In Brief: This article investigates the idea of library student advisory boards as mechanisms for building more student-centered libraries at colleges and universities. Benefits of these types of organizations, measures of success, and the importance of acting on evidence-based user feedback are discussed. Introduction A Google search for “library student advisory board” returns hundreds of results [...]

Several weeks ago I attended my first community college commencement. Despite my staff status, I was pleased to be invited to sit among the faculty behind the stage. From this vantage point I was able to watch the ceremony and play a small role in it (faculty, please stand; faculty, please sit) while reflecting upon [...]

image by wordshore on Flickr This essay reports on a project which evaluated the Understanding Library Impacts (ULI) protocol, a suite of instruments for detecting and communicating library impact on student learning. The project was a dissertation study conducted with undergraduates enrolled in upper-level and capstone history classes at six U.S. colleges and universities in [...]

  My best experience as a teacher-librarian was leading a credit, semester-long course while a librarian at the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) during which my students came to care deeply about the topical content and used their developing research skills to further their engagement.  For librarians, though, this is the exception rather than the [...]

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is pleased to welcome guest author Derek Rodriguez. Derek serves as a Program Officer with the Triangle Research Libraries Network where he supports collaborative technology initiatives within the consortium and is project manager for the TRLN Endeca Project. He is a Doctoral candidate at the School of Information [...]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/penguinchris/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Librarians are always struggling to convince someone of something: convincing voters to say ‘yes’ to a library bond; persuading a library director to invest in a text-messaging reference tool; trying to get students to use library resources instead of Google. One of the most effective ways to be successful is [...]

Recently I was lucky enough to come across the publication of a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace in 2005 to a group of wide-eyed graduates from Kenyon College. While it’s difficult to sum up what one takes away from a four-year-degree, this particular rumination helps to qualify the value of a liberal arts [...]

As a teenager, I never tried drugs because I didn’t like the idea of any substance affecting the processes of my brain. It never occurred to me that the long hours I spend working, reading, and researching in front of a computer could have a similar effect. Recently I found out that it could be [...]