On Thursday, September 27, at the Virginia Library Association Conference, Nancy Speisser (Assistant Vice Chancellor for University Libraries, South University) and Henrietta Verma (Customer Success Manager, Credo) will present Beyond Fake News: Strategies For Evaluating Information in an Era of “Alternative Facts".

Promotion of your IL instructional work to faculty can take many forms, from formal presentations at committee meetings right down to chats in the hallway. Don’t discount the chat approach as ineffective, as it can have many benefits. Not least is that faculty who may find the library intimidating (there are some!) might be more open to hearing what you can do for them in a casual chat than in a committee meeting.

This review, by Credo’s Henrietta Verma, appeared in the August 20, 2018 edition of Booklist Online. For more on fighting disinformation, see Verma’s review of Michelle Luhtala and Jacquelyn Whiting’s News Literacy: The Keys to Combating Fake News and the Know News report mentioned below.

This starred review, by Credo’s Henrietta Verma, appeared in the August 13, 2018 edition of Booklist Online. The book is a valuable tool for librarians who teach news literacy, but also for those who want to inform themselves for their wider library work and as news consumers.

Last week on the blog, we discussed the advantages of getting peer input on your planned IL assignments and offered resources related to assignment development. One idea we shared as a quickfire way to improve your lesson plans was to host an assignment charrette, an event in which educators present their assignments and get feedback on them from peers.

Looking for new assignments to give your students this fall? Try your colleagues and virtual network for inspiration and tips if you’re creating something from scratch. And if you need a good dose of inspiration first? There’s plenty of support to be found online, from content-creation tools to ready-made resources.

This fall’s freshmen students will likely bring with them an awareness of disinformation, popularly called “fake news,” making it something you might find yourself addressing in information literacy lessons. Returning students can benefit from reinforcement of the skills they already learned in this regard, followed by more advanced, scaffolded lessons on how to discern deception in materials they may find in the classes in their majors.

Part of last week’s webinar, What’s New in IL: Credo’s Interns Discuss Current Work,” focused on innovations. Adding to your work, or coming up with innovations of your own, takes creativity. The following are some books that promise to get your creativity flowing. My favorite, and one I think has endless applications in library work, is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow. Flow is a rather serious book, but the list also includes more lighthearted fare that don’t directly address academic learning but can still influence your thinking about it.

A recent LinkedIn article described “customer success” as the “the little-known job that’s booming.” While the title may be relatively new, customer success is something librarians have been all about all along, as it means helping customers do their best work using your products and/or services. Also called CX, it’s related to user experience, or UX, another “it” term that came to prominence some years back.