By:
On:

Lately I’ve been contemplating how much academic libraries should be involved in helping students learn to organize their research. Sure, we do information literacy, which apparently includes “information management strategies,” but from my experience that goes no further than how to use a citation manager to create a bibliography. I work mostly with graduate students, and as a graduate student myself, I’ve struggled with getting a handle on my sources. I started out as a “print everything” person, and fantasized about keeping a massive file cabinet with a single file for each reading (I know, I’m a dinosaur). I used a legal pad during classRead More →

By:
On:

I recently attended the 2014 LACUNY Institute: “Information Literacy to Empower: Theory and Practice.” Usually I just tweet a lot at conferences as a form of personal notetaking, but this time the amazing keynote (from librarian-hero Barbara Fister) and super-smart presentations have lingered longer than expected. The conference, as a whole, was tons of fun, full of invigorating thoughts from smart, engaged, and passionate practitioners who take their theory seriously. During a break, I was chatting with another librarian who asked why I was there. Was I an instruction librarian? Did I actually teach as part of my job? The answer, of course, was no.Read More →