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Author: Iris

Alice in Libraryland

Published by Iris on Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

SLA’s Future Ready 365 team invited me to add an honorary “special” to my librarian credentials and write a post for them, so I wrote Alice in Libraryland. The first paragraph isn’t very rabbit-hole-ish:

Imagine walking through the stacks in your favorite library. The slightly worn spines creating that familiar regular irregularity on each side, that distinctive smell of books and dust and filtered air, everything promising far more to explore than you could ever chart out in one lifetime, everything beckoning you toward its own particular rabbit hole of interconnected facts and ideas. Imagine pulling several books off the shelves to take with you, either to check out or to spread in front of you in the reading room.

After that? Well, I’ve already written with Steve Lawson about some ideas for staving off the insanity and steer us towards one model that might allow us to capitalize on the benefits of new formats without such potential for seeing white rabbits.

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The Fister Maxim

Published by Iris on Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

Any good idea I come up with, Barbara Fister has already thought of, and published on, years ago.

I’d been feeling so proud of myself for “discovering” and beginning to teach information literacy as an arm of rhetoric, so enthused by the reaction it’s been getting from the faculty I work with. And look, there’s this article by Barbara from 1993.

Fister, Barbara. “Teaching the rhetorical dimensions of research.” Research Strategies 11, no. 4 (1993): 211-219.
If students perceive that the research process consists of merely locating, synthesizing, and presenting information from library sources, they will not fulfill the demands of college-level inquiry. This article examines the importance of teaching the rhetorical dimensions of research and suggests several relevant approaches that BI librarians can use when explaining access tools and research strategies.
Excuse me please while I read all about my theory that Barbara predicted.
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Summer time, and the livin’ is… hmmm

Published by Iris on Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

School’s finally out (well, it has been for about a month now), and this year’s summer programs for high school students doesn’t need any involvement from us. We’re working very, very hard on a bunch of large summer projects (a self study, a major campus-wide information literacy assessment project, a couple of articles), and I’m not procrastinating AT ALL right now as I write this. And I’m offended that you’d imply that I was…

One thing I love about the summer is that my co-workers and I settle into a different kind of dynamic. We seem to relate much more like friends who happen to have common hobbies than we do during the school year when our offices are always full of students. We all know we’re all really busy, but we also seem to be able to let our professional guards down and just be people. Much as we like and respect each other and enjoy each other’s company all year round, we’re so often in meetings or working with students that there’s just not as much freedom to interact casually like that during the school year.

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Using Naxos on iThings

Published by Iris on Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

Those of you who have Naxos Music Library know that iPods and iPads and iPhones don’t work well natively with Naxos stuff because Naxos is pretty heavily dependent on Flash. Our music department’s librarian just sent information around about how to make things function, though, so I thought I’d share. As it turns out, there’s an app for that!

  1. Access NML through your library’s subscription on a desktop/laptop computer
  2. Select the playlists tab near the top of the page
  3. Select “sign up” near the upper right corner and follow the sign-up directions
  4. A confirmation email will be sent, with a link to activate the account.
  5. Log in to the desktop interface and create playlists
  6. Download the NML for iPhone App and log in using the same account information.
  7. Accessed your playlists via the app.

Basically, the music you want to hear on an iThing will have to be put into a playlist first, and the playlist is what’s available via the app.

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