May 2019

Cara Barker, Research & Instruction Librarian, Western Carolina University This post is a continuation of “Curriculum Maps: Building a Strong Foundation for Liaison Work.” One of the things I love best about data gathering for a specific purpose is that it sometimes helps in more ways than you anticipated. In academic libraries, you often see this with circulation, electronic resource stats, and building use data. Curriculum maps offer similar opportunities. In the first post on curriculum mapping, I walked through the information gathering portion of creating curriculum maps. In this post, I’ll show you how to transfer the information you’ve collected into the map. I’llRead More →

As instruction librarians, we are always examining and evolving our practice. What we are often missing is a focused, structured way of looking at our instructional program. That’s where curriculum mapping can help. While curriculum mapping is defined as “a process for evaluating the various components of a curriculum for cohesiveness, proper sequencing, and goal achievement,” it has potential beyond this basic description.[1] Over two blog posts I’m going to walk you through the process of mapping, using examples from my curriculum map for the undergraduate programs in the School of Art & Design (SOAD) at Western Carolina University. I will discuss also discuss variousRead More →

Though not all of us work in the context of academic libraries, a significant enough proportion do that at one point or another in our careers we’ll need to—or have the opportunity to!—collaborate with professors. In this week’s post, I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned about communicating and collaborating with professors in my career, and suggest a few best practices that have generally helped smooth my way. Some of the projects I’ve worked on with professor colleagues in the past have included jointly creating custom classroom sessions and activities surrounding the library’s medieval facsimile collection, an instruction project that culminated in a student curated exhibitRead More →