In spring 2016, the School of Graduate Studies (SGS) held focus groups for first-year Master and PhD students to learn more about this cohort’s needs. The first focus group topic was about library resources and services, and seven students attended to share their experiences. Guided questions to get the group thinking about their library experiences … Read More

From Jenna Hartel: You are warmly welcomed to participate in the course INF2330: Information Ethnography at the Faculty of Information this fall. It is offered on Monday, 1:00-4:00. You can learn more about the course, here. As you may know, ethnography is hot as a means to better understand the Information Age. As libraries continue to undergo exciting changes, there … Read More

As part of the June 13 2013 liaison librarians event on acquiring and deploying e-resource collections at the U of T, Dan D’agostino provided an overview of the Oxford Bibliographies and Sage Research Methods Online.  These are excellent tools but receive low use. Many faculty and grad students aren’t aware of them. Librarians discussed how … Read More

I love this succinct post by Barbara Fister on the kinds of knowledge we in the library world (or we over the age of 20!) may take for granted: Tacit Knowledge and the Student Researcher. Having electronic access to materials creates the expectation that everything is a mere Google-search away, but our systems of organization … Read More

Written by a college dean, who argues that non-attendance in workshops is driven by indifference, and that workshops have to add real value to the individual in order for them to be perceived as worthwhile. “That’s not because the content or delivery of workshops is poor. As with anything, they range from outstanding to awful. … Read More

New Report: “‘If It Is Too Inconvenient, I’m Not Going After It:’ Convenience as a Critical Factor in Information-seeking Behaviors” http://www.oclc.org/research/news/2011-06-06.htm Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Timothy J. Dickey, and Marie L. Radford explore empirical evidence for convenience as a critical factor in information seeking, using data from two IMLS-funded user studies.

“Learning Curve: How College Graduates Solve Information Problems Once They Join the Workplace,” Alison J. Head, Project Information Literacy Research Report, October 15, 2012. (Two different versions available: Text with appendix, 38 pages, 5.8 MB or text without the appendix, 29 pages, 5.7 MB.)

Commissioned by the University of California Berkeley’s Library, this highly readable study of the campus users’ attitudes regarding print and digital collections, library spaces, hours, and staff provides a useful reminder of how different our library constituencies are.  http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/AboutLibrary/Hart_Survey_Report_Re-Envisioning_UC_Berkeley_Library.pdf

Although it’s clearly a promo for the EasyBib software, this infographic highlights data around levels of student source selection, plagiarism, and citation practice that makes a compelling case for closer connections between librarians and the teaching/learning enterprise.

and they are… Communicating value Data curation Digital preservation Higher education Information technology Mobile environments Patron driven e-book acquisition Scholarly communication Staffing User behaviors and expectations Read more http://crln.acrl.org/content/73/6/311.long