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Cheery Friday Greetings,
Bibliographic and Referral Center (BARC). A friendly reminder that BARC is open for business! We recently had a question about who took over BARC from TC3, so we thought it was a good time to remind everyone that SCRLC is now running BARC in-house. Indeed, BARC is here to help when you’ve exhausted your usual electronic interlibrary loan options. We work with both WorldShare and DOCLINE, which means we can help bridge some of the gaps between the two systems.
Hospitals/hospital libraries using DOCLINE who need books can send the requests to BARC for referral—as long as the hospital does not have WorldShare itself. If a hospital cannot use DOCLINE, BARC can also help with that. For WorldShare/Alma libraries: Generally, using Medical Information Services Program (MISP) funds, SCRLC can cover the costs of medical interlibrary loan requests that incur a fee on any requests that you place. Just send us the invoice.
If your library is eligible to use BARC but you haven’t signed up yet, we hope you’ll consider giving it a try. “I’m sorry, we don’t have that” doesn’t have to be the end of the conversation with your library user. BARC gives you another option: “We don’t have it in our system, but we can try to get it from somewhere else.”
More information is here, or, schedule a time to chat or Zoom with Christine Brown, SCRLC’s Outreach Services Librarian. Christine can also provide one-on-one training to help you or your staff get comfortable using BARC.
Annual Membership Survey. There are a few days left to respond and we really want to hear from you! Survey results will help us understand what is happening across our membership, plus which SCRLC services are useful, where needs are changing, and where we should focus our efforts.
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Please complete the survey by Friday, September 4, 2026.
- We want to hear from everyone in our member organizations! If you’ve already completed the survey, thank you—and perhaps give a friendly nudge to that colleague across the room who hasn’t gotten to it yet!
SCRLC’s 60th Annual Meeting – Please mark your calendar!
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY
Theme: Through Fire: Libraries in Times of Transformation
SCRLC is turning 60—and we’re celebrating by looking forward in addition to looking back. Our 60th Annual Meeting will bring members together at the Corning Museum of Glass for a day focused on libraries, trust, and transformation, including a keynote from Claire Wardle, and more!
The program will include Lightning Talks! We seek to present 10-minute lightning talks from member organizations. This could be a way to test out a longer talk or to gain experience presenting! Some ideas:
- The best (or favorite!) innovation your institution has tried (remember: innovation means something new to your library—not necessarily new to the world!);
- The biggest community need you see emerging;
- Unexpected partnerships and what happened;
- What is one thing your sector must stop doing, start doing, or do differently to remain a trusted institution in the years ahead;
- Give us one bold prediction for libraries or cultural organizations in your sector for the year 2050;
- Anything else you would like to share with the library and cultural education community.
Interested? Submit a proposal! Deadline—11:59 p.m. - Tuesday, September 1.
SCRLC’s Annual Awards. Presented at the Annual Meeting, we are accepting nominations through October 5, 2026. There is time, but we know how the weeks fly by. This is an opportunity to recognize the people across our region whose work strengthens their libraries, organizations, communities, and the broader library community. That colleague always willing to help. The person who quietly gets things done. The creative problem-solver. The mentor. The person who has made a difference in your organization or in SCRLC, overall.
Complete this form to nominate your colleague!
Pew Research Center Report, August 18, 2026: Young adults in the U.S. are increasingly wary of AI, concerned it will take jobs. One of their points… “For the first time, a majority of adults under 30 (55%) now say they’re more concerned than excited about AI. About one-in-ten say they’re more excited than concerned, and roughly a third feel both equally. Their concern is now on par with those in their 30s and 40s, and those 65 and up.”
As usual, libraries and other cultural organizations have had to figure out new technologies and help our users to navigate them at the same time. How do we teach about it? Incorporate it? Develop organic, useful policies and guidelines around it? How does AI intersect with our missions and what we’re here to do? And how is this technology--and our approach to it--different from other transformative technologies of the past?
Going way back, one of the oldest examples is also one of the most relevant. Fire. When Early Humans learned to use fire, it transformed their society. Fire is one of the most destructive forces of nature, but humans learned to use it to keep warm, cook food, to hold predators at bay, and eventually to transform materials into beautiful glass art (note the Annual Meeting tie in here? :-). Of course, we weren’t asking fire to perform cognitive functions, nor with the printing press or telephone. Personally, I see AI as more of a challenge to sort out than as a threat. And, it is not insoluble.
The upcoming weekend looks beautiful and a good opportunity to unplug for a while. Enjoy!
Yours in partnership,
Mary-Carol
Mary-Carol Lindbloom
Executive Director
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