2013 Georgia Library Association Scholarship Winners

This article describes the 2013 winners of the Beard and Hubbard scholarships, awarded annually by the Georgia Library Association

My Own Private Library: A peek inside the personal library of a librarian

An author\u27s experiences with Hamlet, where it has led her, and why it has a place in her personal library

Constructing Lothiriel: Rewriting and Rescuing the Women of Middle-Earth From the Margins

Examines the presence and absence of female characters in Tolkien, in the Peter Jackson films, and in fanfiction, paying particular attention to a “footnote character,” Lothíriel, and what the body of fanfiction built around her brief mention as the daughter of Imrahil and wife of Éomer reveals about reader engagement with Tolkien’s texts

Collaboration in the Midst of Change: Growing Librarian-Archivist Partnerships for Engaging New Students and Faculty

Collaboration between librarians and archivists is a valuable way to share expertise and effort when instructing first-year English students on research skills they will need to succeed in college. It is also vital to orienting new faculty to library and archive resources for their scholarship and teaching, as well as encouraging students to value the library and archives resources and knowledge. The unique first-year English program at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) provides a constantly renewing pool of both new students and faculty members. This article identifies common themes in library and archive instruction and key elements of engaging first-year faculty and their students in becoming long-term patrons, in the midst of Georgia Tech’s Library Next initiative, a re-imagining of the twenty-first century library and a major renovation of physical spaces

Fighting Fake News and Biases with Cognitive Psychology

Fake news, faulty data, and questionable research outputs: how do we find the truth when so much information is uncertain? Part of this problem is cognitive biases in our decision-making process. The mind will create a durable narrative around knowns and ignore unknowns. Scholar Daniel Kahneman (2012) refers to this phenomenon as, What you see is all there is or WYSIATI. Another common heuristic, the availability cascade, causes the mind to prefer immediate examples that come to mind over more reliable information that is less easily recalled. These biases limit the accuracy of the information that people understand, as well as their own information-seeking behavior. While no one is immune to these cognitive processes, they are a significant issue to address in information literacy instruction. At Georgia Institute of Technology, we created a Fake News and Information Literacy program based on the current research from cognitive psychology, with the goal of equipping students to recognize fake news, faulty research, and personal biases. Rather than provide a list of safe resources, we teach students the skills to recognize authoritative work. Active learning techniques are a key part of each session, which is customizable to the needs of the individual class. Due to the high demand for these services from Georgia Tech faculty, we taught over 25 sections in the first semester this curriculum was offered

Better Together: Changing the Model of Freshman English Instruction through Partnership

This poster presents a partnership between the Humanities Librarian and the Writing and Communication Program, which directs the English 1101 and 1102 curriculum at a four-year urban university focused on science and technology. Due to the critical need for information literacy instruction in the Writing and Communication Program classes, the library\u27s model of instruction has evolved from a single librarian instructing all English classes to a distributed program of six subject liaison librarians teaching information literacy skills in English 1101 and 1102. As most undergraduate students at this institution are engineering or science majors, English 1101 and 1102 are often the only time that the receive library instruction, making it vital to teach research skills they will need for the rest of their careers. This poster presentation will discuss developing the partnership with the Writing and Communication Program faculty who teach English 1101 and 1102 to change the model of library instruction. It will also cover in detail the process of developing a group of teaching librarians, including the training program for librarians created with the Writing and Communication Program faculty. Some librarians in the teaching group were new to instruction, while others were experienced teachers; planning to provide appropriate scaffolding for them as they learned is also an important topic that will be covered. Lastly, this poster will discuss the assessment used in the program, and what the teaching librarians have learned from the partnership to become stronger and more effective instructors