MLIS 2011
Academic Liaison Librarian
San Jose State University
San Jose, CA USA

What I am doing now.

I am a tenure track reference and instruction librarian at the SJSU King Library. I teach information literacy, staff the reference desk, and provide in-depth research assistance for students and faculty. I also manage the library’s print and digital collections in my liaison areas.

Additionally, I work on online instructional design for the library and have made multiple LibGuides for faculty teaching online with our new Learning Management System and for our online students.

I coordinate the Affordable Learning Solutions initiative on campus, which works to replace expensive textbooks with open source educational resources and digital library materials. The initiative seeks to make education more affordable and equitable.

Over the last year I’ve presented practice and research in LIS at Sloan-C’s Symposium for Emerging Technologies for Online Learning, the Hawaii International Conference on Education and will be part of panel on open educational resources at the Association of College and Research Libraries Conference.

What are the most valuable skills I use in my job?

What I learned at SLIS about Academic Librarianship and what you should learn too:

1. Instructional Design & Information Literacy Instruction

• have a teaching philosophy
• know how to develop and express learning outcomes
• be comfortable making information literacy materials for face-to-face and online delivery
• be prepared to teach digital literacy, too!

2. Information Technology Tools & Application

• know how to make a website in a day
• understand ways to analyze user experience
• application and methods of information architecture (How will you arrange and label this for findability?)
• connecting to the people, blogs, social media feeds that help you use the newest tools the fastest

3. Reference (Take LIBR 210!)

• how to get students to tell you their topic and information needs
• best resource for the information need
• search strategies and how to model them

4. Online Searching (Yes, you need this. No, you don’t already know how to do this.)

5. The class I didn’t take but wish I did – Anything about Collection Development and Management

Contact Permission

It is OK to contact this alumni.

Send email to: Christina Mune