Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Today I gave a presentation on Ageism and libraries at the Critical Approaches to Libraries Conference 2020 (held online). I talked about what ageism was, how the COVID19 crisis has brought ageism more sharply into focus, ageism in the (library) workplace, and ageism in services to library users. These are the slides, and the references are at

https://tinyurl.com/yb7x49kd

In our series of free weekly webinars April 29th saw a session focused on the work of the ASPIRE service which helps publishers and vendors tell the story of the amazing accessibility work they are doing to create a transparent environment for content.

Decolonising Library collections and practices: from understanding to impact

Several Twin Cities library systems are considering an “open libraries” model that would give patrons access to books, computers and other resources by themselves at times when the library isn’t open and staffed. Two west metro libraries already use the idea on a small scale.

The setup relies on technology — via a central management system — to let people enter the library, check out items and log onto computers — all while video monitors record their actions. There’s a phone connected to a central library or an on-call librarian so patrons can ask questions. Automated systems announce when the library is closing, flick the lights off and on and can even operate amenities like a gas fireplace on a schedule.

The conference Brag Deck is one of my favorite community engagement secret weapons. It’s a slide deck with pictures of things libraries want to show off. It runs on repeat somewhere during the conference, preferably someplace high-profile like over lunch or during a meeting. People can watch it, see what other libraries are doing, get ideas. I make a little web page that goes along with it so it’s available online all year. If you can make slides, operate email, and download images, you can do this. Here’s an example from last year (sorry no ALT text version available yet)

In my role as the library dean I have already been engaged with data-driven student success initiatives. We are still working to implement use of EAB on our campus. The company offers a set of tools that can track grades and registration (OK – we already do that). It also provides functionality that tracks visits to the tutoring center, the health and counseling centers, and can analyze how successful students are when they take specific classes and specific times. If you guessed that faculty are very wary of that last bit of analysis you’d be correct.

Libraries and learning resources services have embraced digital practice over three decades. Lis Parcell reflects on their pioneering approach and considers how libraries will continue to reinvent themselves

There is currently a dearth of research on African American college students and their interactions in academic libraries. The purpose of this quantitative study is to investigate whether African American college students view academic libraries as welcoming places and to identify factors that are most influential in their perceptions of welcomeness. Adopting the theoretical lens of “library in the life of the user,” we administered a national online survey questionnaire to 160 black college students attending non-historically black colleges and universities in the United States. The survey data were analyzed by employing correlation coefficient and multiple regression analysis to test our hypotheses. The analytical results showed that participants felt welcomed in academic libraries, and library as place and information needs were significant factors that affected students’ perceptions of welcomeness. Our findings suggest that library patrons are important actors in constituting the atmospheric character of the library.

Special librarians need to keep our eye on the Internet of Things, since it not only reduces the friction between user and their goals for turning on lightbulbs, meeting with each other, and managing their viewing habits, it’s already a long way into exploring the content universes that they rely on.

While the role of the library has evolved to provide services from internet access to journalism programmes, countless libraries still face closure, as civic leaders fail to recognise the critical social, intellectual, cultural, and economic roles they play 

Christopher Cox predicts the significant ways academic libraries will shift in terms of collections, services, spaces and operations as a result of the pandemic.

“If you build it, they will come”

This quote from 80s baseball film Field of Dreams is how I feel about school libraries! My own school, a large independent secondary day school in West London, has a well-funded, well-staffed library. In the current crisis, access to quality information and to books and recreational reading has never been more important for students.

9.30 - 10.00 Registration

10.00 Welcome and housekeeping

10.15 - 11.00 Group Discussion.

11:00-11:40 Presentation

11.00 - 11.40 Decolonising LSE Collections - Kevin Wilson (London School of Economics)

11.40 - 11.50 Tea break

11:50 - 13:10 Presentations

11.50 - 12.30 Broaden my Bookshelf: working with the University of Huddersfield SU to tackle the attainment gap -…

We all have an original nature, with our own authentic wants and needs. We act spontaneously. Then we meet other people. Very soon, who and what we want to become and even who we believe ourselves to be becomes influenced or even defined by others. Such internalised messages can become self-limiting, and the friction between the self-concept imposed from without and a person’s true nature within can be painful and may even result in mental ill-health (Dykes, Postings, Kopp, & Crouch, 2017, p. 179). For repressed groups, such as women and black, Asian and minority ethnicity (BAME) people, the messages received about who a person is and what they should be are often harmful and repressive. These groups are systematically shown that that they do not matter to society, not least through the lack of BAME role models and the abrogation of their cultural heritage. BAME women suffer intersectional repression and are among the hardest hit.

The ACRL Board of Directors recently articulated a new core commitment of our strategic plan, the Plan for Excellence. Along with the association’s core purpose, “[t]o lead academic and research librarians and libraries in advancing learning and scholarship,” and our core organizational values, which include visionary leadership, responsible stewardship of resources, and the values of higher education and intellectual freedom, we have made an explicit commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI).

On October 17th, 1989, the Oakland A’s were playing the San Francisco Giants in the World Series, but just as the game was kicking off—the television broadcast cut out. When the signal came back, it was no longer the baseball game. These were the early minutes of the Loma Prieta earthquake, which struck near Santa

From virtual reality to state–of–the–art makerspaces, higher education institutions are bringing digital innovation to a traditional academic hub on campus.

Despite the innovations happening on college campuses, university libraries continue to be an academic center for students. 

In order to keep up with the continuous marriage of education and technology, universities are implementing new digital solutions in their libraries.

Libraries have long counted up the books on their shelves to show their value. That meant Harvard University’s library (with 18.9-million books) was clearly superior to Duke University’s (with 6.1-million volumes) or University of California at Riverside’s (with a mere 3 million titles).

These days, though, libraries are finding new ways to measure their worth. They’re counting how many times students use electronic library resources or visit in person, and comparing that to how well the students do in their classes and how likely they are to stay in school and earn a degree. And many library leaders are finding a strong correlation, meaning that students who consume more library materials tend to be more successful academically.

While I am delighted to be here, I have to admit that I thought long and hard about whether to accept the invitation to speak today. I am aware that we’ve heard a lot of voices like mine, that voices like mine can drown out other people's voices, and that really it is time for me, for us at CILIP to stop speaking and start listening.

But we also have to be accountable, to our members, to the profession, to society at large. We have to explain ourselves – not to dictate terms but to set out a commitment to change and to learn, and to listen.

Because all of us that hold leadership positions in this sector have to confront the fact that we are where we are because of a system of unseen privilege – a system which lifts some of us up while holding others down. The basis of that privilege is rightly being challenged. We are being challenged, rightly, to reflect on that privilege critically and to think about the impact it has on other people’s right to shape our profession.

As a profession, we aspire to universality – but we have to be critical about what ‘universal’ really means. I don’t want to be complicit in a system that promotes some voices at the expense of others.

In 2017 Columbia Libraries took a closer look at ten of our largest external services, most of them delivered by for-profit vendors, to review the quality of these external web-based services. Web traffic to these services exceeds 7 million page views per year.

I spent the better part of two decades in campus IT, where it was typical to brand services with prominent, top-level University branding, write into contracts that vendor branding was to be removed from top-level pages, and change the design to more closely match Columbia web design guidelines.  It was quite a surprise when I discovered that every one of the ten Library services that we reviewed lacked adequate University or Library branding.