All this month, YALSA and ConnectedLearningTV has hosted a series of conversations around teens and the future of school & public libraries, part of the year-long National Forum on Libraries and Teens. The background: YALSA President H. Jack Martin and Crystle Martin, Postdoctoral Researcher for the Connected Learning Research Network, have been moderators the free virtual chats, which will look at the [...]
Thinking about credibility and about Turnitin’s SEER: The Source Educational Evaluation Rubric
May 22, 2013 By 1 Comment
I’ve not been a huge fan of listy/form type evaluation tools. So much of the process of assessing credibility has to do with context. Black and white decisions and rules of thumb are far more fuzzy in a read/write, citizen journalist, open scholarship, media-rich web. Truth is, I often find value in casually published, unvetted [...]
Networking and the incoming class of 2017
May 17, 2013 By 1 Comment
The deposit checks are in the mail but the college buzz is buzzier than ever. Having survived the arduous college admissions process, our seniors are now taking full advantage of their opportunities to negotiate the social landcape of their newly selected school well before they land on campus in late August. They are so much [...]
Thinking beyond the (summer) list
May 10, 2013 By 14 Comments
I hadn’t thought about it till today, but our summer reading list is a snooze. A dinosaur. A relic of a time when reading lists looked like, well, reading lists. Today, two things woke me up. 1. Finished with her AP exam, Sierra asked me for a book recommendation. I excitedly booktalked Libba Bray’s The [...]
Our first PSLA/MU Unconference
May 6, 2013 By 2 Comments
I am a big fan of the unconference/edcamp movements and of open space planning. And though I’ve personally been lucky to attend a number of local, regional, and national edcamps and unconfs, I’ve wanted to share my excitement about these participant-driven events with my TL colleagues in Pennsylvania. Our traditional PSLA state conference is pretty darn [...]
“It’s about time, Dr. V!”: On maximizing database use with the one-login MackinVia app
May 1, 2013 By 1 Comment
Frankly, our password sheet has always been a royal pain. I’ve long been in search of an authentication solution–a relatively barrier-free strategy for out-of-school database access. For Mackin customers, MackinVia creates a single hub for e-books and database content–a one-user ID and password to your database collection (and your MackinVia ebooks) accessible from any internet-connected [...]
Web2MARC/DL2SL: Making our OPACs more gracious hosts
April 26, 2013 By 1 Comment
It’s time to bust open the OPAC. In fact, it’s long past time. My notion of collection development and of cataloging were a little different back in the day. I now consider digital resources–OER, images, videos, audio files, slideshows, documents, ebooks, maps, art, student work, data sets, interactivities, simulations, and especially the elements of the [...]
The new community-sourced Classroom 2.0 Book
April 21, 2013 By 2 Comments
To celebrate its 5th anniversary the Classroom 2.0 Community (with the help of additional educational networks), recently released the community-sourced Classroom 2.0 The Book. Inspired by and led by community founder, Steve Hargadon, with Richard Byrne (Free Technology for Teachers) and Chris Dawson (ZDNet Education), the project’s official deadline for submissions was today, April 21st. In [...]
On maximizing database use: Part 1, the one-page approach
April 18, 2013 By 1 Comment
A few questions continue to keep me up at night. Among them: How can I get my students and teachers to discover and use our e-resources to the max? What does face-out shelving look like in an e-collection? We are fortunate, I know it, to have a wonderful collection of subscription databases and e-books. We [...]
National Digital Public Library to launch
April 12, 2013 By 2 Comments
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is one of those projects a librarian (and perhaps any other geeky type) dreams of. We’ve been blessed over recent years with access to the resources of so many powerful digital archives. But until now, these efforts existed as silos. We’ve had no infrastructure to aggregate these wonderful [...]
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