Lily Todorinova

Information Literacy in a Global Context

Lily Todorinova — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:30:30 PDT

University of South Florida

Lily Todorinova — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:26:03 PDT

Untapped Resources: Graduate Assistants and Collection Development

Lily Todorinova et al. — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:00:07 PST

In response to budgetary crises, academic libraries are often forced to relegate traditionally professional librarian duties to student assistants, paraprofessionals, and other support staff. Among the newly transferred roles is collection development including the analysis, selection, and maintenance of materials and resources. Review of the literature reveals that this trend has substantially grown over past years; however, the scope and level of responsibility of the transferred projects has been limited. Additionally, the literature severely lacks mention of the roles played by graduate students working in academic libraries, while pursuing their MLIS degrees. The objective of this session is to explore the use of graduate student assistants working toward their MLIS degree in the conduction of complex collection evaluation, selection, and analysis from the perspective of one graduate student assistant and one professional academic librarian. The attendees will learn about the benefits of involving graduate student assistants in the collection development process, in terms of the need to acquire hands on experience prior to first-time professional employment, issues of current subject specialty knowledge, curatorial objectivity, and professional development in the mentor-mentee relationship.

Making Decisions: Using Electronic Data Collection to Re-Envision Reference Services at the USF Tampa Libraries

Lily Todorinova et al. — Wed, 18 May 2011 07:09:46 PDT

Declining reference statistics, diminishing human resources, and the desire to be more proactive and embedded in academic depart- ments, prompted the University of South Florida Library to create a taskforce for re-envisioning reference services. The taskforce was charged with examining the staffing patterns at the desk and developing recommendations to give librarians greater flexibility and to better respond to the information-seeking needs of users. These recommendations were based on statistics of desk usage, collected with the newly adapted online tool Desk Tracker, and structured interviews with library administrators. The taskforce was interested in how these stakeholders use quantitative data in decision making.

Exploring Writing and Research Connections

Lily Todorinova et al. — Tue, 17 May 2011 13:57:18 PDT

Writing Center and Library Collaboration: A Telephone Survey of Academic Libraries

Lily Todorinova — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 08:00:09 PDT

Writing and researching are highly interrelated processes and there is much overlap between the goals and responsibilities of writing center staff and librarians. There is little evidence, however, that partnership between writing centers and libraries has been instituted as standard practice in academic institutions. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to explore the current state of the relationship between the writing center and the library. A telephone survey was administered to librarians in a sample of 268 academic institutions. The results indicated that only 26.7% of libraries actively collaborate which their university’s writing center. A strong majority of the non- collaborating institutions (74%) expressed a willingness to do so in the future, while 85.7% of the collaborating institutions thought that the program was effective in increasing the writing and researching skills of students. In the libraries where collaboration was either not possible or not desirable, the main reasons, which were interpreted from the librarians’ responses, included lack of resources, a disconnect between theory and practice, and cultural issues.