Current Issue: July/August 2023
Feature
Lizzy Borges, Faith Rusk
Constructing and revising a user-centered curricular toolkit
Supporting faculty with inclusive design
Librarians at San Francisco State University (SF State) set out to create a curricular toolkit of research skills and information literacy learning activities that could easily be used by instructional faculty in their classrooms, in-person or online. The goal of undertaking this work ...
Perspectives on the Framework
It’s not just us
Sharing the ACRL Framework with writing tutors
The research process and the writing process are intertwined, but academic libraries and writing centers can too often be siloed campus resources working alongside but apart from one another. The Towson University (TU) Library was beginning a renovation to build a one-stop academic support center on our main floor that would include a dedicated TU Writing Center satellite location. The Writing Center employs a peer tutoring model that supports both undergraduate and graduate students. This opened the doors for some more intentional collaboration between our two units. After some cross-departmental visits, we identified a need ...
Feature
Sarah K. Tribelhorn
Planning for sustainability
Articulating efforts toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
Sustainability is a vital component of the new San Diego State University (SDSU) Library strategic plan, especially in Goal 2: Resilience: Designed to Thrive. This goal details how the University Library will promote sustainable practices ...
The Way I See It
Paul Robbins
Finding my chance to be me
My journey with high-functioning autism
I have spent almost my entire life feeling different. It seemed as though there was a set of social rules that everyone else appeared to live by, and those rules just didn’t work for me. Social interactions have always been difficult for me. When trying to express my thoughts and feelings to others it has always seemed to get lost in translation somewhere between my mouth and their ears. Over time, I learned to assimilate and to act the way others expected me to. Shakespeare once wrote, “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” This is how I saw myself, as an actor that never got to exit the stage, but had to keep performing....
Feature
Glenn Ellen Starr Stilling
Building a better community
Librarians serving on community nonprofit boards of directors
Service is a component of the job expectations and performance appraisal guidelines in many academic libraries. However, little is known from the literature of academic librarianship about whether this includes service specifically to the local community. The closest it has come are articles about librarians serving on the boards of library-related nonprofits, such as a consortium of libraries or a division of a library association. In this article, I will present the potential advantages, for both academic librarians and community nonprofits, of having a librarian on the board of directors. I will draw on my experience on the board of directors of OASIS, Inc....
The Way I See It
Miriam Rigby, assisted by ChatGPT
Artificial imaginings
ChatGPT envisions its future in academic libraries
Miriam: Many essays have been written recently about ChatGPT (https://chat.openai.com/) and its impact on higher education, not least of which is a review of the technology in C&RL News in March 2023. But how many have asked ChatGPT what it has to say on the matter? I set out to learn what ChatGPT thought it could contribute to academic libraries.
ChatGPT: Hi there, I’m ChatGPT! As a language model, I wrote a fun essay on using ChatGPT in academic libraries. I generated the text using my natural language processing skills, which let me create text that sounds like a real person wrote it. It’s like magic!...