Meet-Up At The NCCCLRA Conference

The NCCCLRA Annual Conference is just around the corner, April 2 - 4 at the Walker Center, Wilkes Community College, Wilkesboro, NC. The Reference & Instruction Exchange Group will meet Wednesday, April 2 from 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm in the Orchestra Room at the Walker Center.

Adapting To Technology

What kind of technology user are you? Take the Pew Internet & American Life Project Internet Typology Survey and find out. The survey is designed to measure how internet users and their online pursuits have changed over time.

The Future of Online Journals ...

Although this is a long article (from the Association of Research Libraries) there are some valuable insights into the future of online journals - good reading, especially if you are involved in purchasing decisions for your library: The E-only Tipping Point for Electronic Journals - What's Ahead In the Print To Electronic Transition Zone.

Meebo In Your Web Page

There's a detailed post at Michael Stephens blog, Tame The Web about putting Meebo into your library web page as a quick and easy way to offer some form of virtual reference to your patrons.

Virtual Reference Overview

There's a Virtual Reference Special Section (pp. 8 - 28) in the new issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Much of the content is directed toward large library systems, but if you are considering planning any type of virtual reference service this would be worth reading.

YouTube For Library Instruction?

Here's an interesting article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the use of YouTube for educational purposes. Has your library considered YouTube for library instruction?

Free Online Instruction/Presentation Tools

Last Friday, District III of the NCCCLRA held it's winter meeting at Rockingham Community College. I did a presentation on the use of free instruction/presentation software to support library instruction and for publicity purposes. Some of the tools require a download to your computer, and others are completely web-based. Here's an expanded list of the software grouped into categories; all are free, and most allow you to include audio along with the presentation:

Screenshots, Screen Recorders: Webinaria, ZDsoft Screen Recorder, Jing

Power Point-Style Presentations: Thumbstacks , AuthorPoint Lite

Public Platforms for Power Point-Style Presentations: AuthorStream , SlideShare

Short Publicity Videos, Slideshows with Music: Animoto, SlideStory, RockYou

Co-Browsing Tools: Spreed, Share-It-Now, Vyew

Peer Review Resources

Have you considered peer review as a means to improve instruction? This method is already being used by 40% of the colleges and universities in the United States. The University of Minnesota Center for Teaching and Learning has a great page of resources on the subject that could be used to develop a peer review standards initiative at your library. Scott Walter (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) has compiled a great list of conference papers and models for instructional improvement in academic libraries that include peer review discussions.

Reference & Instruction Exchange Group Meeting

The NCCCLRA Reference & Instruction Exchange Group will meet Friday, December 14 at the Davidson Campus of Davidson County Community College, (driving directions) from 10 to 12. This will be an informal meeting to discuss reference issues. We won't have a guest speaker, and there will only be a couple of topics on the agenda. If there are particular topics you are interested in, please let Pat Leamon (leamonp@alamancecc.edu) know as soon as possible. Lunch will be provided after the meeting.

Please RSVP to Pat by December 7th; more event details forthcoming.

Study Examines Student Research Behavior

Beyond Google: How Do Students Conduct Academic Research? is a departure from the findings of some other research studies on the topic. The study used student discussion groups, content analysis, and a student survey to determine that students may not be relying as exclusively as previously thought on search engine results and Wikipedia for research in lieu of library catalogs and databases.