Electronic Green Journal

The intent of this editorial  is to provide a starting point for a more comprehensive assessment of libraries’ progress towards environmental sustainability, and consequently contribute to a discourse on pathways that can enable sustainable development of libraries in the future.

This article summarizes a presentation given at the Amigos Library Services Going Green 2 online conference in November 2010. Embedding green messages within your work, tasks, programs, tools, and teaching will passively or subtly inform others without being forceful. My library at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro recently completed a large ten module research tutorial covering concepts from forming a topic to citing sources. By embedding the theme of recycling throughout the entire tutorial, users become more environmentally literate. This brief article discusses the tutorial project and the usefulness of embedding messages within other academic areas, instruction, projects or activities.

Academic librarians have not fully approached the role they could play in embedding sustainability into information literacy: the process of critically accessing, evaluating and using information. This area is a rich opportunity for libraries to help train students to shift their thinking toward more sustainable models. Because libraries are central to students’ academic investigations, the work of librarians in embedding information literacy across the curriculum is an obvious place to transform the practices of knowledge inquiry. By adapting the national ACRL standards to the cultural, historical, ecological, economic and local environment at the University of Montana, students will be led to recognize the importance of the sustainability, place and impact of the information.

Environmental Science is a high-enrollment, freshman-level course in the Biological Sciences Department at the University of North Texas. Dr. Ruthanne Thompson, one of the Environmental Science professors, asked the library liaison for the Biological Sciences Department to create reading lists to support student debates on evolution and global warming in the course. This paper describes the guidelines established for selecting the readings and the sources that yielded the most suitable readings for the debates. Besides impacting the science education of a large number of college students, the librarian saw an opportunity to introduce a green collaborative approach to the professor. The paper elucidates how the librarian and her graduate assistant used the bibliographic management software RefWorks and its collaborative feature RefShare to collect, organize and share the readings with each other and the professor without printing out any materials. The final reading lists are included as an appendix.

Regular column

Review of Protecting Life on Earth

Review of Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America

Book review

Review of Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse by Dean Bavington

Nature's Northwest: The Pacific Northwest Slope in the Twentieth Century