shinylib

The Oregonian takes a stab at infographics using US Census Data.

The Oregonian takes a stab at infographics using US Census Data.

economic inequality and other ravings…

I wrote this as a response to a conversation going on elsewhere about police use of racial profiling. Turned out to be a discussion in which many folks discussed issues of financial inequality and ethnicity so I ended up riffing on those topics a bit. Much of what I am responding to is the assertion that certain people are poor because they spend money unwisely – on items such as rims – and that these expenditures are indicators of certain things (using stereotypes for profiling). I don’t have any personal issues with the folks who assert these ideas, I’m simply working to do some evidence based education.

I wanted to respond in an evidence based method and not an emotional response but it is tricky – hopefully I’ve succeed in keeping my language fairly neutral and judgement free. I do want to suggest to everyone that social injustices never have simple causalities. To say that some folks exhibit the behaviors they do (say, suggesting that purchasing moderately priced “bling” type items is a reason for economic disparity) is oversimplified and insulting. At the same time, stereotypes persist because there is often an element of truth to them. The thing to keep in mind is that truth is subjective and that there are as many, if not more, people who are exceptions to “the rule” as there are rules.

There is a long history regarding economic inequality and leisure spending amongst marginalized cultures in developed nations. Simply put – poor folks spend money on things like televisions, fancy rims, and clothes because all humans have an innate desire for leisure. Can’t afford to take the whole family to Disneyland? Buy a television and a happy meal, it’s affordable in the short term even if in the long term there are problems.

We also have a tendency to conflate wealth and income, and they are in fact very different things. Income is about wages and wealth is about assets (take what you own, then subtract what you owe). These things are very much tied to social injustices (such as lack of quality educational resources). For example, “in 2004, the median net worth for white families was $140,700, but for African American families it was $20,000, and for Latino families it was $18,600. In 2004, 75 percent of whites were homeowners, while only 48 percent of African-Americans and 50 percent of Latinos owned their own homes.” [Lui, M., & United for a Fair Economy. (2006). The color of wealth: The story behind the U.S. racial wealth divide.] To suggest that buying spendy rims is the reason for this disparity is ludicrous. That’s one hell of a lot of spinners, y0.

Also keep in mind that economically disadvantaged people often have quite a lot less access to financial literacy education (also nutrition education). Simply put, if your family has always been poor and struggling there often isn’t anyone to teach you budgeting, how to write a cover letter (to present yourself more effectively in the pursuit of wages), to advocate for yourself in the mortgage process, to avoid payday loan scams, and other such skills. Not having these skills puts a person at a disadvantage and perpetuates cycles of institutionalized inequality. It should be evident to everyone living in the PDX metro area that economic injustice impacts folks of all ethnic and cultural groupings. What’s apparently less evident to folks is how things gotthat way. If you’d like to learn more about how and why migration has happened around the region, going back to the 30s and 40s, I recommend viewing the documentary Northeast passage : the inner city and the American dream. Or, simply Google “Portland Oregon redlining” to learn about the illegal institutionalized practices of systematic disinvestment in African American neighborhoods in PDX. Put simply, brokeass black folks live in brokeass Portland neighborhoods because the City of Portland put them there and stopped investing in the neighborhood. You lose pride in the place you live, you join a gang to survive (get money), you end up driving around with your middle finger up screaming “fuck this place” because hey – it already fucked you.

My point? Stereotypes have truth in them, those truths are often assigned from internal and external points of interaction. Let us please respect one another enough to dig for truths and not simply rely upon the surface view, which is flawed and inaccurate. This is the problem with institutionalized profiling: it is flawed and inaccurate and based upon very skewed impressions of “people” in various “groupings”.

http://www.youtube.com/v/-4CV05HyAbM?version=3 Information R/evolution (by mwesch)

http://www.youtube.com/v/-4CV05HyAbM?version=3

Information R/evolution (by mwesch)

ilovecharts: Am I a Size 4 or a Size 10? Tackling the Crazy Quilt of Sizing Oddly enough, my father

ilovecharts: Am I a Size 4 or a Size 10? Tackling the Crazy Quilt of Sizing Oddly enough, my father

hungoverowls: “Sorry about being out of touch lately, I’ve been catching up on my…uh…books. Yep. Jus

hungoverowls: “Sorry about being out of touch lately, I’ve been catching up on my…uh…books. Yep. Jus

ilovecharts: via bandragirl

ilovecharts: via bandragirl

http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Fplaylists%2F737966 off

http://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Fplaylists%2F737966

officialbeastieboys:

Good people, unfortunately due to circumstances beyond our control, the “clean” version of our new album, The Hot Sauce Committee pt 2 has leaked. So as a hostile and retaliatory measure with great hubris we are making the full explicit aka filthy dirty nasty version available for streaming on our site. We hope this brings much happiness, hugs, and harmony. Enjoy Kikoos for life!

