Current Issue: April 2018
Feature
Chase Ollis
ACRL honors the 2018 award winners, part 1
A recognition of professional development
The VCU Libraries, winner in the university category, was selected for its transformative services, initiatives, and role within the campus community.
“From their many events and partnerships to scholarly publishing and ...
Feature
Detwiler, Jacobson, and O'Brian
BreakoutEDU
Helping students break out of their comfort zones
If you’d walked by Professor Susan Detwiler’s Writing and Critical Inquiry (WCI) classrooms at the University at Albany-SUNY on September 7, you would have seen something rather unusual: two teams of students huddled around tables ...
Feature
Rebekah Scoggins
Broadening your library’s collection
Implementing a LGBTQIA collection development project
A constant concern for libraries is providing a collection of resources that are relevant to its patron population. Since most libraries have budgetary concerns that must be weighed against these needs, sometimes ...
Scholarly Communication
Michelle Baildon
Extending the social justice mindset
Implications for scholarly communication
In 2016, the Collections Directorate of the MIT Libraries convened a Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice (DISJ) Task Force to explore ways to manifest DISJ values in our daily work. Eight staff from archives, technical services, preservation, scholarly communication, and collections strategy focused on this question: How can we operationalize the values of diversity, inclusion, and social justice in our policies, routines, and processes?
Inspired by discussions involving every member of the directorate, as well as work done by other libraries and archives, the task force developed more than ...
The Way I See It
Meggan Press
Words matter
The power of language to create community
Pause for a moment and consider something tiny, yet absolutely fundamental to libraries. Consider the many words that we as a profession use to describe the people who use our libraries. Most of the words we use to refer to the people who use our libraries are transactional rather than relational. I’ve long had difficulty with most of these words, finding myself chafing against their usage, connotations, and general feeling. For instance, calling the people who use our libraries customers isn’t right. We aren’t selling products and they aren’t buying. Customer base, client, or consumer are even further from the target, although I have seen these words used. ...
Perspectives on the Framework
Baggett, Connell, and Thome
Frame by frame
Using the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy to create a library assessment plan
Inspired by the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, librarians at the Carl B. Ylvisaker Library at Concordia College-Moorhead decided to scrap our old information literacy assessment plan and start from scratch. We began by digging into the library’s past assessment plans in an attempt to gain insight into how the organization’s priorities have changed over time. The earliest assessment notes we uncovered were from 2005 and featured a new student orientation pre- and post-test, administered to a random sample of library users. The focus then was on incoming students’ information literacy abilities ...