Tying loose knots
Since I posted about my quest for moon boots the other day I’ve been thinking and rethinking some of my views. I’ve also been using our current housebound-due-to-snow status to catch up on a lot of reading. I suspect I’m about to go on a really long ramble.
I’ve talked in the past about the debate amongst my colleagues at PCC: some of us want to streamline and simplify the home page and others want to put everything conceivably relevant to a student right out there. I have always come down firmly on the side of simplify and streamline for a number of reasons. They’re not original ideas and most revolve around the idea of developing in users a base level of skill and competency that functions in any library system. I also just visually deplore homepages that are crammed full of links and blurbs.
That’s all well and good when you’re operating within a local library context, but what good is it when you’re not talking about the library? Like, when you’re shopping for boots. I realized that I’m asking these sportswear companies to do exactly what I don’t want to do with our website—put stuff front and center so I can find it (or use a reasonably structured schema of some kind). To me library and online retailer are different use environments most of the time, but they probably result in the same expectation from a number of our users.
That’s reminiscent of a conversation over at command-f. I wish I’d been paying attention several weeks ago when it happened, but I’ll just play catch up on my own now.
Essentially, Anne-Marie is riffing on some discussions from the fall OR/WA ACRL meeting. One of the points (attributed to Terry Reese) that really stuck with me is the idea that we need to do more than move the ILS to the network level, we need to shift the entire discovery process to that same level. Not surprisingly the reaction to this statement was varied and emphatic, with some librarians giving the response that Caleb correctly surmises is connected to my thoughts on teaching a systematic approach to research and reference (articles come from databases, databases can usually be found on the library website).
I want to be clear about something here, something that kept coming up for me as I pretended to participate in this conversation. I don’t for a moment suggest or desire that we teach that articles ONLY come from databases. But let’s be very clear about the context I operate within. My students are community college students and their instructors are often, dare I say it, overworked and less-than-imaginative with some assignments. We see students who have been given instructions like “don’t use ___ database, those articles are too easy” and that doesn’t even touch on the “nothing from the Internet” assignments we see weekly. I had to fight with a department chair last year about whether or not Ebsco products contain peer reviewed articles (he doubted the veracity of the student who said the librarian helped her find a peer reviewed article in some Ebsco DB). So when I’m teaching, what I’m really teaching is: here’s how to efficiently and effectively work within the system that you’ve been relegated to. Does that meet the lofty ideals I had in library school, whereby I’d motivate everyone into their own happy info-is-everywhere bubbles? No, but this is reality. Community college reality.
I get 50 minutes, sometimes 110 if I’ve really been working the outreach to that particular faculty. This is not enough time to instill a deep-seated value of information from far-and-wide. It’s probably not even enough to start that conversation with the students. You know the rest of these arguments, they’ve been made by every instructional librarian relegated to the one-shot, I’m sure. The work of groups like OWEAC (The Oregon Writing and English Advisory Committee) and the IL Summit participants make really important steps toward this “more perfect” (heh) end, but they are baby steps and there are so many more to be taken. What those groups will engender for us is a place in curriculum where IL has some mandated support. It doesn’t take us into that philosophical and ideological space where we get warm and fuzzy about information. I don’t know how to get us there. I don’t teach credit classes and it’s a rare pleasure when I see students more than one or two isolated times. I’ll have to count on the credit instruction librarians to let me know what that experience is like. We have a 1 credit class at PCC Library, but even that doesn’t have the room to really get deep with the “creating lifelong learners and productive citizens” (Anne-Marie). It’s an assignment-based class, really, although the assignment isn’t ours.
As noted at command-f, many librarians remain convinced that the local user needs to be connected to local content (quickly). For me this is about two things: practicality (students need snappy turnaround, and they procrastinate like mofos) and pride (more on this in a bit). I totally agree with everyone who wishes we’d stop catering to these last minute people, but I can’t find an actual way to get college students to stop leaving things till the last minute (um, no, you can’t receive that ILL by tomorrow). I think to some extent this is why I want to see our website give some preference toward the moderately information literate user. I require that it be functional and easy for the novice to get in and get out, but I really want it to have something more for the student who really benefits from the experience. I’m hoping that our move to WorldCat Local is going to help us in this quest.
There are going to be new interesting challenges in the WorldCat environment, no doubt. For starters we don’t know how we’re going to limit by campus. This is an important feature, not just for the slaquers, but for the browsers. The people who just want to find the audio fiction while they kill an hour waiting for the shuttle. As my boss is fond of reminding us, this is their library. If they want it to be easy to get a list of the available audio fiction at the building they are already standing in, far be it from me or my system to stand in the way.
The other thing I’m really unsure about is the default location. I believe the default holdings location is local, followed by consortial, followed by WorldCat. I can’t say I’ve worked out what layout works best for which users in which scenarios, but I do know that the decision was probably workflow related. It’s not bad reasoning, libraries are busy and the staff can’t spend a ton of time weeding out requests for things we already own locally, just because someone didn’t notice our holdings. It seems to me that the ultimate solution is moderated by software and interface changes, not by forcing either staff or user to accomodate the system. But we’re not there yet. I don’t have any idea what there looks like. Hm.
Remember I said pride was also at issue here? One of the principle factors is that we’re proud of our systems, tools, environments. We want to promote them to our users. “Learn to use the magical database— it can give you so much.” But should we be proud? I mean to the extent that we’re complacent. You don’t need to read snarky librarian blogs to know that whole aspects of the library experience are completely dysfunctional. Everyone from shelver to director has had some sort of experience with/as a user that confirms this. Obfuscation by call number, crappy interfacing, incomprehensible and aggressive signage.
Read anything related to library history and you are struck immediately by the sweetness of the origins of information and archive management and also with reverence for how far we’ve come. But we seem to be at a total crossroads. We want to give our users everything they could ever need in an easy to use package they never have to leave home to receive but we’re also trying to honor those users for whom the edifice still means something. We’re trying to blend the old track with the new track and coming up with what a DJ would call a trainwreck, except that when a DJ’s trainwreck is caused by technical malfunction we forgive her. When a library’s trainwreck is caused by techinical malfunction it’s something altogether different, I just can’t figure out what.
please, we post almost as often as you do. join in any time. i like reading your thoughts from the ground, as i drift further and further (and farther?) into outer space.