Archive for July, 2010
In The Sweatshop Or Reaping The Lottery Win
Are you feeling overworked these days? Do you feel the pressure to publish, present and serve on a dozen different committees? Does it seem like you are trying to do the work of two librarians, and that you just never have time to get much of anything truly constructive done? If so, welcome to the [...]
Posted by StevenB on July 27th, 2010 under Just Thinking, library careers.
Comments: 6
Let’s Not (Just) Do the Numbers
Meredith Farkas has a thoughtful post at Information Wants to be Free on our love of numbers and how little they tell us without context. Less traffic at the reference desk: what does that mean? It could mean that students don’t find the help they get there useful, or that your redesigned website or new [...]
Posted by Barbara Fister on July 26th, 2010 under Assessment, Information Literacy.
Comments: 4
In Google They Trust
An interesting article swam through my Twitterstream recently that’s a perfect complement to the Project Information Literacy report that Barbara mentioned last week. It’s a recent publication of research by the Web Use Project led by Eszter Hargittai, a professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. The article, Trust Online: Young Adults’ Evaluation of Web [...]
Posted by Maura Smale on July 25th, 2010 under Google, Information Literacy, Student Issues.
Comments: 3
Sudden Thoughts And Second Thoughts
ALA Demo Hell
I usually avoid the orchestrated demos many vendors offer at ALA – you know the ones I mean. There is a small seating area and there’s an infomercial-type presenter – or even worse an annoying robot or Elvis impersonator. My preference is to have a rep take me through a one-on-demo where I [...]
Posted by StevenB on July 22nd, 2010 under sudden thoughts.
Comments: none
Reading Between the Assignment’s Lines
Project Information Literacy has a new study out that complements their earlier work. In the new study, PIL researchers collected and examined research assignment prompts to see how they guide students toward good sources, and discovered that … they don’t. That is, the assignments tend to be fairly specific about the surface features of what [...]
Posted by Barbara Fister on July 13th, 2010 under Faculty, Information Literacy.
Comments: 3