I have two important bits of news to share on AMICAL governance. New Operational Guidelines First, AMICAL’s voting members have just approved a substantially revised version of our Operational Guidelines. The revised Operational Guidelines aim to streamline our organizational structures, re-energizing them through increased participation and engagement: Standing Committees are now associated with active consortial programs, focusing on small and agile committees while allowing all member categories to participate in their governance. Interest Groups have been differentiated from the committees, with participation open to all AMICAL colleagues. The efficient organization of elections for our Coordinating Committee officers has been one of our difficulties in the past. We've addressed this by simplifying both the election process and the distribution of Coordinating Committee roles. Special thanks go out to the other members of the Organizational Documents Revision Committee that joined me in working on this: Sania Battalova (formerly at American U. Central Asia) Cendrella Habre (Lebanese American U.) Elisabetta Morani (John Cabot U.) Ivana Stevanovic (American U. Kosovo). Thanks as well to all who voted, and for the confidence you expressed in the Committee’s work. Coordinating Committee elections Second, we launch today elections for our Coordinating Committee officers. Voting (Full Member) institutions are now charged with electing a group of four officers by 14 September. Their AMICAL Representatives will be getting voting instructions shortly. The new officers of the Coordinating Committee will then assign themselves roles (Chair, Vice-Chair, Secretary, and Member-at-Large). And as of 1 October, they will begin their terms, helping guide the consortium in the planning, steering and evaluation of its programs. Members have nominated a fine list of candidates, and regardless of who gets elected, we’ll have a great team.

I have an update to share with you regarding AMICAL’s web site -- but I know it’s the middle of summer, and you’re reading this from your beach chair with eyes half-closed, so I’ll keep it short. Over the last few years, the internet termites have been slowly eating away at the structure of AMICAL’s web site. The old and weathered Drupal and PHP that held up our site were getting close to crumbling. At the same time, AMICAL has been making exciting plans for new programs supporting digital humanities, digital pedagogies, digital collections, and a more effective interinstitutional collaboration network for staff and faculty. Details about these initiatives will be shared in September, but all of them require us to rethink and redevelop AMICAL’s web site and platforms for communications, collaboration and content. Transitional web site Although this is just an initial step in redesigning our web resources, we are proud to launch today a new public web site at http://www.amicalnet.org. Alex Armstrong, who also created the 2014 and 2015 conference websites, is building the new site on a content management system (Statamic) that emphasizes flexible content and speedy development. The site has a fresh new look and feel. And although this is just a transitional website -- a starting point for new web resources to be developed over the coming year -- we’ve incorporated a few new features that we’d like to highlight here. Blog First, we’ve launched the AMICAL blog! You’ll find here news & commentary on AMICAL’s projects and activities, including announcements from AMICAL staff but also articles and photos by members and invited colleagues. Use the Share buttons at the bottom of each post to help us raise awareness about AMICAL. Subscribe to the RSS feed to stay in the loop. Community Under Community, we’ve grouped together all of the active AMICAL communication platforms and media channels. There are many ways to connect with your AMICAL colleagues; use this page to discover a few you didn’t know about! Do tell us which platforms you prefer, as we’ll be consolidating our communications over the coming year. Content updates Programs & initiatives On our old site, many of our ongoing consortial activities were nowhere to be found, but most major activities are now listed under Programs & initiatives. Committees To give you a basic way to contact committees, we’ve listed their members and linked to the committee contacts posted on AMICALconnect. Future plans. We’ll be expanding all of the site’s content in the fall. Content on its way The main piece of existing content not yet available on the new site is the archive of presentations from previous AMICAL conferences. We’ll be creating a new home for those over the coming months, so hang tight! In the meantime, if you’re looking for presentation slides from a previous conference, just ask us, and if we have a copy, we’ll send it. The best thing about the new site is that it’s not collapsing. The next best thing is that it’s a solid first step toward a more robust set of tools for connecting with AMICAL colleagues online. Everything new starts with a few rough spots, though, so if you notice anything wrong with the site, or have a request to include specific content or features, don’t hesitate to let us know. Enjoy your summer!

