Category Archives: Professional issues

Walking the walk may be trickier than it first appears: An open access publishing story

So I’m pleased to report that an article I wrote, “A Preliminary Methodology, and a Cautionary Tale, for Determining How Students Seek Research Help Online,” has been published in the April 2014 issue of portal: Libraries and the Academy.  Because of a variety of factors, the article is available in its final published version (PDF […]

What I did during my summer

(The title of this post was going to be “What I did during my summer vacation” except I’m on a 12-month contract.) Maura Smale posted her #summerIdidlist on her blog recently, so since this has been a particularly busy summer, I thought I’d do the same: Submitted an article manuscript to portal. Facilitated a conversation […]

How we done good

Two Fridays ago was a busy day for me.  My campus is trying to start up a first-year seminar (FYS) program as part of our new general education program. We’re working on recruiting faculty to teach courses in the program, which has been a bit of a stumbling block for a wide variety of reasons. […]

Stewardship, Librarianship, the ACS, and us

This blog has been dormant long enough that I think it’s probably okay for me to hijack it from its usual purpose (discussion of the hows, whats, and whys of library instruction) to address an issue that’s come to a head in recent days and weeks. So a couple of weeks ago, the libraries at […]

RUSQ, Open Access, and Me

In the past week or so, there’s been a bit of a tempest in a teapot surrounding the journal Reference and User Services Quarterly (RUSQ), the peer-reviewed journal of the Reference & User Services Association (RUSA), itself a division of the American Library Association (ALA).  I’ll try to tell the story as clearly as I […]

Open Access Pledge

Okay, so Barbara Fister linked to me from her spectacular Library Babel Fish blog at Inside Higher Ed, listing me as one of many pre-tenure librarians who’d signed the Elsevier boycott at The Cost of Knowledge.  While it’s certainly true that I’ve signed the boycott, what I haven’t done — yet — is make a […]

Philosophy of Librarianship

There’s a meme that’s been going around lately about people’s philosophy of librarianship.  Since I had to write a statement to precisely that effect1 just last month for my pre-tenure review portfolio, it seemed an easy thing to toss mine off here. Part of my statement of philosophy had to do with continually asking students […]

Why it matters how faculty view librarians

I love it when my friend Vardibidian blogs about libraries, because he always has such intriguing and thought-provoking things to say.  Yesterday, he had a post that very neatly connected some dots surrounding the recent Ithaka S+R report and its contention that while library directors prioritize the library’s role in facilitating teaching and learning, faculty […]

ACRL Webcast: Classroom Assessment for Information Literacy Instruction

So, remember those two presentations I did last fall?  Well, I’ll be reworking and expanding that content, and delivering it as a webcast for ACRL’s e-Learning program on Tuesday, July 19, at 2:00 p.m. EDT: “Classroom Assessment for Information Literacy Instruction: Are They Learning What You’re Teaching?” If you want to learn more about formative […]

Conference Presentation Feedback, Part 8: Getting All Meta

(See this post for an introduction to this blog series.) Well, this is the final post in the series, and I thought I would wrap up with one last thought, which is to point out that this entire series has been enabled by the minute paper assessments that I got back at the end of […]