HERS Mid-America Summer Institute
In the October 2003 issue of L-i-t, I reported on my experience at the HERS SA Academy to which I had been selected, as one of only 4 women by the VC, Dr. Balintulo. This time I want to tell you about my experience at the HERS Mid-America Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration. I was one of only six women, and the only librarian, from Higher Education in South Africa who had been selected to attend this month long programme at Bryn Mawr College, just outside of Philadelphia. The SA contingent was sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The one week HERS SA Academy is based on this month long programme. The Summer Institute celebrated it’s 30th year in 2005. The four week programme started on Sunday, June 26, with registration. Registration included the presentation of our course material: 2 extremely big and heavy files, 3 smaller files and a book which we were to read a.s.a.p., and an introduction to the Summer Institute Library. Finally, a trip across campus on a very hot and humid Philadelphia afternoon for a picture id card, and we are registered. The opening reception and dinner was a good remedy for the afternoon’s excursion. Karen Tidmarsh, Dean of the Undergraduate College at Bryn Mawr, did the welcome and gave a brief history of Bryn Mawr College and it’s campus. And what a beautiful campus it is too. The Gothic architecture of the buildings is beautifully maintained and complimented by the rolling hills of grass and trees. Bryn Mawr was established in 1877 for women. The best thing of the campus is however, that the main libraries are located in the centre of the campus, in the good common sense of the Quacker tradition.
The building that originally housed the library is named after a women, M. Cary Thomas, second President of Bryn Mawr, and is a national historic landmark. It is now the place where the Women of Summer come for classes.
Monday morning, first day of classes in Thomas 110, we were introduced to the Summer Institute by Cynthia Secor, retiring Director of the HERS, and reminded that our pre-institute assignments were due the following day. Yes, before we had even arrived we had homework to do.
The days were jam packed and we were in class, group discussion or fire side chats from 08:00 AM in the morning to 09:00 PM in the evening, Mondays to Fridays, as well as Saturday mornings. The fire side chats with the many women Presidents (South African equivalent to Vice Chancellor), the organisers gathered for the Summer Institutes was enormously valuable and sometimes had both and pre-and post dinner sessions with them. All of the women were in residence in the same residence halls. We ate together, socialised together and most of all we, worked together. This provided an opportunity for a strong relationship to develop between all the women; a strong basis for a network that would continue for the rest of the lives for all of the women who shared Summer 2005.
Interspersed throughout the programme, but brought into culmination in the 3rd week, is professional development. This included career mapping and resumè advising, and the best communication skills session and individual feedback that I have been exposed to yet. During this last week, we began to look at how we take to our home institution what we have gained here, culminating in a panel presentation by some of the participating women on the Friday morning, of July 22nd.For more information on the Summer Institute see http://www.brynmawr.edu/summerinstitute/ . For my personal musings see my blog at http://www.highedlibrarian.blogspot.com/.
The question that plagued me whilst I was there, was do I best make use of this time to advocate for librarians and libraries. Nancy Allen, University Librarian and Dean at the University of Denver, is part of the faculty at the Summer Institute. She did an absolutely magnificent job of showing how central the library is to the purpose of higher education. She started off with the question “Everything is on Google, right?” and proceeded to show how everything is in the library, and why the library is important from each of the stakeholders position, namely the students, the lecturers and the executive management of higher education institutions.
I was one of three librarians and we constituted 4% of the attendees. I was very proud to say that WLIC will be in South Africa in 2007, and presented them with an opportunity to come to South Africa. We were also able to fit in a meeting with an alumna of the Summer Institute who is now the Associate Director of Libraries and Chief Information Officer at Bryn Mawr College, Florence Goff. The latter title comes from recent developments in the US, where the Library and campus information technology have merged.
I emerge from the Summer Institute with the knowledge that if we as LIS professionals are to be relevant to our communities, we have to understand their world. In higher education, we have to understand the challenges facing higher education and show that Librarians and Libraries are part of the answers to those challenges.
11 October 2005
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