Reporting from the LAMP Summer Institute 2010

Traveling by land and sea on the Muskegon Ferry, six LAMP scholars and alums spent the weekend of May 20-23, 2010 in East Lansing Michigan at the 4th annual LAMP Summer Institute on the Michigan State University campus.

This was my first institute, and I was impressed right away by the community feeling that has grown up over the years. Returning scholars were excited to reunite, and new scholars (and PAs) fit right in.

I informally polled returning scholars who said this year's accommodations and programming were some of the best that LAMP has had so far. I also chatted with undergrad scholars who are considering librarianship as a profession, and they felt MSU and LAMP struck a good balance between career development presentations that were of use to recent graduates and introductory presentations showing the many different roles library and information specialists can have.

Below, I'll summarize some of the highlights of presentations at the LAMP Institute this year:

Friday, May 21

Job Search Tips:
(presenter: MSU Business Librarian Laura Levitt)

-Even if you're a beginning MLS student, look at job announcements and choose your classes and activities at SLIS to fit jobs that interest you.

-If you have gaps in your resume, ask for practicum and volunteer experiences. You won't know what's out there if you don't ask!

-Laura Levitt suggested that health science librarianship is an up-and-coming specialty area. She also advised students to take instruction/info lit, management, and research methods classes especially if interested in academic librarianship.

-Some online job resources:

libgig.com joblist.ala.org arl.org

Laura Levitt urged new graduates to join LinkedIn for networking.

day in the life of a library wiki provides profiles of professional librarians and is useful for networking

Publishing Tips:
(presenter Business Librarian Laura Levitt)

-Book reviews, encyclopedia entries, blogs, and newsletters are a way to get started with publishing.

-Collaborate with librarians and colleagues who have already been published

-Ask your employer if you can have "research days" or "research hours" built into your schedule

-Check out "A Library Writer's Blog" and ACRL Library News to look for publishing opportunities.

-Finally, have something you want to say.

Library Reference and Instruction Round Table:
(with 3 MSU Instruction Librarians)

-Panelists discussed their jobs in reference and instruction, using online tools like Questionpoint Chat services, LibGuides, Desktracker scheduling.

-Suggested conferences and online resources that will improve your teaching skills:

ACRL Immersion 2010
LOEX
WILU
Library Instruction Cookbook

-Also provided career advice for academic instruction librarians; advised new applicants to ask about tenure requirements at their new institution and to ask what kind of funding or opportunities for continuing education the institution provides its librarians.

Saturday, May 22

Libraries and Government Documents
(presenter MSU Gov Docs librarian Hui Hua Chua)

-Hui Hua Chua introduced the LAMP scholars to the work of a government documents librarian and shared some interesting online resources involving government-funded or produced information. She discussed President Obama's move towards more government transparency. Resources she highlighted included: FAS Project on Government Secrecy, OpenSecrets.org, follow the money, Wolfram Alpha, Chesapeake Project for archiving digitized legal information, govtinfo.org's Ask a Librarian chat service, archive.org's "Fed flicks," and the Google CIC Project to digitize government documents from depository libraries like the University of Chicago and place them into the Hathi Trust (similar to the Google Books Project).

Chinese Film Collection:
(presenter MSU Film librarian Xian Wu)

-With enthusiasm, Wu showed some clips and gave some film reviews of films in MSU's Chinese Film Collection, explaining the educational purpose and various classroom uses of these films. He also discussed challenges of building such a unique collection including DVD 'zoning' (which makes Chinese films difficult to play on most U.S. DVD players), copyright issues, government censorship, and purchasing strategies. Wu also introduced the audience to Tudou (meaning "Potato Net") which is the Chinese equivalent of YouTube or Hulu.

Controversial Materials Cataloging:
(presenter MSU Special Collections Cataloger Ruth Anne Jones)

-In this lively and engaging presentation, Ruth Anne Jones shared selections from several controversial collections at MSU and discussed the stakeholders and freedom of speech concerns related to having such collections at a publicly-funded academic library. She ended her presentation by letting the LAMP scholars peruse boxes of materials from MSU's Special Collections. These included Gay Erotica, Holocaust Denial Literature, Racist Cartoonists' depictions of African-Americans, Radical and Communist materials.

LAMP/AOF Pizza Social

To make sure our students eat during the final week of the semester, SLIS is hosting a

Pizza Social

on Tuesday May 11, 2010

from 4:00 pm to 6:30 pm

for LAMP Scholars and AOF Fellows

Please join us in the SLIS commons to relax, chat about the semester, discuss diversity stuff, or just eat pizza!

Project Information Literacy

Today's post isn't related to LAMP or diversity directly, but it's very relevant to anyone doing research at a university, both librarians and students.

Project Information Literacy (http://projectinfolit.org/) which brings together a lot of new data (2009) on the research behaviors of young adults/university students. It includes research on undergrads' use of Wikipedia, finding that most students use Wikipedia at the beginning of their research to get an overview but not towards the end of their research (that makes librarians happy to hear!).

On the PiL site, you can also find a full report on how college students in the "digital age" seek information. PiL surveyed over 2,000 students at six U.S. colleges in Spring 2009. Some findings I found interesting:

• Almost every student in the sample turned to course readings first—not Google—for course-related research assignments.
• Not surprisingly, Google and Wikipedia were the go-to sites for everyday life research for nearly every respondent.
  
• Librarians were tremendously underutilized by students. 8 out of 10 of the respondents reported rarely, if ever, turning to librarians for help with course-related research assignments.
• BUT....9 out of 10 students in the sample turned to libraries for certain online scholarly research databases (such as those provided by EBSCO, JSTOR, or ProQuest) for conducting course-related research.

What this says to me is that college students turn to librarians when Wikipedia and Google aren't enough and they need credible articles from (complicated) databases. Interestingly, the study also showed that college students in 2009 have different reasons for procrastinating than students in the 1980s:

• The reasons why students procrastinate are no longer driven by the same pre-Internet fears of failure and a lack of confidence that once were part of the college scene in the 1980s. Instead, we found that most of the digital natives in the sample (40%) tended to delay work on assignments as they juggled their needs to meet competing course demands from other classes.

It sounds like the "multitasking generation" is less concerned about doing a good job and more concerned about just getting the job done. Has college become more about busy work? Or have digital resources produced more access to information without more skills in critical thinking?

Since I'm procrastinating right now myself, I thought this video from Project InfoLit's Video Blog was fitting...