Journey to Convergence Recipes

In the movie "Julie and Julia (2009)," Julie Powell wanted to be a useful person like a writer. Although she was marching into the age of 30's, Julie found herself in similar walk of life as Julia Child, who married at the age of 40, didn't know what to do with her life, but finally decided to introduce French cooking to the Americans. In the movie, Julie tried out 524 recipes in 365 days according to the recipes published in Julia Child's recipe book, and shared her experience daily by writing blogs to her audience. The process helped Julie survived her identify crisis, transformed her to be a better person than she was before the project, and most importantly, put her in the position where she wanted to be, which was a writer of her book(s).

Today, academic librarianship faces similar social identity crisis due to a) budget cut of higher education; b) demand of productivity and efficiency in parallel development; c) competing sources of free and enhanced information that are scholarly in nature and readily available to the library's user community; d) shortage of new workforce who can fill in the gap between what a traditional academic library offers, and what its users want, etc.

The existing workforce has been challenged to be 1) proficient in domain expertise which itself is consistently changing and at much deeper level than the way in which a librarian has been trained as a mentor or trainer; and 2) competent enough to break the degrees of human bondages in group cohorts formed by the Millennial Generation, tribalism, cultures, customs, industries, subject disciplines, languages, etc. The changes are disruptive to the notion of academic librarianship in the 21st century.

How to engage and touch the minds of the people who are supporters of an academic library so that the library can become the center of teaching and learning experience of faculty and students in the 21st century? What constitutes the successful recipes for academic librarianship in the age of convergence, which has been defined by this Blog as being 1) that the information at its lowest-meaningful and atomic level of granularity can be bundled, re-bundled, distributed, and consumed by human and applications over the virtual spaces in whatever the library user's experience resides in compliance with info security and the state-of-art of Web-standards and technologies; and 2) that the boundaries of contents, media, carriers, platforms, and services to process, deliver, track, reuse, and maintain the info in Web-scaled infrastructure are blurred? As a result, information becomes a product bundled with infinite possibilities for academic library collection development and user services in the 21st century, particularly when the information is embedded into social media sites or in whichever virtual spaces of library users' choices?

The blog aims to 1) seek social identity of the librarianship in the age of convergence with guidance from thought-leaders in IT industry, publishing industry, academic research and library and information science communities, and 2) hope to response to the engagement challenge of the academic library in the 21st century with the appropriate choice of framework, a set of tools, methodologies, best practices, programs, and agreed-upon deliverables maintained by members of Walker Library Blue Raider Hits (Group), and published three times a year in the "Walker Library Spotlight Convergence Recipes Blog."Please stay tuned for future issues and showcases of this Blog.