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…
We have a new team member starting at MPOW at the end of the month – suddenly I won’t be the new person anymore. This is a bit daunting as I find the I’m new here can you tell me how this works card quite useful. I know I’ve only been here a few months…
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…
Sounds painful doesn’t it? Here at MPOW we often get called on to do ‘stuff’ that you don’t do in bigger workplaces. Today, I co-supervised an exam. I kind of enjoy being an invigilator (it sounds so much more probing than ‘librarian’ don’t you think?), although I am glad I don’t have to do it…
There probably isn’t an LIS person out there who doesn’t subscribe to Unshelved. It’s very public-library skewed but for the most part it picks up on stuff that affects us all in libraryland. It’s clever and oh so cynical – I love it. Today’s Unshelved really spoke to me. Sometimes I feel like my role…
Weeding. It’s a term all library folk know, even if it’s referred to in different organisations by another term. Such as culling. Or disposing. Or deselecting. Or ‘managing the collection’. You get the idea. For as long as libraries have held books there has been the vexed question of what to do with them as…
Yes, this is an uninspiring title for a blog post – but let’s face it, shelving is a pretty uninspiring topic. A few weeks ago there was some discussion on my twitter stream about the use of paper signs in libraries (and probably signage in general as we all know no-one reads them). I’m here…
Here at MPOW it’s nothing to get involved in projects that are technically a little (or even a lot) outside one’s area of expertise and professional knowledge. I’ve blogged before about this so it’s nothing new. The particular ‘things’ that are taking up my time at the moment include teaching academic skills as our usual…
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