Thank you,

The Management

ALA 2011 Program Topic Survey: ACRL New Members Discussion Group

ACRL New Members Discussion Group (NMDG) is planning its 2011 ALA Annual Program and we’d like your help to choose the topic.

What do you think is most important to new librarians and new members of ACRL? Take our online survey at http://bit.ly/fx3ne7

New Members Discussion Group is dedicated to helping new ACRL members navigate both professional organizations and their careers.

post-ACRL braindump

Note: this is really just the conference writeup from MPOW. I’ll try to say something else soon.

I gave my talk Wednesday night on options for engagement and professional development within ACRL. This was the biggest audience I’ve ever addressed, with about 500 people in attendance.  There aren’t any slides or handouts that accompanied my talk, but it was basically about how to get involved at either the division, committee, or individual level (nationally, for the most part) and what the benefits of such engagement might be. I encouraged attendees to think critically about their goals personally and professionally and to make strategic moves within the association that would aid in meeting those goals.

Thursday

Ask Them – They’ll Tell you! Eliciting Student Perspectives to Improve Services
[ article | slides]

Library web pages provide the main access points to many of the library’s services and resources. But how well do they really serve students? In this session, find out how a small college uses quick and inexpensive methods to grab student perspectives in order to help revise web pages and provide follow-up assessment. Insights gleaned additionally highlight gaps in learning better addressed by teaching and other services.

Delivering a WOW User Experience: Do Academic  Libraries Measure Up?
[article | handout]

The annual Great Retail Shopping Experiences survey identifies the qualities that contribute to a WOW experience, a user experience that is extraordinary. This paper closely replicates the survey to determine the extent to which academic librarians and their user communities agree on whether the library delivers a WOW experience. Attendees will learn how engagement, executional excellence, brand experience, expediting and problem recovery come together for the academic library WOW experience.

Five qualities of a WOW experience

• Engagement – being polite, caring and genuinely interested in listening and helping
• Executional excellence – outstanding knowledge of the products and ability to explain them
• Brand experience – appealing design and atmosphere making customers feel they are special
• Expediting – helping speed the process to save customers time and sensitivity to their time constraints
• Problem recovery – fix it quickly and make it right

Research Overview

• Would students see their library experience as a WOW experience?
• Have students answer selected Retail Study questions for library and retail
• Have staff complete survey from perspective of the student (!!!)

Examined Nine Attributes

• Product availability (book)
• Ease of finding product
• Greeting/acknowledgment
• Were the right questions asked
• Were the staff interested in you
• Evidence of executional excellence
• Sensitive to your time
• Patient and caring
• Problem resolution

Key Findings

• Student respondents at both institutions rate the library experience superior to their retail store experience (lookout for bias here)
• Staff consistently think that students will rate the retail store experience superior to the library experience (excepting “executional excellence”)
• Bottom line – we are doing a better job at delivering WOW than we think we are

Takeaways

• Academic librarians are capable of delivering a WOW experience
• Use these findings to focus staff energy in designing a WOW library experience
• The survey instrument is included with the paper – replicate at your library
• Use what you learn to start a discussion about UX at your library

User Experience as Professional Development: Transforming Services Through Collaborative Assessment
[article | handouts 1, 2, 3]

How do patrons experience the services we deliver? In 2008, a team of academic librarians explored this question in the context of virtual reference through a process of transcript analysis and discussion. Their findings (or discoveries) challenged perceptions of quality reference services, and resulted in an innovative model of professional development grounded in engagement and self-reflection. Literature related to critical reflection and transformational learning validates this ‘discovery’ process for adult learners.

