Home

ACRL

Recent Posts

Recent Comments:

  • Erin: Thank for the blog post shout out :) Great tips here – I agree, particularly about attending social...
  • John: We did successfully get a Twitter feed to display during the Libraries Open House at Penn State. A great way to...
  • Julie K: You could even do a VERY low budget version of this by creating jpgs from power point slides (or other...
  • GavinB: You may want to consider placing the display somewhere other than the entrance. An entrance is a space which...
  • stevenb: For a smaller library facility, I wouldn’t necessary advise going with a wall mounted display monitor....

  • Recent Trackback

Recommended Posts



Site search

Have a story idea?

Pages

Categories

Archive

Authors

Blogroll

Manage

Login

Web Feeds

Entries RSS

Comments RSS

Archive for 'Simplicity vs. Complexity'

Must Scheduling be Sisyphean?

I was planning to post last week about something interesting I’d read in the library or higher ed news and literature, but I haven’t kept up with my reading as much as usual recently. The task that’s been occupying my time? Scheduling our English Comp library instruction sessions. It’s not the most glamorous or fun [...]

Something Is Better Than Nothing

As you read and learn more about design a basic principle appears again and again. Design for simplicity. In fact one hallmark of great design is that it makes the complex simple. That said, as Garr Reynolds put it in a recent presentation, simplicity should not be confused with simplistic. Simplistic is about dumbing things [...]

Feeling Lost In A World Of Search Zombies

Maybe I’m getting more removed from mainstream search. I know that some aspects of online searching can be complex, and depending on the uniqueness of some disciplinary databases (think about using financial screening tools in NetAdvantage or ValueLine Research Center) search can reach the extremes of complexity. But I would never have thought to associate [...]

Open and Closed Questions

Another way to introduce students to the idea of complexity in the research process is through open and closed questions. In Second-hand Knowledge: An Inquiry into Cognitive Authority, Patrick Wilson describes closed questions as matters which (for now) have been settled beyond practical doubt and open questions as questions on which doubt remains. [...]

Why Students Want Simplicity And Why It Fails Them When It Comes To Research

The research process, by its very nature, can be both complicated and complex. For students it presents a gap between the known and unknown. They get a research assignment, usually broadly defined by the instructor, and then need to identify a topic without necessarily knowing much of anything about the subject. Then to further complicate [...]