In Brief: The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) has emerged in the past few years as the poster child of the online higher education revolution.  Lauded and derided, MOOCs (depending on who you ask) represent the democratization of education on a global scale, an overblown trend, or the beginning of the end of the traditional […]

  My best experience as a teacher-librarian was leading a credit, semester-long course while a librarian at the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) during which my students came to care deeply about the topical content and used their developing research skills to further their engagement.  For librarians, though, this is the exception rather than the […]

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is pleased to welcome guest authors Iris Jastram, Danya Leebaw, and Heather Tompkins.  They are reference and instruction librarians at Carleton College, a small liberal arts college in Minnesota. Becoming forensic librarians “Wait, this is information literacy?” a rhetorician at our workshop exclaimed in excited surprise. “But this […]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/penguinchris/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Librarians are always struggling to convince someone of something: convincing voters to say ‘yes’ to a library bond; persuading a library director to invest in a text-messaging reference tool; trying to get students to use library resources instead of Google. One of the most effective ways to be successful is […]

Recently I was lucky enough to come across the publication of a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace in 2005 to a group of wide-eyed graduates from Kenyon College. While it’s difficult to sum up what one takes away from a four-year-degree, this particular rumination helps to qualify the value of a liberal arts […]

Setting the Stage Last fall, as a part of the Texas Library Association’s “Transforming” initiative, my library held its own transforming retreat. Austin Community College (ACC) Library Services has gone through a hiring spurt recently, adding 10 new full time librarians in just the last three years. This retreat brought together all 23 of us […]

It’s a truth so many of us keep in the dark corners of our lives as instruction librarians: we were never taught to teach. We’re not unusual, really, and the same is true of many of our higher education colleagues. We study a field, we gain some expertise in that field, and then – bam! […]

Welcome to another guest post at ItLwtLP. This time we bring you thoughts from Carrie Donovan, an instruction librarian at Indiana University Bloomington. Enjoy! Once upon a time in libraries, you could call yourself a good teacher if you spent more than 30 minutes planning a lesson, if you wowed students with your search savvy, […]

Working in an academic environment, the majority of my student interactions are based around a specific assignment. Every semester there is at least one assignment that comes across my reference desk that makes me throw my hands up in exasperation (such as: a scavenger hunt that was written before we moved much of our content […]

We at In the Library with the Lead Pipe are happy to welcome two guest authors to our blog! Hyun-Duck Chung and Kim Duckett are two of our creative and inspiring colleagues at the North Carolina State University Libraries. Read on to learn more… Lately we’ve been thinking a lot about the creation and re-use […]