E-Science, the Next Step in Information Literacy: The What & How of E-Science for Librarians
[handout]

Scientists and librarians discuss the emerging area of e-science, what it is, how it is used, how librarians can support scientists’ efforts, and how librarians can teach users to make better use of the resources that are available.

I left this session early as it was very high level and seemed to be a discussion of favorite collaborative e-science web spaces. My basic takeaway was: “e-science is networked data-driven science”

Taming Lightning In More Than One Bottle: Implementing a Local Next-Generation Catalog Versus a Hosted Web-Scale Discovery Service
[article | slides]

This session will compare implementing the VuFind “next-generation catalog” and Serials Solutions’ Summon “Web-scale discovery service” at an academic library. Different though complementary, and both positively disruptive, these systems each offer easier searching for users through leveraging metadata. The session will focus on aspects of each implementation including purpose, function, architecture and development model, faceted interface, metadata management and interoperability, governance and project management, and differing perceptions and feedback from librarians and users.

I had hoped this session would talk about the experiential differences between these types of products, but was largely a case study explaining the migration process within one library. Bottom line: library faculty and staff had relatively low trust because they did not understand how the indexing and retrieval functions worked, which lead to less willingness to teach the product in instruction sessions. Students behaved more or less the way students do, with less impetus to search multiple discreet collections unless somewhere in the process they were told explicitly that there’s merit in searching multiple sources. These types of tools bring “ever-quickening change cycles” and this requires adaptation, emphasis on communication to build trust and manage expectations. “Discovery can solve more problems than it exposes.”

When User Research meets Software Development: the eXtensible Catalog
[slides | website]

The eXtensible Catalog (XC) provides a fully-customizable open source discovery layer that enables a library to serve the unique needs of its users without heavily investing in custom programming. This presentation will showcase the XC User Interface, describe how its design was informed by user research, and explain how XC software empowers libraries to take control of how they present library resources to their users online.

More excellent work from the University of Rochester (in partnership with Cornell University, Ohio State University, and Yale University), building upon The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester (yanno, that big study they did that we all reference from time to time) to put control of the discovery environment into the hands of the library itself by building a homegrown discovery tool (eXtensible Catalog, called XC). XC is a highly configurable, modular open source catalog built on standards and protocols.

The presenter spoke quite a lot about the user research that went into developing the catalog and what the implications of those findings were in terms of development (see slides for more). I was really impressed with the quality of the discovery tool and the user research that went into the development of such. I don’t think for even a second that we’re ready for this sort of solution at PCC, but it was very interesting and I will definitely make a report to the Alliance.

The Librarian as Situated Educator: Instructional Literacy and Participation in Communities of Practice
[slides]

Whether or not “instruction” appears in our job titles, librarians in the academy are increasingly in the position of teaching our users, colleagues, and peers. Despite this reality, faculty and student perceptions of librarians often do not adequately reflect an awareness of this changing role. At a time of massive transition in higher education, the library’s pedagogical mission must be integrated more meaningfully into the learning and research communities that comprise our institutions. This process is inhibited in part by the collective challenge of developing on-the-ground instructional literacy: library professional education has not kept pace with the escalating need for preparation in pedagogy and instructional design, creating widespread demand for viable, on-the-ground instructor development strategies. At the same time, we seek outreach and integration strategies to cultivate awareness of our ability to participate in and contribute to learning communities.

This talk by Char was definitely one of the most well attended of the entire conference (I’d hazard a guess she easily had more folks listening than did Raj Patel). It’s relatively hard to distill the content of a high level talk about being an effective, reflective teacher into takeaway notes.

In a nutshell:

Whereas librarians in higher education

1) are uniquely suited to facilitating academic growth through objective interpersonal and intellectual mentorship,

2) are unequivocally equipped to observe, understand, and reflect our academic communities,

3) and possess an unassailably strong conviction of our enduring purpose and value,

we can become situated educators, melding to our contexts, leading our efforts with instructional literacy, and engaging our constituents with critical inquiry. <http://infomational.wordpress.com/>

Essentially, this was a talk about the importance of communities of practice in developing reflective practice : a flow from communities of practice > situated learning > instructional literacy, couched in the understanding of when “good enough” is appropriate.

