New Job and Some Other Professional Updates

Two weeks ago I started a new position at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. I’m the Instruction and Assessment Librarian, which means I’ll coordinate the library’s teaching efforts and also work with librarians and faculty to improve student outcomes when the curriculum or assignments include a research component.

I’ll also staff the reference desk and serve as liaison to a department once I get set with my main tasks. It was tough to leave Georgia after having such an enjoyable and valuable year in my Information Literacy Fellowship, but I’m excited at the opportunity at Sinclair and look forward to the new semester which starts in just a couple short weeks.

Before making the move to Ohio I attended my first ALA Annual conference in Chicago. It was a great experience and a completely different animal from the few smaller conferences I had attended previously. As part of the Reference Research Forum I presented a Research Guides Usability Study with Angela Pashia. Basically we were interested in how we could improve the effectiveness of our Libguides and employed usability tests, focus groups and data from Google Analytics to determine specific steps to take in redesigning them.

And just before that the book Web Analytics Strategies for Information Professionals came out, in which Harriett Green, Jordan Ruud and I contributed a chapter. Our project was titled “Using Website Analytics Tools in the Development of a Humanities Library Web Portal.”