Journal or book – does it matter anymore?

Today I put out on twitter Does it really matter if students know if their source is a journal or a book? Why/why not? #infolit #crowdsourcing as this is something that has increasingly had me wondering. This has been prompted in part by a discussion on twitter yesterday about whether as undergraduate students ourselves we ever used…

New shiny in the workplace

We haz an iPad in our team and we are downloading your apps… The Outreach teams at MPOW have been given an iPad to use in our work.  We have to share it, but it’s a pretty damn exciting piece of equipment to be allowed to play with, particularly as buying my own is not…

Reference librarian of sorts

Yesterday I spent an hour shadowing a reference librarian colleague  in the library’s ‘Help Zone’ – a central spot just inside the main doors of the library where students can come to ask for help on just about any topic. The Help Zone includes a few computers for students to quickly look up or check…

Overuse syndrome

I’m a bit behind catching up with RSS feeds of some of the blogs I follow – I KNOW the ‘mark all read’ button is really handy and I do use it for plenty of my subscriptions, but I usually find Roy Tennant interesting so I saved that one from the all powerful delete button…

Information literacy in the real world

The more I read and think about the term ‘information literacy’ the more I find it a fairly meaningless, libraryland-jargon-type term.  I’ve been for a few job interviews lately and inevitably, there is the question (or some variation of the question) “can you tell us your understanding of information literacy”?  Well, no. Not really. Not…

Updating my CV

I was doing some updating of my ALIA PD points today and it startled me to see that I have pretty much already accumulated the points I need for the 2011 year (it’s a financial year thing).  I only joined the scheme in April 2010, realising that all the reading and learning I had been…

Zombies here, zombies there…

Over the weekend I listened to the May instalment (ok, so I’m a bit behind) from the crew at Adventures in Library Instruction.  If you haven’t heard this podcast and you are in anyway involved in information literacy training and/or instruction it’s worth at least having a peep (or hearing a peep if you want…

Why information literacy?

Yesterday I took myself on an excursion to UTS to hear Heidi Julien from the University of Alberta talk about information literacy.  As part of preparing to write this post with my comments on the talk, I thought I’d revisit Miss Sophie Mac’s recent blog post on information literacy in context.  Sophie says of information…

You know you’re information literate when….

Some Friday afternoon fun!  How do you know if you’re information literate? This question was recently posed on the ALA Information Literacy Instruction e-list by Becky Alford, Reference & Instruction Librarian at Clarke College, Iowa. Becky very considerately collated the responses and posted them to the list – it goes something like this: You know…