the future of stuff and things and instruction
OK, so…I’m still out here in the world. I have been taking a lot of time to deal with—and reflect on—life. During this time I have been thinking a lot about the future. Many futures, really.
To some extent I am thinking about a less expensive immediate future of things and services, meaning I’m trying to save money and live more cheaply. In some ways it is easier than I imagined, I love to cook so stashing away endless of my own frozen convenience meals is handy, cheap, and fun. In other areas it has not been as easy as I was hoping. It turns out that I really am not sure that I am willing to live without HBO, Showtime, or Bravo. These are all channels that require more expensive living. Ugh.
I’m also thinking about the future in a personal where-do-I-fit sense. Big shifts in my personal life + super long roadtrip home this last summer (California, the Bay Area) have me thinking about how to relate to the world, my place in the world (please say I’m something more than just a librarian!), and all the junk a person normally thinks during major life changes.
On top of this I am thinking a lot about the future of libraries. Partly I am thinking about this because I’ve been working on slacking on a group project in which we spent time envisioning Oregon libraries about 10 years hence.
I actually had been kind of avoiding these topics (largely impossible, but I can stick my head in the sand with the best of ‘em) so last summer, when I was more actively engaged in the project, I decided to do a little Google-fu for posicore futures for libraries. I found some snippets in an LJ article wherein both JFW and José-Marie Griffiths are riffing about the future of libraries and librarians.
JFW suggests that we’re going to be moving into the “ideas business” while Griffiths suggests that the future is perhaps more about librarians than libraries, with collections that don’t need to physically reside in one location. All of this got me thinking two things: distributed and decentralized—not just items, but people and services.
I think there are a number of ways to contemplate distributed, decentralized library services. I have been thinking about my instruction environment, since that is the place I am mostly obviously hammered for time and resources this year. We’ve seen a districtwide enrollment increase of +20% over last year. Some campuses are up 24%, distance learning is up 16%—32% of our students attend more than one campus . Full-time faculty librarians? We still number seven. At my campus we are turning down library instruction requests, and that bums me out…a lot.
How can we premediate elements of library instruction in a way that is effective and engaging yet maintains asynchronous elements? I think it’s strictly a matter of precedent and ego that keeps us convinced that our librarian presence is the most important part of library instruction. It really isn’t. For inspiration I have been looking to conference and workshop models, there has been quite a lot of innovation there in the past five years or so. Of necessity, those sorts of programming models have to figure out how to convey a large volume of information, in a short period of time, to a crowd who probably paid to be there and thus has really particular (and likely varied) expectations. Sounds a lot like your typical college classroom to me.
What are the elements of your usual one-shot library instruction session that you could deliver in an asynchronous, premediated format? What do you teach that’s usually met with a groan and a chorus of “Ugh, I’ve done this five times already this year!” What do you teach that you are pretty certain wouldn’t actually work without you in the room?
I’m certain that the first thing I could cross off of my list is tours. I hate giving library tours. I feel like they are a complete and total waste of my time. It’s not that I don’t think tours themselves are useful, but I am pretty sure we could slap one into video format and you could tour the library from off-campus. I’m pretty sure we could slap one into audio format and you could listen to it on headphones or cell phone while touring yourself around the library. I think that classroom faculty would appreciate losing less valuable time to the tour also. Just assign it to the student to do and move on. I don’t think that means we’d never conduct in-person tours, there are still groups who benefit from the face time. But let’s face it…at whatever salary you make as a librarian, you are way too expensive to be pulling a Vanna White over in the periodicals. Okay, so Vanna made more than our wildest dreams, but you know what I’m sayin’…