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.

It’s summer at last, and that means that many of you may have time to take stock a little—see what needs tweaking for the fall, what can go, and what needs a complete overhaul. You’ll have an idea of how your various initiatives are going, of course, but to make the most informed decisions you should rely on usage statistics.

Every now and then the conversation about the necessity for librarians to have an MLS restarts. This year, it was hotly debated during the search for a new Executive Director for ALA. Whether the person should be required to hold an MLS (or equivalent, such as MLIS) was the subject of many articles and blogs, including at Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and, last week, at Meredith Farkas’s blog, Information Wants to be Free.

When I was in library school, we constantly heard that it was important to graduate quickly so that the skills we learned early on wouldn’t be out of date by graduation. At a certain point, however, graduation is long past and you need a brush-up on a few things, or to learn about new things that didn’t exist back in school. Where should you turn?

Next week, Credo invites you to join us in our InfoLit Learning Community for a presentation from librarian and accreditation expert Kate Sawyer. On Thursday, June 28 at 2 PM Eastern Time, Sawyer will present a free webinar called “Accreditation Tips and Pitfalls: Accreditation, Reaccreditation, and Your Role,” after which she will take live questions from the audience on concerns when facing the accreditation process, whether you're in the midst of it, or just embarking on it.

Accreditation has been on our minds lately at Credo, as we’re currently updating our list of which of the various accrediting bodies’ requirements are met by each of our InfoLit Modules—we’ll soon share that new information in our Learning Community.

One of the resources that continues to inform our thinking on accreditation is a webinar that we presented last year. In it, Kate Sawyer, a consultant who specializes in assisting libraries that are preparing for “the big day,” discussed why librarians should view an accreditation review as an opportunity; Sawyer also has strong feelings on which opportunities libraries should squeeze through while they have the chance.

Last week’s blog post discussed what to do if your accreditation visit involves discussing a mistake or lapse in some aspect of your library’s work. Communicating that without ruining your accreditation chances can be a minefield. But what if you’re gearing up to tell the committee about a great success? It might seem like an easy task at first, but there’s a knack to being forthright about success while maintaining the academic tone required in an accreditation report or interview.

So you’re faced with an accreditation visit. You’ve looked back at your notes and plans from the previous visit and there’s a problem... you didn’t do what you said you would. Or, you tried to do whatever it was you promised but it didn’t work out. What next? How can you discuss this issue in a way that doesn’t reflect badly on the library or the institution as a whole?