Even now, decades (ahem!) after my last semester in a school of any sort, the beginning of the academic year fills me with excitement. Back in the day, the activities of reviewing course listings, selecting courses, and even buying books were pleasurable in and of themselves. And while much of that pleasure was of the anticipatory sort, a collateral enjoyment was derived from observing how the selections I had made for the year to come were rooted in the things I had learned and done the previous year.
These twin pleasures—the anticipation of things to come and the sense of building on accomplishments of the past—are very much a part of our mood this fall, as we look back on a year of extraordinary accomplishments at Choice. We began the year by planning for a wholesale remake of the Choice “brand,” retaining a design firm to help us change people’s (yours, for instance) perception of Choice from “magazine” to “publishing unit.” If you are holding our print journal in your hands as you read this, you can see some of the visual proofs of this process in our new design and logo, as well as in the enhanced editorial content we developed this year. And for those of you who are reading this essay on choicereviews.org, the change is even more apparent. The completely rebuilt service, with its emphasis on supporting both collection development and the needs of students and researchers, launched in June after five intense months of development and is the first in a series of efforts aimed at expanding our services and our audience. Also in June came the relaunch of our unit website, Choice360.org, which describes the full range of available Choice services.
Other highlights of the year included the development of the Choice tablet app; our increased attention to the needs of community college libraries; the publication of our bibliographic essays as open-access resources on the LibGuides platform; and the growing popularity of the Choice-ACRL sponsored webinar program. During this past year the program garnered over 14,300 registrations and some 5,500 attendees for its twenty-four webcasts. These and forty-two other presentations, some sixty-six webinars in all, are now available on the redesigned Choice Media Channel on YouTube, where they constitute a useful professional-development library addressing a cross-section of topical subjects.
With these elements in place, we are turning our attention in the coming year to building out our services in a number of related ways. If all goes well, CC Advisor, a collaborative effort with The Charleston Company, will go live in March of next year, and this fall will see a significant ramping up of our efforts to create a critical review and information-sharing service for Open Educational Resources (OERs). At the same time, we will be working with our colleagues at ACRL in Chicago to refocus our library statistics publication, ACRL Metrics, in order to more effectively deliver key metrics about academic libraries and librarians.
All in all, this coming year promises to be as busy—and rewarding—as the last. I look forward to talking with you about our plans in the months ahead. —MC
