– USATODAY.com CHICAGO -- For a stranger, the main library at the University of Illinois at Chicago can be hard to find. The directions I got from a pair of clerks at the credit union in the student center have proven unreliable. I now find myself adrift among ash trees and drab geometric buildings. Finally, I call for help. Firouzeh Logan, a reference librarian here, soon appears and guides me where I need to go. Several unmarked pathways and an escalator ride later, I am in a private room on the second floor of the library, surrounded by librarians eager to answer my questions. Most students never make it this far. This is one of the sobering truths these librarians, representing a group of Illinois universities, have learned over the course of a two-year, five-campus ethnographic study examining how students view and use their campus libraries: students rarely ask librarians for help, even when they need it. However, the researchers did not place the onus solely on students. Pragmatism vs.
Flip This Library: School Libraries Need a Revolution School libraries need a revolution, not evolution One of the biggest business battles of our time is between Microsoft and Google. The two have very different business models. What does this have to do with school libraries? School libraries are like Microsoft (without the revenue, of course). Sorry folks, but the old paradigm is broken. Last year, when I thought of revising my book Taxonomies of the School Library Media Program (Hi Willow, 2000), I realized that I had pushed the traditional model of school libraries about as far as it could go. What has to happen for school libraries to become relevant? This learning commons is both a physical and a virtual space that’s staffed not just by teacher-librarians but also by other school specialists who, like us, are having trouble getting into the classroom and getting kids’ attention. The learning commons also includes an experimental learning center, which also occupies a physical and virtual space. Do that 180-degree flip How? Get spacey
What Students Don't Know CHICAGO -- For a stranger, the main library at the University of Illinois at Chicago can be hard to find. The directions I got from a pair of clerks at the credit union in the student center have proven unreliable. I now find myself adrift among ash trees and drab geometric buildings. Finally, I call for help. Firouzeh Logan, a reference librarian here, soon appears and guides me where I need to go. Most students never make it this far. This is one of the sobering truths these librarians, representing a group of Illinois universities, have learned over the course of a two-year, five-campus ethnographic study examining how students view and use their campus libraries: students rarely ask librarians for help, even when they need it. The goal was to generate data that, rather than being statistically significant but shallow, provided deep, subjective accounts of what students, librarians and professors think of the library and each other at those five institutions. Pragmatism vs.
Flexible Scheduling: Implementing an Innovation tables and appendix Appendix. Stories of Successful Implementation of Flexible Scheduling Each implementation of flexible scheduling in the current study followed a different path, had different circumstances, and ended up in a different place. Each school had unique characteristics that may have affected implementation of flexible scheduling. An inquirer cannot know all the contexts to which someone may wish to transfer working hypotheses; one cannot reasonably expect him or her to indicate the range of contexts to which there might be some transferability. In this study there are potentially many transferable elements. School A. Characteristics and context At the time of the first interview, Atwood School, located in a relatively affluent community, had a population of 560 students in grades K–5, representing mixed socioeconomic levels. What is meant by “flexible scheduling” in this school? What does a typical day in this library look like? The days are highly varied and variable. School B. School C.
US study shows Google has changed the way students research - and not for the better Many university students use scholarly databases like they would Google, revealing an astonishingly poor understanding of how to refine searches for better research results, a US study has found. The Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) Project, a two-year study of the student research process involving five US universities, included extensive interviews with students, librarians and other academics in an effort to better understand 21st Century student research habits. The study, to be published by the American Library Association under the title Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know, revealed worryingly crude research skills among the students surveyed. Many were unwilling to ask university librarians for help – or even knew that they could ask. “While students used the libraries at all five universities pretty extensively, librarians were absent from most students’ academic worldview. Google-style databases A global problem?
The Instructional Consultant Role of the Elementary-School Library Media Specialist and the Effects of Program Scheduling on Its Practice SLMQ Volume 25, Number 1, Fall 1996 Eleonor Putnam, Library Media Specialist, Anchorage, Alaska Advancements in information technology have redefined the role of the school library media specialist in the 1980s and 1990s from that of a collector of resources and facility manager to that of a teacher and an instructional design consultant. In 1988, the American Association of School Librarians developed Information Power:Guidelines for School Media Programsto provide the vision and guidance for the school library media specialists to cope with the significant changes within education and the proliferation of information resources. Information Power calls on library media specialists to provide leadership and expertise in the integration of educational and information technology into the instructional programs. Cleaver and Taylor point out that Information Poweremphasizes the instructional consultant role of the library media specialist. Problem Purposes of the Study Literature Review
Background « ERIAL Project The Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) Project is a two-year study of the student research process. The project is funded by an LSTA grant awarded to Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) by the Illinois State Library. The goal of the project is to understand how students do research, and how relationships between students, teaching faculty and librarians shape that process. ERIAL is built on a unique ethnographic methodology, which employs close observation of students’ research habits. ERIAL is a collaborative effort of five Illinois universities: DePaul University, Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU), Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU), the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS).