Showing posts with label academic librarianship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label academic librarianship. Show all posts

Friday, October 13, 2017

Updates Fall 2017

Well, I suppose I'm more than overdue for a blog update. Here goes! After my last post, it was a race to the end of the semester at Grand View, but not before hosting both the Iowa Private Academic Libraries conference and the spring Iowa Library Association ACRL conference. I was a member of the planning committee for the ILA ACRL conference and as a local person, also helped with IPAL. In addition to generally helping, I also helped plan and co-lead the Information Literacy Interest Group morning session at IPAL. But rather than drone on and on, how about we just check out some of my tweets between my last post and now! :) I think you'll see some exciting things!




































You may have noticed a shift in my role. I took a new position at Iowa State University as an Instruction Librarian focusing on teaching and teaching support. This is a big switch from a small, private university to a large, Regent university, but I'm excited to try new things and serve the students and instructors here! Also, I got an adorable puppy (with photos sprinkled in above). I'm sure I'll share more as I develop into this position, but I wanted to write an official update before I left this blog hanging even longer!
Posted by Cara at 10:14 AM 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, August 19, 2013

Summer Wrap Up

Well, the end of summer is here. Last week we wrapped up the Summer Reading Program (below are just a few of our prize winners).

Here are some fun facts about our Summer Reading Program:
  • This summer was the first time we've done a Summer Reading Program
  • Our theme, Groundbreaking Reads, just happened to also match the construction going on around the rest of campus
  • 36 people signed up to participate, ranging from students to staff to faculty and faculty/staff family members
  • 37 prizes were given out throughout the summer (ranging from candy bars, dried fruit, small gift cards, used books and DVDs, to the large prizes: 20 minute massages, Half Price Books gift card, and a GV Bookstore gift card)
  • We held 4 lemonade lunches, a kickoff party, and a wrap up party
  • A total of 221 book slips were submitted for the prize drawings
  • I received over 50 book purchase recommendations from the book slips that were submitted (on the prize slips there was a check box asking "Was this book one you would recommend the Grand View University Library purchase for others to read?")

The University is finishing up one of the most visible construction projects on campus, the Grand Central Plaza (which includes a more accessible ramp up to the library!). If you look closely, you can also see the addition to the student center (the new level on the roof across the street).


We're gearing up for classes to start next week. This fall is going to be another busy one, but I'm hoping, despite the new challenges and responsibilities this year (new committees, lots of teaching across campus, professional organization involvement), that there will be fewer 12-hour days and a bit more balance.  This fall will definitely not be a "lather, rinse, and repeat" fall, but at least we've done the Core Sem I thing before and have a better idea of what to expect and we're definitely making some improvements to our planning, instruction, and assessment.  

Happy hectic fall, all!
Posted by Cara at 10:31 AM 0 comments
Labels: , , , , ,

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

ILA ACRL 2012 - Preconference & Keynote

This spring's ILA/ACRL Conference allowed me to return to my undergraduate institution, so basically it was like going home for a few days and nerding out with fellow librarians (meant in the nicest way, as I embrace my enthusiastic nerdiness).  The events began with a Thursday evening tour of the Seed Savers Exchange library & labs.  I am a hard-core Decorah lover, but there are still many Decorah attractions I've not yet seen and Seed Savers was one of them.  Bill Musser, former Luther librarian & current do-it-all, one-man-show librarian led the library portion of the tour, while another Seed Savers employee shared the lab portion.  I'm not big into gardens or agriculture, but I still had a great time learning about how this one place serves a wide range of purposes, and how the library supports that mission.

  

 

After the tour there was a fun reception, and then the evening dine-arounds.  I lucked out and chose a fantastic bunch of librarians with whom to share the evening (but, since librarians are the nicest people ever, it would have been pretty difficult to not have had a wonderful dinner with any of the groups dining around at various restaurants).  We had a lovely supper filled with the delicious food, fun conversation, and a fair dose of laughter at Rubaiyat Restaurant. I got to better know other librarians from the Des Moines area and beyond and also got a chance to visit with the keynote speaker, Michael Porter, who joined us for the evening.

