New and Improved – or Not?
One of the lovely surprises awaiting those who have been away from the reference desk for a while is the numerous spanking new database interfaces that have sprouted up. There seem to be more than usual this year, and while some are improvements, others, frankly, need a good spanking. One that has us particularly flummoxed [...]
Posted by Barbara Fister on August 24th, 2010 under Technology Issues.
Comments: 12
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
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
Not a Crisis, a Transition
Chronicle staffer Jennifer Howard reported from the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses, where the incoming president, Richard Brown of Georgetown University Press, challenged the idea that scholarly publishing is in crisis. A crisis, when it isn’t resolved for decades, becomes a way of life, and his preferred description for that way [...]
Posted by Barbara Fister on June 21st, 2010 under Books, Open Access, Scholarly Communications, information industries.
Comments: 3
Breakfast of Librarians
I feel guilty that I haven’t posted in a while. Weekly deadlines for Library Journal columns have kept me hopping. I should take notes on how Steven Bell manages his deadlines. He’s the ultimate kept-up librarian.
But I thought I’d share something fun we’ve been doing this spring at my library – we started a [...]
Posted by Barbara Fister on April 18th, 2010 under Professional Development.
Comments: 2