Saturday, October 07, 2006

Bad Blogger!

I've been neglecting this blog for the past month, but not because anything's wrong - it's just so right that we've been really busy in our library.

We started the year with a new Website design (that we're still tinkering with - thanks, Alec, for your help this week!), a cool new toolbar, a database-driven program for our electronic resources, and a crash course for faculty in some of the new things we've added to the collection.

Instruction's hopping, too, with quite a few faculty scheduling multiple sessions. It's great to have more than a fifty-minute slot to try and cover what is a truly complicated process. And I'm teaching a new first term seminar - challenging, but a chance to get more insight into students' lives and challenges.

All of which is great, but time consuming. I'll try to check in more regularly, now that the first beginning-of-term rush has settled down.

3 comments:

Alec said...

Things have been busy at my library, too! This is the first semester of my college's new first-year seminar program, and librarians were invited to the table. We decided upon common information literacy objectives for all first-year seminars, and met with all first-year seminar instructors last summer to explain what information literacy is and how they can "teach" it. In addition to providing an exploration workshop to almost all (I think over 90%) first-year seminars, librarians designed sample assignments that instructors eagerly adapted and used. In addition, many of our first-term seminar instructors have also scheduled multiple sessions. (For examples, see our Course Page and look under Inquiry Seminars. Many of these course pages are designed for multiple sessions.)

We also started our year with a new Web site. Working with a committee of two other library staff/librarians, we together did usability tests and conceived of a new information architecture. I spent most of my summer realizing our prototype. We also have a new toolbar.

Alec said...

Sorry, all--the link to the "new Web site" (above) should have gone here.

Barbara said...

I *love* what you're doing for your new first term seminars. I forwarded some of it to our FTS director so he'd be aware of what's going on in your neck of the woods.

And wow, your toolbar has an IE version. Ours is strictly Firefox.