February 2008 Archives

A recent report, “Information Behaviour and the Researcher of the future” noted: “The library profession desperately needs leadership to develop a new vision for the 21st century and reverse its declining profile and influence. This should start with effecting that shift from a content-orientation to a user-facing perspective and then on to an outcome focus."

College Learning for the New Global Century, a report from the Association of American Colleges and Universities, highlights information  literacy as an “essential learning outcome for the 21st century.”  Categorized as an intellectual and practical skill, they note that it should be practiced extensively across the curriculum, in the context of progressively more challenging problems, projects, and standards for performance.

The recent Educause/NMC 2008 Horizon Report also addressed the global importance of information literacy, noting that visual, technological and information literacy retain continued (and perhaps redefined) importance. "We need new and expanded definitions of these literacies that are based on mastering underlying concepts rather than on specialized skill sets, and we need to develop and establish methods for teaching and evaluating these critical literacies at all levels of education."
 
The upshot of all of this?  For me, it is that libraries are primed to assume a central role as campus partner in developing and implementing information literacy learning outcomes in University curriculum and graduation requirements.

"It is irresponsible for educational institutions not to teach new knowledge technologies such as Wikipedia...we do a fundamental disservice to our students if we continue to propagate old methods of knowledge creation and archivization without also teaching them how these structures are changing, and, more importantly, how they will relate to knowledge creation and dissemination in a fundamentally different way."

Taken from: Parry, David. Wikipedia and the New Curriculum: Digital Literacy Is Knowing How We Store What We Know. Science Progress. February 2008.

(and thanks to Bernie Sloan (via Web4lib) for bringing this quote---and the article---to my attention)

A student emailed me today asking for a refresher in how to narrow down a ProQuest search so that it only retrieves NYTimes articles.

Rather than writing him back with a message that specified, "look for this menu", now "type this in", now "select this", I decided to once and for all figure out a good, local persistent URL script for ProQuest.  I had previously been able to script a URL down to the journal level, but it didn't go through our EZProxy server, and thus it didn't work off campus.  I didn't want to send the student an URL like that.

I will say that you cannot underestimate my persistence when it comes to playing with URLs.  Some might call it a sickness.

Anyway,  I finally figured out that I could take essentially any current ProQuest journal page or article-level results list and precede it with our EZProxy URL, making it functional.  Our EZProxy server is: 
http://alias.libraries.psu.edu/eresources/proxy/login?url=

Here's the end product for the NYTimes search.  (I'm embedding the URL because the blog entry editor kept cutting off part of it for some reason, but if you right click on it and copy the link location, you can get the entire thing.)

Wouldn't it be cool if we had a locally-based tool (like this one) that could automatically do this for us?

--Ellysa, documenting this so that she never has to search for how to do it again!