Monthly Archives: February 2009

New lesson plan: “Guided Pandemonium”

I tried a new lesson plan idea a couple of weeks back, and I’m not really sure how it went. It was a one-shot instruction session for an intro communications class; I’ve worked with this class and this faculty member before and it’s always gone well. The students are working on informative speeches on an […]

The Library Web Site of the Future: thanks but no thanks.

Steven J. Bell has a piece in the February 17 Inside Higher Ed titled, “The Library Web Site of the Future.” Since we’re currently in the early stages of completely overhauling our current web site, I read it with some interest. (Take note that, as of this reading, the comments are not particularly charitable toward […]

When I don’t do an assessment

I’ve had my conversion experience with the Gospel of Assessment, so I always feel bad when I don’t quite manage to do an assessment at the end of a one-shot library session, or I simply forget. Often I forget because the class hasn’t gone well and I’m all anxious about that, and then I just […]

On-the-fly lesson plan conversion

So a couple of weeks ago, I taught a library research session for a nursing class and professor with whom I’d worked before, on a fairly straightforward lesson plan of “how to find articles in an EBSCO database.” The students were upperclasswomen who had done at least some research before, so I had a whole […]

The “undergrad” checkbox

A colleague and I were chatting this morning about the freaky stuff that undergrads often request through Inter-Library Loan, often not realizing what exactly it is that they’re requesting.  The most common example is Dissertation Abstracts, where if they request the item through ILL, what they get in return is…the abstract of the dissertation.  Which […]

An anecdote, and thinking about people as reference sources

I was listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young‘s “Ohio” the other morning, and it reminded me of one of my favorite anecdotes. My apologies if you know me and I’ve regaled you with this one before: When I was in my senior year in high school, I was working on a paper and needed […]