Catherine

Author Archives: Catherine

Dangers of being too helpful

December 13, 2008 – 10:42 am

I’d like to think that, if we worked hard at it, us reference and instruction librarians could almost work ourselves out of a job. We’d teach students to be so good at not only finding information for themselves and evaluating it, but also learning new systems and new tools for themselves, so that they didn’t […]

Posted in IM, Reference, Service | Comments (1)

Ethical dilemma

December 12, 2008 – 12:44 pm

Someone has requested a couple of truly gorgeous books on quilting via Inter-Library Loan. I can see them sitting on the “Received” pile every time I walk through the tech services area. If you know me personally, you might know that I’m a quilter. I would love to know who requested these books and go […]

Posted in Off-topic blather | Comments Off

What do faculty know about what students know?

December 5, 2008 – 10:58 am

There’s a lot of discussion going on about what students, especially first-year students, know about library research and information literacy. This makes sense: we need to know what students know, and what they don’t know, so that we can avoid boring them with stuff they’re already familiar with, and so that we can fill in […]

Posted in Faculty, Instruction, Students | Comments Off

My transcendent moment of Google-fu

November 25, 2008 – 4:19 pm

Last semester, I had a terrific moment at the reference desk, helping an upperclass student doing some fairly specialized research. The student needed books and/or articles that cited a very prominent work from a decade or so ago, let’s say, Susan Faludi’s Backlash, but she was looking for a particular topic, let’s say work-life balance. […]