University Library Faculty Publications

Librarians just starting out often think ahead to where they want to be in 3-5 years, whether this is self-imposed or part of a formal goal-setting process with a supervisor. This may involve setting a goal to advance to a mid-level management position or achieving a certain level of success without official advancement. If you don’t have a short-term goal of advancement, though, it can be easy to become stagnant once fully trained and comfortable in the job. This article will discuss how you can be proactive in your job – whether you want to be ready for advancement when the opportunity arises, or whether advancement is not of interest, but you want to succeed in your job and contribute to the profession.

The author describes the contents of his own private library. He reportedly uses a podcast media player for listening to audio files of authors like science fiction and nonfiction writer Cory Doctorow and fantasy writer Mur Lafferty. It is stated that Podiobooks uses Really Simple Syndication (RSS) which enables setting up of automatically delivered chapters at regular intervals and that Librovox functions as an online library of audiobooks in the public domain.

Medical librarianship is changing in healthcare environments. Since 1996, by which time the standards that determine how hospitals acquire accreditation changed, many hospitals are acquiring accreditation without a qualified medical librarian on site. For that reason, it has become even more important that healthcare professionals, doctors, nurses and other clinicians, learn to access and evaluate quality information as an integral part of their academic training. Because of this, medical clinicians must begin their careers with strong research skills. These skills must be attained during their academic matriculation and studies in the field of librarianship have shown that departmental outreach hours are an extremely effective way to promote library services to university students, as well as faculty. Other methods, such as technology applications, are useful, but have their limitations. This paper reviews current literature on the vital importance of inperson outreach to future healthcare professionals, and illustrates these insights with a discussion of my personal experiences as a health sciences librarian at Georgia State University.

This is a review of the book Kitchen Secrets: The Meaning of Cooking in Everyday Life by Frances Short.

This poster presents an overview of an exploratory research initiative to examine and assess the viability of developing an institutional repository system at a teaching-oriented four-year university with minimal monetary commitment. A need has been identified for an institutional repository and necessary steps have been taken to implement it. Several departments worked together to create a prototype Institutional Repository using DSpace, an open source repository software. This repository represents a unique endeavor, in that it has been instituted at a non-research based university and has chosen to involve students in the planning, design, implementation, and documentation stages of the project. In addition, the university's Library Science students will also be involved in creating and maintaining collections. This poster focuses on the steps taken to set up and the plans to maintain a quality Institutional Repository at Valdosta State University without placing a large demand on the institution's resources.

This report examines how academic librarians and theorists have discussed the issue of discipline-based information literacy instructional approaches since the publication of the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education in 2000. As Kate Manuel has recently noted, the Standards balance outcomes and indicators of universal or general information-literacy skills with more discipline-specific skills. Prior to the publication of the ACRL Standards, Stephen Plum argued that disciplinary standards can provide valuable frameworks for library instruction; more recent theorists have focused attention on general skills, some arguing that discipline-based skills are the province of subject faculty, others suggesting that discipline-based skills are modeled on more general skills, still others suggesting that liaison librarians work collaboratively with faculty to address discipline-specific information needs. Based on a literature survey, my report is a thought piece addressing the following interlocking questions: how do discipline-based skills relate to more general skills? Who should teach discipline-based information literacy? Is information literacy a discipline in its own right? What role might the subject specialist play in discipline-based information literacy initiatives?

The author relates his decision to establish an Ask a Librarian social networking group for students at Valdosta State University in Georgia. One of the appeals of social networking Web sites to users is the variety of services in one interface. He discovered that many students are using the Facebook site while researching. He recommends the creation of individual accounts because Facebook discourages institute-wide accounts.