From the Editor
The seams of this issue
of the newsletter are bursting with information about this year's annual
conference in our nation's capital. If you did not make it to Washington
this summer, I hope you will take the time to peruse the committee reports
to get a sense of what was accomplished during the conference. You
will find accounts, not only about the work of LIRT committees, but also
about the instruction-related activities of groups other than LIRT.
And, I hope everyone will read the article by Phil Jones about this year's
very successful LIRT program, "Teaching the Teaching Librarian."
No matter how enormous a given issue of the newsletter becomes, we always loosen the belt enough to make room for practical articles likely to prove useful to instruction librarians. Of our regular columns, one of my favorites is "Check These Out": in every issue, Mary Pagliero Popp provides an annotated bibliography of recent articles about library instruction that helps identify the most interesting instruction articles recently published. Billie Peterson's "Tech Talk," another regular column, makes even the most complicated technology palatable for the rest of us. In addition to these regular features, this issue includes a review of WebCT, an innovative software program for developing interactive courses on the web using only a web browser as the development interface.
For future issues of the LIRT news, the newsletter committee is working to bring you a menu of interesting articles representing instruction in every kind of library--school, public, academic, and special. I hope you will help us by submitting an article on library instruction. We encourage articles of the following kinds:
* Teaching technique articles introduce a technique and show how it can be used in a library instruction setting.
* Successful assignment articles examine a library assignment and show how its success might be replicated in a different environment.
*Technology in teaching articles explain a creative use of technology in the library classroom.
*Review articles provide a summary and evaluation of a book, software, or hardware product that may be of interest to library instructors.
*Focus on Academic/Public/School/Special libraries articles focus on instruction issues that may be of special interest to librarians doing instruction in a particular kind of library.
The newsletter committee's recently completed guidelines for contributors <http://diogenes.baylor.edu/Library/LIRT/> is now available on the web, but if you have additional questions about contributing to the newsletter, please contact me. We hope this newsletter will always provide a balanced diet of news and useful articles about instruction.
David G. Sherwood
Reinert/Alumni Library
Creighton University
2500 California
Plaza
Omaha, NE 68111
Email: davids@creighton.edu
Phone: 402-280-2927
FAX: 402-280-2435