Waiting for a ride home? by QualityFrog / CC-BY-NC

Have you ever noticed how many special events there are in library-land? National Library Week, Read across America Day, Teen Read Week, National Poetry Month, National Children’s Book Week—it becomes difficult to keep track! As much fun as it would be, it’s pretty much impossible to celebrate or even acknowledge each and every one of these. When used discriminately, however, they make a great marketing tool for the library to use in promoting programs and materials and can even aid in fulfilling the goals of vision statements and library missions.
One of the newest national initiatives, Teen Tech Week has been celebrated by ALA’s Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) since 2007. This year, Teen Tech Week is March 7–13. According to the YALSA website, “The purpose of the initiative is to ensure that teens are competent and ethical users of technologies, especially [...]

Source: Robyn Vittek

More people than 2000 people attended the first ever Handheld Librarian Conference in July 2009 which featured a wide array of collaboration, learning and networking activities focused on Mobile Library Services!
The Handheld Librarian 2 will continue the dialog with a 2-day online conference scheduled for February 17-18, 2010 and is now accepting registrations at http://www.handheldlibrarian.org.
The program — sponsored by Alliance Library System, and LearningTimes — will include a series of wonderful keynote and featured speakers collection of available resources, discussions boards, and access to the recording of all live events for one year after the conference. More people than ever are using mobile devices for a wide variety of purposes including communication, internet access, text messaging, and entertainment. It is important that libraries provide mobile services as handheld use increases.
The conference will feature four exciting keynote [...]

Source: noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee)

Photo by Flickr user Hammer51012

Picture it, a higher education institution, 2009. The sun is shining. It’s a warm summer day. Your iced coffee perspires on the desk in front of you. You are a faculty librarian participating in a workshop with other faculty members on outcomes-based assessment for teaching and learning. You’re excited to make the leap from routine library orientations to in-class assignments centered around information literacy concepts, which will help improve your instructional sessions and place students on the continuum towards mastery of information literacy concepts. Suddenly, the conversation turns to the topic of the learning outcome for information literacy.
“How is information literacy any different from critical thinking?”
“Couldn’t we just get rid of information literacy since it shares similar outcomes with critical thinking?”
Wait, what?!?
Immediately, your head starts reeling with the national standards of the Association of College and Research Libraries, various statewide initiatives that have mobilized to embed [...]

Source: Heather Davis