Instructional Progress Report

We're into the second week of classes, and so far I've talked to one international marketing class and three finance classes. Coming up are marketing, PR writing, and advertising to see me to the end of the month. I have more classes scheduled this term than my average, with still a couple of faculty I'm waiting to hear from. The library must be hot this year!

Also coming up are presentations with my colleagues at the South Dakota and Minnesota Library Associations meetings, talking about our high school librarian/student research. It is SO neat to be doing original research, however small, and talking to audiences that REALLY are interested in your topic. So even though work is hectic, it's pretty satisfying.

Conference presentation

This week, my colleagues and I presented some findings of our high school research project at the National Catholic Education Association conference here in the Twin Cities. We had a good turnout (35-40 folks), the technology behaved itself, and we somehow managed to talk over the hymn singing session in the room next door. We found that graduating students from Catholic high schools know a few things that we academic librarians can build on (plagiarism is bad, how to cite sources in MLA style, how to select and organize materials for their project, etc.) One thing that surprised me is that they don't know about investigation footnotes, bibliographies, and other clues along the research path. This is something I'll want to talk about more when helping students one-on-one.

In the next few months, I'm talking to a management capstone class, I'm a co-presenter at a regional conference (different topic), and our group is doing a poster session at another national conference. I'll try and catch my breath, every now and then.

What I've been up to lately

I'm dismayed that it's been so long since I've done a blog post. It isn't like I haven't been working. It isn't like I haven't had good ideas for blogging (so far I've found one: what does it mean to be a professional? I'll have to figure out where I hid the other ideas.) But December mean the holidays, and getting ready for them. Just as we rolled into January, the valve on our dishwasher at home broke, and much of our upstairs and downstairs was flooded while we were at work. For the past few weeks, we've been living out of storage tubs (luckily, insurance will cover most of the repairs.) I may blog more on that later. But here's what I've been up to professionally.

Two colleagues and I are doing research on the information literacy skills of our incoming first-year students. We have surveyed (and are interviewing this month) the librarians at some of our "feeder" private high schools, to see what their graduates know, that we can build on. It's a hot topic right now. We are replicating a study done by Islam and Murno in 2006 ("From perceptions to connections: Informing information literacy program planning in academic libraries through examination of high school library media center curricula." College and Research Libraries, 67(6), 492-514.) Earlier this month, we interviewed high school librarians in the Twin Cities metro area, and for the last two weeks of January, we're doing greater Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin (we were "iced in" earlier this week in Des Moines.) It is very exciting to be involved in primary research, even in a small way. I'll try to post more on this later, but right now I need to do more catchup now that I'm back in my office.

High school students and library research experiences

Next week a colleague and I are doing a brief presentation for coworkers about what high school students do and don't learn about libraries and library research while in high school. She will discuss a University of Montana poster session at ALA last summer, and I will discuss a session by Kellian Clink at the Minnesota Library Association conference last fall. In both cases, college librarians surveyed and interviewed high school librarians at their institutions' "feeder schools," the high schools from which a number of their entering freshmen graduate. Many high school libraries and media centers have had their book budgets decreased or frozen for years, although state programs do provide access to online databases. And high school librarians report that students are creating more PowerPoints and iMovies than research papers. This has interesting implications for those of us doing college-level library instruction, about what concepts first-year students have experienced (library databases, online catalogs, citing sources, Dewey classification) and those they may not (evaluating sources, controlled vocabulary, synthesizing & analyzing information.) My colleague hopes to do a similar study of feeder schools of private colleges in Minnesota. The findings should be interesting.