The next day began early, as I arrived on campus around 7 a.m. to assist with setting up Membership Committee materials and other signs.  The conference began with a general welcome and introductions from the ILA/ACRL Spring Conference Committee Chair, the ILA/ACRL President, and the Vice President/Dean of Luther College.  Then Michael Porter, President of Library Renewal, shared his passion and ideas for the future of libraries with us. He began with a simple, yet important equation: libraries = content + community.  I think this speaks to the heart and mission of libraries: service to patrons is why we exist.  We need to bring them the content they need (and oftentimes the content they don't yet know they need) in order to fully nurture them as an entire person (meeting their educational needs, social needs, and even emotional needs in the case of programming & support meetings held in group spaces).  As Porter noted in his presentation, libraries balance out economic and other disparities and are a place where all can come to access information, be a part of the community, learn, and exchange information and perspectives.  The library serves as an equalizer, providing opportunities for all, no matter the circumstance.

This is something I am very passionate about and found myself agreeing with much of what he had to share.  I find myself drawn serve those in need; in my past life as an orchestra teacher I served children in a community that was struggling (and continues to struggle) economically.  Currently I am in an institution where students have struggled academically or financially but are working hard toward a better future for themselves. I often think of Grand View as a place that embraces all kinds of learners, especially those who may not have been accepted anywhere else, and this is a part of my vocation as a librarian and educator--to meet students where they are and help them reach where they need to be.  We can talk about the principles of librarianship (access, community, preservation, learning, literacy, dissemination of knowledge, etc.), but, in my opinion, when you boil those all down to their simplest form they would all fall under this larger umbrella of service.

Porter also emphasized the importance of adaptation to meet the needs of those we serve (and, for libraries to survive in the future, we must adapt).  So much has changed in the past two decades, but how have libraries embraced this? I think the nature of change in academia has already been a form of hindrance to the type of progress Porter and Library Renewal seek, as it does tend to take a very long time.  Library Renewal looks to forward the switch from the current emphasis on print and what I'm calling "broken e-content" (clunky, inaccessible, overpriced, not managed in a way that best serves users, etc.) toward a more open and transparent information sharing platform, changing the infrastructure so that libraries & patrons have a say in how they receive digital content, as opposed to being at the mercy of the greater publishing industry.  That's not to say all publishers are evil--they are also currently experiencing a huge shift in how they do their business and are learning to adapt, but how is the way they are choosing to adapt hindering big picture progress (and at what cost to the public)?

If nothing, I heard an awesome new phrase I can begin incorporating into my quirky phrase repertoire: completely borked, so that's a pretty sweet deal.  Seriously though, I share much of Porter's enthusiasm and passion for raising awareness of these issues and for bringing about change, but at the same time, I know I'm starting my second career as a new librarian in an institution with 4 librarians to staff all instruction, reference, outreach initiatives, do liaison work, and all of the other things that come along with academic libraries, so the change I can make at this point (especially as a non-bigwig person) involves speaking out to legislators, doing what I can to promote change on a local and individual level--and change takes time...
   
Posted by Cara at 11:16 PM 1 comments
Labels: , , , , , ,

Saturday, April 21, 2012

IPAL Spring Conference 2012

No, IPAL isn't an Apple product...It's the Iowa Private Academic Libraries consortium (librarians do like our acronyms, don't we?)! This was the first time I attended this conference which, as I understand it, in the past few years has usually just been treated as a business meeting.  This year, however, in addition to the lunch business meeting there were short 20- to 25-minute presentations highlighting the theme "Library/Campus Collaborations."

The day began on the road.  It was a little over two hours to drive there and, luckily, my colleague, Dan, didn't get too sick of my constant chatter (I was feeling talkative that day).  We arrived on campus with enough time to check in, grab a quick breakfast snack if we wanted, and see some fantastic friends I hadn't seen in a while.  It was so nice to catch up with them (and to see Anne Marie's adorable growing baby bump)! The president of the college shared a few words of welcome with us, then it was off to the sessions!

