In addition to pursuing scholarly activities, Library faculty regularly participate in professional development events within and beyond CUNY. Academic librarianship is a fast-changing profession; librarians have to keep abreast of new initiatives, technologies, and trends that shape how libraries operate and what kinds of services they provide. Below are just a few short reports that illustrate the scope of John Jay librarians’ continual professional development and how it informs the daily working of the Library.

Ellen Belcher: I am co-chair of the LACUNY Special Collections and Archivists Roundtable, as well as a regular participant in the Twitter chat #critlib.

Kathleen Collins: I participate in a couple of groups outside the official walls of CUNY: The Graduate Services Discussion Group, coordinated by New York chapter of Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) which was a significant player in instigating the role of a librarian dedicated to supporting graduate students at John Jay; and the METRO Library Council Special Interest Group (SIG) for Circulation & Reserves. Both of these groups allow for sharing of common challenges and learning about new and workable solutions. The group that informs my work (and also interests me) the most is the Copyright Committee organized by the CUNY Office of Library Services. We comprised of a core group of CUNY librarians promoting fair use and copyright awareness among CUNY faculty, students and administrators – at the moment we are putting the finishing touches on an updated university-wide guide to fair use.

Robin Davis: I organize the CollectiveAccess User Group SIG at METRO, which meets quarterly. I attend and lead workshops at the LACUNY Emerging Technologies Committee, mostly recently Introduction to Text Analysis. One organization that informs my work quite a bit is Code4Lib, an organization for librarians who work with code and technology.

Karen Okamoto: As a member library of the Information Delivery Services (IDS) Project, which is a resource-sharing cooperative based in New York State, I participate in regular trainings and meetings to improve our interlibrary loan (ILL) service. The IDS Project develops tools and workflow processes to reduce the turnaround time for filling requests. This means, in most cases we hope, faster delivery of articles and books to our patrons. One of the current issues we face is the eventual migration of our client-based ILL system, known as ILLiad, to a cloud-based platform in the coming years.

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Read more from the Fall 2016 issue of Classified Information, the Library newsletter