Scott Slattery and I presented our "Literature Review: Content and Process" workshop today to over 100 grad students in Nicholson. More folks had used Google Scholar, Web of Science, Interlibrary Loan, RefWorks, and Google Books than ever before. Not sure if it means anything but it was interesting....
February 2011 Archives
Session overview: Participants will learn to evaluate tools for finding, organizing, and sharing research sources/content and citations.
Citation Managers: Zotero/RefWorks
Research/Content:
Library Tools (gaining 2.0 functionality): Library Catalog (tags, reviews), My account,
Images-UMedia Archive
Sharing/Collaborating:
RefWorks/Zotero--for collaboration
Push feeds to page (e.g. Moodle, etc.)
Discussion:
1.) Brainstorm 3 ways you can use some of these tools in your work.
2.) Share one of these in the comments of this blog post.
Want to get a group to generate ideas quickly and improve collaboration? Gamestorming might be right for you! I attended the gamestorming presentation by Jeff Stafford at the Quality Fair at UMN.
- Groundrules might be good place to start:judge later, avoid discussion, capture ideas, be specific, build, participate, set time limit and number your ideas.
- We played with Red and Green card a fun way for assessment of a large group whether it is a yes/no question or ready to move on, etc.
- Have you ever made it out of Target without spending $100? Rarely. Well, here we had to prioritize a list of items and collective only had $100 to spend.
- As the Libraries and units create a vision for the future during budget cuts I think these three questions were key:
This ties into the book I just skimmed, Ideaship: How to get ideas flowing in your workplace. Two parts that I agreed with in the book are:
- What are things we need to START doing?
- What are things we currently doing that we can or should STOP?
- What are we doing now that works and we should CONTINUE doings?
Another great resources besides the book Gamestorming (I just ordered the Libraries a copy) is creatingminds.org
- Get rid of the word "i": I is very divisive and does not build a collaborative environment.
- Ask for many solutions/ don't reject ideas/ask for more ideas: often there is no one right answer, and if we stop at the first suggestion we might miss another opportunity.
"Good ideas are common - what's uncommon are people who'll work hard enough to bring them about" - Ashleigh Brilliant
Came across this video about What is it like to be student at the University of Minnesota?
The workshops are currently featured on the Libraries homepage:



My Word! : Plagiarism and College Culture by Susan D. Blum
Check it out on Amazon or MnCat.
Chemistry Librarian, Meghan Lafferty, drew my attention to a blog post about this book from Inside Higher Education. The blog post says that the book explores "why plagiarism seems to have moved from deviant to normative behavior amongst college students" giving focus to "the seeming inability of students to properly cite sources and give attribution for other peoples ideas and sentences"
The original post goes into more detail about the scope of the book...but it looks like a good read. U of M Libraries currently own 2 copies (both checked out) and Hennepin County Library has another copy (also currently checked out).
Do you work with a class with high numbers of International students? Add the "Guide" to your LCP page. For example, I just added the Guide for International Students to the WRIT 1301 course (in English, Chinese, and Korean)--I am teaching one of the non-native speaker sections today and realized I should have done this a long time ago.
Take a look: https://www.lib.umn.edu/course/WRIT/1301

The guides are also linked on the Workshops, Guides and Tutorials page: https://www.lib.umn.edu/instruction/tutorials
I don't know if you're all on Twitter...but in case you haven't seen this post (tweet) it made me happy!
Sharing the non-customized LCPs may bring unexpected opportunities.
Sharing the non-customized LCPs may bring unexpected opportunities.

