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Engaging neglected histories

First-year students, archives, and Wikipedia

At the University of California (UC)-Merced, the General Education program recently introduced Spark seminars, a first-year experience that invites incoming undergraduate students into the knowledge-making activity ...

Restaurants of the ’Burgh

Popular spots and hidden gems in Downtown Pittsburgh

For anyone familiar with local Pittsburgh food, you have probably heard about our love for featuring french fries on salads or fried eggs on sandwiches. In addition to these famous traditions, we also enjoy one of the most creative and varied local food scenes in the country. Pittsburgh is widely becoming known as a welcoming and refreshing spot for inventive chefs with a can-do spirit. Whether you are looking ...

What do six questions and fourteen years reveal about librarians?

An analysis of ACRL’s Members of the Week

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) was founded in 1940 and represents more than 8,000 academic and research librarians. Since 2008, the staff-produced ACRL Insider blog has provided information on ACRL activities, services, and programs. The blog features information on publications, events, conferences, and online learning opportunities, along with podcasts and other media. A regular ...

Library publishing workflows

Three big lessons learned from cohort-based documentation

Over the past three decades, library publishing has moved from a niche activity to a regular part of many academic and research libraries’ services to their communities. Communities of practice have also grown up and matured around this work, including the Library Publishing Coalition. While the Library Publishing Forum, library publishing listservs, and other professional spaces are lively and active spaces for discussion, publishing workflows—depictions of all the functions performed by a library publisher as part of its regular operations—are generally undocumented. This makes cross-comparison across publishers ...

De-colonizing one-shots

Critical pedagogies and the ACRL Framework

Librarians with instructional duties, particularly information literacy instructors or subject specialists, often rely on the “one-shot” format of instruction as a primary method for information literacy skills training and development. While not the only method of instruction, one-shots remain a foundational tool in information literacy instruction, although instructors are exploring other instructional formats. As a result, one-shots are regularly critiqued by librarians, who cite difficulties with the transactional nature and questionable effectiveness of the format. Many librarians cite concerns with the one-shot format based on time constraints, institutional culture, and discipline faculty ...

ChatGPT

Implications for academic libraries

ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late November 2022 and immediately went viral, reaching one million users in one week. Built by OpenAI, which is also responsible for the breakthrough image generator, DALL-E, ChatGPT is an LLM (large language model) tool that uses deep learning techniques to generate text in response to questions posed to it. It can generate essays, email, song lyrics, recipes, computer code, webpages, even games and medical diagnoses. Rather than search the internet, ChatGPT has been trained on a large corpus of text, including news articles, books, websites, academic articles, and other sources. The current corpus includes data from multiple languages and computer codes. The generation ...