Do you assess your instruction or research classes? Not sure where to begin? Think it’s all a waste of time? You need to attend the amazingly titled “Dumb Assessment to Smart Assessment: Measuring Student Learning” workshop to be held at SALALM this year. Designed and facilitated by Anne Barnhart, AJ Johnson, Meagan Lacy and Alison Hicks, this [...]

So what happens when all that ethnographic research you did points out that students have a terrible time navigating your web page? Well if it’s the catalog or the library home page, your student may be out of luck, sadly. But if you have even a tiny bit of control over a web page, whether it’s [...]

What do LibGuides, ethnographic research and 3D printing have in common? To my mind, these are some of the latest crazes to sweep libraryland, and guaranteed to cause eye-rolling or cult-like following, depending on your point of view. Naturally, I have my own opinions about these trends (LibGuides, bleurgh; 3D printing, interesting!) but the one where I [...]

    It’s the beginning of December, the traditional time for the ubiquitous and alliterative review article (“Top Ten Tech Trends of 2012!!!”) that always seem to be slightly too enthusiastic for the pale, twitching, shadow of our former selves that we have become by the end of another crazy year. But even Scrooge (topical seasonal joke [...]

Between all of the heartwarming stories about the demise of Big Bird and imminent southern European bankruptcy, you may have noticed that the word MOOC is quickly becoming the academic mot du jour . Believed to have helped cause the UVA presidential saga, and liberally splashed over even the Chronicle of Higher Education, the humble MOOC, or Massively [...]

Go Team, Go Team! Maybe it’s the Olympic spirit that’s getting to me (which also explains the delayed column, sorry!) but I’m increasingly thinking of myself as a coach, or mentor in the research process. Finding, citing, storing and organizing information is such a messy, cyclical, convoluted business nowadays that it’s hard to confine librarian [...]

Standing room only at the very last panel of the SALALM 2012 conference: Pecha Kucha! This is the third time that we have run a Pecha Kucha, where participants are allowed roughly 7 minutes to present their work. There was a wide variety of fabulous topics- thanks to presenters and participants! Here are the presenters’ [...]

How many of you have made a New Year’s resolution to “keep up with more”? Anyone feel guilty when they see their Google reader has 1,064 new unread items? Cry inwardly at the thought of drowning in the information tsunami, the fire hose of knowledge, the flood of media, the sea of despair?! (Yep that’s a [...]

What do REM and impact factors have in common?! To a few of you, the answer may be something to do with sleep. But to my mind, the movement to reconsider the place of traditional measures of scholarly publishing (aka alt-metrics) is fast becoming the new alternative rock, a challenge to the scholarly status quo. [...]

Google + : Facebook slayer or privacy exploiter? Yet another log in, or the dawn of a new age? Asset? Liability? Plus? Minus?! Launched to great fanfare in September 2011, commentators pounced gleefully on Google +, Google’s latest attempt to join the social media bandwagon. For the uninitiated,  Google +, (also known as G+) is technically a [...]

It’s that time of semester again when most reference questions I get seem to have something to do with punctuation, a DOI, or placement of footnotes. Yep, happy citation season, to one and all! Despite running workshops and creating webpages on citation formatting, it’s often hard to get even graduate students interested in citation management [...]

What’s short and yellow and also known as a web application hybrid? Yes, you’ve got it- a mashup! Also known as remixes or meshes, a mashup is “a web page or application that uses and combines data, presentation or functionality from two or more sources to create new services”. In other words, a mash up [...]

Twitter! Oh, that’s disappointing. That’s the place where you tell people about your lunch, right? Isn’t it a bit 2007? Well yes, Twitter has been around since 2007. And yes, there are a lot of lunch tweets. But Twitter just keeps getting better and better- and the uses of Twitter for research, outreach, analytics and [...]

I will be posting a new post here soon- guess what the topic is?!