CJARL Meeting Notes – 05/23/08

Location: Georgian Court University, Lakewood, NJ

In Attendance: Brookdale Community College – Steve Chudnick, Amy Clark Jeanne Ostrowski; Georgian Court University: Mary Basso, Jeff Donnelly, Laura Gewissler, Barbara Herbert; Mercer County Community College: Martin Crabtree; Monmouth University – Lisa Coats; Ocean County College – Caitlyn Cook, Pamela Dong, Gary Schmidt

Announcements:

• The ACRL-NJ/NJLA-CUS User Education Committee is sponsoring a program entitled, "Teaching as Performance" on May 30 at Monmouth University from 10:30 - 2:30. Registration deadline is May 23.
• The FutureTech for Libraries Symposium will be held at TCNJ on June 13 from 9:30 - 3:30. Registration deadline is June 6.
• The NJLA Reference Section is sponsoring a tour of the TCNJ library on Wednesday, May 28 at 3:00 pm. Contact Lisa Coats for more information: lcoats@monmouth.edu
• If anyone is interested in contributing to the CJARL blog - with interesting articles, blog posts, etc. to keep our discussion going between meetings - contact Amy Clark.
• After today's meeting Gary Schmidt, Ocean County College, will be taking over as Chair of the group!

NEXT MEETING: October 10, 2008 ~ Location TBA

Discussion: Subject Research Guides In a follow up to the discussion about Portals from the March meeting, Georgian Court librarians shared via demonstration the subject/course-specific research guides they "house" in the university's course management system, Blackboard. GCU librarians have found that the relationships with faculty largely determine the extent to which the guides are used. The group discussed ways to organize and facilitate access to subject guides in the CMS or on library websites, logistical challenges to maintaining subject research guides, and philosophical questions surrounding subject guide content and students' abilities to find and select authoritative information on their own. Middlestates, General Education, and Information Literacy

Members shared experiences preparing for Middlestates visits with regard to general education and information literacy. Amy shared the work of the ACRL-NJ/NJLA-CUS User Education Committee in addressing the "Technological OR Information Literacy Competency" category in the new General Education guidelines associated with the new Lampitt bill and the comprehensive state-wide transfer agreement (community colleges to public colleges/universities in NJ). Laura mentioned NJ's Title 9, which requires that information literacy programs must be assessed/show that assessment is taking place. The group agreed that an information literacy program must exist before it could be assessed, and many agreed that such a comprehensive information literacy program do not exist at their institutions. Perhaps future revisions of the "Technological or Information Literacy competency" category associated with the state-wide general education model associated with the Lampitt bill will help to make such institution-wide information literacy programs a reality. Future of Print Encyclopedias The discussion came out of a New York Times column, (and it was commented upon in a number of places including recently on the Gypsy Librarian blog). Group members discussed advantages of having print encyclopedias and the need to have most subject-specific encyclopedias in print (due to lack of availability electronically), although it was noted that this is changing. Increasing online course offerings and multi-location campuses were cited as reasons whey electronic encyclopedias were preferable; making their existence known was cited as an issue. Someone mentioned "also available electronically" stickers for placement on print collection as a way to market the electronic collection. High School Partnerships/Collaborations This discussion topic grew out of the article: Burhanna, Kenneth J. "Instructional Outreach to High Schools: Should You Be Doing It?" Communications in Information Literacy (Fall 2007). Barbara Herbert discussed a working relationship she had with an area high school. The group members recalled that the region's Information Literacy group previously identified such collaborations as a project, but nothing lasting really came of it. The group discussed the need for students to establish "healthy" information-seeking habits before they get to college, but struggled with how to make this happen when less healthy ways of obtaining information are so quick and easy, (recall Gary's Whole Foods vs. McDonald's analogy). This led to a discussion of the "good enough" searching/finding so prevalent among our students, and what we can do to address it. It was noted that teachers at the high school level sometimes enable poor information seeking habits when they direct students to Wikipedia, (in ways not designed to teach them how Wikipedia works, which we discussed as a positive approach).

A few references came up in this discussion: Colbert's "Wikiality" clip New book: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, by Farhad Manjoo Movie:Idiocracy (also referred to in a blog post by Marc Meola on the ACRLog) ALSO: Ways folks are using - or might use -- Wikipedia as a teaching tool: Here's a lesson from factchecked.org (a wonderful lesson plan resource from the folks at the Annenberg Public Policy Center) that aims to:

• Examine the ease with which Wikipedia entries can be altered (either innocently or maliciously).
• Discuss the accuracy of Wikipedia as an encyclopedia and consider the usefulness of any encyclopedia as a source of information.
• Search Wikipedia for specific factual errors.

Available at: http://www.factchecked.org/LessonPlanDetails.aspx?myId=19. Article: Badke, W.(2008). What to do with Wikipedia. Online 32(2), 48. Book: Broughton, J. (2008) Wikipedia: the missing manual. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly. (Apparently you can request a free copy of this book from the author if you're using Wikipedia for a class assignment.) Project Muse vs. JSTOR GCU and Monmouth librarians shared their experiences with Muse, which were mixed. Generally, Muse seems to be perceived as a good compliment to JSTOR -- especially for more recent scholarly material -- if the institution can afford it. Also, JSTOR is now linking directly to Muse articles (if the institution subscribes to both). Anecdotes that students found "everything" they needed within JSTOR suggest that students may not always understand JSTOR's historical emphasis (or its lack of the newest content in most cases). A Few Other Follow Ups: At some point during the meeting we touched on the idea of libraries sharing their space. After the meeting I came across this article note from the Gypsy Librarian blog about collaborations between libraries and writing centers. On Sunday morning I was listening to WNYC's On the Media, which was re-airing an episode about books. The segment I caught was the middle one: an interview with Bill Powers, author of a paper entitled, "Hamlet's BlackBerry: Why Paper is Eternal." An interesting follow up to the brief discussion we had about how Amazon's Kindle and other readers have a ways to go before they're truly usable.