Monthly Archives: October 2010

20 posts

Welcome to Office Hours – My New Column in Library Journal

I am very happy to announce I’m writing for LJ again! I thoroughly enjoyed writing The Transparent Library with Michael Casey for over two years – hopefully Michael and I can continue writing again soon! Those columns are some of my favorites. Now, I’m happy to be exploring avenues related to educating future librarians. http://bit.ly/coCkbX WELCOME TO “OFFICE HOURS,” a new space in Library Journal where we’ll explore what’s happening in library and information science education. In the coming months we’ll talk about the ongoing discourse about LIS schools; research that informs us, our users, and our facilities; and stories from the trenches on […]

LJ highlights Placements & Jobs – The Lucky Few

Take a look at http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/careers/salaries/887197-305/placements__salaries_2010_the.html.csp Dominican GSLIS alum writes a thoughtful piece on job searching after graduation entitled “The Lucky Few.” Breaking into the library world has never been a walk in the park. “Doing time” as a clerk, shelving, or simply working part-time is par for the course in this profession. But as a great man once sang, “The times, they are a-changin’.” There is a drastic increase in the number of degreed librarians taking paraprofessional positions, simply because they need a full-time job with benefits. Also, there are more temporary positions being filled with librarians wishing and hoping […]

Open Conversation: The Encourager, the Connector, the Learner

From Michael – This is a reprint of a column originally published last year in Digitale Biblioteek. “On average, students in online learning conditions per- formed better than those receiving face-to-face instructi- on”. That was the conclusion of an authoritative report by SRI International commissioned by the US Ministry of Education. The New York Times wrote about it on August 24th: “The report examined the comparative research for on- line versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military”2. Michael Stephens […]

Managing Personal Change by Roy Tennant

Run, do not walk to this: http://blog.libraryjournal.com/tennantdigitallibraries/2010/09/29/managing-personal-change/ Here are just a few of my favorites: Learn as you breathe. You breathe all the time without even thinking about it. That is how you must learn — picking up bits of knowledge, new skills, and a fresh perspective every single day simply as a part of living. As human organisms, we already do it to some degree, but we all need to get really, really good at it. Don’t be afraid of forgetting. These days you don’t need to remember very much. You can look everything else up on the Internet. […]

School Libraries in Australia – Without Librarians – A TTW Guest Post by Vivienne Taylor

Thought you may be interested in this article in The Age newspaper today – Melbourne’s main newspaper. http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/library-specialists-being-shelved-20100806-11o9t.html?rand=1281079644026 The Australian government’s response to the Global Financial Crisis included a massive infrastructure rebuilding program for government and non-government schools, with particular emphasis on creating new school halls, community spaces and YES – school libraries! Many of these libraries are about to open or have already opened – my school library is a couple of months away from completion!  Whilst there has been some criticism of budget mismanagement for some of these libraries, the one that I have visited so far was fabulous! The Building the Education Revolution program has […]

Motivations of Scholarly Bloggers

Kyle Jones sent this to me: http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2962/2580 Kjellberg, Sara. “I am a blogging researcher: Motivations for blogging in a scholarly context” First Monday[Online], Volume 15 Number 8 (14 July 2010) Kjellberg conducted in-depth interviews with researchers who blog for the study. Take a look at the findings and discussion for some strong evidence for sharing and blogging the research process online as a researcher. Part of the conclusion: The analysis brings out at least three motivations for being a blogging researcher: the blog helps the researcher share with others, it provides a room for creativity, and it makes the researcher feel […]

Butting In: A TTW Guest Post by David Wedaman

I stumbled across an old presentation (December 2009) and I liked it, so I thought I’d share.  It’s called “Butting In” (click here for the PPT). “Butting in” is the idea that we in the Library and IT world are in what I call the “Cloutterdammerung,” or the Twilight of our Clout. We have a little window of time to use this clout to get ourselves inculcated into the places in our schools where the futures of teaching, learning, and research will be decided (or to help create these places if they do not already exist). Our advantages: people mostly like […]