Category: Professional Development

Copyright and Fair Use & OA and OER

Lindsay DavisLeave a comment

The one thing I did not do in library graduate school was to spend a lot of dedicated time on copyright and other related issues. I’m definitely feeling the crunch, particularly in light of the open access (OA) and open educational resources (OER) movements in higher education. Over the summer, I was very impressed with the University of  Maryland University College‘s move to open digital resources for undergraduate education. Here is Barbara Fister’s overview of recent developments in OA during Open Access Week this past fall. Adding to the recent developments in OA that Fister lists, just today I read that the Oberlin Group, with the backing of liberal arts colleges, launched Lever Press.

In the CJCLS listserv this fall, someone posted the following report, “Opening Public Institutions: OER in North Dakota and the Nation, 2015,” and asked where all the community college librarians were in helping to lead OA/OER on their campuses. Here are some resources some people shared from that listserv, as well as some resources from a question about open textbooks from the ILI listserv:

Affordable Learning Georgia

College Open Textbooks

Lansing Community College’s OER Summit

Lansing Community College’s OER LibGuide

Northwestern Michigan College OER LibGuide 

Open Textbook Library

University of Maryland University College OER LibGuide

OA and OER are subjects I follow, but not to the degree I would like. One of the challenges is that our community college is not part of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, but according to the website “[i]ndividuals, whether they represent Consortium members or not, are welcome to use and modify materials and resources found on this website, and to participate in webinars and other Consortium activities.” I just got added to the CCCOER Advisory Google Group, so I hope to gain more knowledge. They also have a YouTube channel. I suspect that with the push for distance education in our college district, and some of the buzz that was generated by a student leader about open textbooks to the Academic Senate, we will become more involved. As the newer librarian two years away from tenure, it’s difficult to broach these subjects, but I am preparing. In fact, I took an online “how to teach an online” class this past fall with other faculty members more to see what the faculty were saying regarding content for courses, etc. There is a need for OER there.

Someone also pointed me to SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.

Here are some relevant conferences. The 12th Annual Open Education Conference was in Vancouver this past November, so I plan to take a gander at the website for #OpenEd2015. I was really bummed that San Jose State University’s one-day Open Access Conference 2015 was during a planned mini vacation. I will be on the lookout for this year’s conference dates.

I definitely also need to carve out time to watch the Blended Librarian recorded webcast On Becoming Open Education Leaders. Librarians really are in the fantastic position to lead the movement, and there are some college’s that have specific OER/OA librarians. How neat!

(As I was finishing up this post, someone posted about Project CORA, Community of Online Research Assignments: An Open Access Resource for Faculty and Librarians. I am so excited! This “library” will really enhance my information literacy instruction work!)

Another thing I have been meaning to do over the winter break is to start the the Coursera course Copyright for Educators and Librarians (librarians are educators, but okay). I still have time to begin  before I go back to work, though.

I sense a theme among some of the links I’ve been collecting over the last few months, as well.

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video 

Digital Media Law Project’s Fair Use webpage

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL)‘s Copyright for Librarians

I also find BYU’s Copyright 101 modules to be helpful. The videos don’t really look modern, but they now have captions!

Refocusing Information Literacy Instruction Under the Framework: Changes & Challenges Presentation

Lindsay DavisLeave a comment

In early December,  I gave a 30 minute presentation, Refocusing Information Literacy Instruction Under the Framework: Changes and Challenges, followed by a 20-minute question and answer session. The link opens to a Google Slides presentation. You can find the works I consulted for this on the last two slides. For more information about the threshold concepts, please see:

ACRL. (n.d.). Annotated bibliography of threshold concepts. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/issues/infolit/teaching/thresholdbib

This is a significant presentation in that it is my first academic presentation on an aspect of librarianship. Sure, I do presentations and teaching sessions for students, presentations on introducing library services to new part-time faculty during orientations, and I have taught with a colleague about Google Drive and Google Tools for back-to-work professional development sessions, but this was different because it was presented to library staff and librarians outside the college where I work.

