What students don't know...

You may already have seen this article in today's Inside Higher Ed, which reminds me of several things:

• We (faculty & librarians) assume our students know more about researching than they actually do.
• Most students have no idea what librarians do or how they can help with research based projects.
• Faculty teaching classes are the key to bridging the gap in terms of helping students find their way to librarians and library resources.

ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) is a multi-institution, ethnographic study of student research behavior, conducted in collaboration with anthropology faculty. Researchers "were surprised by the extent to which students appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school.”
Hopefully, as the new term starts, we can work together to help your students become better critical consumers and users of information.

To be or not to be? Librarians as faculty?

Here at UNLV, Librarians are indeed tenure-track, with similar [albeit discipline-specific] expectations for performance and evaluation in job, service, and scholarship. This isn't true everywhere and this article, "Faculty No Longer," from today's (4/21/11) edition of Inside Higher Ed describes the recent decision by a community college system to change the status of librarians to professional staff in order to save money. This is followed by discussion about why academic librarians are generally considered to be faculty.

WebCampus Toolkit for Library Resources

Ideas, detailed instructions, and screencast demonstrations that help you make the most of the resources available to you and your students from the UNLV Libraries.
WebCampus Library Toolkit

Trends in faculty & librarian attitudes

Whew! I got a little behind in the run up to the new term. I'll try and get caught up with my postings in the next couple of days.
The new Ithaka Report on the most recent survey results also identifies trends in faculty attitudes "related to online resources, electronic archiving, teaching and learning and related subjects..." In addition to providing a link to the white paper, this Web page also links to several more targeted presentations such as the short powerpoint on "What Characteristics of a Scholarly Journal Are Important to Authors?"