NAIS Blogging, part II

Joseph Lucia, a librarian at Villanova University is up next.
As librarians- "We worship at the church of OPAC but we slum at the Google bar and grill." At Villanova- even though they have driven down the amount of resources dedicated to print resources to about as low as they think it can do (20% of acquisitions), they are increasingly feeling that their electronic collections are becoming vestigial. However the balance is that students are increasingly overwhelmed by too much information- library expertise and deployment is valuable in a different context than it was in the past:
Librarians understand the structure and typology of information resoures as they relate to the nature and value of authority, and the processes and channels of vetting and making information authoritative in a format that furthers learning. To access our resources, students and users need to move from the open spaces they are used to to bounded or closed spaces that libraries control. Conversely, to reach users more effectively, we need to push our information out into open spaces. Our initiatives will be in erasing some of our current silos and improving the trails that we mark to enable discovery. At Villanova, they developed VuFind to help with these needs- trying to move their traditional catalog to a more web-native "discovery" platform which would be based on open-source tools that were able to manipulate their MARC data in a appealing, interactive platform.
In the future, Villanova would like to create more connections with social network and to create new forms of dynamic representation of information networks- bringing together the 'subscription' resources that are maintained by the library and universal information environment of the open internet. Lucia also noted that Google has recently accepted the concept of faceting search results- one which libraries and their software vendors have supported for year.