 

Committee Work: Blogs and Bibliographies

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Faculty members do a lot of committee work for their colleges.  Over the summer, I served on a hiring committee for three positions. This year, I will be once again serving on the Student Success and Support Program Advisory Committee, Institutional Review Board, Student of the Month, and faculty union as a representative for my campus.  My newest committee is serving as the Learning Resource Center’s Academic Senate representative. I also serve on various short-term assignments throughout the year. The faculty lead usually asks me about short-term committees rather than long-term ones because she knows that when I am at a meeting it means I am away from the research help desk, and I don’t have back-up.

However, it is also important for me to serve on committees for professional library associations. I am once again serving of the Association for College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL’s) Community and Junior College Libraries Section’s (CJCLS’) Membership and Communications committee. This year, I will be contributing to the new CJCLS blog! I will be responsible for maintaining a bibliography of scholarship written in the last five years by community and junior college librarians. A call just went out on the CJCLS listserv and on the Community and Junior College Librarians Facebook group. I can’t wait to start receiving citations!

I am also serving as secretary of ACRL’s Instruction Section’s (IS’) Instruction for Diverse Populations committee. We’re responsible for the Library Instruction for Diverse Populations Bibliography.  I will be revising, maintaining, and adding scholarship to the Native American Students and Nontraditional Students sections. I am very excited about this work since I am one of the only community college librarians on this committee. It has also been a long time since I have done this kind of literature review work, so I am thankful to get my feet wet again with an established project.

I am continuing my involvement with ACRL’s Library Marketing and Outreach interest group. I tried to get something going here in the Central Valley last year, but for one reason or another, it didn’t take. I need to give it some more thought as far as trying to establish something here, but it may just be that I join the Northern California team. I get so much inspiration from LMO’s Facebook group. The support and energy there has been great. They even inspired me to submit my DIY work to LibrarianDesignShare.org, and I have always been shy about these kinds of things. (I’ll have more news on this front in another post…)

I promise I am not overdoing it, but I also will be contributing to the Two Year Talk blog.

This is going to be an eventful year! I’m excited to stretch my wings a little more.

LexisNexis Academic Webinars

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This year, I am making good on my goal to actually watch webinars when they happen and/or watching the archived recording during the same week (or at least month!) I receive access to it. I have a few saved from last fall and spring semesters that I need to watch.

I participated in LexisNexis webinars at the end of August, and while I do use LexisNexis at the community college and at the university, I don’t use it a whole lot. Here are my notes for each of the webinars.

LexisNexis Academic News

  • LexisNexis Academic News has 17,000 sources.
  • LN also has broadcast transcripts and transcripts from news shows, like 60 Minutes.
  • LN also has speeches, both the transcripts as prepared, as well as transcripts as delivered (the online trainer said that President Bill Clinton was famous for straying from the prepared speech).
  • LN also has a feature that opens web news from 300 web sources.
  • Coverage varies by the source and updates also vary by source. For example, full-text NYT articles date back to 1980 and content is updated daily). The lesson here is to use the information button next to the source name for the details.
  • A note about full-text: While the articles available in the database are full-text, not all articles from a particular source may be included in the database. I knew this, but I didn’t exactly know why. One reason is that freelance articles are owned by the journalist, not the publication, so journalists can elect to have their content removed from the databases.
  • LN will find the singular, plural, and possessive forms of words in searches.
  • LN will also find equivalents, not to be confused with synonyms. For example, if you type 1st Amendment, LN will also find First Amendment. This is a really good tip when it comes to numbers in this context. A search for GOP will also bring up all versions of Republican Party.
  • Librarians love field searching. I hadn’t fully explored all the search possibilities, so searching by length was new for me. What I love about this is that it might be helpful for lower level English courses. (This kind of searching reminds me of Dialog, and I was obsessed with it. I was in library school between 2010 and 2011, and even we used Dialog. Headline searching FTW

