shinylib

Info lit or just plain lit?

I really do have great intent when it comes to blogging and posting. I even have a whole stockpile of half-finished drafts that I sift through every so often. I was just cleaning out the less…um…friendly of my drafts (I do actually have a filter, sometimes it even works) and came across this one…

I’m seeing them more frequently these days. They’re in the library just like everyone else, looking for books to flesh out a Works Cited, hoping I can connect them to a movie that will do what the assigned reading did, trying to find a topic for a Writing 121 assignment. I’m talking about potheads, stoners, whatever you want to call them.

Does that mean there’s a connection between marijuana and literacy, marijuana and community colleges, or none of the above? Hm.) I have no personal or professional judgments on those students, but negotiating a reference interview with someone who is actively craving Cheetos and a Slurpee is difficult.

I think I was planning to go somewhere funny with those thoughts, but they are just so true. This year has totally been the year of the stoner in the library. I actually don’t have a problem with that, I just get frustrated with any student who shows up unprepared and expects me to magic them through an assignment.

Let’s not be too hasty to judge, though. One of my favorite outspoken pro-weed students was apparently recently accepted to an ivy league college. Go dude, go!

Movement

There has been some movement on the chat front. We’re working toward a compromise on staffing models that allows everyone to feel comfortable…and still allows me to do an assessment after the first two quarters and adjust staffing as needed based on transaction data.

The key to compromise turned out to be the phone. I just got to a point where I couldn’t understand the intention behind all of the email I was receiving—so I just started calling folks and hashing things out.

I don’t think things will be perfect, they never are, but at least we can start making forward-going movements again.

Stress!

Lemme preface this post by saying I dig and respect my colleagues. I’m about to go on a major rant, but please don’t think I don’t value my coworkers. I am frustrated and emotional and they’re just feeling a bit more like co-irkers than coworkers at the moment. It will pass. If any of my colleagues are reading…well it’s a free world. Go right ahead, just don’t get passive aggressive with me in the workplace. We’re all adults.

As you know from my long-ass-list-of-junk-I’m-working-on-right-now post, we’re trying to get our chat reference program off the ground at PCC Library. This means we’re knee-deep in conversation about how to staff this thing.

I spent months trying to get folks to have a conversation about these things only to be told “yeah yeah sounds good” about my proposed ideas. Sure we can staff chat from the reference desk, it’s just like another phone line, right?

Now that some “practice” (I use the term loosely, very loosely) has actually happened, the librarians are deciding that maybe staffing chat from reference is too hard for them. I don’t think that’s true at all; they’re just scared. I’m really struggling with my boundaries as the web specialist. There’s a real temptation to say, “You know what? That lady who signs the paychecks seems to think I have some expertise in this area. That’s why she made me the web dork librarian. Just do it my way.” Yeah, that will totally make me friends in my library. Only not.

I sent an email to the librarians asking them to have a little faith in me, in the proposed pilot service, in themselves, and to give it the ole college try for Summer and Fall. I made promises to review transaction data and anecdotal responses at the end of Fall and reevaluate the staffing situation then. Data, data, data I kept saying. Why? Because it’s wicked easier to get the boss to sign-off on proposed staffing changes (or, eee, possibly dig up a few more hours for us from somewhere) with numbers in hand. We served X students, Y per cent of whom waited more than 60 seconds for a response. Based on on X and Y we should really try Z for Winter and Spring.

I even had some comments from various managers who saw my email and said that it was a very well-written email that made a lot of sense. So why did I get back what boils down to a “hellz no” from one of our librarians?

I get that things felt scary during practice (when you didn’t even have real patrons yet) but I also know that some of the librarians didn’t actually practice. Of their own admission, whenever a triage situation arose, they just dumped their pretend chat patron. “Oh, someone’s here, gotta go.” Well, that’s not stretching your skills and abilities at all, now is it? You can’t get better at typing “just a minute please, I have someone on the phone. If you need to go make sure to leave your email and I will follow up with you there,” if you’re not actually doing that.

So I’m super frustrated. The counter-proposal from the librarians is to staff reference from shifts in their offices. Remember this is a community college, not some fancy-pants university library. We don’t have the luxury of office hours and pretty much all of our time not spent teaching and manning the desk is spent in meetings or prepping for eleventy-nine other things. So this alleged time in the office doesn’t even exist. To propose that non-existent office time should be used to staff chat is not especially feasible.

