Category: education
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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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ASIST08: Credibility and Authority of Information in Learning Environments
I was up bright and early this morning for the first session, and am so, so grateful I’m staying in the conference hotel. It just makes life so much easier. This morning’s session (well, one of the several) was on information literacy and how students judge credibility when they’re researching, whether it’s for school or…
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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 as Technology Leaders
Two weekends ago I attended PodCamp Boston 3, with some general sense that I might learn something useful, but an increasing uncertainty about what that might be. The first few sessions I attended had a pretty strong focus on using social media for marketing purposes (blech), increasing your “followers,” and, well, podcasting. Which I don’t…
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Copyright Confusion?
I just came across this nifty website that offers a simple slider to determine copyright status of a work. I wouldn’t necessarily claim the information provided is fool proof, but it sure does offer a good starting point for navigating the ever more complicated realms of copyright and permissions. This would have been super handy…
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Everything is Miscellaneous
I picked up Everything is Miscellaneous to read while on vacation, and was promptly made fun of by my library school colleagues, because, apparently, it’s an assigned text in one of the cataloging classes. Well, I commend the person who’s assigning this book, because it’s really excellent. David Weinberger does a great job talking about…