This was the fifth time I had attended the AMICAL Conference in the last seven years and it was every bit as enjoyable as all the others. I had always hoped to visit the American University in Bulgaria and was glad I had the chance to see the library and campus—a lovely setting for a meeting. Sofiya Katsarska and her wonderful library staff were such kind and generous hosts and I felt so welcome. And, of course, being with all of my AMICAL friends, old and new, was a joy. The sessions at this meeting gave me a much better understanding of information literacy in general and how it is implemented in particular places. As usual, part of what I learned came from formal presentations and part from informal conversations. Lori Townsend’s presentation focused me on threshold concepts in a way that I thought was really clear and well illustrated. (Didn’t you love the cat pictures?!) After-conversations were animated and illuminating. It is wonderful to have the chance to stand around afterwards with AMICAL colleagues and have epistemological conversations about the content of the program. In Sofia, I had a chance to talk to Anne-Marie Deitering about her work on curiosity, which is such an important part of the learning process but does not receive anything like the attention it deserves. The presentations and posters were also terrific. And I love the “un-conference” concept. I hope people participate more and more as they get used to that new format. Others who made the trip out to Rila Monastery were probably just as thrilled as I was to enter the library and see the books. This was a rare and deeply appreciated opportunity. Ivana, Jorge and I washed our faces in the water at the monastery, hoping to enhance our health and beauty. We’ll see how well it worked when we meet again!

This AMICAL 2015 workshop was on what CATs (Classroom Assessment Techniques) are and what they assess. Five exercises helped participants in getting better insight about how a particular CAT is used in the classroom. Examples and experiences were aimed at faculty, Information Literacy librarians and Instructional Technology specialists. Not many participants knew about CATs, 5-6 out of 21 (coming from 13 universities). In a highly interactive atmosphere, all participants got a chance to hear and learn more, getting really inspired by the facilitators’ input. The steps for CATs introduced planning, implementation and feedback as crucial parts of the process, with none to be missed. I will highlight notes on implementation, where communication was mentioned as the essential element. Students should be informed that this is not a test, not a graded assignment; it’s a quick and easy way to check if the direction of the lecture is appropriate for the desired learning outcomes, and whether it needs to be revised. (Note: CATs can also be part of the pre-lecture phase; the workshop focused on the in-class, or post-lecture CATs). Therefore, CATs should be used to help instructors to quickly “look into the head of the student” (Sosa, 2015) and correct the class pedagogy at the spot or via additional correspondence, if the reality check proves that students do not understand the content. Exercises both individual and group have helped participants in reflecting and getting insight into the idea and scope of CATs. Sally provided experience tips, encouraging the group with the note that first few CATs one does might not be as successful. In addition, all three facilitators shared the scope of CATs which should be used; stressing out that not too many CATs should be done in one course. While a single course might include doing muddiest point a few times, Word Journal should definitely be done once. The end of the workshop did bring the cats CATs closure… The workshop was based on the book by Thomas Angelo and Patricia Cross: Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (2nd ed.) Image credits: Dimana Doneva & Asma Al-Kanan / See more

