http://acrlog.org Blogging by and for academic and research librarians Thu, 04 Feb 2010 02:16:54 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Did you know that the number of international students at about 3,000 U.S. colleges and universities rose 8% last year to a new high of 671,616. Big increases in students from China helped fuel the rise. As in other recent years, India once again sent the most students to the ... http://acrlog.org/2010/02/03/interest-group-advances-services-to-international-students/ Classes started at my college last Thursday, officially bringing the winter intersession to an end. While the library was fairly quiet in January, I kept myself busy with a couple of big projects, including getting ready to teach our library's first credit-bearing course this semester. It's been exciting (and, I admit ... http://acrlog.org/2010/02/01/staying-the-course/ Good Example of Having Presence In a previous post I wrote about the important of having presence if you want to be a leader in or beyond your library, and if you want to be perceived as a leader by others. If you are called upon to deliver a spur-of-the-moment, extemporaneous ... http://acrlog.org/2010/01/29/sudden-thoughts-and-second-thoughts-23/ In advance of the American Library Association Midwinter Conference I reported that (scroll to the fourth item) 2009 was the year of hand sanitizer, and that little bottles of the stuff had surpassed pens as the number one giveaway item at professional conferences and trade shows. So quite naturally I ... http://acrlog.org/2010/01/25/no-hand-sanitizer-found-at-ala-exhibits/ Maureen Sullivan, owner of Maureen Sullivan Associates and Professor of Practice in the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science Ph.D. Program in Managerial Leadership, is the 2010 Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) Academic/Research Librarian of the Year. The award, sponsored by YBP Library Services, recognizes ... http://acrlog.org/2010/01/24/maureen-sullivan-acrl-acdemicresearch-librarian-of-the-year/ This guest post by Amy Fry, Electronic Resources Coordinator at Bowling Green State University's Jerome Library, is a timely reflection on Midwinter and on current events that have us all wondering how to strike a balance between convenient access and dependence on a few powerful vendors. ====== Discovery services, as you ... http://acrlog.org/2010/01/22/one-search-box-to-rule-them-all/ It's always fun to stop by the ACRL booth at ALA Conferences to see who's hanging out and who's actually staffing the booth. Here's what the booth is looking like these days: [caption id="attachment_2521" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Hanging at the ACRL Booth at 2010 ALA MW"][/caption] The folks staffing the booth when I ... http://acrlog.org/2010/01/20/a-visit-to-the-acrl-booth/ January always brings lots of discussion about the future, and probably even more so this year now that we're a decade into the second millennium. Collections are central in much talk about the future of academic libraries, which naturally leads me to thoughts about browsing. I have a confession to make: ... http://acrlog.org/2010/01/14/browsing-searching-and-finding/ We've just passed the season of the break for most of us academic librarians. It's common for our institutions to give us a nice bonus this time of year - a week off between Christmas and New Years. What did you do during your break? Did you have a list ... http://acrlog.org/2010/01/12/powering-down-for-reflection/ It has taken me way too long to get around to reading Project Information Literacy's progress report, "Lessons Learned: How College Students Seek Information in a Digital Age." Some of the key findings from their survey of over 2,000 students: --They spend a lot of time getting a grasp of context: ... http://acrlog.org/2010/01/10/what-can-we-learn-from-lessons-learned/