meeting was quite wonderful to contemplate! Several
further "meetings" of CSUL-South in chat mode are likely
to be set over 2001. |