There’s also the issue of inequity between campuses. Everyone is stretched thin and doing more with less. For some reason (dates back to before I was here) our librarians really get off on finger-pointing and insisting that things were better before one campus stole the other campus’ part-time librarian hours. At the campus I work for, we’re generally pretty sure that we’re getting the shaft in this battle, but we’re over it. There’s a perception that we have more hours of librarian allotted to us, so we must have it easier. We also see more students, open reference an hour earlier, and often teach WAY more classes…but hey, whatevs.

So I have a lot of fears that this magical librarian-in-an-office solution will really turn into “why don’t you guys do it, you have more librarians”. Which will then boil down to, “Hey Allie can do it all the time. She types more quickly and is better at that stuff.” And I am willing to sell my time. Hour for hour, desk time for chat time—but I don’t think that’s what they had in mind.

I have a lot more I could say on this, but I’m just getting myself irate while at reference. Egad, I can answer questions, the phone, chat, AND write blog posts at the same time. Maybe I am a freaking genius.

</vitriol>

What I’ve Been Doin’

Friends and colleagues were recently ragging on me about the lack of posts here at shinylib. In lieu of an actual post, I’ll just tell you what I’m doing that keeps me too busy to post.

If you work in an academic library, you know that late spring/summer is project season. PCC Library is totally no different, except many of the projects involve me (read: I’m in charge of) this year.

1. Chat reference.
   • PCC Library is finally getting it on virtual style. Our chat reference services will go live the first day of summer term.
   • We’re using Libraryh3lp to power this beast.
   • For some reason I said I’d be the one to do the coding for this. I have been endlessly mangling a copy of the Ask a Librarian page, but I’m getting it there.
   • I also have been powering the training program for the librarians.
     • + all of the documentation
     • + practices and procedures statements
     • + other junk I keep forgetting to plan in advance
2. Subject guides 2.0ish
   • We’re making the jump to using the Library A La Carte system this year. It’s an open source CMSy thing for our subject guides.
     • this involves much development and training: for me, for other librarians, for web team
     • props to my web team for the intense server work, I claim no responsibility for any of that magic
     • endless migration of content. props to my librarians for sucking it up and migrating their own content!
3. Manuscript
   • I’m finally trying to publish that thing. Yeah, that thing.
   • What up with the confusion, Chicago?
   • I’m trying really hard not to stick this on the back burner again. Is it sad that I have relatively little tolerance for anything non-APA?
4. I should really work on publishing that other thing. Which means I need to write it first. Heh.
5. Did you see my post about the CFP for ACRL NMDG @ALA Annual? Putting together an entirely new type of conference program takes some work. Not tons of work yet, but there’s work.
   • Props go to Merinda Hensley and Linda Hofschire for much work here
6. Speaking.
   • At OLA 2009
     • Librarians Can Help Me With That? Getting the Word Out About Your Reference and Instruction Services
   • At Oregon Virtual Reference Summit
     • Face-to-Space: Creating Buy-in for New Virtual Reference Mediums (check for video here, should be up soonish)
7. School is still in session. These are quarters, not semesters, buddy. No intersession here just yet. (That always makes me think of intercision, like do I just cut away the students? And would that make them demons or dæmons?)

And wait, there’s more. But I really don’t have time to talk about it right now. Those were the 8 minutes I had to spare. (:

I’ll leave you with a bonus… I’m just obsessed with this song at the moment.

Make it better

Hey, lucky you. You have this amazing opportunity to help me. I need to rewrite some text and I need inspiration help.

In the PCC environment, when you go from here to some full text

Some back story: Debate amongst librarians ensues. MANY suggestions are made. None really rock.This text displays on a mostly blank screen for a bit while the resolver connects the user to the full text.

The complaint is that people think nothing is happening and quit. Not something I’ve witnessed—doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Try Here link connects users to a list of options which include any available full text access and various ILL options, etc.

Call for Presenters: ACRL New Members Discussion Group

The ACRL New Members Discussion Group invites the submission of proposals for presentation at its meeting at the 2009 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, IL on Saturday, July 11, 2009.

The ACRL New Members Discussion Group is for new (and aspiring) academic librarians. We meet twice a year–at both ALA conferences–to chat about whatever is on our minds. It’s an opportunity for networking and a friendly place to ask any questions you have about succeeding in ACRL. Presenters at this meeting have the opportunity to contribute to the professional development of other academic librarians, gain conference presentation experience, and build their CV.

