scholarly journals Book Review: Planning Academic Library Orientations: Case Studies from Around the World

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 259
Author(s):  
Holly Luetkenhaus

For those engaging with first-year students and planning first-year programs in academic libraries, the library orientation is a key part of the work we do. “Library orientation” is often a catch-all term that is used to describe many types of library activities aimed at new college students, including in-class sessions, tours, online tutorials, and more. For a librarian revising an existing orientation program or starting from scratch, the possibilities are almost limitless, and it can be daunting to weed through the many options and settle on one that works for your library, your institution, and your students.

Author(s):  
Adam Crymble

After nearly a decade of scholars trying to define digital work, this book makes the case for a need instead to understand the history of technology’s relationship with historical studies. It does so through a series of case studies that show some of the many ways that technology and historians have come together around the world and over the decades. Often left out of the historiography, the digital age has been transformative for historians, touching on research agendas, approaches to teaching and learning, scholarly communication, and the nature of the archive itself. Bringing together histories and philosophies of the field, with a genre of works including private papers, Web archives, social media, and oral histories, this book lets the reader see the digital traces of the field as it developed. Importantly, it separates issues relevant to historians from activities under the purview of the much broader ‘digital humanities’ movement, in which historians’ voices are often drowned out by louder and more numerous literary scholars. To allow for flexible reading, each chapter tackles the history of a specific key theme, from research, to communication, to teaching. It argues that only by knowing their field’s own past can historians put technology to its best uses in the future.


2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 38-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Bradley ◽  
Debbie Holley

This paper reports on empirical research conducted to find out about higher education students’ mobile phone ownership, and the ways in which they are using their mobiles for learning. A survey with a group of first-year students has been followed up by an in-depth study, in which three students were lent Flip Video Camcorders to capture their mobile learning activities and were interviewed to discover more about their practice. The video footage and interview data have been compiled into three rich case studies which help us to better understand students’ practice and attitudes towards mobile learning. The paper focuses on the survey data and the three case studies, which were analysed using grounded theory. The outcomes of this research can inform the work of educators seeking to design effective mobile learning activities that build on existing student practice and extend mobile learning within the blend of learning activities that we offer students.


1989 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 558-569
Author(s):  
Susan Foster ◽  
Sidney M. Barefoot ◽  
Patricia Mudgett

The purpose of this study was to investigate the meaning of communication to deaf college students and to explore with them the range of skills and conditions that they consider important for communication. Ethnographic interviews with 23 first-year students at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology (NTID at RIT) were used to gather information about communication. Analysis of the interviews led to the organization of informants' comments into four dimensions of communication, including language-modality, affective, situational, and sociopolitical. These dimensions were then used to develop a multidimensional perspective on communication. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of a multidimensional perspective on communication for the development of comprehensive communication training programs for deaf people.


Author(s):  
William A. Gentry ◽  
Karl W. Kuhnert ◽  
Rachel M. Johnson ◽  
Brennan D. Cox

Helping first-year students become involved in college via semester- or year-long first-year orientation programs is a major undertaking for college and university administrators. The effect of a weekend-long orientation program on students' involvement in college had yet to be determined until the current study. The authors describe such a program and evaluate its utility. Results revealed that incoming first-year students who attended a weekend-long orientation program were involved in school during their first year, than those who did not attend the program.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Stephanie Rizzo ◽  
Dana J. Tribble ◽  
Louis S. Nadelson

College students’ interactions with campus leaders is critical to their success, particularly in situations of distress. Yet, little is known about college students’ knowledge, perceptions, and identification of campus administrators, faculty members, and staff as leaders and their interactions with these campus leaders. To fill the gap in the literature, we applied a cross-sectional methodology to gather a combination of quantitative and qualitative data using an online survey. We had 60 first-year students participate in our exploratory research by fully completing our survey. We found that students identified their advisors as leaders on campus. We also found most of our participants avoided campus administrators in fear of judgment, intimidation, and feelings of anxiety. Our results have implications for campus leadership, college administrators, student retention, and campus climate. Following our results, we discuss implications for practice and offer additional recommendations for future research.


2017 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 146
Author(s):  
Kyndra Valencia

In any university library, the first-year experience is an essential component of capturing students’ interest and engagement from the very beginning and of publicizing what the library offers them. However, it is always a struggle to determine how exactly to capture freshmen’s attention and disseminate information about the library’s various resources. Coming up with fresh, relevant ideas on top of an already busy schedule is enough to stress almost any librarian. Pun and Houlihan’s book attempts to alleviate this stress by presenting a “cookbook” of ideas, activities, and lesson plans that librarians across the nation have found effective in engaging first-year students, giving library staff a wealth of options to consider, duplicate, or alter according to their own needs. The book itself is divided into four sections—orientations, library instruction, programs, and assessment. Each section’s activities and lesson plans are detailed and well described, offering excellent variety as well as suggestions for accommodating a wide range of program sizes, budget constraints, and time and staffing requirements. Many of the included projects also feature photographs of the activities or reproducible versions of handouts, increasing the ease of replicability for interested librarians.


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