Getting ready for ACRL

I’ve been happily buried under lately, reading some interesting manuscripts (which I hope to find time to blog about later). But, this afternoon, I realized that I’d better start getting my schedule together for the ACRL conference, which is just weeks away(!).

I am looking forward to seeing some of our authors there, and, in general, just soaking in the buzz. There are many, many challenges in academic librarianship, but also some interesting ideas floating around. One focus of mine in the past year or so has been to build into our list some practical titles that offer solutions to some of these challenges. A couple of days ago, I gave you a taste of the Susan Gibbons book coming out on the Net Gen student.

Recently, I put into production another manuscript I’m excited about: Steven Bell and John Shank’s Academic Librarianship by Design: A Blended Librarian’s Guide to the Tools and Techniques. You may have heard Bell and Shank speaking about their vision of the new role for the librarian: the blended librarian. This idea reflects the authors’ conviction that, to thrive, academic librarians must be better integrated into the teaching and learning processes at their institutions. In addition to library skills, the blended librarian brings in information technology and instructional design skills. The book is organized around “design thinking”, which affects everything librarians do, from collaborating with others on campus, having a presence on course management systems, helping faculty save time, and creating digital learning materials. As they talked about instructional design, this section jumped out at me.

Academic librarians, at the core of the profession, are educators. Whether they work in public or technical service areas, the work of academic librarians is directed to helping students and faculty achieve academic success. Instructional design is a set of skills that are used by many educators to create products that enable people to learn more effectively. We think instructional design has the potential to help us make that success possible, and that is owing to the improvements it can bring to how we approach the construct and implementation of new services and resources. Along the way another powerful influence in the development of our ideas and practices is design thinking….

To tell you the truth, I don’t even want to know how these two authors pulled off getting the manuscript to me on time. Both are impressively busy. Steven Bell, as you probably know, is nothing if not prolific, with a number of blogs, journal articles, etc., to his name. I have never asked him this, but I suspect he’s one of those who can get by on four hours of sleep. They have started a new blog, Designing Better Libraries, that expands on some of the “design thinking” ideas that are behind the book.

Recent other additions to our list that will be especially interesting to the academic library crowd:

Creating the One-Shot Library Workshop: A Step-by-Step Guide by Jerilyn Veldof. The one-shot lesson continues to be the vehicle by which many academic librarians provide information literacy and bibliographic instruction. I’m a sucker for practicality, and this book is a gem in its step-by-step approach. And, it shows how to deliver the information so it sticks in those undergraduate (and graduate) minds.

Information Literacy Assessment: Standards-Based Tools and Assignments by Teresa Neely. Again, very practical. Neely frames the book in the context of the ACRL standards and, using best practices from the U.S., Canada, and Australia, provides assessment examples to see how well students are developing their information literacy skills and assignments designed to sharpen those skills.