Our meeting topic for the conference is “The Publication Process: Getting Published in LIS Journals.” We are interested in presentations that share personal experiences with the publication process, that will help new and aspiring academic librarians gain a better understanding of the various steps that are involved in this process. We seek proposals for presentations that address this topic from a variety of angles, including (but not limited to):

-Planning a systematic research program
-The publication process: Generating topics, writing up and submitting the manuscript, working with an editor, responding to reviewers, etc.
-Targeting various journals for publication
-What to do if your manuscript is not accepted

The ACRL New Members Discussion Group meeting will take place on Saturday, July 11, 2009, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Presenters should plan to speak for 10 minutes and allow 5 minutes for questions/discussion. There will be three presentations. Following the presentations, we will open the floor for discussion on the topic, or we can answer your questions about getting involved in national activities and/or academic librarianship in general.

Proposals are due by June 8, 2009. Notification of acceptance will be made by June 15, 2009. Please include the following information in your proposal:

1. A cover sheet with your name, title, institutional affiliation, mailing address, phone number, and email address.
2. A second sheet that contains no identifying information and includes the title and a 200-300 word description of your presentation. The description should clearly identify the topic of your presentation, your personal experience with this topic, and how your presentation will contribute to new and aspiring librarians’ understanding of the publication process.
3. Keep in mind that there will be no use of technology for these presentations. Feel free to bring handouts if you’d like to provide a list of further reading, etc.

Please submit proposal by email to Merinda Hensley (ACRL Convener) at mhensle1@illinois.edu

{I’ll talk more about this in a future post, but I hope you’ll consider submitting a proposal. We’re trying to shake things up and get new blood involved in ACRL–the only way to do that is to participate.}

Conversations

I had an interesting conversation with a student tonight. She mentioned that she had just transitioned from English language learner classes to “regular” college classes.

The writing class she ended up in focuses on political themes and she said she felt completely unprepared for political language. I hadn’t really thought about that. Sure the classes prepare you for basic college English, but then you end up in a Writing 121 that focuses on the 60s and you’re trying to decipher peacenik-speak anti-hippie rhetoric.  Or you end up in the writing class focused on popular culture references that are completely out of your framework. Most of the time students have no idea what kind of writing class it will turn out to be. As far as I know it’s completely at the discretion of the instructor. Sure the student could drop the class and try to take a different section, but that’s a total crapshoot when you’re competing with thousands of other students for the right spot in the right class at the right time on the right campus. Ugh, I don’t envy them.

What she didn’t say, but would have been completely justified in doing so, was that on top of this there’s the added layer of research language for which no one had prepared her either. As we looked at a few results in a fairly basic database search I could see her almost physically shrinking away from the screen. I backed up a few steps and tried to give her a basic rundown of what a database is and does (she’d already identified a need for articles, not books) and I think that was working for her.

I think on a more fundamental level she was struggling to understand why I was being so helpful. Maybe she was trying to figure out why someone had sent her to me in the first place (I got the distinct impression she didn’t wander in on her own). I finally realized she just hadn’t ever worked with a librarian. Once I figured that out I could assert the it’s my job factor in a convincing manner. I think we’re in good shape for a future visit.

I just wish her paper wasn’t due Monday. Or that she’d come in sooner. Something. It’s hard to go from zero to research in a short period of time.

Pretentious…language…dork

I usually get perturbed with faculty who refer to our instructional services as presentations, orientations, and other non-teaching language. It’s recently occurred to me that this mostly just makes me a pretentious dork.

I still think it is important that our colleagues value and understand what we do (teaching) but I’m realizing that many of them are simply lacking the language to describe what we do. It might sound ridiculous to suggest that a teacher cannot describe teaching but from their perspective they lack the language to describe librarianship. It’s just that no one’s ever told them that we teach. After all, the last librarian many of them spent any time with was 15-30 years ago in primary and secondary school. If that was your most recent experience with a librarian you might not know what we do either.

Add to this the fact that most of them have never seen our styles of instruction (creative, innovative, multimedia, collaborative, etc.) and…well, you see where I’m going.

I’m trying to look for the intent behind the language to help me understand how to respond. For instance, a health sciences faculty member contacted me for help with something recently and after I connected her to what she needed, she thanked me for giving her a tutorial. At first I wondered who in their right mind would call that a tutorial, but then I realized what she was saying was “thank you for the service you provide.” And isn’t that enough? Maybe I can let the semantics go for once…

Citation Woes

Hm. I am bummed. I just got word that a nursing student has threatened to file a grievance against one of the nursing faculty. The student received a poor grade on a paper due to the ridiculously non-APA citations she submitted.

