Current Issue: October 2020
ACRL TechConnect
Guarnieri, Kry, and Porter-Fyke
The eyes have it
Using eye-tracking to evaluate a library website
When Western New England University announced its intentions to switch over its entire website from a legacy homegrown system to a brand new CMS, we were faced with moving all content on the library’s website from one platform to another ...
Feature
Bongiovanni et al.
From Golden to Xuzhou
Teaching a graduate student workshop in China
In late spring 2019, eight staff members from the Colorado School of Mines (Mines) Arthur Lakes Library, in Golden, Colorado, visited the China University of Mining and Technology (CUMT) in Xuzhou, China. The trip was intended to develop ...
Feature
Sharun and Smith
Educational development partnerships and practices
Helping librarians move beyond the one-shot
Given the current, widespread concern about “fake news” and information disorder, those working in post-secondary contexts have recognized a pressing need to develop students’ digital literacy (DL). ...
Feature
Tomlinson and Leebaw
Reflections
Middle management during the pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has uprooted all of our lives in varied and numerous ways. In academic libraries, we are living in ambiguity and uncertainty, while trying to plan for what seems like an ever changing “pivot” as our institutions’ plans fluctuate by the day. Library staff at all levels must engage in continuous scenario planning, both in their jobs and in their personal lives. We wonder, when will our campuses reopen, or if they are open, we wonder if they will shut back down. We try to weigh the importance of our services with the risks to our staff and our patrons.
Perhaps hardest of all, we often lack control over the decisions ...
Feature
Elizabeth Hobart
Antiracism in the catalog
An analysis of records
As people seek to learn more about race, bookstores have begun selling out of books on antiracism. These titles are, of course, also available in libraries, but can be difficult to locate in the catalog. Patrons will be able to find them through known title searches, but the catalog should go beyond this.
The first user task in the “Library Reference Model” is to find, defined as “to bring together information about one or more resources of interest by searching on any relevant criteria.” Ideally, a patron should be able to search terms such as racism or antiracism in the library’s catalog and find a comprehensive list of titles on the topic or start with a known title ...
The Way I See It
Hulbert, Smith, and Fife
Activating agency in the time of COVID-19
Cultivating relationships for resilience
Trust is hard to come by during a pandemic. In times like these, how do we flatten the hierarchical curve in higher education? Like other colleges across the nation, Western Colorado University grappled with how to prepare for an uncertain fall semester in response to COVID-19. We are a triad of colleagues from a small, state-funded institution on the Western Slope of Colorado with varied institutional roles: an associate vice president for academic affairs, a director of library services and online education, and a program coordinator for first-year seminar (FYS) and the Writing Center. We come to the table with a shared belief that a 21st-century liberal arts ...