The Authority File

For this four-part series, The Authority File takes a break form its usual interview format to present a panel Bill moderated at the Charleston Conference called, “Marketing Academic Library Resources and Services: How Marketing and Outreach Support a Library’s Value Proposition—and an Analysis of Current Practices.” The panel covered the current state of marketing and outreach activities at libra...

For this four-part series, The Authority File takes a break form its usual interview format to present a panel Bill moderated at the Charleston Conference called, “Marketing Academic Library Resources and Services: How Marketing and Outreach Support a Library’s Value Proposition—and an Analysis of Current Practices.” The panel covered the current state of marketing and outreach activities at libra...

For this four-part series, The Authority File takes a break form its usual interview format to present a panel Bill moderated at the Charleston Conference called, “Marketing Academic Library Resources and Services: How Marketing and Outreach Support a Library’s Value Proposition—and an Analysis of Current Practices.” The panel covered the current state of marketing and outreach activities at libra...

For this four-part series, The Authority File takes a break from its usual interview format to present a panel Bill moderated at the Charleston Conference called, “ Marketing Academic Library Resources and Services: How Marketing and Outreach Support a Library’s Value Proposition—and an Analysis of Current Practices. ” The panel covered the current state of marketing and outreach activities at lib...

For this four-part series, Bill speaks with Becky Brasington Clark, the head of the Library of Congress’ publishing office and Carol Saller, chief copyeditor of the Sixteenth Edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Their conversation weaves together the mission of publishing at the Library of Congress and the ethical and moral considerations that emerge from editorial, style, and publishing norms....

For this four-part series, Bill speaks with Becky Brasington Clark, the head of the Library of Congress’ publishing office and Carol Saller, chief copyeditor of the Sixteenth Edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Their conversation weaves together the mission of publishing at the Library of Congress and the ethical and moral considerations that emerge from editorial, style, and publishing norms....

For this four-part series, Bill speaks with Becky Brasington Clark, the head of the Library of Congress’ publishing office and Carol Saller, chief copyeditor of the Sixteenth Edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Their conversation weaves together the mission of publishing at the Library of Congress and the ethical and moral considerations that emerge from editorial, style, and publishing norms....

For this four-part series, Bill speaks with Becky Brasington Clark, the head of the Library of Congress’ publishing office and Carol Saller, chief copyeditor of the Sixteenth Edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Their conversation weaves together the mission of publishing at the Library of Congress and the ethical and moral considerations that emerge from editorial, style, and publishing norms....

This week, Dr. Carol Ember and Dr. Peter Peregrine discuss their research into the cultural responses to disaster. Dr. Ember and her colleagues are investigating societies that lived in hazard-prone environments to see which cultural practices may have been adaptive. As part of the same grant, Dr. Peregrine has examined catastrophic disasters—because they are more readily apparent in the archaeolo...

In this week’s episode, Dr. Carol Ember explains how the Harvard Song Project partnered with HRAF to data mine the cultural record to better understand the variety of ways humans use of song. She also highlights the ways in which HRAF’s structure—as a collection of human-tagged and annotated documents—make it a particularly valuable resource for data miners. In addition, Dr. Peter Peregrine discus...

In this series Dr. Carol Ember, president of HRAF, and Peter N. Peregrine, professor of archaeology at Lawrence University, join Bill to talk about the history, make-up, and relevance of HRAF—and how the cultures and cultural practices contained within its million pages of information can illuminate a wide variety research areas. This episode zeroes in on HRAF’s interdisciplinary inception, the re...

This week each of our guests talk through library anxiety inducers for their incoming cohorts of freshmen, and some of the tactics they use to allay those anxieties, while educating students about the resources the library can provide. They also discuss bringing folks other than undergraduate students into the library and weigh some of the benefits of these practices.

In this episode, Bill, Danielle, Andrew, and Ray discuss bringing empathy to the library—some of their successes and difficulties—as well as tactics for connecting with busy faculty and adjunct instructors to maximize the impact of library instruction.

Bill, Ray, Danielle, and Andrew talk through ideas for expanding the library’s reach among first year students in this week’s episode. Andrew thinks through the opportunities and drawbacks in East Bay’s move away from a required first year experience course, while Danielle offers strategies Pasadena uses to engage students who opt not to take the voluntary first-year experience course. And Ray off...

This week Bill talks about the student library experience with librarians from a community college, a master’s granting institution, and a university. He gets perspective on the different types of FYE programs at each institution and how the differing student bodies shape the programming—or don’t—at Pasadena City College, California State University East Bay, and California State University, Fresn...

This week Bill, Ray, Lisa, and Laura talk tactics for collaboration—who should you build bridges with? Students? Faculty? Other library departments? What if there’s not time? How does partnering with an off-campus group work? Bill finds answers to these questions and others with this week’s group of expert panelists.

This week, Bill talks with Ray, Laura, and Lisa about collaboration as a key component of first year experience programming and development, and some of the things that can complicate the library’s efforts to collaborate. They also talk about strategies for sustaining the collaborations without reinventing the wheel year after year.

In this episode Bill speaks with Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Ray Pun and Laura Kohl about a study Lisa recently published in Communications in Information Literacy that examines first year student misconceptions about information literacy—how those misconceptions take root, what they are, and how librarians can help root them out. They take for an example the common misconception, “All library source...

Learn how Bryant University integrated information literacy into its list of five things that differentiate a Bryant education, and how that led the library into developing both a summer bridge course and four courses designed to teach the differentiators. Laura Kohl, Director of Library Services, provides insight into how things got started and what it takes to keep iterating and innovating while...

In this final episode about big data research, we focus on the utility of pulling data sets out of the desk drawer and making them available for wider examination and manipulation. Ian also dives into the problems that can arise when research funders don’t take into account the specialized tools researchers sometimes develop to dig into their data and how the loss of those tools can result in hete...

In this third of our four episodes about big data research, we continue our conversation by focusing on the The University of Southern California’s library’s day-to-day work with Big Data, and how integral partnerships with researchers are to understanding the individual research questions and the tools necessary to answer them. They also discuss how prevalent big data research is at USC and some...

In this second of our four episodes about big data research, we continue our conversation by focusing on the library’s role with not only services and instruction, but how big data impacts collection practices and how it’s altering the relationships between libraries and vendors. Fundamentally, a library’s broader strategy for supporting big data research starts with the reference interview and gr...

In this final episode of our four-part series on the evolution of institutional repositories, our guests talk about how they not only sustain engagement with their IRs, but grow it as well. A key driver of success is relationships. Partnerships with faculty and students are, of course, crucial, but Illinois Wesleyan’s Stephanie Davis-Kahl and Utah State University’s Dylan Burns both describe how t...

For this series on the research methodologies around—and library support of—big data, our guests discuss the growth of big data research and how the academic library is stepping up to meet its unique service and instruction needs. In this first episode of our four-part series, we define what the term “big data” means in an academic setting and how big data research is outgrowing its science-based...

In this third episode of our series on institutional repositories, Illinois Wesleyan University’s Stephanie Davis-Kahl and Utah State University’s Dylan Burns describe how their IRs are currently structured and how they’re are opening up new collaborative opportunities. At USU, for example, the physics department has been especially active with the IR, going so far as to use it for their personal...