I’m really looking forward to visiting Macalester, which is where I earned my undergraduate degree. Sad, though, that my most favorite professors have all already retired or moved on to other Universities.
Anyway, I will surely be posting more about the conference before, during and after the fact. Next Wednesday March 10, SLIS is hosting a dry-run of our workshop at noon in the U of I Main Library Computer Lab 3092, with cookies!
Librarians often conceive of themselves as information providers: they select and provide the resources that they consider most authoritative in given contexts. But this approach can exclude multiple valid perspectives. In my research, I’ve sought to understand how librarians might implement a more inclusive yet critical approach to information. How can librarians encourage patrons to consider where information comes from, and to seek the “missing voices”? To address these questions, I turned to theories such as information literacy, critical literacy, and new literacy to construct my own conception of critical information literacy. I then explored methods to apply these theories via my work with teenagers at the Iowa City Public Library (ICPL).
I am in love with the new look for Librarian in a Banana Suit. Don’t you love it, too? The White as Milk theme by WordPress was good to me, but my brilliant and talented fiancé decided I needed a new custom CSS stylesheet with little bananas flying around in the background, and viola! Here it is, a little Valentine’s Day present just for me. I am such a lucky girl!
Two of my favorite authors died within the last 24 hours. Howard Zinn, the historian and author of A People’s History of the United States, died of a heart attack last night at age 87. I love Howard because he had the guts to tell the “untold” histories of unheard Americans, like Native Americans, Black Americans, Women, and Vietnam Vets.
Clive Thompson from Wired Magazine — one of my favorite techno-journalists — writes that tools like Twitter can help us develop a “sixth sense” about the people in our networks. All those seemingly mundane facts like “having homemade bagel & lox for breakfast!” and “reading Vonnegut during flight delay…” can add up to give us a picture of what’s happening in the lives of those around us. As librarians, we can use Twitter to help our communities develop a sixth sense about who we are and what we offer, and we can also use it to develop our own sixth sense that will help us tune into the wants and needs of our communities, too. For instance, if you see a lot of chatter in your network about the recent PBS documentary Copyright Criminals, you can schedule a showing at your library and then send a tweet about the event to all your Twitter followers!
December and January have been all about launching B Sides, our lovely new open access electronic journal for the University of Iowa School of Library and Information Science! We hope the site will be ready to go live at the beginning of spring semester on January 19th, when we will begin soliciting submissions from current SLIS students and alumni.
As the founding editors, my colleague and I have been busy rounding up faculty sponsors, setting up the peer review process, customizing the content management software, working with a graphic designer, and meeting with both the University’s ITS department and Digital Library Services. Whew! In the meantime, here’s a little snippet from our homepage to give you an idea what B Sides will be all about:
The Iowa City Public Library put on a fantastic Technology Petting Zoo today! ICPL’s Emerging Technology Committee offered an inservice session to expose library staff to new gadgets, including the Sony eReader, Overdrive eAudio, iTouch, the CanoScan Scanner, and eeePC. I presented on Flip Video, which I’ve used with ICPL teens in Teen Tech Zone to help them produce their own YouTube videos. You can check out my Flip Video presentation notes by clicking here, or you can click here to download the pdf.
Lev Vygotsky located the Zone of Proximal Development between a child’s “current development level and the level of development the child could achieve ‘through adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’” (Vygotsky, as quoted in Woolfolk, 44). He wrote that children are always on the verge of being able to solve certain problems, and that they just need some structure, clues and reminders to help them. This Zone of Proximal Development is the area “where instruction can succeed, because real learning is possible” (ibid). Carol Kuhlthau built on Vygotsky’s claims when she described her theory of “zones of intervention.” She studied the information gathering process of high school students, and noticed that doubt, confusion and anxiety often prevent students from knowing how to move forward in their work. When uncertainty prevails, mediators can intervene in the search process. “Mediators” can be friends, family, librarians, teachers—in other words, any capable peer or adult who can provide the student with some clues or structure to help her find her way.
The freedom to access and create information is the most important ethical consideration of a librarian’s work. This is true of both public and private librarians. Democracy depends upon an informed citizenry, which in turn depends upon the freedom of information. Whether librarians serve the public or a private organization, they should not seek to censor or repress the information that their users seek.
Individual information seekers in a democratic society must be held accountable for their own use of information. If librarians were liable for the information they help discover, intellectual freedom would be destroyed. Librarians would withhold information that isn’t necessarily “accurate” to save themselves from being punished in a court of law. This is true for private as well as public libraries, and would have particularly disastrous effects on research communities. Even in rigorous research environments, “accurate” information is not always the most valuable information. New scientific hypotheses, for instance, often disprove the accuracy of previously recorded information. Rather than worrying about information liability, librarians should be concerned with discovering “more” and “useful” information. Conflicting viewpoints are necessary to challenge existing hypothesis and promote stronger research.
Karen Schneider gave a lovely pragmatic talk on understanding open source at the Iowa Library Association 2009 Annual Conference (which was a welcome change from the sometimes cult-ish “Open Source is good, Open Source will solve all your problems” rhetoric). I hope to be able to link to her slides on slideshare as soon as I can find them, but here it is in a nutshell:
I. What is open source?
Schneider started out with a definition of open source from Wikipedia (I love it when librarians aren’t afraid to use Wikipedia!): “Open source software generally allows anyone to make a new version of the software, port it to new operating systems and processor architectures, share it with others or market it.” She pointed out that sometimes you don’t even know when you’re using open source: Audacity, WordPress, Firefox, and lots of in-flight movies are just a few examples of open source software in action.
Hi guys, I'm a public librarian in Iowa City, IA, who gets excited about social media, technology and civil liberties. By day I teach teens how to make multi-media projects and Facebook pages, and by night I fight for intellectual freedom in my Banana Suit! Well, just kidding about the Banana Suit. ...Or am I?
@angimur and I will talk about Second Life & Twitter in the U of I Main Library 3092 at noon. Dry run for #LibraryTech conference next week! 1 hour ago
Just found out that "LibTech" is a kind of snow board. Damn, guess I'll have to figure out a different hashtag. . . 1 hour ago
What I've learned from Tony Bechler's book: professors are like rappers. 15 hours ago
Btw that wasn't meant to be cryptic. Distress caused by banging head against wall, doing homework. 17 hours ago
Elevator music at Starbucks = strangely comforting. 17 hours ago
Rachel
