 Welcome to the 2012 ARL Fall Forum remarks by Wendy Pratt-Louget and Carton Rogers. Good afternoon. I'm Wendy Louget from University of Minnesota and the newly minted president of ARL. And it's fabulous to see you all here for what I'm sure will be a really exciting next day and a half. Last spring, at the ARL Association meeting, during the business meeting actually, we hit a really deep nerve. And I don't remember now how it arose, but the people kept coming to the microphone with stories to tell about change going on in their libraries, about new kinds of positions, about new roles, things they were being asked to do, the kind of challenge of working across boundaries where we call those horizontals in my place. And a whole array of strategies that libraries were using to mine that kind of ferment and figure out what the talent pool was, how to make the most of it, how to figure out where one needed new talent. But it clearly had become a hot topic that way expanded beyond our usual thinking about human resources or organization development. Something else was going on. Library workforce issues are clearly a really important topic for us. And this is going to be, we think, a very promising program to look at both opportunities and also the challenges that we all face. We talk all the time, don't we, about that staff are our most important resource. So this is our opportunity to really make that so and to figure out how to develop it for the future. For the rest of the afternoon and tomorrow morning, you'll hear from an esteemed group of people who will address a variety of topics about what the workforce needs really are. And at this point it's my pleasure to introduce Carton Rogers, who chairs the ARL Transforming Research Libraries Steering Committee and is Vice Provost and Director of Libraries at University of Pennsylvania. Carton. Thanks, Wendy. I appreciate the introduction. I hope I'm still employed by the University of Pennsylvania when I go home at the end of this week. But I wanted to add my own welcome as Chair of Transforming Research Libraries to that of Wendy's and also to thank you all for your participation in what promises to be a terrific meeting, chuck full of thought-provoking discussions. As Wendy pointed out, the whole issue of the 21st century workforce has become a fairly hut button issue in most of our libraries. We're implementing strategies to ensure that our workforce has the skills and competencies going forward that are necessary to support the information and service needs of the many campus constituencies that we all support. The environment in which we find ourselves is both volatile and highly competitive. We need a workforce that not only supports the needs of 21st century researchers, but one that positions us to move into new areas of engagement on our campuses as those opportunities arise. We had a really interesting conversation at this morning's business meeting about MOOCs and how our campuses are being overrun by MOOC fever, and trying to figure out how to position our research libraries to manage that whole issue. Libraries are not alone in this, in the need to read tool staff, other professions are talking about it, and it is certainly possible that as we go along, we will explore options to work with other professions to come up with solutions that work for all of us. We might also find it useful to engage with our colleagues in professional schools to find out how they're dealing with this whole issue of staff transformation. And now in future library workforce writ large is a topic that the Transforming Research Library Steering Committee has been discussing for the past year. At the May ARL membership meeting, as Wendy pointed out, the directors engaged in several discussions about workforce issues and how ARL can be useful in framing the issues and providing possible means of addressing them. There was a lively conversation that Wendy mentioned had me up here on the stage, and I was the recipient of some of this energy from the crowd. And frankly, it was really a great experience actually, and it was fun to see the directors really be engaged in an issue like this and to be forceful in voicing their opinions. I hope there are opportunities throughout this session for you to give feedback and to throw your opinions into the conversation, because this is a really, really critical issue for all of us going forward. Over the next day or so, we have programs covering a range of issues, demographic trends, organizational strategies for bringing about change, new roles for information professionals, and the very tricky role of iSchools in addressing the changing educational needs of our staff. We look forward to these presentations and certainly again to the discussions that we hope follow. I'd like to thank a group of colleagues who helped in the planning of this forum. A special thank you to Joan Giusecchi, to Anne Kinney, and Vicki Williamson. Also to ARL staff members Mark Puente, Judy Rutenberg, and Sue Boffman. With that, I think that we should call up the first panel of the day. Joan Giusecchi is the convener, and she'll be joined by Kathleen DeLong and Jorge Shaman. Thanks again for attending. Hope you enjoy the show. Thank you for listening. Music was provided by Josh Woodward. For more talks from this meeting, please visit www.arl.org.