Creating the Academic Commons

Creating the Academic Commons
Author: Thomas H. P. Gould
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2011-06-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0810881098

Today's library is still at the heart of all university activities, helping students and faculty become better learners, teachers, and researchers. In recent years there has emerged the formalizing of one or more of these activities into an Academic Commons. These centers of information have been labeled variously but they all share a commonality: the empowerment of students and teachers. In Creating the Academic Commons: Guidelines for Learning, Teaching, and Research, Thomas Gould gives a detailed outline of the various roles and activities that take place in commons located within the administrative umbrella of the library. Gould provides a roadmap for libraries seeking to establish their own Academic Commons, complete with suggestions regarding physical structure and software/hardware options. And to ensure new ideas are examined, evaluated, and adopted broadly, Gould shows how the Millennial Librarian can be at the center of this evolutionary library. Including information regarding the latest technological advances, this book will be an invaluable guide for librarians.

Creating a Learning Commons

Creating a Learning Commons
Author: Lynn D. Lampert
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2019-01-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1442272643

Creating a Learning Commons: A Practical Guide for Librarians provides experienced and detailed research-based guidance for academic librarians and other professionals charged with creating a learning commons. Readers can follow the entire process of developing a library learning commons design and implementation plan from inception to post-occupancy planning and assessment. This practical guide is designed to help librarians develop sound strategies for navigating the challenging issues that often emerge in launching a dynamic and collaborative new library learning commons space within a university or college setting. Lampert and Meyers-Martin provide a practical guide, complete with examples and photos of award-winning learning commons designs. This book will help dedicated professionals identify best practices within today’s existing learning commons settings and get up to speed on how to best approach developing their own library’s new and innovative learning spaces.

Choosing & Using Sources

Choosing & Using Sources
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2016
Genre: Academic writing
ISBN:

Choosing & Using Sources presents a process for academic research and writing, from formulating your research question to selecting good information and using it effectively in your research assignments. Additional chapters cover understanding types of sources, searching for information, and avoiding plagiarism. Each chapter includes self-quizzes and activities to reinforce core concepts and help you apply them. There are also appendices for quick reference on search tools, copyright basics, and fair use.

The Composition Commons

The Composition Commons
Author: Jessica Yood
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2024-04-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 164642543X

The Composition Commons delivers a timely take on invigorating higher education, illustrating how college composition courses can be dynamic sites for producing a democratic, just, and generally educated public. Jessica Yood traces the century-long origins of a writing-centered idea of the American university and tracks the resurgence of this idea today. Drawing on archival and classroom evidence from public colleges and universities and written in a lively autoethnographic voice, Yood names “genres of the commons”: intimate, informal writing activities that create peer-to-peer knowledge networks. She shows how these unique genres create collectivity—an academic commons—and calls on scholars to invest in composition as a course cultivating reflective, emergent, shared knowledge. Yood departs from movements that divest from the first-year composition classroom and details how an increasingly diverse student population composes complex, evolving cultural literacies that forge social bonds and forward innovation and intellectual and civic engagement. The Composition Commons reclaims the commons as critical idea and writing classroom activities as essential practices for remaking higher education in the United States.

Academic Library Services for First-Generation Students

Academic Library Services for First-Generation Students
Author: Xan Arch
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2020-07-16
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1440870187

Presenting strategies for improving academic library services for first-generation students, this timely book focuses on programs and services that will increase student academic engagement and success. Demographic data and secondary school graduation rates suggest that colleges and universities will enroll growing numbers of first-generation students over the next decade. Academic Library Services for First-Generation Students focuses on ways academic libraries can uniquely contribute to the successful transition to college and year-to-year retention of first-generation students. The practical recommendations in this book include a wide range of ideas for the design and modification of library services and facilities to be more inclusive of the needs of first-generation students. All of the recommendations are specifically aimed at addressing challenges faced by first-generation students. Topics covered range from study spaces and service points to information literacy instruction and campus partnerships. The book makes the case—both explicitly and implicitly—that academic libraries can help address known risk factors (e.g., by helping students build academic cultural competencies) and thereby improve success, persistence, and retention for first-generation students. Academic library professionals in both leadership roles and public service positions will benefit from the actionable strategies presented here.

Beyond the Information Commons

Beyond the Information Commons
Author: Charles Forrest
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2020-08-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1538141140

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, academic libraries responded to rapid changes in their environment by acquiring and making accessible a host of new information resources, developing innovative new services and collaborative partnerships, and building new kinds of technology-equipped spaces to support changing user behaviors and emerging patterns of learning. The “Information Commons” or “InfoCommons” blossomed in a relatively short amount of time in libraries across North America, and around the world, particularly in Europe and the British Commonwealth. This book is more than a second edition of the 2009 book A Field Guide to the Information Commons which documented the emergence of a range of facilities and service programs that called themselves “Information Commons.” This new book updates this review of current practice in the Information Commons and other new kinds of facilities inspired by the same needs and intents, but goes beyond that by describing the continued evolution. This new book is an attempt to answer the question: “What might be the next emerging concept for a technology-enabled, user-responsive, mission-driven form of the academic library?” Like its predecessor, Beyond the Information Commons is structured in two parts. First, a brief series of essays explore the Information Commons from historical, organizational, technological, and architectural perspectives. The second part is a field guide composed of more than two dozen representative entries describing various Information Commons using a consistent format that provides both perspective on issues and useful details about actual implementations. Each of these includes photos and other graphics.

