The transition from high school to college can be one of the biggest transitions a student ever makes. Being new to a college campus, most incoming freshmen are unaware of what services the library offers and where they can receive assistance. As the library staff, we can be quick to use library jargon and start teaching these students about information literacy. Before we drive into the hard-hitting library content, it’s important for the library staff to connect with students.

Here it is Friday again, and if you’re like most people, you didn’t accomplish all you hoped this week. Maybe your to-do list has only a few things crossed off, as they took longer than expected. Maybe you don’t have a to-do list and it’s all swimming around in your head. Since time management is one of the skills we try to impart to students, reading some time-management tips can kill two birds with one stone: help you to get more on track and give you ideas to help students get their work done, too. Here are some relevant articles and tools.

This blog series provides easy, free access to open web resources and content that support affordable learning opportunities. A wide variety of resources published by government entities, think tanks, and more are curated to demonstrate what may be relatively unknown or ‘buried’ in the internet. Resources reflect issues happening today for the use of librarians, students, and all audiences.

May 3, 2019 saw the annual LACUNY Institute held at LaGuardia College’s Performing Arts Center. Below are details of the programs that were of most relevance to information literacy librarians. While the audience was mainly librarians from CUNY (the City University of New York), the advice and experiences shared by the presenters could work just as well in other academic settings.

By Beth Black and Hailley Fargo

Recognizing that underclassmen students at Penn State were often overwhelmed by the process of identifying and applying for fellowships, student engagement librarian Hailley Fargo teamed up with Caitlin Ting, director of the University Fellowships Office, to create the Spark Program. In this interview she shares how they launched their collaboration, what inspired them, and how the program has evolved.

Looking to up your library's social media game? One of the best ways to engage followers to is to provide a consistent stream of fun/useful content. Understanding that libraries don't always have the time to generate all of the content they'd like, we're here to help! 

Sports analogies are overused in business, but this time we must go ahead anyway, because in her webinar “Creating a Buzz: Getting Faculty and Students Excited About Library Resources,” Brandy Burbante indeed hit it out of the park, scored a touchdown, took it to the house...take your pick!

I looked forward to ACRL 2019 in my home state of Ohio for weeks, and the conference in Cleveland did not disappoint. As I reflect on the conference, a key theme of challenging assumptions and taking the time to talk with others began with Michele Norris’ opening keynote about The Race Card Project.

K-12 librarians and those who serve college and university students have their own forums—the recent TLA conference would have found many K-12 professionals, for example, while ACRL naturally attracts the post-secondary crowd. The professional literature they read doesn’t overlap much, either, and they may not often visit each other’s libraries, except perhaps as patrons or parents. But there’s so much the two “camps” can learn from one another.

The latest issue of College and Research Libraries includes an examination of how 15 librarians use the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education in their work. “Implementing the ACRL Framework: Reflections from the Field,” by Don Latham, Melissa Gross, and Heidi Julien, reports some good news: the framework is being used by the librarians surveyed, though more it is implicit in their work than explicitly spelled out. Less positive is that some reported librarian and faculty opinions that the document is “too highly conceptual to be practical for students.”