Catalogers, electronic resources librarians, and acquisitions librarians spend a lot of their time in the "back room" of their library. Yet even as their roles expand to include participation in innovative library initiatives like institutional repositories, shared print analysis, and digital collections, they are not often consulted on new user-instruction activities like enhancing the information literacy (IL) programs for their library community. Information literacy to advance student learning is now emphasized by many accrediting agencies, making it one of the hottest topics in public services today. There are endless library conferences, workshops, and poster sessions devoted to its meaning, methods and assessment. Is there any connection between Technical Services and Information Literacy? Do technical services professionals have a role at their library for improving information literacy within their user community? Can they have something to contribute to the discussion? This paper proposes that these "back room" librarians do have a place in IL efforts and should be included in the conversation. Suggestions include reasons to collaborate on IL with public service colleagues and methods of active learning to use in one-shot sessions. Additionally, the paper highlights ways to relate professional roles to IL initiatives, demonstrates how to make time for participation in these initiatives, and provides ideas for staying on top of trending IL topics.
There have been many articles written about the variety of ways faculty and students define eportfolios, collect artifacts, write reflections, and use finished eportfolios. However, little has been written about the dynamic process of adopting electronic portfolios in schools of education. This study employs cross-case analysis to investigate implementation of electronic portfolio initiatives in seven schools of education. Case analysis shows the most commonly identified purpose for initiating an eportfolio system to be program evaluation for national accreditation. With program evaluation as the eventual goal of eportfolio development, at least eight design steps of an electronic portfolio process were found to be necessary for successful implementation. These steps are discussed and various methods of implementation are described. Case analysis results further suggest that the final step involving data gathering, aggregation and analysis has been most difficult for these schools to implement. None of the schools represented in this study have yet made use the data collected from eportfolios to make data driven decisions about their programs of study. Suggestions are made for further study into the use of eportfolio data for program evaluation, improvement and ongoing development.
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