Thursday, October 19, 2006

Here is another idea

I saw this entry in Gary Price's Resource Shelf (great resource for keeping up to date by the way even if you aren't lucky enough to be a librarian!)

It is about some of the excellent support that libraries offer to businesses in the community and quotes a BusinessWeek article that makes the same point.

So this got me thinking, what if a college like Rollins supported its business programs (in our case that would be two very different programs, the various Crummer MBA programs and the International Business department) in a similar way?

Business education is increasingly emphasizing entrepreneurship and group work. Could we model our assistance to these students as support for small businesses rather than the traditional academic reference/instruction model? The physical collection would be housed in a separate "center" and specialized assistance would be available for this group of users and organized around focused, user-centric, problem solving and information gathering. Online support would be organized in the way that some of the sites Resource Shelf list do it rather than as part of a larger academic whole.

Maybe it is a crazy idea, but it is Friday afternoon. A perfect time for crazy ideas.

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