News Report 5: Ringing the changes: phone box becomes mini-library.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/nov/30/phone-box-mini-library-somerset
Monday 30 November

The townspeople of Somerset, England have renovated decommissioned Phone Booths, into a public library. This change came after the local mobile library went out of business and there were threats of moving the old red phone booths. The phone booths in Somerset store around 100 books and 80 DVDs, which locals can take and return at their leisure. There are not any librarians, and no way of passing out late fees.

I think that this is an innovative way to both reuse the old red phone booths which were loved in the community and also bring back an opportunity for the locals to access books and DVDs for free.

Reading Report 5: Information Navigation 101

By Andrea L. Foster

Today’s College students, dubbed the “Net Generation”, uses a much larger variety of technologies than any previous generation. However, these students have also lost the key skills needed to effectively perform academic searches (on a large scale). Librarians believe that the sudden abundance of electronic information is a leading factor in the Net Gen’s confusion regarding academic materials online, including the rise in academic journals, websites, online encyclopedias, and other online source materials.

Professors on Cal State's Fullerton campus are fighting back this trend by often sending their students to the computer labs, where they are taught how to navigate the university's online catalog of “databases, scholarly books, and journals to do research in a particular discipline.”

Since colleges and accrediting agencies say college graduates must be information literate, there are now many standardized created to measure students' skills in information literacy. The most notorious being Educational Testing Service, a nonprofit group based in Princeton, N.J. "Most librarians said they viewed the tests as only one measure of students' information-literacy proficiency. Some anticipated that colleges would move away from standardized tests in favor of interpretive measures of students' skills, like research papers, multimedia projects, and electronic portfolios."

I believe that while it is undeniably important for University students to be proficient and capable in using the academic resources available to them, I also believe that a standardized test may not be the best measuring tool in grading their understanding of these skills.