Char talked a lot about the tendency toward anxiety when developing presentations and instructional design, stressing that skill, design, and knowledge all come together to create effective practice. Effective instruction is often developed by managing expectations and assumptions. Char refers to a lecture by Dr. Diamond of UC Berkeley as an informative and positive example of how to set expectations and manage assumptions at the outset of a class (watch first 2 minutes).  Librarians are particularly subject to “psychotic ego ideal” – the idea that you’re never going to get comfortable with the idea of “good enough” at your skill set.

Char asserts that what this is all really about is “instructional literacy”. Instructional literacy is the intersection of reflective practice, educational theory, teaching technologies, and instructional design. She suggests that the more we hone these skills the better poised we are to promote the livelihood of libraries. Librarians are, as Char suggests, the indicator species of our environments – when libraries are threatened it tends to be because something is weakening in the fabric of the intellectual democracy.

Instructional Literacy

• Reflective practice: metacognition – gleaning – collaboration
  • Metacognition (3 question reflection): What went well? What did not go well? Something to reflect on for next time
  • Gleaning: being inspired by your environment by taking cues and characteristics from it
  • Collaboration: communities of practice, mentorship, co-teaching, input and vetting, observation

• Educational theory is totally rooted in practicality. It’s about efficacy on the ground, in the classroom. It’s thinking about doing – an evidence based roadmap for effective practice.
  • Behaviorism: Pavlovian dog/bell (2+2=4 trad. Classroom)
  • Cognitivism: looked at the brain, unsatisfied with a simple framework of behavior/response
  • Constructivism: looks at culture and context of education/learning
  • Connectivism: the internet changes the way we think; knowledge exists in the world, not your head

• Teaching Technologies
  • assessment, collaboration, communication, customization, documentation, play, portability, productivity, sharing, visualization

• Instructional Theory
  • USER method: understand, structure, engage, reflect

So, as we start to line up our outcomes in terms of tangibles (feedback, collaborators, tools, resources) and intangibles (knowledge, skills, insight, confidence) for our reflection and assessment, we have to always consider the library in terms of environment, culture, and context. There is no one size fits all approach here. Traditionally, impact is measured in a top-down fashion, at various levels, which include institutional/external, organizational, departmental, and individual. In many cases, the biggest impact we have is absolutely intangible and immeasurable, and if we shift our perspective to include the same facets from a bottom-up style of assessment we can more easily see the “situated impact” focusing on the individual.

It’s all about individuals. Char would have us embrace the idea that librarians are “research therapists” – we support people when they are most vulnerable with their idea insecurities and give them academic moxie to press on.

“Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself” –John Dewey.

Keynote: Raj Patel

I guess I was supposed to be really jazzed about this talk but found it mostly trite,
but enjoyable and entertaining. My takeaway was that “common good”
of public education is about creating good citizens. When this becomes
“privatized good” it becomes about creating good workers.

I suppose by this point I had also gotten the word about the MHCC librarian layoffs and was thinking about global economy in quite different terms.

Friday

Going the Distance: A Closer Look at Uniting with Remote Users
[slides]

Distance learners are a growing user population in libraries. This presentation discusses three academic libraries’ attempts at “uniting” with distance users. Determining their needs, implementing services specifically for distance users, and assessing the success of such services are ways to “reinvent” the user experience for our distance learners.

This session was quite disappointing so I left. The panelists spent the time reading survey results from their slides.

Reserve It with Google

Libraries have limited rooms and equipment available to a student population that demand our services and assistance. For many libraries, a commercial product is cost prohibitive, but the Google Reservation System, which uses Google Apps, is easy to adopt and adapt to fit your library’s needs. The Reservation System allows for immediate confirmation to the patron and a posting to a Google Calendar with a single keystroke. Limited programming skills are necessary.

This talk was really cool. The presenter, Sharon Whitfield, Emerging Technologies Librarian at College of New Jersey ran through the development of her project which uses Google Docs, Google Calendar, and some JavaScript. (It’s adapted from freely available code by Martin Hawksey, E-learning Advisor [Higher Education] at JISC RSC Scotland N&E.) Whitfield didn’t have any handouts or slides available, but did indicate she’s willing to provide advice to colleagues interested in trying this solution.

More in the vein of Google from Columbia University librarians Jeffrey Carroll, Colleen Major, and John Tofanelli in their poster:

“E-Resource Renewal Awareness: Using Google Calendar to Bring Selectors on Board [PDF],” which was about using Google Calendar to track e-resource subscriptions. They tracked on expenditures and renewal dates, which, as they mention, “are typically buried in acquisitions modules.”

