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Bridges do more than connect two land masses

So I arrived in the Bay Area in time for the closure of the Bay Bridge, and might I add, if they who know these things believe the bridge should be closed, then by golly, please do close it.

Right before I arrived in the Bay Area I had a chance to swing through Monterey and attend a reception for SCELC, the key consortium MPOW belongs to. (MPOW, for those new to this blog, means My Place Of Work, which in this case is the Cushman Library at Holy Names University.)  This was a chance to meet our peers in the private-academic-California sector of LibraryLand and to soak up some of the SCELC zeitgeist.

While I was listening to people talk about libraries and librarianship, more than once I overheard someone describe SCELC members as “the libraries that aren’t CSU or UC.”  I can see why they would say that, since UC and CSU do tend to dominate the discussion in California academia.

Yet collectively, the SCELC libraries are quite the force; and a consortium such as SCELC helps them become more than the sum of their parts.  To date SCELC has been extremely useful for these libraries. And tomorrow, and the tomorrows beyond? As we as a profession move toward massive-scale resource-sharing and centralized print and digital collections, the neural networks built by consortial bridges will make the smallest libraries powerful indeed.

Posted on this day, other years:

This was written by K.G. Schneider. Posted on Thursday, October 29, 2009, at 10:17 pm. Filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.