LexisNexis Legal Research

  • I don’t think I have learned this much from one webinar before. I don’t get too many legal reference questions, but I can tell you that it’s not my strong suit. I always used LN with some trepidation, and while the students and I could find the relevant cases, I knew that I needed to know more about the legal research side in LN to get the most out of it.
  • For legal cases, you can search by citation, party, or topic.
    • Citation: You have to use the exact Blue Book citation, including the periods. The citations are composed of three parts: the first number refers to volume, the second set of letters is an abbreviation for the book or reporter, and the third number refers to the page.
    • Party: You don’t have to enter both party names, and they don’t have to be in the right order. LN will do the search. Just be aware that when doing a party name search, LN will go through short party names, as well as the full list of parties involved, which could be numerous. For example, a search for Jones v. Clinton will also pull results for completely different cases whose short party name does not have either Jones or Clinton. I used to wonder why results like this pop up, but the online trainer said that when LN does the search, it pulls matches from the full list of parties, not just the short party name. Party search looks for matches in the full list.
    • Topic: This isn’t natural searching. This search will look in the headnotes section for matches. Think of headnotes like subject searching/breadcrumbs in the legal world. Here’s how headnotes are super nifty. They tell you all the subjects/topics covered by a particular case. For example, if you look up the headnotes for Roe v. Wade, you can find that other issues besides a woman’s right to choose were involved.
  • The reason why a million things pop up when you do a party search for Supreme Court cases—everything related to a Supreme Court case gets published. This is why you get a lot of hits looking up one case.
  • LN has a handy Landmark Cases feature, which you can find near the big “search everything related to LN” search box. There is a button to the right of the large search box that says “Search by Content Type,” where you can find the Landmark Cases feature. Cases are organized by topic. This is such a useful tool for the kinds of material two-year college students need for their coursework.
  • Also under the legal section under the “Search by Content Type” button is a way to search for federal and state cases. For most student research, the online trainer says it’s best to stick to one’s jurisdiction when searching. In the Federal and State Cases Search, head to the advanced search settings. There is an option to select the specific circuit, such as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, as well as state, such as California.
  • One of my favorite parts of the webinar was a question the online trainer posed, emulating a reference question that is probably common, “What are all the [insert your topic] laws in California?” The easiest way is to go to the ““Search by Content Type” button,” go to the Legal heading, and then select “State Statutes and Regulations.” Under the advanced options, check box statutory code and then the state. Yay for codified law!
  • LN does not have cases related to those at the state trial level. This is because the verdict only affects the parties involved in the case. The decision does not do anything to an entire state or the nation. For these kind of cases, especially for a local issue of interest, newspaper articles are the best bet for research.
  • LN has a legal reference section! Find the “Search by Content Type” button, go to the Legal heading, and then select “Legal Reference.” Under the advanced options, you’ll find American Jurisprudence 2d, Ballentine’s Law Dictionary, Bieber’s Dictionary of Legal Abbreviations, and the Modern Dictionary for the Legal Profession.
  • At this point in the webinar, I had to talk to a faculty member, so I missed the introduction to Sheppard’s. It’s a nifty citation tool that allows you see if a case has been overturned, reaffirmed, questioned, or cited by other cases.

Small Font Purpose

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While I was planning the idea of blogging to help me through work while on a road trip though the southwest at the end of May/beginning of June, I came across a New York Times article called “The Small, Happy Life.” It’s had me thinking for over a month now. What really hits home is the following:

Terence J. Tollaksen wrote that his purpose became clearer once he began to recognize the “decision trap”: “This trap is an amazingly consistent phenomena whereby ‘big’ decisions turn out to have much less impact on a life as a whole than the myriad of small seemingly insignificant ones.”

Tollaksen continues, “I have always admired those goal-oriented, stubborn, successful, determined individuals; they make things happen, and the world would be lost without them.” But, he explains, he has always had a “small font purpose.”