I had such a lovely time at the 2015 conference — THANK YOU all for inviting me and taking such awesome care of me. AMICAL really knows how to put on a conference (and how to party)! And Bulgaria is a gorgeous place to do so. I came away with so many nice connections, lovely conversations and ideas for teaching and learning. When Dimitris asked me to write a short blog post, I was initially nervous (not being a regular blogger), but it’s been really nice to reflect on my trip after the whirlwind of getting home and getting back into the day-to-day business of being an instruction librarian. One of my biggest takeaways from AMICAL finally clicked into place for me near the end of the conference. It reminded me that when you experience a transformative understanding, it’s not necessarily a strike of lightning, but the sun rising and slowly changing the entire landscape around you. Everything is the same but everything is also different. As time passes, you make new connections and experience a sense of wonder. And maybe also feel a bit stupid for not having “got it” before when it was right there in front of you all along. What connected the dots for me? Curiosity. Motivation. Affect. I was thinking about what I call the “Research process” threshold concept and the Framework calls the “Research as inquiry” frame — the one that boils down to “research is a process of inquiry that leads to the creation of new knowledge.” This one has always summed up so much for me about what we teach in higher education. But what starts this process of inquiry? And why do we persist through obstacles and fear? Curiosity. It’s a defining characteristic of the human species. Almost everyone is curious about something. I participated in Anne-Marie’s workshop and it reminded of this. And, perhaps more importantly, it gave me a tool to use in activating curiosity in my students. When we talk about engaging students and making learning fun, I now believe we are in large part talking about activating or satisfying their curiosity. Some of us are naturally curious about the kinds of things that school often deals in — ideas, abstractions, complex technical or theoretical arguments. Scholars love hearing about each other’s research and want to figure out how to solve this or that problem. I’m a naturally abstract kind of person — passionate about ideas, a bit detached from the real world sometimes. But our students? Motivation. This idea about curiosity was with me when Nancy gave her talk about researchers and their habits. She was talking about a very small group of folks — top researchers at elite institutions. They are the embodiment of the information literate person in academia. And I wondered, and asked, how does that look in the workplace? Nancy answered (thinking quickly on her feet) that it’s perhaps someone who is extremely motivated to find good information — to seek out reliable, authoritative sources and not settle for less. I think it was Elisabetta who pointed out that all of Nancy’s researchers were motivated and we could not say the same for all of our students. Which led me back to this idea of curiosity. I looked again at the Framework and the dispositions for the Research as Inquiry frame and one was “Values intellectual curiosity.” Yay! Someone (not me) thought to include curiosity! But as I thought about it some more, I was struck by the qualifier “intellectual.” Isn’t all curiosity intellectual? I hadn’t even questioned that word earlier, but after Anne-Marie’s workshop, which differentiated among types of curiosities, I recognized that I was subjecting students to my own bias in thinking that curiosity is something that some have and some don’t. But, to repeat myself, almost everyone is curious about something. Affect. I led a short workshop on literature reviews for incoming graduate students when I got home. After the workshop, a student approached me. She was an older student who had taken a few years off and was re-entering grad school to work on her dissertation. She said that she had been feeling really hesitant and filled with self-doubt. But after the workshop, she felt a renewed sense of confidence. It wasn’t any specific thing I talked about. It was that as the workshop progressed, she was reminded of the tools available to her, the help available to her, and that there are established ways to investigate and generate research questions. That she isn’t alone. She said, “I feel like I can do this.” I think that as academic librarians, technologists and faculty, we could do worse than to offer our students tools, both abstract and concrete, to support the exploration of their curiosity. We can remind them that they are curious by nature. Being “educated” can mean finding answers to some of their questions, finding that each answer leads to even more questions and that those questions and answers can help them find a place in the world. Motivation can rise from curiosity and once begun, generates its own momentum. We can help students get started by activating their curiosity or help them get going again when their momentum fades or they get stuck. And finally, this is as much about what our students are feeling as what they are thinking. This understanding gave me a new way to look at my students and I’m pretty sure it’s going to lead to new ideas about where I want our instruction program at UNM to go. Thanks AMICAL! If you want to read more about curiosity, I highly recommend Anne-Marie’s writing on the subject. Image credit: Dimana Doneva / See more

AMICAL conferences are always a great opportunity to learn new things, connect with old colleagues and meet new ones. And they are always fun! This year we managed to share more of that special AMICAL juice and spill it all over social media! Here's a collection of attendees' posts during AMICAL 2015. Thank you for sharing!

I am back in Oregon now and my email inbox is under control after a week in Bulgaria at the AMICAL conference. When Dimitris asked if I would write a little piece for this blog about the experience I couldn't pass up the opportunity to say thank you to AMICAL, its members and the conference organizers for the invitation and especially to our hosts at AUBG for the wonderful, wonderful hospitality. I don't think I have ever been so well taken care of at a conference! I taught a pre-conference workshop called It takes a campus: Creating research assignments that spark curiosity and collaboration. This is one of my favorite topics and I spend a lot of time talking about assignment design with librarians and faculty. This workshop had a dual purpose. We talked about the needs and challenges students face, which helps us help them. And we also talked about how we can advocate for our students' needs on campus. All of the activities we did work equally well with students and in faculty/staff/librarian workshops. Here are the slides and handout. The workshop was broken into two parts. In the first half we thought about four factors that significant affect the success of research assignments, particularly with undergraduate students. I argued that good research assignments: ask students to work on real-world tasks introduce students to academic culture provide support when they push students out of their comfort zones build in plenty of opportunities for meaningful feedback Then I asked participants to jump in and think about all four of these factors as they applied to their own teaching goals. Even though this meant trying to do several weeks' worth of work in a few hours - they did amazing work! You can see the results here. (Apologies for my terrible photography) In the second half of the workshop we played with the concepts of curiosity and collaboration. We examined a bunch of random objects and reflected on how curiosity is sparked by many things. We took a variety of research topics and tried to find practical and conceptual connections between them. All of these exercises are designed to help us help students ask better and deeper questions -- a skill that is at the core of the academic research process. Whenever I teach a workshop I learn more from everyone else than they learn from me, and I don't think this was any exception. I got so many new ideas about how these concepts can be used in teaching from the participants in Bulgaria. I arrived home late Monday night and Tuesday afternoon went into my library to teach a workshop for our First-Year Experience faculty, where we did some of the same work. It was wonderful to share what I learned together with the AMICAL attendees with this new group. I couldn't be more grateful that I got the opportunity to attend this conference with this wonderful group of people. Hopefully, I'll have the chance to continue working with this great community in the future. Image credit: Dimana Doneva / See more

