Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Reconsidering Literacy, Audrey Powers, Marc Powers

Charleston Library Conference

Literacy, until recently, was defined as the ability to read printed text and to understand the nuances of both the form and content of that printed text. More recently there has been a focus on subsets of literacy – data literacy, numeracy, visual literacy, media literacy, etc. – that recognizes the means of communicating ideas and facts are not limited to the printed text and that there are multiple means which may be more powerful ways of communicating in our world. In recent years, higher education has been redefining what it means to be educated – from a focus on …

Reason Minus Zero/No Limit: Trying To Bring It Back Home, Thomas C. Reich

Charleston Library Conference

Negotiations connected with database renewals are sharply critical and ultimately impact renewal decisions. Today, academic libraries face an ever-consolidating marketplace, often accompanied by disruptive cost increases that toss sound reasoning aside. Instances of super-exponential cost increases transfigure once reasonable practices based on sound criteria to unsustainable subscriptions and inappropriate access models. Most troubling is that libraries have seldom been asked to participate in stakeholder discussions before these models and decisions were made. The paper reviews University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Libraries struggle with these changing metrics. In context, the paper looks at how recent political upheaval in Wisconsin has overturned Wisconsin’s …

Spring Forward: Collaborating To Build And Assess A Collection Of Learning Objects, Stephanie A. Jacobs, Audrey Powers

Charleston Library Conference

Delivering innovative information literacy instruction to an ever-growing student population requires some resetting of previous practices and ideas. Collaboratively developed interactive learning activities that address library skills and the research process presented in a flipped-classroom style may represent a useful innovation in this area. This paper addresses the ongoing project at the University of South Florida (USF) Tampa Library in which interactive digital learning objects are developed, embedded into all sections of a university course via the online learning management system, assessed, and reworked.

Landing The Job: Tips And Tricks To Prepare Students For The Job Hunt, Nora B. Wood, Heather A. Howard, Lauren Reiter

Charleston Library Conference

With universities, parents, and politicians paying close attention to student success after college, academic libraries are making efforts to support career readiness and preparation through collections and licensed resources as well as related instruction sessions and reference services. This paper presents examples from business librarians at three universities, covering a wide range of practical opportunities for libraries to support career preparation across campus, including partnering with Career Services for database cost sharing and career readiness workshops, teaching students to conduct company and industry research for interview preparation and salary negotiation, and out-of-the-box opportunities at career fairs and Alumni Association events.

Catching Their Attention! Using Nonformal Information Sources To Captivate And Motivate Undergraduates During Library Sessions, Jacqueline Howell Nash

Charleston Library Conference

Students at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica are required to complete a course on research and writing for academic purposes. Students are scheduled to visit the library for a hands-on session in the library’s computer laboratory. How can we motivate them to acquire the research skills required in academia? We must first capture their immediate attention and then encourage their academic curiosity. How can we stimulate them to become information detectives? What are the nonacademic sources of information that have impacted the lives of Caribbean students prior to arrival at university? It wasn’t the journals or scholarly …

Improving Student Success: Arkansas State’S Partnership With Credo And Regional High Schools, Jeff Bailey, April Sheppard, Ian Singer

Charleston Library Conference

In this “out of the box” session, two librarians from Arkansas State University (A-State) and Credo’s chief content officer discussed their innovative collaboration in which A-State and Credo are working together to bring information literacy resources and instruction to local high schools in support of college readiness.

The session covered several issues, including how the library engaged and garnered administrative support, the challenges in establishing meaningful partnerships with local high schools, and developing and tracking the right metrics to validate progress. Topics of discussion included ways in which the library is working to do more to enhance its strategic importance …

Post-Acquisition Management And The Issue Of Inaccessibility, Beth Caruso

Charleston Library Conference

Though advocates are calling for publishers to develop born-accessible e-books to comply with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) standards and the EPUB 3.0 measures now backed by the Society for Disability Studies, the realistic timespan for this achievement to become standard practice is far from ideal. To equitably serve users with disabilities, stronger technology and a mindset toward accessibility must become the standard in electronic collections. Librarians are expected to have a strong working knowledge of the library’s collections but receive little training in best practices for assisting patrons with disabilities. We cannot wait …

Cost Per User: Analyzing Ezproxy Logs For Assessment, Tiffany M. Lemaistre

Charleston Library Conference

Cost per use has long been a staple of collection development decision‐making for electronic resources, but what of the users behind those retrieval and search counts? Questions about the interdisciplinary usage of an e‐resource, the depth of integration into a given program or course, and who will miss it if it is cancelled are generally relegated to the realm of anecdotal evidence. Researchers at Nevada State College have made efforts to remedy this gap in knowledge by analyzing EZProxy logs, which can be set up to capture unique user identifiers at the point of authentication into library electronic resources. When …

A Crossroads For Collection Development And Assessment, Its Fallout, And Unknowns: Where Do We Go From Here?, Thomas Reich

Charleston Library Conference

Where do we go from here? Achieving goals of sustainable resource collections through a thorough collection assessment is evermore challenged by fallout and unknowns lurking ubiquitously. There is an ever‐increasing competition for both physical space and economic space. We’re at an important crossroads for collection development, collection assessment, and libraries themselves. Change and assessment must be sustainable. To be effective, change must create its own momentum. Three years into our collection assessment project, momentum has been steady and efforts continue. However, we’ve encountered fallout and unknowns which we hadn’t planned on, and these are of an institutional and political nature.

Support When It Counts: Library Roles In Public Access To Federally Funded Research, Kristine M. Alpi, William M. Cross, Hilary M. Davis

Charleston Library Conference

In November 2012, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it would begin enforcing its April 2008 mandate of public access to NIH-funded research by delaying processing of investigators’ grants reporting noncompliant publications. In response, the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries offered to assist the University’s sponsored research administration in supporting NCSU researchers who had publications stemming from NIH funding and had not achieved compliance. Since the 2008 NIH mandate, over 1,000 articles based on NIH-funding have been published by NCSU across research areas including veterinary medicine, life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences, engineering, textiles, design, math, and statistics. …

Engaging Students Through Social Media, Beth L. Mcgough, Danielle Salomon

Charleston Library Conference

Students use social media to seek out, collaborate, and obtain information from their classmates and academic peers. Even if students are not currently interacting with the library using social media, they are open to doing so. Social media sites also have uses for organizing research and sharing it with others. Enabling and fostering that use is an ideal role for libraries. However, social media is not considered an appropriate information source for research.

In this day and age of oversaturation of marketing messages on social networking sites, it could be worthwhile for a library to explore smaller social networks.