Queen of Links and Thinks

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Part of my summer goal is to reduce my digital clutter. I’m an expert saver of links, and I always intend to follow up, but you know how that goes. Right now I’m going through my Evernote account. Apparently, I have a notebook specifically called Life. I came across a Lifehacker article I had saved called “If You Want to Follow Your Dreams, You’ll have to Choose a Focus.” In the past, I have been very good at staying focused–sometimes too good–but for the last year or two, I have been restless because I have been lacking focus.

I do have to say that I think people can go too far with the advice in the article–you don’t want to alienate others in your life while you work on your dream; it’s a lonely way to live. I do, however, agree with the advice about saying no to extra things. I have been saying no to extra things, including a flooded inbox, to give me time to research and think about my next step.

Some others related links I came across in my Evernote Life notebook include “How to Get Back on Track After Disappointing Yourself,” which also talks about the power of saying no. Here is my favorite passage:

It’s remarkable how much time people spend chasing things that they don’t really care about. Then, when they don’t achieve them, they beat themselves up and feel like a failure for not achieving something that wasn’t important to them all along.

“Start a Seven-Step Depth Ritual to Focus on Your Task at Hand” is a good reminder about being mindful about what you’re doing, which I really struggle with when I have time off. I thrive off of a schedule, so not having one during the summer freaks me out a little bit.

Left My Librarian Heart in San Francisco

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I went to my first American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in 2010, just a mere semester and a couple of weeks into library school. I was doing a fellowship in DC at the time, and the conference happened to take place there that summer. It was incredibly overwhelming because it’s a giant conference, and I didn’t know anyone or much of anything back then. After that, I didn’t go for a few years. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t go until I was working somewhere full-time. At one point, I was working four library positions, so it was hard to take time off as a part-time employee. I was also really concerned with saving money because my husband was working so hard while I was in school and hunting for a full-time job; it made me feel bad not to be contributing as much as he was putting in.

Fast track, so I went to the conference in Las Vegas last year. I meant to start this blog after I got back to talk about all the things I went to and saw, but now I’ve come back from the conference in San Francisco.

This year, I took my sister with me. Kory, my husband, was going to go with me, but it ended up not working out with his job. My sister and I played Eloise at The Plaza for a few days since I booked at the Westin St. Francis. It’s so fancy it took a minute to figure out the elevator. In between my conference sessions, meetings, and meet-ups, we had a fabulous time shopping, eating Thai, crashing in on the Philippine Independence Day outdoor concert featuring Jessica Sanchez, and catching bits of the SF Pride Parade.

What I love about the craziness of ALA is that it’s mashup of everything library–you can be talking to a public library director, teacher librarian, vendor, dean of library services, reference librarians, librarians who don’t work in libraries. It’s everyone from the rock stars to the in-the-trenches librarians. This happened to me last year. I didn’t realize who I was talking to was a more well-known person until half an hour had passed because Twitter pics are not the same. I almost died. lol

The meeting I most anticipated this year was the Association of College and Research Libraries Library Marketing and Outreach interest group (ACRL LMO IG). Last year, I found myself at a really small meeting for a new interest group. This group has really given me something to focus on in the midst of all the things I can’t necessarily do at work. The IG is just a place to share ideas and inspire others. The idea is that states will have their own meet-ups. I signed up to be Central CA’s rep for ACRL LMO IG last year, and I recruited a librarian at the local UC to help me begin tapping into the Sacramento-Fresno area, but for one reason or another, we didn’t get started. As luck would have it, I happened upon a librarian from a private university about 30 minutes north of me who was on sabbatical when I had contacted her about getting together to form a regional group. I’m excited to see if we can wake up our sleepy area. Those So Cal and Nor Cal librarians are a little more social than the Central CA bunch.

Here’s what else I went to:

Lucha Corpi, Javier Huerta, and Viola Canales: Mexican-American Poetry Panel reminded me of my childhood–making trips to the discount supermarket, visiting Don Juan Foods where my mom worked as a cashier in between cannery seasons at Del Monte, and eating raspas and playing Lotería with my cousins. My upbringing in a tight-knit Mexican-American family in an even tighter-knit Protestant domination has had such a significant impact on my life, I can’t even explain but in poetry. And I haven’t written poetry in many years, partly because I’m not very good at it.

