Reference work may occasionally live up to its glamorous reputation. For every experience with a student of high potential that challenges the reference librarian’s skills and knowledge, there are more interactions with students who give the impression of being under-prepared for college-level research. So we academic librarians may groan a bit, but we ultimately dig [...]

The good news about open access keeps coming. Here at ACRLog, we’ve followed the trend since Harvard’s Arts and Sciences faculty adopted an open access resolution. Boston university and MIT have made similar resolutions. Individual scholars like Danah Boyd have committed to making their work available online by boycotting publications that don’t allow it. And [...]

According to a story in this morning’s Chronicle, many scholars remain “wary” of the Google Book Search project. This is perhaps to be expected (many librarians are wary of it, too, although I prefer to think of our work more as “due diligence”), but more distressing is the conclusion drawn by Pamela Samuelson (UC Berkeley [...]

One thing I have found difficult in my librarian-instructor capacity is how to impress students with the idea that some sources of information are better than others. We are all comfortable with the concept that value is subjective. But does this apply to information? (My own answer varies depending on what day it is.)
Of students [...]

Editor’s Note: A few weeks ago we put out a call for someone to be our new faculty blog correspondent. With this post I’d like to introduce Laura Wimberley, the librarian we’ve selected to keep us up-to-date on what’s happening in the faculty blogosphere. Laura works at the Medical Center Library at the University [...]