Prominent British librarian Dr. Colin Harris will give a talk on "They Do Things Differently in Britain" on Friday, February 10 from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. in the Wells Library, Room LI 001, Indiana University, Bloomington. The program, part of SLIS Brown Bag Talk Series, is sponsored by the American Library Association Student Committee.
Abstract: They Do Things Differently in Britain
While the development of electronic content and the global economy of, for example, library management systems have made the experience of academic librarians around the world more uniform, there are, nevertheless, significant differences in the political and educational environments in which librarians work. Dr. Harris will highlight some differences in the experiences of U.S. and U.K. university librarians in such areas as free market vs. managed economy, centralized vs. distributed provision, and library consortia in practice, among others.
Biographical Sketch
Professor Colin Harris is University Librarian at the Manchester Metropolitan University and was formerly Director of Academic Information Services at the University of Salford and also Director of the Centre for Research on User Studies (CRUS) at the University of Sheffield. He is a member of The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) - Committee on Electronic Information, the JISC ASSIST Advisory Committee and the Resource Discovery Network Steering Group. He is the editor of the New Review of Academic Librarianship, editorial coordinator of the New Review of Information Networking and a member of the editorial board of the New Review of Information and Library Research. He was for thirteen years a non-executive director of Talis Information and has been involved in consultancies for Higher Education Funding Council for England, JISC, UNESCO, the British Council, the Organization of American States, the International Development Research Centre and the Hong Kong UGC institutions. He is currently a member of OCLC's Membership Council. Professor Harris holds both a bachelor's (Hull University) and master's degree (McMaster University) in Sociology, and a MLS (University of Western Ontario) and doctoral degree (Hull University) in Library and Information Science.
Posted February 06, 2006