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 [...]

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 [...]

It’s a truth so many of us keep in the dark corners of our lives as instruction librarians: we were never taught to teach. We’re not unusual, really, and the same is true of many of our higher education colleagues. We study a field, we gain some expertise in that field, and then – bam! [...]

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, [...]

Working in an academic environment, the majority of my student interactions are based around a specific assignment. Every semester there is at least one assignment that comes across my reference desk that makes me throw my hands up in exasperation (such as: a scavenger hunt that was written before we moved much of our content [...]

We at In the Library with the Lead Pipe are happy to welcome two guest authors to our blog! Hyun-Duck Chung and Kim Duckett are two of our creative and inspiring colleagues at the North Carolina State University Libraries. Read on to learn more… Lately we’ve been thinking a lot about the creation and re-use [...]

My alternate title for this post was “The Internet is awesome. Start acting like it.” It is a call to arms to shift our attitude away from magnifying the perils of online research and towards examining the many types of useful information along with how and when to use them; to shift our primary focus [...]

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath I always feel the need to preface my praise for this book with a little background. I’ve read a slew of best sellers on behavior. I started when a friend was raving about Malcolm Gladwell. I picked up Blink [...]