The student alleges that a librarian told her that the citations were fine. She also claims that “some program” made the citations for her. I’m looking at the student’s works cited list and I can confidently say that she may have used various citation helps that came from within different databases, but no single tool generated these cockamamie citations.

Having said that, I don’t believe the student was intentionally doing anything untoward (despite the fact that her first citation comes from Homer & Simpson, 2007). When I check in Academic Search Premier, sure enough the database is generating incorrect APA citations. Each citation the student gave has the exact same flaw in the date section.  This tells me that she decided that Ebsco should do a better job than she would of providing citations and she went back and edited each of hers to match the date formatting given by the database.

Sigh. Add to this that only some of the Ebsco suite of databases provide DOIs for APA citations and others stilll use a Database name and retrieval date and we’ve got an intensely sticky situation. Others of our databases just don’t provide citation assistance–in the past that really vexed me but now I’m kind of wishing that none of them did if this is how it’s going to go.

One of our library faculty has suggested that we propose to all subject faculty who assign APA that they just accept incorrect APA citations until such time as the databases have caught up but I find that idea deplorable. You’ll be hard-pressed to convince me to teach students to do things incorrectly just because it saves a headache in the long run.

I have a lot more to think and say about citation styles, but first I need to finish prepping my talk for tomorrow. You can find me at the 2009 Oregon Virtual Reference Summit, where I’ll be speaking about creating buy-in for new reference mediums.

#amazonfail

I’ve clearly been under a rock recently and so missed the news about Amazon’s ridiculous failures in de-ranking. Y’know, where they “inadvertently” removed the sales rankings in many books with gay or lesbian themes in them somewhere. Something to do with adult content. NPR explains. Tweeple are outraged. Amazon blames some French guy.  Tweeple apologize, sort of.

People in the tubes are predictably upset and I was kind of surprised when I was reading some of the comments at NPR.

Comments include sentiments similar to JustAnnie’s proclamation that she’s pretty much done with Amazon forever; feeling both lied to and discriminated against are more than she can take. Purly and others assert that Jeff Bezos is not a prude or a conservative and Amazon clearly fumbled here but meant no harm.  Clearly people are taking this stuff very seriously, very personally.

I guess when I heard and read about the issue it never occurred to me to think that someone made this decision on discriminatory grounds, for personal reasons. As noted in the NPR comments, Amazon has had financial success selling any number of adult books in the past (hey, not everyone wants to lurk around the OPAC looking for su:erotic fiction) so I don’t think it makes sense to assume any scenario in which they make it harder to sell something that’s got to be doing well.

I think this is what happens when you taxonomize in a vacuum. It seems perfectly clear to me that some well-meaning team of geeks (or some po’ French dude, apparently) somewhere structured this puppy in to existence. I’m sure there was an intent to make those materials more easily searchable by the folks who are looking for them and less prominently visible to folks who’d rather not know about those results. Bingobango and a few keystrokes later it’s done. Okay, we know it took longer than that. There were a number of D&D breaks and quests for cheese.

What I think is interesting is what this guy says over here, that no one else seems too worried about (emphasis added):

Daisey: I doubt anything will happen. While embarrassing to the public, it will fade quickly as the changes get reverted. Amazon is no longer the company it once was: it’s just an online Wal-Mart. Like any behemoth, there’s little accountability inside the bubble.

More interesting is that everyone in publishing entrusts their rankings and status to a single provider. That’s the story no one likes thinking about in publishing.

That bit about publishing and rankings gives me the heebies.  Pervasive Amazon is always a bit creepy to me. It first happened when the Amazon/Target thing happened.  I’ve talked about how we’re switching (PCC) to WorldCat Local soon (nowish, in fact) and one of the features you can enable in WCL involves rankings from Amazon. I’ve been wondering what the hell OCLC were thinking, and they’ve been asked as much at meetings I’ve attended and no one can say why they felt embedding Amazon ratings (and links to purchase materials) was necessary. Or maybe they were rankings. What’s the difference between a rating and a ranking? And where do reviews come in? Anyway. I’m not entirely opposed to giving people rankings or purchasing options, I just think it would be great to select those sources on our own. Then I’d send people to somewhere local and save on shipping and emissions.

Monoliths are another story, nothing there surprises me. I just like that phrase about the bubble. *eyes the ALA bubble warily*