ALA Annual Conference

I don’t get to learn much at ALA these days because I spend most of my time in committee meetings.  Here are a few interesting things I did, though:

• Attended both Instruction Section Discussion Sessions, one on online instruction and one on “Using the Social Web to Enhance and Promote Information Literacy These are huge discussions where you learn a lot about what others are doing, and a digest with summary is posted on the web after conference.
• Attended a kickoff meeting of the ACRL Instruction Section/ALISE Joint Working Group on curriculum.  This committee resulted from an action plan I submitted to ACRL and was made possible by the approval of the ACRL and ALISE Boards.  The group will explore good practices for preparing LIS students for careers in instruction/information literacy in academic libraries.
• Started my year as Chair of the ACRL Instruction Section, which will be a big job!  If you’re interested in getting involved in any way, let’s talk

Going to ALA? IS Program Speaker Jeff Liles to facilitate @ LILI Retreat

I will be attending ALA in Anaheim next week.  As incoming chair of the Instruction Section, I will be attending many, many meetings and not have much time for fun.  But here are a few things I’m looking forward to (all Instruction Section sponsored, so you can look at our online schedule for times):

• The Instruction Section Soiree will be 5:30-7 Friday at the Tangerine Grill & Patio at The Anabella Hotel.  This event is open to anyone with an interest in instruction, so stop on by!
• Instruction Section Discussion Groups will feature “Using the Social Web to Promote and Enhance Information Literacy” on Saturday at 4 and “Academic Library Instruction in an Online Learning Environment”  Sunday afternoon at 4.
• The IS Conference Program on Sunday will be Dr. Jeff Liles, “Creating Change: Teacher Librarians and New Learners.”

Here’s the exciting part… Jeff Liles will be coming to Madison for our LILI Retreat August 14.  His workshop will have the same topic as the IS Program but will have a more discussion-based structure so that we can work together on real instructional problems that we encounter in our work.   Mark your calendars!

Understanding Students & Faculty: Susan Gibbons talk at CUWL Conference

Today at the statewide CUWL meeting and conference , Susan Gibbons, Dean and Vice-Provost at the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries, discussed their user research program. They are a small residential campus but an ARL member. The library’s work with anthroplogist Nancy Fried Foster is the subject of a recent monograph (free for download from ACRL) and a lot of positive press.

The presentation began with a discussion of characteristics of the “Net Generation.” As a group, these students are relatively more sheltered than previous generations. For example, they regularly seek advice from their parents on their schoolwork and have absorbed Mr. Rogers’s “you are special” message. They expect services to be customized, personalized, one-stop shopping, and in the “Mommy model” of service. These students feel pressured to succeed; 21% of those aged 15-17 have been diagnosed with some type of emotional disorder. They want to know the rules, are team-oriented, and want to collaborate in person and online. They tend to ask peers, not experts, for information. They are multitaskers, and value speed over accuracy in their work.

The next topic was techniques we can use to understand our students…

LOEX highlights – How best to share what we learned?

I’ve saved my notes for a big posting about the LOEX conference, but didn’t want to let another week slip by without saying something about it. The contingent from our campus included Eliot Finkelstein and Steve Frye (College), Steve Baumgart and Rebecca Payne (Memorial), Sheila Stoeckel and Sarah McDaniel (LILI Office), Electra Enslow (SLIS), and Diana Wheeler (Engineering). We did our best to spread out to cover all the presentations. You can see the full program online, including the presentation slides and handouts where available. LOEX also publishes printed proceedings, which we get in the LILI Office, but it takes quite awhile for them to come out.

Here are a few things that I found interesting:

• At the University of Dubuque, the library co-teaches an information literacy component of a required writing course, teaching students to analyze shared scholarly articles and marshal evidence to support their arguments for a paper assignment.
• At the University of North Carolina -Wilmington, the library has worked with the curriculum committee to create for-credit courses that are listed in the catalog and schedule of classes as LIB. It’s a small campus, but the policy documents are interesting.
• Marquette University discussed their process for creating and filling a new E-Learning Librarian position.
• Temple University talked about integrating information literacy into the curriculum in ARL libraries. They had a nice implementation of LibGuides as course pages and an interesting example from the history department.

I’ll try to share something about the keynotes in a later message. The bigger question, as we all head into professional conference season, is how best to share what we learned?

Wisconsin Association of Academic Librarians (WAAL)

It was the first time I’ve attended this state conference and I was only able to squeeze in one day out of the three. Many UW-Madison folks were there as well as a few people I knew from my early stint at UWM.

I went to three sessions (full program): “Connecting with Faculty” by Regina Pauly, Jennifer Snoek-Brown, Kay Young, & Dr. Rea Kirk, UW-Platteville; “Reinventing the One-Shot Library Session” by Eliot Finkelstein & Carrie Nelson, College Library, UW-Madison and Trisha Prosise, College & Steenbock Libraries, UW-Madison; and “Open Editions: An Introduction to Collaborative Environments for the Production of Scholary Editions” by Thomas Walker, UW-Milwaukee. In my choices, I tried to broaden my horizons beyond instruction (i.e. liaison, scholarly publishing).

I have to say that the instruction folks always give the very well-conceived presentation. Eliot, Carrie, and Trisha managed to introduce a lot of interactivity and engagement into a session with about 100 people. How? They invited volunteers from the audience to participate in a restaurant menu exercise that paralleled the process of searching the library’s licensed database. We (yes, I “volunteered”) had no context for what was going on, didn’t understand the syntax, and ended up with peanutbutter on our placemats. Then they showed the same exercise structured a different way. For the details, you have to go to the authors!

The other presenters were engaging and very enthusiastic about their subject matter. There were also good snacks (thanks planning committee). And at lunch I went offsite for a burger that was about an inch bigger than the bun around the entire perimeter, which I’m in favor of (with a medium diet coke).