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 [...]

  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 [...]

“Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.” — Neil Gaiman The night before I was scheduled to return to work after summer vacation I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling trying to quiet my thoughts and reset my body into work mode. Unfortunately I [...]

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is pleased to welcome guest authors Iris Jastram, Danya Leebaw, and Heather Tompkins.  They are reference and instruction librarians at Carleton College, a small liberal arts college in Minnesota. Becoming forensic librarians “Wait, this is information literacy?” a rhetorician at our workshop exclaimed in excited surprise. “But this [...]

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 [...]

Picture it, a higher education institution, 2009. The sun is shining. It’s a warm summer day. Your iced coffee perspires on the desk in front of you. You are a faculty librarian participating in a workshop with other faculty members on outcomes-based assessment for teaching and learning. You’re excited to make the leap from routine [...]

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 [...]

Setting the Stage Last fall, as a part of the Texas Library Association’s “Transforming” initiative, my library held its own transforming retreat. Austin Community College (ACC) Library Services has gone through a hiring spurt recently, adding 10 new full time librarians in just the last three years. This retreat brought together all 23 of us [...]

Welcome to another guest post at ItLwtLP. This time we bring you thoughts from Carrie Donovan, an instruction librarian at Indiana University Bloomington. Enjoy! Once upon a time in libraries, you could call yourself a good teacher if you spent more than 30 minutes planning a lesson, if you wowed students with your search savvy, [...]