After my first year here, when I realized that I needed to sell the power of a library instruction session from the inside rather than the outside (meaning, by actually teaching rather than begging for time) to those departments that hadn’t made much use of my services, I came up with a plan. The plan was to point out that students would come seek me out for help if they knew my face and could see that I’m a real person and not scary or mean or intimidating or any of those things. I pointed out that if professors were structuring their classes in a way that relied on their students coming to me rather than having me come to their class, they’d have to give me at least a little face time. For reasons I’ve described before , this mini-class idea was especially important to the language departments, but it wasn’t just them. In a 10-week term, pretty much every professor is jealous not of hours, but of minutes of class time. It’s been one of th...
Content suppressed by ://URLFAN, for full article visit source
Wikipedia Angst Still Alive and WellFrom: feeds.feedburner.com
Post Date: 2008-06-10 02:29:00
I was reading The Sheck Spot this morning and thinking "Yes! My thoughts almost exactly!" when I remembered the surprising and recurring sub-theme at the Midwest Library Technology Conference :* Wikipedia angst. Wikipedia was mentioned in the first keynote and then became the dominant discussion theme during the question period. Then it resurfaced as a discussion topic during the question period after the second keynote. And it wasn’t that the discussion about Wikipedia was bad or inapp...
more New Phone!From: feeds.feedburner.com
Post Date: 2008-06-09 09:33:00
I arrived this morning to find a brand new phone on my desk at work. Or rather, I found a new phone manual on my desk, wondered why somebody would leave me a manual, paged through it for a bit, and then realized that the phone sitting there was not my old phone, but a new one, complete with caller ID, conference calling, and the ability to go hands free! Finally, I’ll be able to tell if my in-coming calls are likely to be questions, random calls from people not affiliated with the college...
more Growing via CommentsFrom: feeds.feedburner.com
Post Date: 2008-06-07 02:43:00
I’ve been having the most interesting exchange with Mark in the comments on my last post . I love it how a seemingly simple discussion about jargon can push me to interrogate my mission and place within the educational system in ways I’d never articulated before. Have I mentioned recently how much I love the fact that we can have this type of discussion so easily these days? Well, I do. ...
more Scholars Index Their Own LiteratureFrom: feeds.feedburner.com
Post Date: 2008-06-03 08:25:00
This year I’ve been shamelessly cribbing off one of my co-workers who’s mantra is "scholars index their own literature." At first, I didn’t know what she meant, but the more I work with the idea, the more I absolutely love it, especially for the "softer" areas of study where traditional indexing falls short (yes, I’m thinking of the MLA International Bibliography, here). Here’s the idea, indexers can give a general sense of the primary topics of a given art...
more 
Websites mentioned in article
Buzz Words mentioned in article:
How popular is feeds.feedburner.com?
