A week of presentations

Last week was a bit busy around here.  In addition to the usual – answering reference questions and teaching classes to introduce university students to library research – I had opportunities to give two presentations of a different sort.

On Monday evening, at the university where I work, I spoke with the students of Dr. Fern Kory's graduate English seminar on youth media reviewing about the historical fiction genre, best practices in reviewing, and the differences between professional reviewing and blogging.  I've put those slides online for anyone interested in taking a look.  I cribbed from past presentations, so a few of the slides may be familiar.



It covered topics I think about and work with every day, as a reviews editor and reviewer, but rarely get the chance to speak about.  The students had good questions.

Then on Wednesday (my birthday!) I headed out to Peoria for the Illinois Library Association conference.  Two library colleagues, Janice Derr and Pam Ferrell, and I gave a presentation Thursday morning on readers' advisory in the academic library, with resources supporting academic libraries' establishment of popular reading collections.  For those slides, which are hosted in EIU's institutional repository, visit the link and click on the Download button.



New knowledge isn't all that I brought home from Peoria, though, since I caught a cold at the conference and have been lying low since, alternately resting and catching up with my overlarge NetGalley queue.  I'm determined to move my "reviewed" percentage a bit higher!