Mark Your Calendars!

All are welcome at our next meeting on May 18, from 10-12 at the CJRLC Headquarters in Freehold. Directions are available on the CJRLC website. As always, light refreshments will be served.

The agenda is tentative at this point, but a few questions and ideas for discussion include:

Academic Reference Issues: How many hours are librarians spending on the reference desk?
What kinds of questions and challenges are students presenting at the physical desk?
What methods of e-ref are CJARL members using? How are these methods working? Have any best practices been established?

Library-sponsored research awards -- (Is anyone doing this?)

If you have ideas for discussion, or know of any resources related to tentative topics that may be of interest to the group, please respond to this blog post, email me at aclark@brookdalecc.edu, or bring them to the meeting!

Print & Electronics Resources Program Summary

For those who couldn't make it, Paul Schroeder has posted a summary of the March 27 program, Print vs. Electronic Resources, on the NJLA blog.

Link: http://blog.njla.org/

ACRL Conference, Information Literacy Assessment and More

There were countless sessions devoted to information literacy assessment at last weekend's ACRL conference. Here's an article from InsideHigherEd.com about a panel session that addressed challenges associated with effective information literacy instruction and some different IL assessment tools. There was also a poster session about "how librarians at Kent State are collaborating with the K-12 community to reduce anxiety about academic libraries and ease students' transition to college...using TRAILS."

Overall, I found the conference very inspiring. My head is full of ideas, some of which I hope to act on before the post-conference momentum is lost!

Article Link: http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/02/libraries

The Flawed Metaphor of the Spellings Summit

In his article, "The Flawed Metaphor of the Spellings Summit", David Chambliss argues that despite what Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and others would have us think, "education is nothing like business." What a concept!

Read more at: http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/04/05/chambliss