The Authority File

In this series Dr. Carol Ember, president of HRAF, and Peter N. Peregrine, professor of archaeology at Lawrence University, join Bill to talk about the history, make-up, and relevance of HRAF—and how the cultures and cultural practices contained within its million pages of information can illuminate a wide variety research areas. This episode zeroes in on HRAF’s interdisciplinary inception, the research needs it was designed to meet, as well as its deep organizational structure.

To learn more about HRAF, visit the Human Relations Area Files website.

This week each of our guests talk through library anxiety inducers for their incoming cohorts of freshmen, and some of the tactics they use to allay those anxieties, while educating students about the resources the library can provide. They also discuss bringing folks other than undergraduate students into the library and weigh some of the benefits of these practices.

In this episode, Bill, Danielle, Andrew, and Ray discuss bringing empathy to the library—some of their successes and difficulties—as well as tactics for connecting with busy faculty and adjunct instructors to maximize the impact of library instruction.

Bill, Ray, Danielle, and Andrew talk through ideas for expanding the library’s reach among first year students in this week’s episode. Andrew thinks through the opportunities and drawbacks in East Bay’s move away from a required first year experience course, while Danielle offers strategies Pasadena uses to engage students who opt not to take the voluntary first-year experience course. And Ray offers his thoughts on key elements of FYE programming.

This week Bill talks about the student library experience with librarians from a community college, a master’s granting institution, and a university. He gets perspective on the different types of FYE programs at each institution and how the differing student bodies shape the programming—or don’t—at Pasadena City College, California State University East Bay, and California State University, Fresno.

This week Bill, Ray, Lisa, and Laura talk tactics for collaboration—who should you build bridges with? Students? Faculty? Other library departments? What if there’s not time? How does partnering with an off-campus group work? Bill finds answers to these questions and others with this week’s group of expert panelists.

This week, Bill talks with Ray, Laura, and Lisa about collaboration as a key component of first year experience programming and development, and some of the things that can complicate the library’s efforts to collaborate. They also talk about strategies for sustaining the collaborations without reinventing the wheel year after year.

In this episode Bill speaks with Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Ray Pun and Laura Kohl about a study Lisa recently published in Communications in Information Literacy that examines first year student misconceptions about information literacy—how those misconceptions take root, what they are, and how librarians can help root them out. They take for an example the common misconception, “All library sources are credible” and examine how a student might arrive at that specific “successful error,” as Bill dubs it.

Learn how Bryant University integrated information literacy into its list of five things that differentiate a Bryant education, and how that led the library into developing both a summer bridge course and four courses designed to teach the differentiators. Laura Kohl, Director of Library Services, provides insight into how things got started and what it takes to keep iterating and innovating while maintaining a tight focus on the program’s goals. Lisa and Ray also provide their views on collaboration and how to foster it. Don’t miss the episode!

In this final episode about big data research, we focus on the utility of pulling data sets out of the desk drawer and making them available for wider examination and manipulation. Ian also dives into the problems that can arise when research funders don’t take into account the specialized tools researchers sometimes develop to dig into their data and how the loss of those tools can result in heterogeneous methodologies that complicate interpreting huge data sets.