2009
8
Jul
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6 Comments
A Look at Librarianship through the Lens of an Academic Library Serials Review
By Annette Day and Hilary Davis Talk to any librarian or library vendor and you’ll hear the same thing – the global economic downturn is hitting hard. Libraries everywhere are taking an axe to their collections; libraries are cutting book budgets, canceling serials subscriptions, allowing institutional memberships to lapse, and letting go of databases. Libraries and their stakeholders... Read More
By Editorial Board This week we decided to do a “collective wisdom” post about job hunting mistakes. This is an issue affecting every librarian, whether you’ve got a job, you’re in the market, or you’ll begin looking five years down the road. We’ve all made errors in selecting jobs to apply for, drafting our cover letters... Read More
2009
10
Jun
A Conversation with Char Booth
Welcome to a special audio edition of In the Library with the Lead Pipe. Ellie Collier talks to Char Booth, E-Learning Librarian at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Informing Innovation: Tracking Student Interest in Emerging Library Technologies at Ohio University, a book length research report recently published by ACRL and available... Read More
By Kim Leeder If you want to start a passionate conversation, ask a past Emerging Leader (EL) about their experience in the ALA Emerging Leaders program. Created by former ALA President Leslie Burger as one of her presidential initiatives in 2007, Emerging Leaders was initiated to put new librarians “on the fast track to ALA and... Read More
2009
13
May
Why We Should Adopt ALAConnect: A brief review and rumination on ALA’s new online community
By Emily Ford So ALA has joined the ranks of two point oh. Last month it rolled out ALAConnect, a service influenced by Ning, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Docs, and other online networking platforms and shared work spaces. Despite the hoopla about the system I hadn’t even heard of it until one of my working groups was... Read More
2009
29
Apr
A Conversation with Kristin Antelman
By Brett Bonfield Only a few information technology organizations predict the future by inventing it.1 One of the canonical examples is Xerox PARC, which in the early 1970’s produced the first mouse, pioneered Graphical User Interfaces, invented Ethernet, and developed the first laser printer, along with dozens of other innovations. Among contemporary organizations, the inheritor of... Read More
In the Library with the Lead Pipe is pleased to welcome another guest author, Steve McCann! Steve is a Digital Projects Librarian specializing in information architecture, usability studies, and data analysis. By Steve McCann In 2008, when I was visiting Anaheim, CA, for the ALA Annual Conference, I had a rather unpleasant experience renting a car.... Read More
2009
1
Apr
Are You Worth It? What Return on Investment Can and Can’t Tell You About Your Library
“The indicators that served as benchmarks in the past, such as number of volumes and number of journal subscriptions, are no longer sufficient because of the more expansive role that the contemporary library has assumed” (Weiner, 2005). “The measurement of quality will come back to the questions of who are the users, what are the... Read More
2009
18
Mar
Stepping on Toes: The Delicate Art of Talking to Faculty about Questionable Assignments
By Ellie Collier 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... Read More
By Editorial Board Since our launch last October, In the Library with the Lead Pipe has been publishing a new post nearly every Wednesday. As writers, drafting long-form, in-depth posts on a weekly basis has proved challenging, even with the contributions of our talented guests. We’ve heard from many of you that, as readers, you’ve found... Read More