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.