ILA 2008

Last week I attended the Illinois Library Association conference in Chicago. There were two sessions that actually applied to Academic Libraries. They were Systemic Change Needed in Information Literacy and Academic Integrity and the College Student.

In the first session Lisa Stock, from the College of DuPage, discussed a study she conducted on how students develop info lit skills. She found a need to educate the educators and that there should be full collaboration between librarians and faculty, not just parallel work or cooperative work. Our new workshop forms are more collaborative.

The session on Academic Integrity seemed to bring up more questions than answers. The speakers were from Eastern Illinois University and Elmhurst College. They found that while there are not more students plagiarizing, students are plagiarizing more. They discussed what role librarians have in teaching students about plagiarism, citations, and use of information. They discussed how to keep students from cheating. Turnitin software was mentioned. One suggestion was that faculty need to create cheat proof assignments and not give the same tests over and over. They too said that collaboration between faculty and librarians is vitally important.

One session I attended in which I had to stand for 1.5 hours (see below) was The Customer Focused Library - Lessons Learned from Retail. This was the result of a study conducted in the Chicago area of four libraries, both public and academic. While the academic library was larger than our libraries are, there were still some things that apply to us. One of them was to keep the desk uncluttered - lofty goal for me since I do all my work from my desk. Also, look at your library from a patron's view and keep computer-generated signage fresh or it will lose power among frequent visitors.

I did attend a session on gadgets, where they had the Kindle, some phones, some battery chargers, etc. It led to my purchasing an ITouch. After all, we did step up to DSL from dial up at home last month. Now if I would just connect everything so that I can use it. :)

I wanted to get into the session about leadership, but it was full to overflowing. (I still uploaded slide presentation to Google Docs.) As a matter of fact, that happened to me in three of the sessions that I wanted to attend. I noticed that some of the very popular sessions were put in rooms that had only about 50 seats, while others were in huge rooms and had only a scattering of attendees. That was the frustrating part of my week.

I placed the handouts and PowerPoints in the ILA 2008 folder under conferences in Google.