I am Joan Petit, an Instruction and Reference Librarian at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and I’ve been working over the past year to shove my library into the world of 2.0. I’m particularly pleased that I convinced our administration to let me establish a Facebook page for our library, which now has over 800 fans. I also suggested we use LibGuides to replace our outdated subject guides.

A big part of my job revolves around LALT 101, the university’s required information literacy class for undergraduates. Each semester I teach at least two sections of LALT 101, and I also help coordinate it.

We’ve made some big changes to the class since I’ve been here. Last spring we started using a wiki to organize our course content rather than relying on the very clunky course management system. I established the wiki and have primary responsibility for keeping it updated, which includes developing and refining lesson plans for each week and making sure students are connecting with the curriculum.

This past fall, I managed to convince the other instructors to abandon weekly quizzes in favor of a weekly blog entry. This has added some time to librarians’ work load, but our students like blogging, which is new to them and which is particularly satisfying given that this is a required course they usually dread. Plus, our students are now learning more about library research and user-created content beyond Facebook.

I started a blog last year which still has more potential than actual content, and I keep up with librarians in the States and elsewhere via Twitter.