What Technology is going to HIT Higher Ed

The Horizon Report from ELI (Educause Learning Initiative) is always awesome. Key areas to watch:

• Mobile Phones
• Virtual Worlds
• Emerging forms of Publication

http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2007_Horizon_Report.pdf

Reference at Finals Time

Class will be over in about a week and the library is jammed with students finishing papers and groups working on projects. The kind of things you will handle:

• Patron prints to Legal, but we don't have legal size paper.
• How do I print a PDF?
• How do I figure out where this book was published?
• How do I cite this webpage in Chicago style?
• Do I cite all the sources I used or just the ones what I quoted directly?
• Phone calls ( I lost my hat, usb drive, etc....)

Wikis for Facebook

So, I am one day into my new job at Reed Library at SUNY Fredonia and I am loving it! I am already working with one of the librarians on an upcoming class of hers. We were talking about the pros/cons of using a wiki app from a Course Management System versus a stand alone. Facebook has got an app from wetpaint that looks promising.

My webpage is broken

So I am sitting in our Center for Scholarship in Teaching and Learning trying to fix my website. I have some cool flash modules that I made with Raptivity and they are broke! Oh no! Hopefully, we can fix everything.

On a heavier note, I just finished up a summer as interim department head and I miss the hustle and bustle of the Information Commons construction. We are still missing some carpet and the soft seating isn't here yet, but I am super excited.

Yeah - in the course of this post - it was fixed! They're good.

Building Sequences

Building a library instruction program is all about building sequences. Start with Deans or Department heads, gain their support and get a permanent program set up. After a lot of meetings - we have joined up with the College of Business. We are going to meet with faculty and department heads of three different courses this Fall and pilot in the Spring. Yeah - Library Instruction.

I had a cold for our last meeting with the College of Business and I think that helped. I talk slower and I don't sound like a 13 yr old kid.

Our Promotional Material is the Best!

Our library word poetry magnet just won the Best of Show award in Printed Materials Promoting Websites category. It will be presented by LAMA at the ALA conference on Sunday June 24th, 207 at 12:30 p.m. Setting you up with a lil bit of the preview...

Tornado & End of Semester

Greensburg, Kansas

Spent the weekend in Kansas where I encountered my first tornado. Yes Tornado! We were far from the real devastation, but it was still scary!

Two Week Work Rundown

• Candidate in for Interviewing
• Student Affairs Meeting
• Graded Business Law Assignment
  
• Met with my Advisor for my second Masters (Graduating this Summer - Yeah!)
• End of Year Library Wide Meetings
• Quality Matters Online Training
  

Semester is Winding Down

There is only 3 weeks left until the end of the semester and the nine-monthers are off. (We have a mixed staff of 9 and 12 month contract). Therefore, all projects must come to a good conclusion - fast.

• Set up my facebook account to join a FYE Librarian group, but then learned how to post an event on for my Madden Xbox Tournament.
  
• Started a new relationship with the Journalism program on campus. Presented at their Journalism Bootcamp. (Got a nice T-Shirt!)
• Weeding Reference with my collegue (Russian Dictionaries anyone?)
• Just started serving as a Library Mentor for the McNairs Scholar program and have had two consultations already.
• The publicity committee I chair is getting ready to archives the year in photos, work on storing that metadata, printing out the photos, exploring Flickr as a photo gallery option, putting together a graduating student worker thingy, and working with producers of CBC to get permission to do a library event around one of their shows.
  

Tuesday Blahs

So today, I had to read my lecture info and complete assignments for a mini online session that our Southeast Online office offers. It prepares faculty to teach online (on my list of future projects) but I also wanted to see if it addresses linking to library resources.

Met with a collegue and classroom faculty to brainstorm how to sequence info lit classes in the department of communication and how to add multimedia elements for courses taught at our satellite centers and then how we can use the Course Management System on campus to create activities with automatic feedback.

Did the last of three session for an online workshop of Chickering's 7 Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education over lunch. Showed some student assistants how online conferencing works in the process.

Tried to find a student on facebook and myspace that wants to do a library gaming night. He wasn't there! (I'm surprised :O!)

Talked with department head about new brain teaser games we will have on the main floor and talked about different items that need to be adjusted and programs affected by our new 4th Floor Quiet Zone.

Tried to figure out how to best weed a section of reference with my partner. What rules will we use to a section that is mostly dictionaries? Do all foreign language dictionaries belong in reference? Had another collegue run a list for us to help us when we meet this afternoon to do the weeding. We'll meet right after the library wide meeting.

