Category: academia
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Personal Librarians
I have been toying with the idea of assigning college students a personal librarian for a few months now. And then I read that Yale already does this. I think this is a terrific idea and I’m happy to find that it wasn’t impossible to implement at all. This is an idea well worth sharing.
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Scholarly Communication and Librarians
Convincing faculty of the benefits of publishing through open access sources, or contributing to an institutional repository, is one of the many new challenges facing academic librarians. Faculty outreach has always been a bit of a struggle, but now we’re trying to change a long-standing tradition of scholarly communication, and insert ourselves more visibly into…
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Institutional Repositories and Gardening
I love it when my varied interests collide, as they just did when I found these great For the Gardener papers in the University of California’s institutional repository, eScholarship. These papers were created by the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz, my alma mater. They produce a ton of great…
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ASIST08: Evaluating E-Reference: Transforming Digital Reference through Research and Evaluation
There are a lot of sessions at ASIS&T (and probably most conferences) with fairly impregnable titles. I’ve found myself sitting in sessions which were about something very different than I thought. But this session title is pretty straightforward: It was all about evaluating virtual reference services. Marie Radford (Rutgers University) and Lynn Connaway (OCLC) spoke…
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Should librarians hate Wikipedia?
I just finished reading an article in the MIT Technology Review, Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth, by Simon L. Garfinkel, which brought up what I still consider a pretty touchy subject: What about Wikipedia? Is it an ok jumping off point for research, or should students (and librarians) avoid it at all costs? Garfinkel…
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Students Disappoint Me, Yet Again
Twenty-four students at the University of Central Florida accepted a challenge from one of their teachers to go tech-free for five days. No cell phones, no email, no computers, video games, television, iPods (well, you could use your phone or computer for work or school, but that was it). Only two students made it through…
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Noisy Libraries With No Books?
I’ve been reading a lot about these noisy libraries lately, where people aren’t reading or studying, but are instead playing Dance Dance Revolution, watching movies, and coming for their latest books-on-tape fix. To be honest, I have yet to find myself in a noisy library. Even in the newly redesigned Simmons library (where I go…