by Lindsay Davis
It’s hard to believe the end of the semester is here. Soon, we’ll be seeing more and more “best books of 2016” lists—Times Critics’ Top Books of 2016, NPR’s Book Concierge: Our Guide to 2016’s Great Reads, NPR’s The 10 Best Books of 2016 Faced Tough Topics Head On, Book Riot’s Best Books of 2016, Goodreads Choice Awards 2016, Flavorwire’s 15 Best Books of 2016, Jezebel’s The Best Things We Read in 2016 That You Still Can Too, Chicago Public Library’s Best of the Best Books 2016, and World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2016 to name a few.
What about you? Are there books or articles you read—or podcasts you listened to or videos you watched—this year that were useful to you in your work as a librarian?
I’m having a hard time thinking about last spring semester, but, this fall, I read chapters from Heidi Buchanan and Beth McDonough’s The One-Shot Library Instruction Survival Guide, 2nd ed. (2017), which I enjoyed. There is a lot of practical advice in this easy-to-digest read. I also read Amanda Hovious’ Designer Librarian blog and Kate Ganski’s My So-Called Librarian Life blog, which allowed me to think about my instruction efforts a bit more. I was also impacted by Anne-Marie Deitering’s post “Culture is What People Do” in her info-fetishist blog. Most recently, I read Stonebraker’s (2016) “Toward Informed Leadership: Teaching Students to Make Better Decisions Using Information.” (It is behind a pay wall.) I enjoyed this article because it offers some practical information about how to incorporate evidence-based management strategies– decision awareness, process creation, and decision practice–into library instruction, both in a credit information literacy course or in the one-shot environment.
If you’re itching for some professional reading over your winter break, check out LIRT’s Top 20 Articles in 2015 list that was released this summer. ACRL also has a Goodreads account. Don’t forget, the CJCLS Blog also has a list of books and articles written by community and junior college librarians , which you can find in the CJCLS Scholarship page. (We’re still working on updating the citations to MLA 8.)
Please let us know what books, articles, blogs, podcasts, websites, etc. helped you in your work this year in the comments. Also feel free to share any curated book lists like the ones mentioned at the beginning of this post. And, finally, if you published a peer-reviewed article or book this year, let us know. We will be happy to add it to our section’s growing bibliography.
Happy Reading! Happy Holidays!
