ISCI 761 Library Blog

  When the vision aligns juuuuuust right...     This week, as I completed my website evaluation assignment, my thoughts turned to my own library webpage.  I couldn't help it, really- it was hard not to feel some level of embarrassment for the state of it.  I don't so much as have a picture of myself up, let alone any of the eye-catching, attention-grabbing elements that characterized the examples in my evaluation.  It's not as if I haven't put in any legwork- I do have a digital pathfinder, and some info about how to access the GALILEO database- but this week's readings made me reflect on my role as a center for technological integration, and made me realize I ought to be doing more.     Of particular impact was Wine's (2016) identification of the School Librarian as Information Specialist in this new era of digital curation.  Until now, I've been somewhat resentful of my role as glorified tech support, having to field the requests of an endl...

 How I feel, daily, trying to keep ahead of misinformation trends among my students...     This week, I was asked to think deeply about information literacy- what constitutes my information diet, how I process it, how I evaluate bias, and how all of that fits into the larger framework of Being A Librarian (TM).      The first thing I noticed is that a *lot* of my information comes from social media.  Not the badly spelled Facebook Minion meme type, thankfully, but from places like Twitter and Reddit, where I tend to rely on the ability to read other people's views and opinions to form my own.  In some ways, I think this Information By Consensus approach is useful, insofar as I'm not getting my information from one unknown source, but rather a multitude of independent evaluations of an existing, credible source- like a news article or national broadcast.  Often, other commenters point out areas of bias or notable anomalies, which helps me eval...

  One of my primary preoccupations as a librarian is with access and equity.  Having worked my whole career thus far in a high-poverty district, I understand better than many the absolute necessity of ensuring that all students have equal opportunitie s to develop skills and access resources, particularly when those students find themselves faced with no home internet, uncertain housing, and food insecurity.     As the ISTE blog (Valenzuela, 2022) notes, “As a digital society, we’ve widely accepted the notion that rights and freedoms of expression, beliefs and pursuits are for all. Unfortunately, for some, this is just lip service.”  In essence, everyone *wants* to believe that technology is the great equalizer, providing complete and perfect access to information for everyone .  My own school district, in fact, follows this philosophy, using a 1 :1 laptop distribution model; every single student in the county is issued their own, personal laptop for...

"Stop asking me to commit Copyright Infringement!!" "Hey, could you make this into a poster for me?  Thanks! :) Attached:  BadlyCompressedTeacherMemeOfDubiousOrigin.jpg" I average 2-3 such emails a week in my school, and with over 50 educators in the building, you can imagine the work piles up.  There's a certain temptation to just powering through the endless print orders- sometimes I just want to turn off my brain, fire up my poster maker, and get print whatever cruddy, badly artifact-laden images I've been sent, so that I can move on to more substantive work. I don't, though. My mother was a school librarian, and one of the big tips she gave me as I started my own career was to ALWAYS be careful of copyright.  Teachers, she said, are constantly overworked and often looking for a quick solution- and just as often undereducated on Copyright and Fair Use.  This was never an indictment of teachers, of course- just a simple acknowledgement of fact:  Teache...