http://acrlog.org Blogging by and for academic and research librarians Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:05:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Are you feeling overworked these days? Do you feel the pressure to publish, present and serve on a dozen different committees? Does it seem like you are trying to do the work of two librarians, and that you just never have time to get much of anything truly constructive done? ... http://acrlog.org/2010/07/27/in-the-sweatshop-or-reaping-the-lottery-win/ Meredith Farkas has a thoughtful post at Information Wants to be Free on our love of numbers and how little they tell us without context. Less traffic at the reference desk: what does that mean? It could mean that students don't find the help they get there useful, or that ... http://acrlog.org/2010/07/26/lets-not-just-do-the-numbers/ An interesting article swam through my Twitterstream recently that's a perfect complement to the Project Information Literacy report that Barbara mentioned last week. It's a recent publication of research by the Web Use Project led by Eszter Hargittai, a professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. The article, Trust Online: ... http://acrlog.org/2010/07/25/in-google-they-trust/ ALA Demo Hell I usually avoid the orchestrated demos many vendors offer at ALA – you know the ones I mean. There is a small seating area and there’s an infomercial-type presenter – or even worse an annoying robot or Elvis impersonator. My preference is to have a rep take me ... http://acrlog.org/2010/07/22/sudden-thoughts-and-second-thoughts-27/ Project Information Literacy has a new study out that complements their earlier work. In the new study, PIL researchers collected and examined research assignment prompts to see how they guide students toward good sources, and discovered that ... they don't. That is, the assignments tend to be fairly specific about ... http://acrlog.org/2010/07/13/reading-between-the-assignments-lines/ We're moving the subject guides on our library website from HTML pages into a wiki, which we hope will make them easier for us to update and customize. It's been a nice opportunity to freshen the content, weed out the dead links, etc. We plan to encourage faculty across the ... http://acrlog.org/2010/07/11/a-guide-or-a-crutch/ The great thing about our higher education system is the enormous diversity found in the approximately 4,000 institutions that offer degree programs. Having too many options is sometimes a challenge, but a more significant issue in American higher education is the disparity between the have's and the have not's. ... http://acrlog.org/2010/07/07/does-where-you-work-define-who-you-are-as-an-academic-librarian/ Two new reports from ACRL serve to remind the academic library community that our future is increasingly one based on digital collections and a virtual presence. Both the Futures Thinking for Academic Librarians: Higher Education in 2025 and the 2010 Top Ten Trends in Academic Libraries point to the importance ... http://acrlog.org/2010/06/29/add-cyberwar-contingencies-to-your-disaster-plan/ Over the past academic year I've worked on a research project with a colleague to study the ways that students do their scholarly work, similar to the project at the University of Rochester a few years ago. We finished with data collection for this year and are spending the summer ... http://acrlog.org/2010/06/26/caught-between-the-old-and-the-new/ With June comes the ALA Conference (except for Chicago years), and when it ends that also signals a close what I would call the library “presentation season” for both academic librarians who present and those who attend. While there are programs throughout the year, I find that the months between ... http://acrlog.org/2010/06/22/planning-out-your-presentation/