This session comprised of three presentations on learning models of information literacy and instructional technology. The session included three presentations: Cognitive apprenticeship: a model for information literacy instruction in a virtual reference environment, by Mary Kickham-Samy Information literacy as complex learning, by Anguelina Popova On the threshold of a new era: information literacy and Generation Z, by Dannie Chalk & Krasimir Spasov In the first presentation, Mary Kickham-Samy highlighted the importance of identifying learning opportunities via virtual reference. She also suggested a cognitive apprenticeship model comprised of six points including modeling, scaffolding, fading, coaching, visibility and meta-cognitive activities. She also suggested some recommendations to make the goals and strategies of information literacy more visible to the students. In the second presentation Anguelina Popova discussed critical thinking exercises and information literacy as complex learning. She discussed the importance of complex learning because it create knowledge, skills and attitudes. She also discussed the four components of information literacy as complex learning including learning tasks, supportive information, procedural information and part task practice. In the last she also mentioned three holistic scenarios of complex learning. The third presentation was a team presentation by Karismir Spasov and Dannie Chalk. The speakers discussed information literacy requirements by generation Z. The speaker discussed presented the background of how the world has changed with the inventions such as the Internet, Google, the iPhone, WiFi and how they affected people's lives. They also discussed that new generation of students dislike traditional lecture method and they see graphics as a quick way to understand. They also presented their experience and research on a cloud-based instructional platform. Image credit: Dimana Doneva / See more

Nancy Fried Foster spoke of her research of the practices of people who do research, in a university environment. Her research is within the overall scope of helping students become Information Literate (IL). (She stated that due to the newness of the research results, some information shown to the AMICAL audience should not be digitized yet.) She places this research within the IL Threshold Concepts model. She described how she wanted to start from the premise--that IL should be defined by the actual practices of productive and excellent researchers. The actual practices of these excellent researchers are not just confined to the office/library environment. The 24 hour movements, activities, and places of such researchers—analyzed within an ethnographic model, could reveal and become the definition of IL. Foster than described several ethnographic study methods, being applied to excellent researchers. The studies are in-progress. The study methods include: Observation; Photo Elicitation Interviews (ref. Douglas Harper method); Map Diaries (ref. Michael Moffitt); Retrospective Interviews (conducted by Merrilee Proffitt at OCLC Research), and the "Day in the Life" approach (referring to a current project by Kornelia Tancheva at Cornell U.). The initial results were shown from these, and other, studies. Overall, the study (singly or combined) results show the relative importance to excellent researchers of: databases, literature searches, known knowledge, footnotes, personal networks, and search engines. The results also indicate how researchers will spend time, in a variety of activities—such as note taking, manuscript preparation, managing documents, interacting with others directly or remotely—which are also important with respect to understanding his/her IL level. She noted the status of the researchers involved as subjects in the studies: mostly upper-level graduate students or junior faculty (Cornell U. study); non-tenure stream faculty (U. of Pittsburg study). Often, the research/IL was taught as part of an English composition course. The heavy usage of junior faculty to teach IL skills and concepts to undergraduates implies that such faculty should be a part of the university's research community. She concluded by emphasizing that she believes the studies show that excellent IL can be described by activity and thought; IL does not remain an abstract concept. The results show the importance of connecting students to researchers (with work and life activity patterns); IL is not a product, it is instead a process.

Anchalee Panigabutra-Roberts (Joy) from the American University in Cairo described preparation for the post-MARC world. She mentioned the relevance of the idea of the Semantic Web, and its description in the 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila. The goal, for libraries (libraries being one part of community of all digitized information, or all metadata) continues to be to move information on the web into web/machine readable data. For libraries, this goal then implies that data elements must be conceptually described in formats focusing on RDF Schema (Resource Description Framework Schema), often abbreviated as RDFS/RDFa. The basic concept of the Semantic Web is that RDFS will allow search results based on links between elements, rather than just frequency of usage of key word(s). Joy then described how the US Library of Congress is initiating a large project, or model, called BIBFRAME which will eventually replace the MARC standards for bibliographic data. The full characteristics of the BIBFRAME model are a work-in-progress, however at its base will be the categories of: Works, Instances, Authorities, and Annotations. BIBFRAME will be applied to serials, and also resources found on the web such as audio and video. Related links: Semantic Web basics Linking Open Data Cloud BIBFRAME initiative