RSS 1.0SUNY Plattsburgh Library and Information Technology Services Faculty Work
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State University of New York at Plattsburgh: Immersed in TeachingA chapter from the book: Hidden Architectures of Information Literacy Programs: Structures, Practices, and Contexts. This chapter outlines the structure and processes used in coordinating the library instruction programs at SUNY Plattsburgh’s Feinberg Library. Focus is on our one-credit course, proficiency exam, and one-shot course-related instruction.
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"And Still We Rise": Open Pedagogy and Black History at a Rural Comprehensive State CollegeChapter begins: In Spring 2019, students at The State University of New York College at Plattsburgh (SUNY Plattsburgh) researched, designed, and built And Still We Rise: Celebrating Plattsburgh’s (Re)Discovery of Iconic Black Visitors (ASWR), an exhibit in the Feinberg Library on prominent Black political and cultural figures who had visited the college since the 1960s. The thirteen students in African-American Political Thought (Political Science 371), taught by Dr. John McMahon, researched in the college’s archives and secondary sources to curate photos, text and multimedia for physical and virtual exhibits....
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Exercise: Popular vs. Scholarly SourcesThis is a guided discovery activity to help students learn about the differences between scholarly and popular publications. Students are asked to look at an example of each type of resource and make observations. This activity is done individually or in small groups or pairs with a whole class discussion about the applications of each resource at the end of the activity. The activity requires 45-60 minutes of class time.
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Preservation in Practice: A Survey of New York City Digital HumanitiesDigital Humanities (DH) describes the emerging practice of interpreting humanities content through computing methods to enhance data gathering, analysis, and visualization. Due to factors including scale, complexity, and uniqueness, the products of DH research present unique challenges in the area of preservation. This study collected data with a survey and targeted interviews given to New York City metro area DH researchers intended to sketch a picture of the methods and philosophies that govern the preservation efforts of these researchers and their institutions. Due to their familiarity with evolving preservation principles and practices, librarians are poised to offer expertise in supporting the preservation efforts of digital humanists. The data and interviews described in this report help explore some of the current practices in this area of preservation, and suggest inroads for librarians as preservation experts
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Assessing Outcomes with Nursing Research Assignments and Citation Analysis of Student BibliographiesWhat are the library and information research requirements in a typical undergraduate nursing program? Do distance-learning library services provide undergraduate nursing students with the research materials they require for their academic work? In order to determine how the broad range of reference, instruction, and access services offered by Feinberg Library at Plattsburgh State University of New York, are used by students, the author reviewed selected nursing course syllabi for research requirements and the resulting student research bibliographies as an outcome assessment. The review included 441 bibliographic citations from 78 student research papers from 1998-1999. Results indicated no significant difference between on and off-campus student bibliography citations with regards to currency, format or number of citations. Results also indicated that the reviewed undergraduate nursing research assignments were indeed designed to promote research integration into nursing practice, and that student access to information was sufficient to allow them to complete their academic assignments.
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Social Justify Your Lesson Plan: How to Use Social Media to Make Pop Culture ScholarlyIn this chapter, we describe a lesson plan rooted in feminist pedagogy -- a teaching/learning that actively engages with the material being studied by embracing social media as a viable platform for scholarship. This lesson plan honors that the personal is political and correlates structural and systemic inequity to student experiences of oppression.
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Zotero: A Tool for Constructionist Learning in Critical Information LiteracyThe chapter describes a method for teaching Zotero, a bibliographic management program, to undergraduates over the course of a one-shot library instruction session. The session is intended to help students take control of their own sources and research.Students create their own libraries by choosing among sources, then using Zotero to put the material into a form they can organize, annotate, and cite. The process helps students to see themselves as not just consumers but also critics and creators of scholarship.
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Developing Scientific Womanpower: Gender and the Cold War-Era Science FairThis paper examines the intersection of gender and science in the U.S. during the Cold War by looking at girls' participation in science fairs. Official rhetoric encouraged both boys and girls to develop their skills in science and technology in the interest of national security, and in the years after World War II science fairs became popular vehicles for the display and promotion of science. Although boys participated in larger numbers than girls, young women were visible participants in science fairs, both at the local level and in national competitions such as the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (established in 1942) and the National Science Fair (begun in 1950).
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The "French Traveller," Patrick Henry, and the Contagion of LibertyIn 1921 the American Historical Review published the journal of a "French traveller" describing his trip to Britain's North American colonies in 1765. From the West Indies, the traveler sailed north to the North Carolina coast and journeyed overland to New York. Over those nine months he broke bread and drank wine with a cross-section of the colonies' wealthiest and most powerful men. The journal is unusual in two ways. First, it was written in English and yet found in a French naval archive. With its detailed descriptions of colonial port cities and their defenses, the journal was apparently written by a spy for Britain's greatest rival. Second, it contains the only extant eyewitness account of the debates in Virginia's House of Burgesses over the Stamp Act. These debates and the set of resolves that emerged served as a spark for resistance to the Stamp Act throughout Britain's North American colonies -- and yet we know little about the drama played out in the Capitol that day. The traveler never revealed his identity within the pages of the journal. Neither the editor of the AHR copy nor later historians could connect the journal to a known historical figure. This paper, then, will reveal the identity of the "French Traveller," reevaluate what the journal tells us in light of the author's identity, and examine the implications on our understanding of how the Virginia House of Burgesses and their resolves ignited colonial resistance to the Stamp Act.
