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 […]
March 13, 2012 – 10:45 am
Three things I’ve been mulling over lately, that probably aren’t enough to justify a blog post on their own but, put together, make a substantial post. Think of this as the tapas of blog posts. Thing The First I wrote up a lesson plan recently that contained the directive, aimed at myself, “and go from […]
February 24, 2012 – 8:46 am
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 […]
October 12, 2011 – 9:55 am
It’s been a long time since I’ve given a simple yes or no answer to the question, “would this be a good source for my paper?” but lately I’ve been getting even more nuanced in my answers (and probably the students are getting even more frustrated with my unwillingness to give them a straight answer!) […]
October 3, 2011 – 9:59 am
This is going to be blindingly obvious to probably about 90% of my readers, but to the 10%1 for whom it isn’t, it might be a bit of useful knowledge. I was teaching a class last week that focused primarily on print sources, and I was showing the students a selection of the books that […]
September 1, 2011 – 10:38 am
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 […]
August 26, 2011 – 1:13 pm
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 […]
August 25, 2011 – 1:33 pm
I just finished up writing my pre-tenure review portfolio, and one of the things I wrote about in my “philosophy of librarianship” statement was asking students, repeatedly if necessary, “how do you know that?” It’s a fantastic question to ask, when you’re trying to get students to think critically about the sources of information they […]
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 […]
So I looked up the other day and realized that I’ve been a professional librarian for seven years now. Wow. How did that happen? I got my degree in May of 2004; spent two years working at a Fellow at the NCSU Libraries; moved to South Bend and worked for a year as a CWIL […]
