For me, summer time is important prep time as we get ready for our fall programming. This year, our One Book, One College program is looking at the book Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant by José Ángel N. who is an alum. This book was suggested by several of our faculty . To promote the programming for the academic year, a couple colleagues and I interviewed our One Book author. It was a fun and meaningful conversation. I thought it would be fun to share this with all of you Tame the Web readers. I love tinkering around with videos like this. Interview […]
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This is an interview I did with Brian Mathews originally posted on his blog The Ubiquitous Librarian which is part of the Chronicle Higher Education blog network. His blog (which has been awesome for many years) will soon end as the Chronicle ends its blog network, so Brian gave me permission to also post the interview here. I am appreciative of the good and honest thinking Brian has provided our profession over the years. BM: You have stated that librarians have long been champions of intellectual freedom and that you see critical information literacy as an extension of this value. […]
From the moment that I began working in libraries in around 2007, I was not a fan of Summer Reading programs and the themes they were generally packaged around. They were boring, cookie cutter, and out of date. The themes seemed to be 1-2 years behind what was popular at the moment. As a teen librarian, my job was to take these themes and put some excitement around them. I found it to be a difficult task that took energy away from what I consider to be the most important part of any public library: the community that uses the […]
Amy Hofer, Sylvia Lu, and Lori Townsend’s keynote at the 2015 Information Literacy Summit (Illinois). They discuss their research and thinking about information literacy threshold concepts, which underlie ACRL’s Information Literacy Framework for Higher Education. The IL Summit is a partnership between the Moraine Valley Community College Library and the DePaul University Libraries. Description: When introduced to threshold concepts, librarians usually ask “How do I use them?” Yet this question hopscotches another: “Do I understand threshold concepts and how they relate to information literacy?” Threshold concepts are themselves a threshold concept. They are transformative, integrative, irreversible, bounded, troublesome, and – […]
I am very excited to announce the publication of Not Just Where to Click: Teaching Students How to Think About Information from ACRL. I co-edited this collection with Heather Jagman. From the ALA Website: Not Just Where to Click: Teaching Students How to Think about Information explores how librarians and faculty work together to teach students about the nature of expertise, authority, and credibility. It provides practical approaches for motivating students to explore their beliefs, biases, and ways of interpreting the world. This book also includes chapters that bridge the gap between the epistemological stances and threshold concepts held by librarians […]
I have been keeping tabs on the state of journalism over the last decade. I do this because it is part of my job as someone who helps build information literacy skills in students, but I also do this because the disruptive forces ripping apart journalism are related to forces impacting libraries. Journalism is at the epicenter of the earthquake, and we’re a bit more removed (so far at least). As media companies implode, merge, vanish, and reappear in new forms, I think it would do libraries well to sit up and take some notes. One of these opportunities caught […]
In 2013, ALA Annual was in Chicago, and all of librarianship celebrated the greatness of the Chicago Blackhawks. It was a special time, and it was at this conference where I attended LITA’s Top Tech Trends panel. This panel was made up of smart folks all of whom I greatly respect (Gary Price, Aimee Fifarek, Sarah Houghton, Clifford Lynch, Char Booth and Brewster Kahle moderated by Loran Dempsey). The conversation covered many topics that have faded in my memory, but there was a part of it that has remained. Several panelists held up the benefits of free content and the […]
I am a big fan of the Circulating Ideas podcast. Steve does a great job of enriching the discussions within our profession. Thus, I wanted to share info about his Kickstarter. Help out if you can! Circulating Ideas began as a podcast to share the innovative ideas and projects that librarians are creating to keep libraries vibrant and relevant in the 21st century. The show has spanned more than 60 hours of content with more than 100 librarians and library supporters and now I’d love to do more to make the show’s content more accessible and searchable. This Kickstarter campaign […]
When people ask me why I became a librarian, I offer them a two-part story. First, it’s so I could get married to my wife Haley. Her mom (who is an amazing librarian doing great things) told me that I would make a great librarian. Being that I really wanted to get married to her daughter, I took her recommendation and here I am today. The second part of the story was simply because of the fact that being a librarian allowed me to combine everything that I wanted in my life into a career: the opportunity to do really awesome […]
The ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education Task Force has completed a final draft of the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. This draft is working its way through the infrastructure of ACRL. (I have previously posted about the Framework on this blog: The New Information Literacy Framework and James Madison, Information as a Human Right: A Missing Threshold Concept?, and Using the New IL Framework to Set a Research Agenda. I should note that I am a member of the Task Force but that I do not officially speak officially for the Task Force in this […]