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.