"I give them what they need."

I was reading The Librarian as Bibliotherapist today and really found that I liked some of the ideas in this article. The most difficult part of doing this sort of technique I believe, is that it makes it difficult to create a standards based lesson plan where you ensure that students at a certain level have the opportunity to truly learn and practise certain information literacy standards.

That doesn't mean that I disapprove of the idea of asking students what they want and working with more personalization. I actually love the idea of a discussion based library class room and have done something similar in the honors classroom. The problem certainly comes down to one of time and how best to ensure that the basics are presented, but students still have the opportunity to ask for specifics to their research.

The hardest part of setting certain standards for a class, is that in a general research writing class there is such a variety of topics, it can be difficult to hit the important aspects of research for each student. Some standard must be given to make the assignments uniform, but for some students a book will not be nearly so useful as a journal article or vice versa.

Relevance is hugely important, but can be extremely time consuming, so the challenge then is to somehow create relevance, and teach standards while doing so. That is no easy challenge really.

Open Library

I definitely would like to spend more time looking at Open Library. It looks like it might be fantastic fun, not to mention that in the brief bit I read about the project, I certainly concur with it's goals. Personally I think it would be fantastic for the first posts for books that come up are not links to buy (necessarily), but are rather worldcat.org or Open Library links.

I think I need to spend more time looking at it when I've got a chance - probably that means this summer.

Summer is here

Ah yes, summer, the land of perpetual chill at work.

I can tell summer is here with how cold it is in the library. As is typical, they have turned the air conditioner on far beyond when it should be turned on, and I am hunched over the reference desk in a thick sweater and a running space heater.

At this moment I pray for concentration, because cold is never conducive to productive work for me.

Zotero; some initial thoughts

Recently I've been trying to make better use of Zotero in my research at home. What I've discovered is that I really do appreciate the tool.

Currently I'm using it to organize the children's literature books that I've read, as well as some that I stumble across in my reading that I would like to read. It's easy to add links either into the Summit Catalog or to Worldcat.org, both of which are useful places to link to. It's also easy for me to keep copies of web pages, or download and attach .pdf articles to abstracts & citations I find through our local databases.

The best aspect about it, is simply knowing that if I add all of my information there it's easy to find. I have a paper folder that I'm keeping print copies of articles in, but I'm trying to be faithful about adding those electronic copies into Zotero - because then I know anything I've looked at - I won't lose it, it's going to be there waiting for me to pull it up again.

As I'm trying to do a wide variety of reading in this topic - I'm currently looking at everything from the history of Children's librarianship, to the history of children's print, to actual reviews, criticism, and analysis of children's books specifically - it's really useful to have it all in one place, where I can include notes.

This month's plan is to read Children's Books in England, since I think I'm most interested in criticism of British authors of children's books, in general, and specifically those writing fantasy, i.e. E. Nesbit, George MacDonald, and of course C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling, to name a few more modern examples. Fairy stories, if you will.

At any rate, I think I can learn more about making Zotero work for me, but I'm well on my way to making it a very real part of my research process.