Are You Where You Want To Be Professionally (from ACRLog)

I thought this post from ACRLog might be of interest as it relates to professional development-

It’s a thought that probably comes to every librarian at some point in their career. Professionally, am I where I’m supposed to be at this point in my life? Should someone my age be further along? Should I be an administrator by now? Should I have a bigger reputation in the field? And the ultimate question, should I be making more money? And when we seek the answers to these questions we often have no choice but to compare ourselves to others, whether it be a colleague down the hall, that blogger being profiled in the Chronicle, or folks who graduated in your MLS class. We seem to have the tendency to judge ourselves against the A listers rather than the mass majority of library professionals who are in all likelihood doing about the same as we are. It’s a harsh mirror into which we gaze. It’s hardly unique to librarians.
Rest of the post is at: http://acrlog.org/2007/12/05/are-you-where-you-want-to-be-professionally/

Library friends

In my Dean/Director call this week Donna told Emily that we felt that the collection grading has helped bring the faculty into the library. They feel ownership now and feel welcome to give feedback. Donna commented that our faculty found many materials that were outdated and helped me with titles that would replace them. Emily made the comment that not everyone was able to get this cooperation. Donna shared that we kidnapped the faculty from our Friday meeting and told them that the meeting was to be moved to the library so that they could help me with the collection. They came willingly. When I do this again I will have food. It seems that I always forget that.

Library programs

I know we're all doing workshops/demos, but is anyone doing library programs (other than the diversity programs already posted about)? Or have you done programs in the past, like Pat's book club, that worked well? (in-house or partnering with outside groups)
Thanks!

Spot a librarian

Today we celebrated Rastoberfest at the Rockford Campus. I stopped down to see how the festivities were going and some little girl asked me if I was the librarian. I told her I was and asked her how she knew that. She replied that all librarians looked alike. (ouch!) She said that she could pick out librarians and artists. When I asked her if there were any artists in the room, she took a look around and said no. Too funny.

Disabilities-related resources

In B&T is a cart, "Disabilities Resources", similar to the carts we have for programmatic/liaison resources. Titles included here may be useful for your campus collections. I will continue to add resources to this list.

Explaining what information is common knowledge..

I think I'm going to start going more in depth with explaining the concept of what students need to cite and what information is common knowledge. It seems like students really struggle with this. I have a feeling that this academic integrity issue is being overlooked by some of K-12.




For a Humanities class this morning, I gave a general information literacy workshop preparing the students for a research paper that they have to write. I explained with concepts that might interest the students for their Humanities research paper. The students and I discussed why the information on the right column needed to be cited, and I felt like (for one of the first times) it clicked!

Chain, chain, chains

The diversity committee, of which I am a member, has instituted a Chains of Diversity activity for Diversity Awareness Month. This is to be my activity for the fall where the librarian is to be in charge of cultural diversity in the student community. There is a blurb about it on the student portal. So, what the committee has decided to do is to create paper chains (you know, the kind you did in kindergarten/grade school) to represent the different aspects of each individual and how we are all connected to support and strengthen the bonds of community. Every five links will represent a person. Of course this idea originated before we had over 500 students. With that in mind, we decided to target the Success Strategies classes so that we had all of the new students involved and then make it voluntary for all of the other students. The incentive to participate is a $50 gift card for Borders. Participation in the activity is anonymous, but students can put their names on the back of the ballots if they want to be entered into the drawing. The chain will start at the library bulletin board which has a diversity theme and includes information on Chains of Diversity and the Chain legend and go all over campus, I expect. More to follow as the activity progresses....

I attempted a "quiz" for my assessment

Tonight I gave a workshop for a Pathology I class. I gave a few workshops last week, and I noticed that I have a lot of students that overlap. I realized that I need to create a variety of assessment options so the same students will not be doing the "mapping exercise" over and over again. :)

I made the document to the right. I gave them this sheet before the workshop. Then, they answered the questions throughout the presentation. then, we went through the answers at the end. The students were really engaged throughout the workshop, and I walked around to make sure that the students were filling in their questions. I did not collect the quiz because I wanted the students to be able to take these "notes" home and have a copy of the Survey Monkey link.

Working with faculty

Emily asked that I post and let all of you know about a success I have had in working with faculty. Our full time Massage instructor, Tilley, has wanted more materials in the library... I have added over $3000 to the collection within the last year and the collection now takes up to two full shelves. One night Mary was talking with Tilley and telling her that we need to get our circulation stats up. That night Tilley brought her class in and told them that they all needed to check out a massage book. Just recently Tilley sent me an email and told me to look at her new assignment she created for her Intro to Massage class. Here is what is being required:
Book Review Assignment
This weekly assignment is to familiarize you with books within our library system so you may better understand the massage therapy profession and its many modalities.

The last statistic I read on bodywork modalities is that there are 250 different techniques for the public to choose from. Rasmussen’s library doesn’t (unfortunately) have books on all 250 different techniques; however there is a nice selection.

Tilley would like to see more materials coming in for her students and we are hoping that the circuluation will go up. This will also give the students practice with APA style as this is a requirement for any class students will take with Tilley.

Call for Presentations – 15th Reference Research Forum, 2009 (ALA Annual in Chicago)

The Research and Statistics Committee of the Reference Services Section of RUSA invites the submission of research projects for presentation at the 15th Reference Research Forum at the 2009 American Library Association Annual Conference in Chicago, IL.

The Reference Research Forum continues to be one of the most popular and valuable programs during the ALA Annual Conference, where attendees can learn about notable research projects conducted in the broad area of reference services such as user behavior, electronic services, reference effectiveness, and organizational structure and personnel. All researchers, including reference practitioners from all types of libraries, library school faculty and students, and other interested individuals, are encouraged to submit a proposal.

More info at http://rusa.ala.org/blog/2008/10/09/rrf/

Open Workshops

Are any of you planning open workshops to highlight the new databases? I've been thinking about offering open workshops by discipline. During the workshops I'd like to cover our traditional resources as well as our recent database additions. Do you think students would be interested or would participate? I hate holding empty workshops (sorry for complaining). Can anyone think of ways to "jazz" them up?

The Future of Reading - Part II

"Using Video Games as Bait to Hook Readers" is the front-page headline of the Monday, Oct. 6, 2008, issue of The New York Times. It is the second installment in the paper's "Future of Reading" series. The series is "looking at how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/books/06games.html

Syncing Google Calendar to Outlook

I have now tried to sync twice from Google Calendar to my Outlook Calendar. All that transfers is the chat schedule. As much as I would love to know who is doing virtual reference every hour, this really clutters up my calendar. Also, not having the Master Calendar transfer to my outlook is quite bothersome. I uninstalled and reinstalled Google Sync in hopes that if I highlighted only the Master Calendar that it would work, but it did not. Who can tell me how to make this work?
Thank you!

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.