Esther Grassian - Home

Esther Grassian received an MLS in 1969 from the UCLA Graduate School of Library and Information Science (in later years joined with the UCLA Graduate School of Education and renamed the UCLA Information Studies Department). She retired from the UCLA College Library in June 2011 after 41 years serving in a variety of reference, instruction and management positions, including Reference/Instruction Librarian, Electronic Services Coordinator, Instruction Coordinator, Interim Head of College Library, and Information Literacy Librarian. She was awarded Librarian of the Year in 1995 by the Librarians Association of the University of California, Los Angeles Division, and in 1998, was granted Distinguished Librarian status by the UCLA Library. As of February 2015, she is a part-time Adjunct Librarian at Pierce College, one of the nine Los Angeles Community Colleges.

She and Joan R. Kaplowitz designed a 4-unit, Quarter-long graduate course in information literacy instruction in 1989 and alternated teaching it most years to MLIS students in the UCLA Information Studies Department, though Esther has been teaching it herself for several years. In addition, Ms. Grassian designed and has taught one-unit UCLA undergraduate information literacy courses for the UCLA English Composition Department and the UCLA Honors Program.

She has also held elected and appointed positions in information-literacy-related organizations, including serving as a member of the first ACRL Institute for Information Literacy Advisory Board, the group that established the ACRL Information Literacy Immersion Programs, under the direction of Cerise Oberman. Ms. Grassian also served as Chair of the ACRL Instruction Section, Chair of the California Clearinghouse on Library Instruction, South (now called ACRL CARL SCIL), and Founding Chair of LILi (Lifelong Information Literacy), a multi-type library group.

Her publications include the ACRL Instruction Section’s 2004 award-winning Information Literacy Instruction: Theory and Practice (2001; second edition 2009), as well as Learning to Lead and Manage Information Literacy Instruction (2005), and the “Information Literacy Instruction” article in the 3d edition of The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (2010), all co-authored with Joan R. Kaplowitz. In February 2005, she wrote a response to Stanley Wilder's Chronicle of Higher Education essay, "Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong Assumptions." Her response was titled "Information Literacy: Wilder Makes (Some Right, But) Many Wrong Assumptions" (pdf). She also wrote Thinking Critically About World Wide Web Resources (1995) and Thinking Critically About Web 2.0 & Beyond (2006). In addition, she created Teach Information Literacy & Critical Thinking! , a site which includes many of her exercises, handouts and slideshows, all freely downloadable under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. In addition, she has written magazine articles including “Building on Bibliographic Instruction,” published in American Libraries in October 2004 and “Do They Really Do That? Librarians Teaching Outside the Classroom,” published in Change in May 2004.

In Second Life (SL), as Alexandria Knight, she established and managed the UCLA Library in Cybrary City from 2006-2011, and co-managed Entropia, the CLIR/DLF island from 2008-2010. She has helped orient a number of UCLA faculty, staff and students to SL, and has done presentations about SL within SL, as well as in RL (Real Life). She and Rhonda Trueman (Abbey Zenith) have co-authored "What's In It For Me? Professional Development in Virtual Worlds," in Advancing Library Education: Technological Innovation and Instructional Design, edited by Ari Sigal. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2013.

Ms. Grassian has also done a number of presentations and workshops, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally, including the keynote for the 2010 Georgia Conference on Information Literacy. The slide show (in two parts) and bibliography for her address, "Dream a Little Dream of US... United for Success!" and her accompanying "IL Partnership IQ (Institutional Quotient) Self-Test," all freely available for downloading.

She was invited to serve as a speaker at the Plenary session and conduct a Master Class in information literacy for the October 2011 Belarusian Library Association Conference in Minsk, Belarus. In addition, while in Minsk, she was invited to do a presentation to the students and faculty of the Information & Documentation Communications Department of the Belarusian State University of Culture and Arts, as well as a workshop for public library librarians in Belarus. This trip to Belarus was supported by the U.S. Embassy in Minsk, Belarus, through Fulbright grant funds. Copies of her slide shows and handouts are freely available for downloading in English and in Russian (русский), under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

June 2012, Ms. Grassian delivered the keynote at the LOEX of the West Conference in Burbank, California. Her keynote address, results of an informal survey she conducted in Spring 2012, and other materials are freely available for viewing and downloading, under a Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

During the week of August 27, 2012, she did nine 2-hour interactive information literacy workshops for librarians and faculty at the University of San Diego. Topics ranged from the history and evolution of the modern information literacy movement, to selecting, designing and revising instructional methods and materials, active learning and critical thinking, faculty/librarian collaboration, and more. Contact Esther Grassian for information on arranging for these kinds of workshops, including fees.

In October 2013, she did a workshop at the first European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL), entitled "How to Identify and Analyze Instructional Problems." (See the tab for ECIL 2013 above, for downloadable materials.) She, Valerie Hill and Sheila Webber also did a poster session for ECIL 2013, entitled "Moving Toward Global Information Literacy (IL) 3.0."

She was greatly honored to be named the 2014 Miriam Dudley Instruction Librarian by the ACRL Instruction Section. She was also greatly honored to be presented with the 2015 Distinguished Alumni Award by the UCLA Librarian and Information Science Alumni Association (LISAA).