Library Juice: 4-26-2010

Rory Litwin in her April 26, 2010, blog post for Library Juice asks what the role of a librarian in an academic library should be and comes up with the idea that because academia has embraced SLOs (Student Learning Outcomes) that librarians should in effect be teachers.

I find this very funny since I just spent three years getting my MLIS after teaching English composition for over 20 years with my MA degree.  What this breakthrough means to me is that I'll go from teaching to. . . teaching!  The big difference, of course, is that I won't be taking stacks of student papers home to grade--maybe.

Because SLOs must be measureable, librarians have to come up with some way of proving that students have "learned" something.  Teachers do this all the time by giving tests, but traditionally librarians aren't test givers.  Librarians are answer givers; they don't ask students to give them answers.