Part of my job includes instruction at my small art school library, and while I only just recently took teaching on for the first time, I’m sure that every instruction librarian regardless of experience can agree that one of the biggest difficulties to face is assessing whether or not students are connecting to what you are saying. There’s only so much pizzazz you can put into your powerpoint and time you can spend talking at your students. My least favorite part comes at the end of my session, when I ask “Any questions?” and my students just stare blankly at me and I can only hope that what I said resonated with at least one of them. Being at a small library means that we don’t have large-scale instruction strategies. It’s a very DIY environment, where we work out our ideas and see what works and above all, try and…
Author: Nimisha Bhat
“Settling for a Job” and “Upward Mobility”: Today’s Career Paths for Librarians
I very recently shifted positions from a large academic research library to a small art school library, and during my transition the phrases “settling for a job” and “upward mobility” were said to me quite a bit. Both of these phrases set me personally on edge, and it got me thinking about today’s career paths for librarians and how they view their own trajectory. At my last job, I was a small cog in a very well-oiled machine. It was not a librarian position and because I was in such a big institution I did not have a large variety of responsibilities. Librarian positions there were traditionally tenure-track, though it was clear that Technical Services was already on the path to eliminating Librarian titled positions and removing MLIS/MLS degrees from the required qualifications of position descriptions. A recent post from In the Library With the Lead Pipe addressed the realities of…
To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Scholarly Engagement and Twitter
I’ve been thinking a lot about scholarly engagement on Twitter lately, especially after reading Bonnie Stewart‘s latest blog post, “The morning after we all became social media gurus.” Based on her research and writing for her thesis, she weighs exactly what we as academic librarians and LIS professionals are getting out of digital scholarly engagement and how we measure that influence in terms of metrics. I’d like to unpack this topic a bit and open it up to a wider reader discussion in the comments section, after the jump!
Organizing Library Workflows with Asana
As coordinator for non-Roman language cataloging at my library, I have to keep track of several workflows simultaneously without actual fluency in any of the 10+ languages that my section deals with. As a librarian it goes without saying that I’m a big fan of organization and efficiency. So I’ve implemented a free task-based program called Asana in order to keep track of my section’s productivity, statistics, and progress. Asana was created with the objective of eliminating dependability on email in order to manage projects. Tasks and conversations are all in one place to promote transparency and accessibility, which is extremely valuable when you are on a team of five or more people with multiple established workflows. I’m certain I’m not alone when I say that email can often seem like a void that creates more confusion than clarity when it comes to communicating important work updates. Not everyone that…