Framing and Enhancing Visual Literacy: Using the New ACRL Framework to Develop Effective Art Instruction was a really great panel that featured librarians at different institutions who incorporate visual literacy into their instruction based on the new framework and Standards for Information Literacy. There were some great lessons and ideas for how to do this, but the one that sticks out to me most was a lesson on how an image of a snake charmer became the image associated with Mami Watta, an African water goddess.

Current Topics Discussion (ACRL IS), which focused on how to establish and strength our partnerships with faculty members, which was led by Amy Wainwright, a fantastic librarian I have gotten to know a little bit through ACRL LMO IG. We discussed problems we have, as well as possible solutions for improving our relations with faculty members. Because I’m at such a small campus, I kind of have an edge when it comes to this, but there is always room to improve, and I know that my slight shyness does get in the way.

Multimodal Literacy and Comics, which focused on how comics can help people see different viewpoints, particularly those from the position of a person of color. These provide another narrative that students might not encounter in school which focuses on the traditional canon. I’m a person who wasn’t exposed to comics until I was 20, and by exposure I mean not exactly reading them but getting to know someone who reads them. I also grew up not having books with characters with my family dynamic in a bilingual/bi-racial household. Let me say, when Marisol MacDonald Doesn’t Match arrived at the public library I was working in at the time, I cried made me cried in the children’s department workroom.

PR Xchange is basically displays and examples of libraries’ marketing materials that you can take home. If you know me, you know that I absolutely love this stuff. That’s a nice display sign,” is something I say on a regular basis. Not that my own designs are gorgeous; my job is way too Jill of all trades to be perfection in one area.

And a million posters…

But I found it on Google: Teaching college students Critical Digital Literacy

College student engagement in information literacy activities across the disciplines

Dogs, Donuts and other Distractions: Assessing Finals Week Activities at Academic Libraries

One-Shot Assessment on the Fly: Using Free Mobile Technology and Polling Software

Plotting a new “maptastic” course: building community and unearthing collections through pop-up exhibits Click here for a copy of the poster.

Sustainable Assessment: Using Google Forms for Library Instruction

All in a Day’s Work: Workplace Information Literacy from a Student Perspective

Can You Kern? Librarians as Graphic Designers

The Undergraduate Experience: Is it Enhanced Through Employment as a Library Student Worker? Click here for a copy of the poster.

Wikipedia: Metaliteracy in the digital landscape

I had a great time. I learned a lot. This sort of makes up for having to miss the ACRL conference in March. Next year, the ALA Annual Conference is in Orlando. ACRL won’t happen again until 2017, but CARL, the CA chapter of ACRL has a conference in 2016. I signed up to help out with the planning recently, so I will go to that. I think I might go to Internet Librarian in October. I’ve always wanted to go, and a colleague mentioned to another colleague that it’s one I would probably really enjoy.

Leading from the Middle

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I’m not a library manager. I don’t have a budget, and faculty members like me don’t supervise staff, but my immediate supervisor is the dean of my campus, not the library director at the main campus. She, the library director, the other librarians at the main campus, and the staff I work with throughout the day realize the weird position I am in. I am the only full-time employee.

There are so many employee changes in store this coming academic year. In April, we hired two part-time librarians to help cover evening  hours when I leave work. Both these ladies are working this summer (I have a 10-month contract), and I am so happy to have the extra help and assistance for our students in our much busier fall season. Our part-time library media technician just retired after 27 years of service, and one of our part-time library media bookstore clerks (the bookstore is in the library) just got a great new job at the local University of California (UC). We have one remaining library media bookstore clerk. The dean is really going to push for a full-time library media technician position, and I think we have a good shot at getting it, but, in the meantime, our substitute library clerk will be filling in, and I think our new retiree may  be helping through September.