Making Teaching and Learning Matter

Making Teaching and Learning Matter
Author: Judith Summerfield
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2010-12-09
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9048191661

This volume captures the spirit of collaboration and innovation that its authors bring into the classroom, as well as to groundbreaking undergraduate programs and initiatives. Coming from diverse points of view and twenty different disciplines, the contributors illuminate the often perplexing debates about what matters most in higher education today. Each chapter tells a unique story about creating vital pedagogical arenas that have the potential to transform teaching and learning for both faculty and students. These exploratory spaces include courses under construction, cross-college and interdisciplinary collaborations, general education reform initiatives, and fresh perspectives on student support services, faculty development, freshman learning communities, writing across the curriculum, on-line degree initiatives, and teaching and learning centers. All these spaces lend shape to an over-arching, system-wide project bringing together the often disconnected silos of undergraduate education at The City University of New York (CUNY), America’s largest urban public university system. Since 2003, the University’s Office of Undergraduate Education has sponsored coordinated efforts to study and improve teaching and learning for the system’s 260,000 undergraduates enrolled at 18 distinct colleges. The contributors to this volume present a broad spectrum of administrative and faculty perspectives that have informed the process of transforming the undergraduate experience. Combined, the voices in these chapters create a much-needed exploratory space for the interplay of ideas about how teaching and learning need to matter in evolving notions of higher education in the twenty-first century. In addition, the text has wider social relevance as an in-depth exploration of change and reform in a large public institution.

Assessing Academic Library Performance

Assessing Academic Library Performance
Author: Holt Zaugg
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2021-10-29
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1538149249

Assessment is essential to describe a library’s value and to inform decision-making. Using the four key assessment components of design, data collection, data analysis, and dissemination, Assessing Academic Library Performance: A Handbook provides strategies and case studies for performing four different types of assessments: Service assessments for the library’s outward and inward facing services that either help library users or other library employees to help users. These assessments focus on providing and improving how things are done to better serve others. Resources assessments for the physical and virtual resources that the library has in its holdings or to which it provides access. Resources are the reason libraries exist as they help patrons in instructional and research pursuits. Space assessments for physical and online library spaces. These assessments help ensure that spaces meet user needs. Personnel relationship assessments look at how library employees interact with each other. as library professionals. While not for evaluation or advancement purposes, these types of assessments provide information on what library employees can do to improve their relationships with one another. Each section has information on conducting each aspect of libraries followed by three examples to illustrate how assessment is used to support descriptions of library value and to help library employees make decisions that are critical to library improvement.

The Information Commons Handbook

The Information Commons Handbook
Author: Donald Robert Beagle
Publisher:
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2006
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN:

A pracitcal guide to the new model for library service delivery, the Information Commons, an umbrella concept describing the physical, virtual, and cultural environment for new learning communities of students, teachers, scholars, and researchers.

Creating Research Infrastructures in the 21st-Century Academic Library

Creating Research Infrastructures in the 21st-Century Academic Library
Author: Bradford Lee Eden
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2015-08-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1442252421

Creating Research Infrastructures in the 21st-Century Academic Library: Conceiving, Funding, and Building New Facilities and Staff focuses on research infrastructures, bringing together such topics as research and development in libraries, dataset management, e-science, grants and grant writing, digital scholarship, data management, library as publisher, web archiving, and the research lifecycle. Individual chapters deal with the formation of Research & Development teams; emerging scholarly forms and new collaborative approaches to knowledge creation, dissemination, and preservation; managing small databases requiring the same level of support as large databases: metadata, digital preservation and curation, and technical support. Motivation for such services is provided in a chapter that considers how assessment and data now drive decisions and new services in higher education in general and academic libraries in particular and how statistical data can help to tell stories, make decisions, and move in new directions. Conceptualization of the research process also receives attention through the presentation of a research lifecycle in the university environment with the library as an integral partner and leader. Also, a topic that is increasingly important: the library as publisher, with new institutional repositories tied to journal creation, curation, and management is examined with a discussion of the workflow and expertise necessary for the library to be successful and responsive to the research needs of its institution, and become a leader in providing publishing services to its faculty. A related topic, Web archiving in libraries is explored in a chapter that includes discussions on the process of establishing buy-in and legal permission, the policies and procedures, and the technology necessary for its success. All of these efforts require funding and chapters are included that address this need: finding funding outside of the university for support of the library is now a necessary and vital part of academic libraries: guidelines and steps for how to write a grant and be successful at obtaining outside funds. A second chapter deals with the problem of developing a grant-seeking culture in the library, what some of the barriers are to the grant-writing process and how to create a reward system for a grant-writing culture. The volume concludes with two case studies related to implementing research data management services at two liberal arts colleges. They demonstrate that the integration of data management services for undergraduate and faculty research in liberal arts colleges is just as important as it is for the large research universities, and that new service models should be incorporated so that all librarians and library staff participate in this integration in their duties and responsibilities. It is hoped that this volume, and the series in general, will be a valuable and exciting addition to the discussions and planning surrounding the future directions, services, and careers in the twenty-first-century academic library.