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Social Media as Game Strategy: Twitter in the #infolit Instruction SessionThe lure of distractions can entice even the strongest of student wills in a computer classroom. Research requires strategic thinking and ordered planning to drown out the noise of online distractions. This poster demonstrates a unique way to capitalize on the natural overlap of research, communication, and social media by employing game strategy to lead learning outcomes for undergraduate student research. Instead of silencing social media, this activity incorporates Twitter as a platform to introduce information literacy concepts and participatory practices of scholarship.
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Reading Freire for First World LibrariansLibrarians in the nascent critical information literacy movement have embraced the dialogical, problem-posing educational model that Paulo Freire described in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. But less well known are Freire's later works addressed specifically to First World educators, in which he clarifies and expands upon his earlier writing as if in dialogue with this particular audience. These pieces can help the critically-minded librarian think through important issues surrounding authority, expertise, and our relationships with students, faculty, and administrators.
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Locating Information Literacy within Institutional OppressionThe ACRL's draft Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education represents a chance to undo the neoliberal assumptions of earlier information literacy standards. Despite some positive changes, the language of the Framework still reinforces existing structures of power. The Framework relies on a rhetoric of crisis and on the metaphors "information marketplace" and "information ecosystem." These metaphors naturalize information resources as a series of walled gardens that might instead have been part of a larger commons.
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My Reflections on CharlestonMy reflections from Charleston: It was my first time attending, and there was so much going on and so many workshops offered that I wasn't prepared to figure out what the best course of action should be. I followed the Thread for Management (MA) and that seemed to work quite well. The vendors showcase on Wednesday was impressive. Workshops introduced new ways of publishing were introduced and one web site in particular called smashwords. Another presentation described a crowdfunding web site called un-glue-it. I came away from the Conference with a sense that all of us in Serials and Acquisitions are striving to create new workflows with our current staffing. Here is a sample of some of the workshops and presentations I attended.
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Digital Commons as a Tool for OutreachThis presentation describes SUNY Plattsburgh’s use of Digital Commons to increase outreach to faculty and students. I explain the origins of this approach, discuss how librarians work with faculty to co-administer series, provide examples of this collaboration, and, finally, examine a particular setback that sheds light on the strengths and weaknesses of the outreach approach.
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Those Immersed Resurface: A Follow Up with Track 2 Participants of the First Information Literacy ImmersionSo what happens to all those great ideas and all that motivation that we get when we attend conferences and professional development opportunities? In the case of the first Track 2 participants of ACRL's Institute for Information Literacy's Immersion program, quite a lot. Two years after the first Immersion program, a follow-up survey pursued this question and found where great ideas and motivation are taking librarians and the institutions they work for.
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Reinforcing Information and Technology Literature: The Plattsburg Tip SheetThis article describes a Plattsburgh State University Library and Information Services (LIS) faculty workshop on information and technology literacy. The workshop was developed in response to a call for the redraft ing and submission for academic curriculum review of all courses intended for General Education approval and credit to meet new college General Education requirements. The focus of this article is on the infor mation and technology literacy specifics of the new requirements, the particular style of tip sheet developed for the workshop, and its potential for use by other librarians. The essence of the Plattsburgh Tip Sheet is a practical approach to rethinking lectures, class activities, and assignments to reinforce information and technology literacies.
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Reconsidering Reference for a Generation Without BoundariesMuch attention has been focused in the media recently upon the "dangers" that mentally ill college students pose to their communities. Indeed, there have been several well-publicized, albeit sensationalized, accounts of mentally ill college students lashing out violently against an individual or the wider community. Pundits have hotly debated the level of responsibility these students' respective campuses had in identifying these students, assessing them as "at risk" for violence, and remediating the risks posed by these students to society prior to their violent outbursts. These campuses contend that they addressed the students' behavior in a manner consistent with any higher educational institution's responsibility to act in loco parentis. The level of campuses' legal or ethical responsibility in these instances is beyond the scope of this chapter. What is important to note, however, is that it was individual faculty members who first reported their concerns about student behavior indicative of severe mental illness. One could rightfully dismiss these instances of extreme emotional disturbance as comparatively rare occurrences within the entire college student population. One cannot, however, dismiss the fact that students today are less prepared than previous generations to deal with the stressors of college life. They are seeking help in greater numbers to deal with those stressors, and they are more comfortable disclosing their problems in non-clinical, public settings. This situation presents several significant challenges for librarians and other academic faculty. These challenges include not only recognizing students experiencing emotional disturbances, but also responding sensitively to those students at that moment and identifying the appropriate campus or community resources to which one should refer them.
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The Foundations of Naval Science: Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power on History and the Library of Congress Classification SystemThis article is a history of the creation of the Naval Science class within the Library of Congress Classification System (LCCS) during that system’s fashioning and development at the turn of the 20th century. Previous work on the history of classification and especially of the LCCS has looked closely at the mechanics of the creation of such systems and at ideological influences on classification schemes. Prior scholarship has neglected the means by which ideologies are encoded into classification systems, however. The present article examines the history of a single class by looking at the ideological and political assumptions behind that class and the means by which these assumptions were written into the LCCS. Specifically, we argue that the Naval Science class resulted from a concerted effort by naval theorists to raise their field to the status of a science, the interest in Washington’s political class in this new science as a justification for imperial expansion, and a publishing boom in naval matters as the American public became eager consumers of such work during the Spanish-American War. This complex narrative thus illustrates the manifold influences on the creation of any classification system and asks us to consider that multiplicity of influences, whether we as librarians teach about existing systems or work to build new ones.