Printed out conference summary letter so I can get my funds, need to turn in expense report.

Followed up with another collegue about NSSE and senior student exit surveys.
Somewhere in there I am going to adjust my microphone levels to create a camtasia clip for an online tutorial thingy I do with business law students.

ACRL vs EDUCASE

I had the absolute pleasure of going to EDUCAUSE in October. It was super high-tech, high-energy, high-volume, you name it, they had it. However, it felt good to get back to my roots at ACRL National this weekend.

The big difference between the two as I see is it; ACRL is warm and EDUCAUSE is cold. For example, before a session begins at ACRL neighbors are talking to each other and asking what institution they are from. At EDUCAUSE people wanted to be near a plug for their laptop or have more space around them for their technical gadgets.

I have a pile of info from ACRL (lots from the Poster Sessions) that I need to wade through, but yesterday I taught four classes, had a morning meeting, an afternoon research consultation and had to jet off to my grad school class at nigh. Today was a meeting with the Dean of Graduate studies, an online workshop about Chickerings 7 principles and then an afternoon of catching up with email and tracking down difference offices on campus to start some outreach programs.

Turnitin.com - High School Woes

I have done a faculty development session on Turnitin.com and a collegue has done several. Lots of questions come up from faculty and copyright is a big issues since student submissions become part of a large pool that turnitin.com uses to find plagiarizers. Last I checked students had to click on a button saying its okay when they submit.

Two kids in California high school are suing. They claim they had copyright and told turnitin.com not to archive their paper. As the Washington post article says - Turnitin.com have very much won their legal battles on the college campus.

Article from Washington Post

Getting Ready for ACRL

So, it is 3 days before we leave for the biennial national ACRL conference. A colleague and I have been working with our campus printing and duplicating office to print out our poster for our Poster Presentation. After leaving detailed instructions two weeks ago, we are now taking another run at it with graphic designer (Time - 2 emails and one face-to-face visit to see proofs and more on the way I suspect.) The handout is ready (300 copies), I have a tentative itinerary for the conference, made not of the vendors I want to visit at the vendor fair, figured out ground transportation to and from airport - now I just need to check weather to see what to pack.

59 hours until the airport shuttle picks us up.

Internet Censorship World Wide

This awesome website came through in the ALA direct online newsletter. It is an internet filtering map of the world. Last week I had an exchange student from China that was doing a speech on this very topic. Wish I had had this website to give to her.

Field Trip

Today my department head and I went to the library at Southeast Hospital. The hospital has a nursing program and a few of their classes have been coming to our library for instruction. I thought it would be a good idea to see what they had in their collection, which databases they subscribed to (more health ones with full-text from EBSCOHost than we have), what is their instruction program, and what type of services they provide. Armed with a packet of info, we will spread the info to the rest of the department and of course invite her to visit our library.

Practical Note: Now when we get instruction requests from the hospital we know what type of resources and services their own library provides and what we can provide that is both different and beneficial to their students.

Ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies

UNESCO, an education arm of the United Nations, just published a report titled Ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies. The first four chapters deal with metadata, digital identity management, biometrics and radio frequency identification. I was talking with a colleague about all the wonderful things RFID tags could do if they were on books. You could do inventory quickly, shelf-reading could be done with a hand held device. Locating a missing book in the library would be a piece of cake. Then we started talking about the negatives - the privacy invasions. Any person with the right technology could drive by your house and see what you were reading! The stigma of "being tracked" might even stop some people from picking up a controversial title.

If you read that section of the report you will learn that airlines might start using RFID tags to stay on top of your luggage, and that employers are already placing RFID tags into employee badges to track their whereabouts.

On the practical side of librarianship, doing a retrofitting of all books for RFID tags would be a very costly and time consuming venture. You would also need a different type of security gate, compatible software to checkout the books and new software for collection management, plus train all of your staff and student workers on how to use all of that stuff.

Welcome to my Blog.

My name is Michelle Dubaj and I am currently an Instruction Librarian at Southeast Missouri State University. I got my Masters in Library Science from the State University of New York at Buffalo. I worked briefly as a pre-k Spanish teacher before getting a part-time job as a reference librarian at Niagara University.

Hopefully, my blog will give some insight to perspective library school candidates, interested library school graduates, academia, my mom and the community on what it means to be an Academic librarian in the 21st Century.