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…
Over the past year I have heard about the Arizona State University library’s (ASU) creative use of YouTube for their library minute initiative, but hadn’t had a look until today. For the uninitiated, the library has put together about 30 short videos (they are literally a minute) on a range of topics – for instance, today I…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
This past couple of weeks has seen me working on a website for the library, within the Google Aps domain that we hold at MPOW. Google Sites is a wiki based ‘put the modules together’ platform and really easy to use (once you get the basics sorted out in your head!) While there are all…
I am heartened by the fact that other staff at MPOW seem to think that student patronage of the library has increased tenfold since it has been staffed full time (about 6 weeks now). I like to think that the fact that I am bombarding the students with messages, information, classes and emails is helping. …
Welcome to my ramblings as a first year graduate (at 43) librarian. I wanted to use this blog to record my achievements, efforts and successes (and yes, I guess my failures too!) so that I would have some way of being able to measure how far I had (hopefully) come in my first year of…
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