The first session I attended was UD's Jon Helmke's Skyping session, "Collaborating from a Distance: Using Skype to Help Achieve Student and Faculty Goals." During my internship at UD I was aware they had a professor Skyping in to teach an aviation class.  In order to accommodate this, the students met using a model similar to that used with graduate students.  The full group met once/week with the other class periods used for students to independently complete their course work. Several features of Skype made it the top choice for UD: the ability to screen share (so the professor could share with the students his computer desktop, and vice versa), the fact that it was free, instant messaging/mobile options.  Skype not only allowed the professor to lead classes, it also allowed him to be present at staff meetings and, later, when the professor had returned from campus, bring in guest speakers (reducing travel & housing costs and allowing more flexibility for the guest speaker's schedule).  The premium service allows for video conferencing between more than 2 users at some cost (similar to Google+ Hangouts).  There were some questions from the audience about campus bandwidth restrictions, outages, and clarity of sound/video.  For the most part none of these things were an issue in the speakers' experience.  UD campus bandwidth is pretty generous, though occasionally things will load a little less quickly or be a little more jerky/jumpy during prime campus-wide usage times.  Basic microphones and cameras work well and the professor said, as long as the students were projecting, he didn't have issues hearing classroom discussions or questions on the other side of the camera.  They did recommend you consult your IT department to be sure your network can handle such bandwidth use.

The second session I saw was another UD group, Anne Marie Gruber & Marta Abele in their session, "From Cover to Cover: Library-Campus Collaboration to Support At-Risk Students." They discussed their BRIDGE program, which is a summer program that brings at-risk or under-prepared first-year students to campus earlier than the rest of the incoming freshmen in order to better prepare them for their first year in college.  Many of these students have an ACT score of 17 and 75% of the group are the first-generation from their family to attend college. Much of the way Marta described the BRIDGE program made me think of Upward Bound or a more intensive version of the federal TRIO program.  They discussed the partnership between the BRIDGE program and the library and how the library was involved from the early development stages.  The library provided a literature review when the program was just beginning development, and has continued support them by providing materials to support student success & the faculty teaching at-risk students. (Some of the resources mentioned were The Naked Roommate: And 107 Other Issues You Might Run Into in College, The Thinking Student's Guide to College: 75 Tips for Getting a Better Education, & Teaching Unprepared Students: Strategies for Promoting Success and Retention in Higher Education.) The summer program is primarily to orient students to campus and for bonding, not necessarily a time to focus on academic catch-up from what they may have missed in high school.  As the year goes on, students will spend time in required study-hall sessions in the library computer labs and take introductory/student success classes.  Not only does the library provide the space, they also build connections with the students early (during the summer session) so the students know who to speak with when they have questions about coursework.  The librarians also come in and introduce the "Who, What, When, Where, and Why" of research strategies.  Students were given a "fake paper," similar to they type most first-year students would receive in an introductory level writing course.  Instead of writing the paper, however, they looked at the guidelines and came up with a strategy as to how they would approach the assignment.  They answered "Who can help me with this paper? What is the format of this assignment? When is it due and when can I work on it? Where do I find the information I need? and Why am I doing this--what will I learn from this?" This reflective process helps the students see that the "fake paper" is a manageable assignment and it helps them form a strategy that can be applied to other assignments in the future.

The third session I attended was "Collaborating for Information Literacy: The Drake Experience." given by Carrie Dunham-LaGree and Bruce Gilbert from Drake.  They discussed their first-year seminar model at Drake and how they've worked to incorporate IL into all sections of the course.  One of the sections is led by a librarian, but all first-year experience courses.  Particularly helpful was the link to their libguides (http://researchguides.drake.edu/fys) and the example rubrics they shared.

Throughout the day it was nice to meet new people and hear about what other institutions had been up to.  In the middle of the day we enjoyed a working lunch where we reviewed the minutes from the last IPAL meeting and discussed new business.  Officer nominations were approved and the Secretary/Treasurer's report was given. In the afternoon I attended Dan's session where he discussed the embedded librarian program we have, how it began, and where we're going with the development and implementation of the new Core Sem I courses.  There was a lot of interest in what Grand View is doing and several nice questions from the audience.  Our plan was to slide out and hit the road early, but Dan got stuck with this Chatty Kathy (points thumbs at self) and we wound up visiting with a good friend of mine from my undergraduate days.  We may be chatting more in the future about collaborating on an ACRL presentation proposal, which would be really exciting!  The laid-back feel of the conference was nice and it got me even more ready to head up to ILA/ACRL next month!
Posted by Cara at 3:34 PM 0 comments
Labels: , , ,

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Mentoring Meeting

The week before Christmas I met with my ILA/ACRL mentor, Rebecca Funke (Director of the DMACC libraries). This was our first meeting. I was able to see the Ankeny campus library, learn more about their collection, meet some of the other library staff, hear about their policies & procedures, and ask tons of questions (like the new librarian I am). It was interesting to hear about their set-up, and hear the similarities between what we are doing at as a university & what they are doing as a community college. I shared a bit about what we are doing with the embedded librarian program & how we structure our instruction sessions. There were several take-aways from the day spent in Ankeny, but one that I'd like to take steps toward implementing within the next year is to have an all-campus reads program. (It all depends on administrative approval, collaboration between other areas on campus, effective marketing, and overall interest.) The Iowa Center for the Book chooses one book each year to be the All Iowa Reads selection; this year's selection is Tracy Kidder's Strength in What Remains.I have been brainstorming about marketing and programming related to a campus-wide program.  Possibilities include:

  • a read-in
  • collaboration with student groups
  • collaboration with faculty & departments on campus
  • perhaps a raffle with book give-aways
  • utilizing the existing book trailer to increase interest 

Creating marketing materials, talking to the on-campus radio and television production groups as well as the student newspaper to help get the word out & to cover events held throughout the year (semester?) is going to be a big part of getting this program started.
Posted by Cara at 9:02 AM 0 comments
Labels: , , ,

Thursday, November 3, 2011

SLIS CareerCon - Networking, Conferences, Professional Organizations, & Personal Branding

Earlier this fall I was contacted by a friend and current SLIS student and asked to return to Bloomington to speak at the first SLIS CareerCon. Several student organizations collaborated to put on this convention. According to their website, "CareerCon is the first career exploration and preparation conference designed specifically for library and information science students at Indiana University. CareerCon offers presentations and workshops from library and information science professionals in the Bloomington area to help you land your dream job." I was excited to be on a panel discussing Networking, Conferences, Professional Organizations, & Personal Branding. Though it took a lot of behind the scenes work (various emails back and forth between the session organizer and myself, making sure I could have the time off, figuring out travel and lodging for the weekend), I was glad to return to visit with new SLIS students and old friends about my experiences since I left Bloomington at the end of last December (to complete my last semester of SLIS as an intern at University of Dubuque).

I was only able to attend Friday and Saturday's sessions, as Thursday was a full day of travel across "the I states" as I like to call them (Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana). I attended all of the sessions I could and caught up on tweeting my notes from the sessions in the evenings (#SLISCareerCon). Much of what I talked about during my session I have discussed in previous posts on this blog, but I also explained how I laid the groundwork for my internship. Beyond the typical messages encouraging students to carefully proofread job application materials, and the rest of the pointers they can find on any generic website related to job hunting and success, this panel focused on what it is like in libraries. Librarians have high expectations (not that we're type A or anything...oh, wait...)--Not only do we hold ourselves up to these high expectations, but (especially in this rough job market) we hold others, especially job applicants, to a high level of accountability as well. I encouraged students to step out of their comfort level and put themselves out there as a professional.

Below are the pointers I touched on:

Networking, Conferences, Professional Organizations, and Personal Branding

Indiana University SLIS Career Con
3-4 p.m. 10/21/11 E174

Personal Branding:
  • Evaluate your professional goals
  • Craft materials that reflect your philosophy of librarianship, your goals, and that present you as a professional (make use of technology)
  • Have a strong online presence
    • Personal website (you may want to utilize the space available to you through IU; use free websites like Weebly, Blogger, Google; or you can purchase a URL and server space pretty reasonably)
    • Have profiles on Linked In, Academia.edu, Twitter, and maintain a blog discussing current topics in librarianship or projects you are working on
    • Be aware of how what you put online may be interpreted by others; remember things like online privacy and security (Facebook)

Professional Organizations:
  • Be a member of national, regional, and student organizations
  • Be active within those organizations (volunteer to serve on committees or assume leadership roles)
  • Take advantage of lower student rates and test out different divisions and/or roundtables within larger organizations, receive professional publications

