I met our author Susan Gibbons for the first time at the Charleston Conference last week. We were both leaving a plenary session. Susan was headed down the street to the College of Charleston’s Addlestone Library, where she was a co-presenter on a “Lively Lunch” discussion of e-books. To go from the main hotel to the Addlestone Library one crossed the gate into the College of Charleston’s campus, sharing the sidewalk with the “net generation,” whose social (software) behavior was the topic of so much talk. A sort of visual affirmation.

Similarly, last night on my train ride home, I paged through Susan Gibbons’ The Academic Library and the Net Gen Student. Coincidentally, a student had sat in the seat across the aisle from me. She immediately laid down on her seat, knees propped up, and put in her earbuds, not the norm among us nine-to-fivers commuting back to the suburbs. Not long after I was reading through Susan’s description of the helicopter parents and how libraries can develop programs for them, the student was on her cell phone, presumably talking with a parent, apologizing that she had messed up, plaintively noting that she “felt like shit,” and offering assurance that she had tried to explain things to her professor.

We see the Net Gen all around us, or at least in front of us at Starbucks ordering complicated drinks. Susan Gibbons, associate dean for public services and collection development at University of Rochester River Campus Libraries, had the advantage of grant funded anthropologist studying her students. For more information, see the report, available as downloadable PDF and in print, or listen to a podcast interview of three researchers. Drawing on a perspective from the research results as well as Clayton Christensen’s “disruptive technology” concept and successful business models described in Jim Collins’ Good to Great, Susan offers an intelligent, convincing, and readable synthesis on how academic libraries can respond with action.

In the Preface of Academic Librarianship by Design, co-author Steven Bell describes the transformation of Philadelphia University toward curricula rooted in design. In 2004 banners hung around campus proclaiming “Design Matters.” They got into Steven’s head. During the past few years, he and coauthor John Shank have been discussing and developing their concept of “blended librarianship.” The blend is an integration the resources and services of the library into the higher education’s teaching and learning process. Design is the best tool for achieving this blend. Bell and Shank recommend the book The Art of Innovation, coauthored by Tom Kelley, who was general manager of the Silicon Valley design firm IDEO. I’ll have to add it to my list of books that I’d like to read someday. Along the same lines, I need to someday get to Donald Norman’s Design of Everyday Things.

Bell and Shank host the The Blended Librarian Portal for an ongoing, community exploration of the concept.

I like strolling through poster sessions at conferences. I can get a birds-eye view of the sorts of projects happening in libraries. The ACRL Conference poster sessions suggest assessment is the order of the day. An article at “Inside Higher Ed” picked up on this trend, covering a conference panel on assessing information literacy instruction. It describes the First Year Information Literacy in the Liberal Arts Assessment project (FYILLAA), which grew from a collaboration of eight Midwestern universities and is now used by 119 colleges. The article notes that groups developing assessments are not always paying attention to each other’s efforts.

While it’s important that the educational community agree on standards, and the article references ACRL’s Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, it’s appropriate to handle assessment differently. The article references two of the well-known instruments: the Educational Testing Service’s ICT Literacy Assessment and Kent State University’s Project SAILS. Teresa Neely describes each in her book Information Literacy Assessment. Project SAILS, developed solely for ACRL’s standards, is for “programmatic-level” assessment. It measures incoming college-level students’ skills and long-term improvements. The ICT Literacy Assessment builds on ACRL standards along with others. It differs from most other tools in that it is “simulation-based,” assessing multiple aspects of ICT competencies by “requiring test takers to use basic technology as a tool to arrive at solutions” rather than posing multiple choice queries. Librarians working on information literacy assessment can get a good overview of what others are doing, including specific examples, from Neely’s book.