Archive for February, 2008
02-18-2008
MS Word for Dissertations / Publications
When I worked at UM, my responsibilities included doing technology consultations at the Knowledge Navigation Center. When I begin there, I used to dread faculty members or dissertation-writers with horribly messed up Word Documents. Usually they’d come in with obscure publisher requirements or the Rackham Dissertation Formatting Guidelines - they’d need to get their already horribly messed up document into shape.
By the time I left, I loved these patrons - I’ve become so savvy with all the little bugs and issues in Microsoft Word that I can bend it to do my will no matter how messed up a document is when I get it. I enjoyed taking frazzled, frantic patrons and showing them “how Word thinks” so they could not only fix their document, but also use it correctly the next time they wrote a longer document.
We also offered a workshop called “Using Word Effectively for your Dissertation” and a similar one for publication (aimed at faculty). Invariably, people would leave the workshop exclaiming about how much easier it was going to be for them to write their document and get it formatted for their final editing deadlines.
I’m about to teach the same class here at UT Arlington. After checking with the Office of Information Technology (who has their own set of technology workshops, including Word I and Word II) and the Graduate School, there is a need for this technology instruction on campus aimed at writers of dissertations and books.
There’s been a lot of talk about libraries and their role in the scholarly publishing process. UM hired two copyright specialists to talk to faculty about their rights when they publish. Librarians applaud and sometimes lead the charge in developing open access publishing models. Institutional repositories are more often than not initiated from and housed at the library.
Teaching the technical aspects of writing aren’t out of a library’s responsibilities. Just as we are the ones that end up teaching classes on bibliographic management software, so to should we be the ones teaching the technology that enable scholarship.
What kinds of classes could this entail? Adobe Illustrator? I know plenty of history faculty struggle making custom maps for the books they are writing. Digitizing images? How many times has a faculty member struggled to get their digital images into the right resolution and size for their next writing project? Let’s teach them Photoshop!
I also think providing our scholars and researchers with classes that immediately empower them to do new things will be rewarding for not only the scholars themselves, but for the library. Wouldn’t it be nice to surprise your stakeholders with capabilities they don’t expect from the traditional library?
Posted by frierson in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
02-13-2008
Politics 2.0
Part of my new job’s responsibilities include liaisoning with the Political Science department here at UT Arlington. While so many people have gone head first into Politics 2.0, I’m somewhat of a newcomer. In the coming weeks, I’m going to start collecting YouTube videos, blog feeds, … anything I can find that provides an example of political participation with Web 2.0 tools in action.
Being new at this, my first order of business is to see who else has done the same. Anyone out there reading this have a web-bibliography of web 2.0 political sites? I don’t want to provide any political commentary - just a resource list for those researching online political participation.
What an exciting time to become a political science librarian!
Posted by frierson in Politics 2.0 | 1 Comment »
02-12-2008
Lesson Study in (smaller) Libraries
I’m starting a Lesson Study group here at UT Arlington Library. UT Arlington is very, very different than the University of Michigan. Unlike UM, UTA only has 1 main library, 2 branch libraries, and 2 ‘electronic’ libraries - essentially banks of computers with a librarian on hand to assist with research. UM has too many libraries to count, several of them bigger than our own main library here.
The staff is significantly smaller too. At UM, we typically had a group of 8 - 10 regular attendees at our Lesson Study events. Though 24 or 25 people were on the mailing list, time conflicts and attrition of interest kept the group size down to those core 10. That was a good number, though, I think - not too many cooks in the kitchen, and everyone hand a chance to contribute.
Here, I’ve managed to get 13 of us on the mailing list - that’s promising. Our charge will be to make a lesson plan that will help us teach students how to critically evaluate resources. This was chosen over ‘finding journal articles’ and ‘incorporating LibGuides into instruction sessions’. Oddly enough, that topic was the one being done at UM when I left. I remember the discussions we had in finding a focus for our lesson plan - we had trouble nailing down exactly what it was we wanted to teach.
For that reason, I’m glad I get a chance to do it here. I’m interested to see what kinds of perspectives come from our group at UTA. People from all over the libraries have joined our group - those from Information Resources (collection development librarians), Access Services (circulation/interlibrary loan), Information Literacy (instruction librarians who focus on undergrads), and Information Services (my group - the liaison librarians) are all part of it, along with our library assistants.
Many people have already e-mailed me and said ‘I don’t want to teach - I’m not comfortable with that just yet - but I want to help develop it.’ Here’s where we really test our claim that Lesson Study is a way to encourage nervous teachers to give it a shot.
It, hopefully, will also foster a community approach to instruction. UTA is particularly good about this already, I’ve found - it’s really easy to find people here who are willing to let you come watch them teach. It’s encouraged.
Posted by frierson in Lesson Study | 2 Comments »
02-11-2008
From Innovation to Implementation
I recently watched an introductory lecture to a course offered at MIT called “How to Develop ‘Breakthrough’ Products and Services.” It’s offered through MIT’s OpenCourseWare. The professor, Eric von Hippel, spoke about the origin of breakthrough ideas. They don’t come from ideating sessions in darkened conference rooms; they don’t come from company designers explicitly trying to think of something new. They come from users who encounter real-world problems and develop tools to solve those problems.
He goes on to explain that successful companies don’t come up with great innovation themselves; instead, they are good at finding and identifying user-generated innovations and putting them into production.
A good example of innovation is in the products made by the people at the Center for History and New Media. I have heard more history faculty gush about the usefulness of Scribe, and now Zotero (a bibliographic management tool with added note-taking functionality), than you can shake a stick at. I wonder how they developed their ideas for these tools.
Posted by frierson in Uncategorized | No Comments »