Conferences:
  • Take advantage of reduced registration rates for students
  • Determine, based on your employment goals, which conferences will benefit you the most (consider both the information presented in sessions as well as the networking you can do)
  • Ask those around you for recommendations of conferences to attend
  • Bring business cards with you (vistaprint.com, zazzle.com, etc.)
  • Examples of conferences I’ve attended: Iowa Library Association Conference, Iowa Library Association/ACRL Conference, Brick & Click Libraries Symposium (North West Missouri State University), Library Technology Conference (Macalester College), LOEX Conference (current students should seriously consider doing a poster presentation!), ALA Annual Conference
  • Others I’ve heard wonderful things about: ALA Midwinter, ACRL

Networking:
  • Take advantage of every networking opportunity you can (both in person and virtually, utilize technology to build and maintain connections)
  • Volunteer to help at conferences (things like working on the registration committee, being willing to introduce presenters at sessions, and even submitting proposals to present a session or poster yourself will help get your face and name better known)
  • Attend conferences and be outgoing (even if you’re not a naturally outgoing person)
  • At conferences and meetings, make it a point to sit among those you don’t know; be sure you are projecting and open and inviting attitude
  • Take advantage of those few minutes before and after sessions or lunch to chat with those around you, the conference presenters, and those who are hosting/organizing the conference
  • Have something to say (read or glance through professional journals and blogs to have go-to conversation starters)
  • At conferences you will see a wide variety of attire ranging from very casual to business formal; I have found it’s best to dress professionally but comfortably (especially your shoes as you will be walking a lot at conferences)
  • Remember, librarians are the friendliest people ever

Here's a link to a printer-friendly version.
Here's a link to my tweets (which served as notes) from the other sessions I attended.
Posted by Cara at 1:17 PM 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Faculty Development and Instruction Librarian (and Nursing Department Liaison)

After a whirlwind summer, the school year got off to a great start! The library is quite a bit quieter in the summer, which gave me a good chance to learn about which resources we have (I made some tutorial videos using Camtasia and step-by-step PDF handouts, which helped me learn by doing). I was thankful for the opportunity to ease into my responsibilities, but thankful when more of the students arrived back on campus. They bring an energy, excitement, and unpredictability that was lacking in the summer. Plus, their return brought more opportunities for me to do what I love best, help & teach!

I am embedded in 3 1/2 English classes, and have been working with a wide range of classes for one- or two-shot sessions (ranging from Biology to Business to Speech and Nursing). I love getting to work with students and, because of the smaller size of the University, I get the chance to learn names and really connect with students in many of the classes I work with.

I also get to work closely with faculty, particularly those leading the classes with me as their embedded librarian, but also through my Conversations on Information Literacy sessions. This semester I have already led one, and am preparing to lead the second, faculty development session with faculty that exposes them to library resources and services that will (hopefully) help make their lives a little simpler and more connected to the library. Our last session was entitled "Saving Time and Stopping Plagiarism." In the next session, I plan to cover how the library can support faculty work and student learning through Blackboard.

I can't emphasize how lucky I am to a) have found a job, b) that I love, c) that allows me to wear many hats and, d) connect with fantastic students and faculty through, e) instruction and reference work and f) (and this is a big deal, friends) no cataloging!!!
Posted by Cara at 2:04 PM 0 comments
Labels: , , , , ,

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Weeks 14, 15, and 16: Whirlwind End of the Semester!

