2017
5
Jan
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5 Comments
Liaisons as Sales Force: Using Sales Techniques to Engage Academic Library Users
In Brief Liaison librarians are assuming a wide variety of new roles that serve their institutions’ students, staff, and faculty. An essential foundation of these new roles is the ability to engage with the liaison’s user community. These engagement skills are not necessarily natural or innate, nor are they skills that most liaison librarians have... Read More
2016
7
Dec
Critical Pedagogy, Critical Conversations: Expanding Dialogue about Critical Library Instruction through the Lens of Composition and Rhetoric
In Brief: As interest among academic librarians in critical pedagogy has grown, discussions about this concept and its implications for librarianship have been richly expanding our ways of conceiving of library instruction and of our (librarians’) instructional roles. At the same time, this concept is still a relatively new one for our field. We may... Read More
2016
23
Nov
Library Lockdown: An escape room by kids for the community
In Brief Hoping to bring the unexpected to Nebraska City, the Morton-James Public Library applied for an ALA Association for Library Service to Children Curiosity Creates grant to undertake an ambitious project: build an escape room. In a library storage room. With children. The hope was by trying something completely different, we could increase interest... Read More
2016
9
Nov
The Information Literacy of Survey Mark Hunting: A Dialogue
In Brief: This article makes connections between the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and the activity of survey mark hunting. After a brief review of the literature related to geographic information systems (GIS), information literacy, and gamification of learning, the authors enter into a dialogue in which they discover and describe the... Read More
2016
12
Oct
Putting Critical Information Literacy into Context: How and Why Librarians Adopt Critical Practices in their Teaching
In Brief Critical information literacy asks librarians to work with their patrons and communities to co-investigate the political, social, and economic dimensions of information, including its creation, access, and use. This approach to information literacy seeks to involve learners in better understanding systems of oppression while also identifying opportunities to take action upon them. An... Read More
2016
23
Sep
The Collective Approach: Reinventing Affordable, Useful, and Fun Professional Development
In Brief: In 2014, a small group of librarians at the University of Tennessee set out to redefine the library conference landscape. Frustrated by the high cost and lack of tangible skills and takeaways at professional organization gatherings, they conceived of a low-cost, high-value symposium where academic librarians might learn, create, and collaborate together. The... Read More
Image by flickr user ashokboghani (CC BY-NC 2.0) In Brief: This article was written to describe the University of New Mexico’s Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center’s (HSLIC) catalog cleanup process prior to migrating to a new integrated library system (ILS). Catalogers knew that existing catalog records would need to be cleaned up before the... Read More
2016
29
Jun
Inclusivity, Gestalt Principles, and Plain Language in Document Design
In Brief: Good design makes documents easier to use, helps documents stand out from other pieces of information, and lends credibility to document creators. Librarians across library types and departments provide instruction and training materials to co-workers and library users. For these materials to be readable and accessible, they must follow guidelines for usable document design.... Read More
2016
18
May
Beta Spaces as a Model for Recontextualizing Reference Services in Libraries
In Brief: Reference services are at a cross-roads. While many academic libraries continue to offer reference services from behind a desk, others are moving to roving and embedded reference models. Meanwhile, libraries are also engaged in the development of collaborative learning spaces—often rich with technology, such as makerspaces and learning labs—but these spaces are often... Read More
2016
4
May
Considering Outreach Assessment: Strategies, Sample Scenarios, and a Call to Action
In Brief: How do we measure the impact of our outreach programming? While there is a lot of information about successful outreach activities in the library literature, there is far less documentation of assessment strategies. There may be numerous barriers to conducting assessment, including a lack of time, money, staff, knowledge, and administrative support. Further,... Read More