Building Together: Nurturing Leadership through Communities of Practice

In the current era of never-ending change, effective library organizations must be nimble and flexible. Formal committee structures and reporting lines often get in the way of making changes quickly and may not provide opportunities for leadership development. Communities of Practice (CoPs), as realized at Arizona State University Libraries, provide a flexible model to gather employees from diverse areas and levels of an organization to address a common interest, project or problem. The issues and projects addressed by CoPs at ASU Libraries have benefited overall organizational dynamics and promoted management/staff interpersonal relations, leadership skills, self-awareness, and increased involvement from employees of all areas. Many who participate in these groups go on to participate in further leadership roles in formal groups within the organization. In this workshop, participants will learn about CoPs as an organizational and leadership development resource, including discussion of the theory behind the practice, resources useful for these collaborative working groups and an interactive discussion break-out time for an opportunity to consider how such groups might work in individual organizations.https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/library_presentations/1004/thumbnail.jp

Open Your Minds to Open Access

"...a student's education is only as valuable as the information that a student has access to..." ~Matt Cooper, (2012 President if the National Association of Graduate and Professional Students), at the October 2012 SPARC/World Bank Open Access Week kickoff event. Abstract: Want to increase Open Access participation at your institution? This poster and its accompanying handout present resources and strategies from a large public research university library to encourage understanding of and participation in Open Access practices, including promotional materials and persuasive talking points

OSF@VT: A Customizable Platform for Research Management and Sharing - Training and Educational Materials

This project site holds materials for OSF workshops at Virginia Tech

Instructional methods used by health sciences librarians to teach evidence-based practice (EBP): a systematic review

Background: Librarians often teach evidence-based practice (EBP) within health sciences curricula. It is not known what teaching methods are most effective. Methods: A systematic review of the literature was conducted searching CINAHL, EMBASE, ERIC, LISTA, PubMed, Scopus, and others. Searches were completed through December 2014. No limits were applied. Hand searching of Medical Library Association annual meeting abstracts from 2009–2014 was also completed. Studies must be about EBP instruction by a librarian within undergraduate or graduate health sciences curricula and include skills assessment. Studies with no assessment, letters and comments, and veterinary education studies were excluded. Data extraction and critical appraisal were performed to determine the risk of bias of each study. Results: Twenty-seven studies were included for analysis. Studies occurred in the United States (20), Canada (3), the United Kingdom (1), and Italy (1), with 22 in medicine and 5 in allied health. Teaching methods included lecture (20), small group or one-on-one instruction (16), computer lab practice (15), and online learning (6). Assessments were quizzes or tests, pretests and posttests, peer review, search strategy evaluations, clinical scenario assignments, or a hybrid. Due to large variability across studies, meta-analysis was not conducted. Discussion: Findings were weakly significant for positive change in search performance for most studies. Only one study compared teaching methods, and no one teaching method proved more effective. Future studies could conduct multisite interventions using randomized or quasi-randomized controlled trial study design and standardized assessment tools to measure outcomes

COS Ambassadors

A collection of materials and resources for COS ambassadors