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2016 Best Books (& Blogs, Articles, Podcasts, etc.) Lists

2016 Best Books (& Blogs, Articles, Podcasts, etc.) Lists

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!

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Instruction for Diverse Populations Bibliography

by Lindsay Davis

Now that it’s mid-October, many of us are in the thick of teaching research skills in the classroom and at our virtual and physical reference desks. How do you help create an inclusive learning environment? How do you learn about reaching diverse populations in your instruction?

In August of this year, several of us from the Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Instruction Section committee on Instruction for Diverse Populations (ISDivPops) presented a poster at the National Diversity in Libraries Conference (NDLC) at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), “Reading About Diversity: Developing and Reflecting on Inclusive Instructional Resources.” The poster outlined the work we did in the 2015/2016 academic year, which consisted of updating the Instruction for Diverse Populations bibliography.

Instruction for Diverse Populations Bibliography Poster

The ISDivPops committee’s charge is “[t]o support instruction librarians in providing instructional services to diverse populations. The committee reviews, researches new content, updates, and promotes the ‘Multilingual Glossary’ and the ‘Library Instruction for Diverse Populations Bibliography’ bi-annually, focusing on one document per year” (“Instruction for Diverse Populations Committee”). The bibliography includes print and electronic resources key to development of effective methods and materials for providing library instruction and teaching information literacy competencies to diverse student groups.

In spring 2015, the committee moved the bibliography from a static PDF document to a Zotero bibliography that utilizes collaborative and dynamic features. In fall 2015 and spring 2016, the committee added new student populations, including veteran students, and also worked on adding tags and new content. The committee focused on adding resources written primarily within the last ten years that specifically describe teaching diverse groups within an academic library context. In 2016/2017, the committee will continue to update the bibliography and will also be updating the Multilingual Glossary.

If you come across an article, book, website, or another resource you think would be a good addition to the bibliography, do let us know in the comments. Ernesto Hernandez, Teaching and Learning Librarian at University of California Irvine, is the chair of the Instruction for Diverse Populations committee this academic year.

Stay tuned later this week for a resource not yet in the bibliography that I discovered while at the NDLC.

“Instruction for Diverse Populations Committee.” ACRL Instruction Section, www.acrl.ala.org/IS/is-committees-2/committees-task-forces/instruction-for-diverse-populations. Accessed 17 Oct. 2016.

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Keeping Up With Scholarship

by Lindsay Davis

Earlier this month, Nora Bird, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Library and Information Studies department in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, announced that she was the new editor of the Community & Junior College Libraries journal.

In her message to the CJCLS listserv, she wrote:

We are always looking for content. We publish research length articles, opinion pieces (1000-3000 words), book and electronic resource reviews, and there has been a column, ‘The Librarian Abroad’ documenting visits to international libraries. So, if you are traveling this summer and want to submit something that would be great.

Maybe you are working on a project to re-design your library space or a service and have done a literature review in preparation for it. Please do consider sharing it. (2016)

I don’t know about you, but I have never heard of this journal. What a great place to submit articles about all the great work being done at two-year college libraries.

This also got me thinking—what journals (or other information sources) do two-year librarians typically read to keep up with and learn from the library profession and/or higher education? Let us know in the comments!

And don’t forget–the CJCLS blog also has a Scholarship page devoted to literature written by two-year librarians. If you’ve published a peer-reviewed journal article, book, or book chapter in the last five years, contact Lindsay Davis at davis.lindsay.ann@gmail.com, so we can add it to our growing bibliography.

Bird, N. (2016, July 7). Announcing a New Editor of Community and Junior College Libraries [Electronic mailing list message]. Retrieved from http://lists.ala.org/sympa/arc/cjc-l/2016-07/msg00041.html

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Student Services and Your Library: The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship?

by Amy Waldman

I joined the CJC-listserv not long after starting library school in 2008. At that point, I’d been running the Displaced Homemaker Program at Milwaukee Area Technical College for five years. Student Services didn’t have a lot of interaction with the library, so the listserv gave me a window into some of what might be happening over there.

Early on in my MLIS program, I knew that getting some work experience in a library while in school would be invaluable. I also knew that there was no chance that would happen– I had a full-time job already and graduate school was like having another full-time job.

Something else did happen, though.

As a Student Services professional, I knew a lot about our students and their needs. As I learned more about what the library had to offer, I was able engage and collaborate in ways that would never have happened had I not had a foot in both worlds.

So, from a Student Services perspective, here are a couple of things that happened because I went to Library School that might be of use to some of you.

  1. Bibliographies
    1. In 2010, the Displaced Homemaker Program teamed up with a community organization to host a morning-long conference on accessing mental health services in the area. The library prepared a display and created a bibliography that was handed out in the conference materials.
    2. When author Shauna Singh Baldwin spoke about her book “The Selector of Souls,” at a college community event in 2012, the library prepared a bibliography of resources on intimate partner violence.
  1. Energy Assistance Sign-up
    1. Many of our students are low-income and qualify for energy assistance, but the only way they were able to access the program was to stand in long lines at a local agency, thereby missing classes. If they didn’t sign up and were unable to pay their electric bills, their power was shut off in mid-April, just as they were gearing up for final projects and exams. In conjunction with the library and our Office of Student Life, I arranged for the agency to come to MATC and see students by appointment at the three of our four campuses within its service area. The library co-sponsored and hosted. More than 200 students (many who had never set foot in the library before) signed up for appointments. The event has continued on an annual basis and is now hosted by the library.

3. The Affordable Health Care Act

One morning, while meeting with one of our program counselors about a student, an adviser walked in and handed him a sheet of paper. It turned out that large numbers of students were asking for information about the Affordable Care Act. I got back to my office and called our library manager.

“Do you have a LibGuide about the Affordable Care Act?”

“No,” he said. “But that’s a really good idea.”

When it was complete, Counseling and Advising was notified. The department now provides students with a link to our library’s LibGuide.

These are just a couple of examples of successful collaborations between Student Services and the library. Please share yours!