LJ Movers & Shakers 2010: Fearless Innovator

Fearless Innovator Jason Puckett is known for harnessing new technology for library users and fellow librarians. Consultant and trainer Beth Gallaway (Information Goddess Consulting, Hampton, NH) describes him as both an early adopter and a “fearless innovator.”

Puckett is particularly proud of his work teaching and promoting the open source citation manager Zotero. He's responsible for generating interest and enthusiasm for Zotero in jobs at Georgia State University (GSU) and Emory, where both libraries had supported EndNote exclusively before he arrived. He created a guide to Zotero (research.library.gsu.edu/zotero) that “integrates live chat with a librarian, a comparison to other similar tools, and helps students connect to other Zotero users,” says Gallaway. The university allowed him to put a Creative Commons license on it, enabling many other libraries to copy and adapt the guide.

Puckett and former colleagues Anna Van Scoyoc and Rachel Borchardt (“two of the best instruction librarians I know,” he says) developed and now coproduce the podcast “Adventures in Library Instruction.” An innovative professional development tool for instructional librarians in the form of a monthly discussion show, the podcast includes interviews and guests. “We talk about anything and everything library instruction—theories, ideas, experiences, experiments, and just cool stuff we've heard about,” says Puckett.

He uses podcasting for library marketing and instruction to students, having developed sessions at Emory and GSU. He writes and speaks on how to podcast, most recently at the Internet Librarian conference.

Gallaway likes the “sense of fun” Puckett injects into his work by bringing in popular culture. He even used The Simpsons TV program as an example for limiting searches to exclude nonrelevant results. This embrace of where students are at was also illustrated last June when he developed a multidisciplinary library display on video games and virtual worlds to give students ideas about how they might write about gaming for their classes. He shared the concept on the Games in Libraries podcast and via Flickr and his own web site.

“While Jason is a fearless innovator in experimenting with technology, he is very selective and uses technology that is relevant,” Gallaway adds. “He shares what he does with it and, in true gamer fashion, evaluates the results, then moves on to something else.”