I lead from the middle, so to speak. I do have a vision for a more friendly space. I have very slowly been making changes over the last two years to help cultivate the library as a campus hub, and now that I know what needs to happen and what kind of stuff works, delegating will be easier. I sense excitement with our remaining team, and I am looking forward to getting to know our future new people and discovering what people like to do and what they want to learn more about. This is my first professional librarian job, and I just wouldn’t have been ready for such a big change in my first or second year.

With that, I am really thinking I might need to do a little more reading about leadership. I found this great little article from Lifehacker, “Become a Stronger Leader by Asking Yourself These Three Questions” that made me take pause. The questions are:

1. What am I not saying that needs to be said?

2. What am I saying that’s not being heard?

3. What’s being said that I’m not hearing?

Which questions would you add? Someone in the comments from the Lifehacker article gave this little gem, “What is best unsaid?” Isn’t that the truth? I think I might even make a little note with these for my desk.

Mini One-Third Life Crisis

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I turned thirty in April.

I look at my 20s, and all I can say is that I whipped it. I finished college; met and married my wonderful husband; finished graduate school; bought a house; and I am about to embark on my third year as a full-time tenure track librarian at a community college. I am proud of where I am. My mother is an immigrant from Mexico (she came here as an adult), and both of my parents work in canneries operating machines. Academe is not part of my home culture, and I have been navigating it ever since my beginning college days.

Right now, it seems that my biggest concern is professional development. I have not found that ONE THING I really enjoy in librarianship, that one thing I can say, “Yes, this is what I’m into.” I had the same problem as an undergraduate. I could have majored in any humanities. The only reason I have a history degree and not an English degree (I minored) is that I had one more class completed when it came time to really decide.  I struggled coming up with a senior thesis topic. The real reason I dropped out of the history MA program is that I just didn’t have a niche in order to write an eventual thesis. And, yeah, that letter from library school also helped.  I did love library school, though. LOVED IT. However, I didn’t super love my fellowship at the Library of Congress. I now, it sounds like blasphemy, but I wasn’t thrilled working with 17th and 18th century Spanish plays. (Am I truly a generalist?)

My job is a Jill of all trades librarian position at a very small full-service campus of a community college. I’m the only full-time employee and the only librarian during the day. We finally hired two part-time librarians to cover the evenings when I leave work.  Our campus has 19 full-time faculty, myself included; 1,100 students; and a 2,000 square foot library. The campus has been around for over forty years, but we’ve been at our newer location since 2007 or 2008 (not quite sure of the exact year–I was an adjunct in 2012 and became full-time in 2013). We’re an hour away from the larger main campus. At the main campus, which has 9,000 students, there are three full-time librarians, two long-time part-time librarians, and the two part-time librarians who work at my campus in the evenings also help out at the main campus.

I teach information literacy sessions, create LibGuides, weed the collection, order just a few materials, assist students with research, create displays, provide research help, participate in college committees, and I am otherwise trying to cultivate the library into a campus hub. It’s hard, mostly because I do it all from the reference desk with very little money and few tools, including no access to review materials. (I don’t have off-desk time; my concentration and feeling present have really suffered.) And yet I just keep churning ideas, ideas that don’t always or can’t transpire for any number of reasons.

I do truly love helping our students—you can actually see students’ lives being transformed at the community college level—but I often feel like something is missing. So many people will tell you how passionate I am about my work. I really am, but I often find myself longing to do the big sexy projects that other colleagues at other places do (sigh, I am definitely feeling Magpie Librarian here). I find myself captivated by all the librarians’ clever social media bios, witty blogs, and the dizzying array of library-related groups (I made the mistake of actually trying to organize Twitter via lists. haha I’m still not done…).

I can’t be the only person who feels like this, right? I don’t want the rockstardom that runs rampant in academics and the library profession. I don’t need to be the “it” person for something, but I would like a something.

That’s what this is. An attempt for a something.