September 27, 2012 – 11:51 am
This blog has been dormant long enough that I think it’s probably okay for me to hijack it from its usual purpose (discussion of the hows, whats, and whys of library instruction) to address an issue that’s come to a head in recent days and weeks. So a couple of weeks ago, the libraries at […]
March 13, 2012 – 10:45 am
Three things I’ve been mulling over lately, that probably aren’t enough to justify a blog post on their own but, put together, make a substantial post. Think of this as the tapas of blog posts. Thing The First I wrote up a lesson plan recently that contained the directive, aimed at myself, “and go from […]
I am old enough to have used the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, in print. There. I said it. As a matter of fact, I used print indices of various sorts right through my undergraduate degree and my first graduate program. (Ah, those print volumes of RILM, eventually supplanted by the CD-ROM version that ran […]
December 18, 2009 – 9:49 am
One of the things you do at Immersion is prepare and present a 5-minute teaching segment; this is where you work on all the “public speaking” aspects of teaching: vocal projection, filler words, hand gestures, etc. My 5-minute segment was a quick set piece about how the “Find Text” (OpenURL resolver) links in our databases […]
I posted this to FriendFeed over the weekend, but I wanted to expand a little on it here, because it relates to information literacy instruction: My good friend Vardibidian, who works in a library but is not, generally speaking, a library blogger, has an hysterical post up about attending a “training” “webinar” for his library’s […]
So we’re well into the summer intersession here at MPOW, and faculty often ask me if the librarians work in the summers. The short answer is that we do, as most of us are on 12-month contracts. The building closes at 4:30, so we all get off work a little early, and we don’t staff […]
February 4, 2009 – 12:36 pm
A colleague and I were chatting this morning about the freaky stuff that undergrads often request through Inter-Library Loan, often not realizing what exactly it is that they’re requesting. The most common example is Dissertation Abstracts, where if they request the item through ILL, what they get in return is…the abstract of the dissertation. Which […]
January 21, 2009 – 4:56 pm
WHY didn’t I think of this sooner? I’ve been struggling to explain EBSCO’s “My EBSCOhost” feature to students for a year now. Most times, when I explain that it’s a way to save citations and articles (and other stuff, but I generally don’t go into that) from one session to another, or a useful way […]
