Archive for the ‘Information Literacy’ Category.
June 13, 2008, 8:00 am
Happy Friday the Thirteenth! I thought I would address your worst conference nightmare…wasting a session. It doesn't matter if it's ALA or ALAO (that's the Ohio ACRL chapter), but I usually end up sitting through one disappointing presentation. In this case, the content delivered didn't live up to expectations created by the session title and description.
The issue with this specific session was the use of the phrase "lessons learned" in the title and the thought provoking questions posed in description. Instead of hearing about lessons learned or best practices or tips or sage advice…I heard an infomercial. My disappointment stems from the content presented not being scalable or applicable to another institution. Don't tempt us with "How do you prioritize your resources and staff?" to only tell us that you were able to hire more librarians and have money for an information commons. That's great for you, however it's not practical or implementable for the majority of your audience.
The only transferable "lesson learned" (and not even to my local situation) I got out of the presentation is to share laptops between library departments. Do you use laptops for instruction and for lending to students? Great! Work with circulation/access services/whomever controls the lending side to pool laptops during peak times of the academic year. Use the majority of laptops for instruction at the beginning of the semester/quarter (when instruction is high and assignments low). Reverse the distribution model at the end of the semester. Let circulation/access services use your laptops for students to borrow to work on all of those end of term papers and projects. You're probably not doing much (if any) instruction at the end of the term. It's a win-win and a great way to extend those insufficient capital expense dollars.
Feel free to take a look at the PowerPoint slides. You might get something out of them that is useful for your institution. My lesson learned for you? Go with your gut instinct when picking conference sessions. I'll try to do a better job with all of my schedule conflicts in Anaheim.
If I could do it over again, I would have gone to hear Paul Waelchli and Sara Holladay talk about "Fantasy Sports: The Road to Information Literacy Championships." Paul and Sara win the prize for information sharing! You have to appreciate the amount of time they put into creating an amazing Fantasy Football Toolkit for Libraries. Check it out…
June 12, 2008, 8:00 am
"Leveraging the Economics of Information and Scholarly Communication Process to Enrich Instruction" was the rest of the title of this session presented by Kim Duckett and Scott Warren from NC State University. Their PowerPoint presentation (1.9MB) is available and you should read through the slides because I can't do them justice in this post.
Kim and Scott started with the argument that our students are not savvy enough to know when they have left our discovery tools to access paid content. Students have not made the connection yet, even though they probably have a similar mental model. Students normally don't consider how much money is spent to provide access to electronic journal articles. They go to the library web site and get access to the content for free (with few or little authentication barriers), so it's just like a lot of other content on the open web.
Strategies they have been using successfully with upper level classes…
Start with what students already know about the peer review process and build on their prior knowledge. Challenge assumptions by asking:
- Why don't researchers just use blogs?
- Do all papers submitted get published?
- Are all journals equal?
- Do authors get royalties?
- How much does it cost an author to publish?
Examples of sticker shock were used to further challenge assumptions about how much scholarly content actually costs. This naturally leads to a discussion about why publishers charge so much and why libraries provide access to expensive content. They discuss the various stakeholders in the publishing process: author, publisher, database vendor, and library.
Continued discussion of the invisible web follows, where the concept that Google doesn't make a distinction when indexing content if it is free or free. The crawlers are just discovering content and making a pointer to it available for retrieval. Finally, Scott and Kim were able to leverage the existing mental model of online shopping (buying airline tickets at Expedia or Travelocity) to help the student make the connection between discovery and access.
June 10, 2008, 8:00 am
Amanda Izenstark and Mary MacDonald from the University of Rhode Island discussed how they revamped the library component of their university's First Year Seminar program. They have been doing FYS since 1995. FYS student mentors were not enthusiastic when bringing groups to the library. Content was stale. Librarians felt in a rut. They experienced a large number of cancellations. This prompted them to review their program and decided to make it more interactive for students. They also wanted to include a tutorial as part of program to focus on key information literacy concepts.
They used the backward design model from Making the most of understanding by deign and Debra Gilchrist's five questions (see their PowerPoint slides) to envision the revised program. Their new program included a pre-activity, library visit, and post-activity. They deemed the redesign a success, but decided to modify it based on student feedback.
Detailed information can be found in their PowerPoint slides.
