Posting has been light as I am in Cambridge (UK) this week. Some of the time I was talking with folks involved in the Arcadia Programme. This initiative is potentially important in that it provides some space for otherwise busy practitioners to do some thinking ….
The Arcadia Programme is a three-year programme funded by a generous grant from the Arcadia Trust to Cambridge University Library. The grant will enable us to explore the role of academic libraries in a digital age, create new programmes and services, particularly for undergraduates — and also to improve the external environment of the library. [Arcadia Programme | arcadia@cambridge | Cambridge University Library]
A major part of the Programme is the Arcadia Fellowship Programme which will bring talented people to Cambridge to work on aspects of this very broad subject. Arcadia Fellows will work on projects aimed at increasing the library’s capability to provide users with services appropriate to a networked world. Each Fellowship will have ‘deliverables’ (broadly defined) associated with it and our findings and outputs will be shared with colleagues in the academic library community worldwide.. [Arcadia Programme | arcadia@cambridge | Cambridge University Library]
The academic adviser to the programme is John Naughton. We spent a congenial hour or so the other day wandering around Saffron Walden, an interesting market town south of Cambridge. We ended up in, er, Starbucks. A Starbucks, mind you, which exposed some modest wooden beams. We were very impressed that they were able to process my US Starbucks card. A global organization indeed …
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