The author describes his own personal library. His father was a constant reader, and when he was young all of their books were kept on long, two-shelf bookcase in his bedroom. His personal library started with the works of Jules Verne and HG Wells, but in the mid-1970s, two ...

Abigail P. Dowling designed a second-year lower-division course at Mercer University in Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations for fall 2017 geared towards History and Classics minors and majors. The course was designed to fit into her four-course pre-modern course series, each of which focuses on a different historical skill set. She planned the Ancient Mediterranean course to focus on historical analysis of material culture through active, engaged student activities.

The benefits of attending a library conference lead to advantageous opportunities for career advancement, learning through shared knowledge, relationship-building through networking, and scholarship through presenting papers or posters. Unfortunately, it is not always possible for every librarian to make it to every conference to reap these benefits, whether it is due to lack of funding or conflicting schedules. ALA’s list of reasons to attend its most recent Annual Conference includes becoming a better advocate, relationship-building and networking, and being exposed to new ideas that bring a fresh energy to libraries.

In order to teach information literacy skills in an online library instruction session, a bit of pre-planning involving student/librarian engagement through active learning techniques is always helpful, if not necessary. Sarah Parramore (2019) discusses active learning techniques and information literacy: Active learning techniques are the topics that are dominating the higher education scene. Not only are they the focus on college and university campuses, but academic libraries are also taking notice and integrating these techniques into their lessons on information literacy. (p. 476) Using active learning techniques to increase student engagement works well for face-to-face classes, but how well does this work for increasing student engagement in a live Zoom class? Research librarians at Mercer University are currently researching ways to enhance virtual student-librarian engagement through an IRB-approved research study in which we seek to use two active learning techniques to in...