As librarians' instructional roles continue to evolve, metaphor can be a powerful tool through which to reflect on and at times to reframe librarians' evolving educational roles and pedagogical approaches, as they consider beliefs and assumptions about teaching and learning and about their unfolding work and identities. This article explores this…

According to the author, we are all creators and consumers of media. Technology has made it easy to copy, paste, and transfer anything educators might want to use in their classrooms. As educators, school librarians have an obligation to honor the law and be the role models that learners and other staff members need them to be. So many times the…

In the book "Redesigning America's Community Colleges" (Bailey, Jaggars, & Jenkins, 2015), the authors briefly noted the role that librarians might play in informing and supporting guided pathways reform. In this short essay, one of the book's authors joins with a librarian to provide updated and revised thoughts on the role of…

J. Linda Williams was coordinator of school library services for Anne Arundel County Public Schools prior to her retirement. She served as AASL President 2005-2006 and is also a past president of the Maryland Association of School Librarians. Looking back on her 2005-2006 term as AASL President, Williams writes that she feels that particular year…

Librarians at universities continue to seek new ways to engage and partner with researchers in order to enhance and enrich the way that they work. This article looks at some of the ways that libraries have been doing this in recent years, what has worked, and what needs to be done to continue to develop these important partnerships. These…

A librarian-led Faculty Learning Community (FLC) focused on Open Educational Resources (OER) can be a practical, low risk way to sustain campus-based OER programs during and after initial start-up. Creating a space for sharing teaching successes and challenges is an important goal in the iterative journey toward open. The experiences and trust…

This Innovative Practices piece details the design of a scaffolded project in a public health course that paired a narrative inquiry assignment with an empirical health literature review assignment to highlight both the positivist and constructivist epistemologies of critical health research in public health. The authors discuss and reflect on the…

Zines have begun to gain a place in higher education as pedagogical tools studied or made by students, and many academic libraries maintain zine collections. The library literature reveals little about how nonlibrarian faculty use zines in their classrooms. This paper describes the results of a survey of faculty from a range of academic…

The role of school librarians has a history of radical change. School librarians adapted to take on responsibility for technology and audio-visual materials that were introduced in schools in earlier eras. With the advent of the Information Age in the middle of the 20th century and the subsequent development of personal computers and the Internet,…

Librarians are continually teaching students and faculty how to identify and access learning resources. They teach during individual reference consultations, through presentations to classes, and through library website content they create. Are librarians well prepared to design and deliver well-crafted instruction? Academic librarians have…

Academic librarianship has had a traditional role encompassing various specialisms: subject support, training, journal subscription management, collection development and user engagement front of house. While many of these roles remain, they should be re-evaluated. New competencies and skillsets in teaching, publishing, bibliometrics, impact, data…

Meaningful and sustained assessment is best achieved when a campus unit takes a collaborative leadership role to work with other departments, offices, and groups. Simply developing and implementing assessment in isolation and for the unit itself is not enough. While the value of collaboration among diverse campus constituents is widely recognized,…

This article explores the role of the instruction librarian as an equal player in higher learning initiatives, and focuses on student motivation, information literacy, activity and assessment, and collaboration. Library literacy is a major component of student success in community colleges, but the role of the instruction librarian is often…

In this article, the authors describe an undercurrent to the school librarian's public professional narrative, a silent but steady divide between what should happen and what "does" happen. Increasingly, rich collaborative planning is the exception, not the rule. Many library collaborations, when they do occur, happen in minutes over…

This article explains how the South Piedmont Community College librarians educated faculty members about how they guide student use of the library and how it is advantageous for them to require high-quality resources for student papers. As documented by observations at SPCC and in the library literature, students use the tools they know to find…