It is hard for me to believe we are already at the end of the semester! I've continued to assume additional responsibilities as the semester has gone on, putting in extra hours to attend committee meetings, observe and assist with unique info lit sessions, and prepare for our upcoming LOEX presentation. Here's a quick rundown of some of the highlights:
    University of Dubuque, Charles C. Myers Library 
  • After having life-sized cut-outs of people in the library for April's abuse/assault awareness, we spent one morning dismantling the display so it could travel to its next destination (quite a moving display showing the names, ages, and the story of how they died as a result of domestic abuse).
  • LOEX prep, LOEX prep, LOEX prep. (Did I mention LOEX prep?) Anne Marie and I have worked hard to complete both the paper and presentation, sharing our experiences from our internship/mentorship semester, as well as recommendations from the literature. See you in Fort Worth in just a few days! (Here's a sneak-peak at our Prezi: http://bit.ly/LOEXMentoring2011)
  • Crafts (not just for elementary teachers, dear friends)! Between helping prep multicolored note card packets (complete with stickers) for the Great American Poetry Race (more on that in a bit) and transcribing colorful handwritten concept maps into electronic form, I was all about being crafty and creative!
  • We had a master's student studying communication host a workshop for the library staff. We talked about effective communication, our habits as a staff, effective leadership, diversity of views & how that helps groups come up with new ideas.
  • Web meeting: What do we like about what we have? What would we like to change? What new technologies would we like to incorporate into our library services and how would that be reflected in our website?
  • Ref desk coverage for a colleague and my regular shifts--always something new there!
  • The Great American Poetry Race: Students work in small groups, racing through a set of cards to find critical sources on their chosen poems. After a brief refresher on library resources, particularly those they'd likely use for this task, the students are on their own to find quality resources (with one "help card" they can cash in for librarian assistance). Progress is charted on the wall and the first group to complete all of their cards receives an awesome prize! The students were really involved with this activity and, while it was competitive, the competition didn't overshadow the learning objectives.
  • Evaluation time! Anne Marie and I scheduled some time to go over the evaluation forms from IU as well as just discuss the internship experience. I won't go into too much detail here, but I am so thankful to have found a place for my internship that matches my student-first philosophy, one that has given me an abundance of opportunities and realistic experience that I can take with me anywhere, not to mention the new friends I have made!
  • Jenny Parker and I prepared and led a book discussion over Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach. The meeting at the end of last week went really well, and reminded me that despite my colleagues having more experience than me, they continue to face the same challenges in and out of the classroom. By opening a dialog and sharing successes and frustrations, I think we were able to better understand each other as librarians and educators. At the end of the discussion, Mary Anne expressed an interest in regularly scheduling other discussion times to continue the professional sharing that happened during our meeting. 
  • OCLC visit day! We hosted a meeting with the Iowa OCLC rep and invited the Loras library folks to join us as we learned about what is available through OCLC's Web-Scale Management Services, what will be available in the near future, and offered suggestions regarding features we like with the current system that aren't readily available through OCLC's product.
Anne Marie Gruber & Cara Stone

It has been a fantastic semester, and I would recommend this experience to anyone interested in librarianship! Many thanks to those who helped coordinate details between Bloomington and Dubuque, and to the UD faculty and staff for helping to develop me as a librarian!
Posted by Cara at 1:20 PM 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Top Ten List: Number Six

From the Library Technology Conference, in reverse chronological order:

6. E-learning: Tips, Tricks, and Tools of the Trade, Susan Kane, Harvard Office of Information Systems
  • Susan Kane presented a wide range of tools and approaches to online instruction. She began with a brief introduction, asking which tools attendees had used in the past (see list below), to get a sense of our backgrounds/levels of experience. Then she dove into the "why?" questions. While there is nothing wrong with teaching face-to-face, particularly if instruction is an accepted and promoted part of your institution's culture, there are sometimes barriers to instruction delivery. They include scheduling conflicts, poor attendance at sessions when offered independent from a class (particularly when not tied to grades), and users may prefer to have things available online to be viewed and reviewed at their convenience. The benefits of online instruction are the flexibility of when the content is delivered (at user's convenience), reusability of tutorials when applicable, users may go a their own pace (supporting multiple learning styles when well done), instructor consistency (when delivering in-person instruction to multiple sections, some information may be accidentally excluded, creating inconsistency), and ease of standardized scoring, and that these technologies and the way information is presented is becoming more and more native to today's users. Drawbacks include a disconnect between students and librarian, potential for learner distraction (i.e. checking other web pages or doing other things while the instruction session is happening), watching tutorials can be boring, high-speed internet is usually required to successfully run online tutorials, computer proficiency, software updates "fix" or cement content (making it harder to update content). There is a trade-off between face-to-face instruction and online instruction. Face-to-face may require complex scheduling, man power, and cooperation from faculty, etc. Online instruction may be perceived as time-saving; however, production and maintenance is quite costly when examining the staff time it takes. An interesting figure presented was, for every hour of training you are trying to convert to online presentation/format you will spend between 49-127 hours in production. 49-127 production hours/1 hour of product. Making content reusable can help alleviate some of this strain, but then you risk lowering the relevance or context which may make it less valuable to the user. Kane recommends being as specific as possible within your goals for reusability. By determining what does and does not need to be taught in context, you are allowing for the potential of greater reusability.
Planning and Pre-production
  • Determine what you are starting with. Notes from an in-person lecture? PowerPoint slides? A website or other documents? Nothing?
  • Determine your goals. Does everyone agree (what are others' expectations)? What are your limitations on staff time or policy objectives? Service objectives? How much content is presented and how interactive will it be? What are the key objectives (choose one or two).
  • Do you have the tools to accomplish what you want? The hardware, software, staff time (assumption is that this will save time, but people often forget about the behind-the-scenes work in producing the content), expertise, and delivery platform?

