On behalf of the University of Michigan’s SI 641 / EDCURINS 575 : Information Literacy for Teaching and Learning class, I invite you to download a copy of our 170+ page book, Information Literacy in the Wild.

In this book, we share our experiences doing observations, teaching, and online resource creation related to information literacy in public libraries, K-12 classrooms, K-12 school libraries, college classrooms (online and face-to-face), academic libraries, educational outreach projects, the natural history museum, and more.

As their professor, I couldn’t be more pleased with their honest, unvarnished looks at what’s working in information literacy and what isn’t. So much of library literature is written as if there’s never a problem — everything goes off without a hitch. Ooh, doesn’t that make us jealous? But what I love about the deft hand of these writers is that they lift the veil and show you when the boat rocked and then what they did to right it.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of our classmate Kristel Wieneke, we did a limited print run (shown above) for friends and family courtesy of the the University of Michigan Library’s Espresso Book Machine.

But we’re releasing it for free in digital format for everybody else!

You can download it for your eReader for free here:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/115254

Or you can download it in a formatted-for-print PDF here:
http://bit.ly/infowild

So if you want to know what happened when a bird unit flew into a Physics classroom, what Lady Gaga has to do with synthesis, what it means to use a chainsaw to cut cake, what a Tyrannosaurus rex has to do with information literacy, or what database-a-phobia is, we hope you’ll download our book.

Then share your feedback with us!
informationliteracyinthewild [at] umich [dot] edu

(And that’s not all … they also created some amazing IL online resources … but I’ll save sharing some of those for another day.)

PS - To learn more about the Espresso Book Machine, check out this video!

Apparently, it’s mostly the people who work there. From D-Lib’s November-December issue comes a short paper that looked at randomly-selected academic libraries from the QS list of best-ranked world universities:

Academic Libraries on Facebook: An Analysis of Users’ Comments
Michalis Gerolimos
Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Greece
mike@ionio.gr
doi:10.1045/november2011-gerolimos

ABSTRACT
This paper examines users’ comments on the Facebook pages of 20 American academic libraries and subdivides them into 22 categories. A total of 3,513 posts were examined and analyzed in various ways, including how many of the posts included user comments and how many had none; how many comments were included in each post; and what the percentage of user participation was on the library walls, in terms of “likes” and comments. The most significant findings are that approximately 91% of the posts do not include any comments, over 82% of user participation is expressed via the “like” functionality and most comments on academic libraries’ Facebook pages are not uploaded by prospective users (i.e., college and university faculty and students) but rather by library personnel, employees affiliated with the same institution as the library, and alumni.

While it is a bit of apples and oranges to compare academic library behaviors with those in school libraries, I wonder how this finding jives with what you see happening in your school. Thoughts?

In a small study reported today on Education Week’s Inside School Research blog, findings show that middle-class students ask for — and receive — more help than do their working-class counterparts, even though teachers find the frequent middle-class queries “annoying.”

If these findings can be extrapolated, what are the profound implications for librarians in mixed socioeconomic buildings? And holy cow, what are the implications once these students get to college and no longer “have to” work with librarians? Do middle-class students seek out more librarian help, while working-class kids don’t?

Study: Middle-Class Students Are Better at Asking for Academic Help - Inside School Research - Education Week via kwout