Other helpful things to keep in mind when producing online instruction content
  • Will you need to convert the files to another format in order to deliver the content (i.e. post to Moodle, etc.)?
  • Why reinvent the wheel? Will some of your older content work with your new software (i.e. pulling in PowerPoint slides)?
  • How easy is it to add audio, what is the quality like, and how can you edit as necessary?
  • What are the costs associated with what you are using? Several options are free or quite reasonable, but do the free products offer you the flexibility you need? Are the more complex programs too complicated and clunky? Find that balance.
Resources mentioned throughout:
Posted by Cara at 9:10 AM 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Article 7: Communities of Practice at an Academic Library

Henrich, K. J., & Attebury, R. (2010). Communities of Practice at an Academic Library: A New Approach to Mentoring at the University of Idaho. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 36(2), 158-165.

Communities of Practice are made up of a group sharing a common goal. The environment created is one in which participants feel safe to share professional ideas. Benefits include efficiency of professional development; innovation, collaboration, and project success; and raised awareness about current happenings within the larger organization. Best practices for creation of Communities of Practice in libraries include having a common interest in the topic, inclusion of information and communication technologies, sharing common knowledge and experiences, promotion of publishing opportunities; and ensuring leadership is done from within the group. Promoting a Sense of Community, and making the Community of Practice meetings as part of the professional workday help add legitimacy to the development and sharing process. Challenges to Communities of Practice include finding and maintaining focus on the issue/s, allotting the time and effort to the group (it is a commitment), it can be difficult to sustain and leadership may lose momentum. When forming the group, the librarians at the University of Idaho kept the following points in mind: the goal is to benefit all members; they outlined how the time would be spent, who the facilitator was, what the goals were, how disagreements would be handled, and how they would stay on track. The group was limited to library faculty and they discussed research ideas and gave feedback to their peers. Participation was voluntary, and the environment was promoted as one that was confidential and an open space for sharing ideas without the threat that their research idea would be stolen. Meetings were held once per month the structure was that of presentation and discussion.
Posted by Cara at 8:45 AM 0 comments
Labels: , , , , , ,

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Article 6: Effective Mentoring

Freedman, S. (2009). Effective Mentoring. IFLA Journal, 35(2), 171-182.

Mentoring is guided learning to promote the development of skills and knowledge and happens in various points throughout a librarian’s career. Libraries are in a time of organizational change; many librarians are retiring, leaving professional gaps in experiential knowledge; the scope and approach to librarianship continues to adapt with changing technologies. By mentoring the incoming workforce, that experiential knowledge gap can be bridged, and new librarians are provided with the support they need to help libraries (and themselves) transition into the changing library & information services environment. Mentored workers feel supported by their colleagues, are given feedback, participate in professional development activities to aid with improving performance, and are socialized to their new work environment. Mentors may feel personal satisfaction and a renewed enthusiasm for their profession. The employers may see improved employee retention, and improved leadership throughout their organization. While there are many advantages, some disadvantages do exist, including mismatching mentor partnerships, lack of mentor expertise or commitment (feeling forced to mentor), and organizational cultural barriers. Formal, informal, peer, group, self managed, or professional association mentoring models may be considered or incorporated into mentoring practices.
Posted by Cara at 7:51 AM 0 comments
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)