Reference Desk Renaissance: Connecting with Users in the Digital Age
[article | slides]

ARL members have reported steady declines in reference desk transactions over the past decade and are closing staffed service points in response. USC is bucking that trend. Upon reopening the Doheny Library reference desk after seven years, demand for personalized service—in addition to e-reference support—has proven even greater than anticipated. This paper will describe a hybrid reference model—revealing a persistent demand for the high touch as well as the high tech.

Interesting talk about the changing role of reference desks in library literature at large and about the reference desks of USC’s Doheny library in specific. Totally beautiful library, not so much applicability to PCC at this point.

S. Thompson: “reference services should be format agnostic.”

C. Quinlan: As librarians providing [reference] services the challenge is “in addition to rather than instead of” (format)

Are All Reference Interactions Created Equal? How Gender Might Matter to Our Users
[slides]

How does the gender of a user influence her or his experience at the reference desk? What patterns of user behavior might emerge by applying a gender perspective to better understand reference transactions? This study recorded over 400 user-librarian interactions at the reference desks of a large research library in the quest to answer these questions. The results of this study may have implications for how librarians interact with users while staffing the reference desk.

Basic conclusions are that patrons are 3x more likely to approach female librarians, especially when they are sitting on the left side of the desk (from patron perspective). Patron gender not statistically significant. Presenters freely acknowledge that there are many things for which their highly theoretically based study did not account. Any future study should account for nonverbal communication + desk placement + gender. In general attendees seemed to echo a sentiment of “wow, I can’t believe anyone spent time researching this.”

Apparently it’s a “known fact” that there are a disproportionate number of left-handed librarians in the workforce.

Re-inventing Reference Service
[article | slides]

Grand Valley State University (GVSU) has been considering the shifting nature of reference services in the contemporary academic library. Re-inventing reference involved thinking about who delivered service and how. This included evaluating statistics; discussing trends; re-evaluating and re-locating the print reference collection; revising the Reference Desk Assistant (RDA) training; and increasing the use RDAs. This program will discuss GVSU’s experience in redesigning reference and the process employed in the move to a single-service point.

Outreach, marketing & digital literacies: using social media to blur the differences

The media has long been abuzz about the myriad ways social media blurs our personal & professional lives, the public & the private, friends & family. Less has been said about the potential this subversion of boundaries creates for eliding other distinctions.

This paper discusses the ways the inherent boundary-shifting nature of social media (including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and whatever comes next) can be successfully bent to disambiguate outreach, marketing, and 21st century literacies.

This can be boiled down to two key themes:

1. libraries are poised as the sole intellectual campus space for cross/interdisciplinary knowledge creation
2. “marketing is about telling us that we need something and outreach is about making the contact”

The rest is about specific methods, most of which we’re already engaged in (hooray!).

Borges Envisions the Library’s Future

Have you ever wondered why librarians and archivists quote Jorge Luis Borges but rarely analyze his fiction? In fact, two of the Argentine librarian’s stories reveal the dynamics of the archive articulated in Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Both speaker and attendees will explore ways in which fiction and theory intersect to predict emerging practices that are transforming the researcher’s relationship to the materials, procedures, and products of research in the library environment.

I have to confess I have no idea what this woman was attempting to explain, nor apparently did most of the other attendees who began leaving almost immediately. There was a delightful discussion about Tolkien fanfiction, fan-based research, and “the death of the death of the archive” (I think). The presenter argued that fanfiction doesn’t actually have any research and was unrelated to her talk, the person at the mic was insulted by this assertion and issued a retort. There were only about 7 people present by this point.

Saturday

Intellectual Curiosity and Engagement: Creating a culture of community, knowledge creation, and learning
[slides]

This panel will explore how the need to update our lobby triggered new thinking and inspired us to re-imagine how we create and support a culture of community, knowledge creation, and learning. We will share trends in the changing nature of student work, a sample of programmatic changes made in response, and how we have transformed library spaces to support new learning models.

This was a fascinating session. They considered the remodel of the undergraduate library lobby (Bert’s Study Lounge) at University of Michigan (and building of a café) from the perspective of Arum & Roksa to consider how much students are learning in contemporary higher education and how space design can facilitate better/increased learning  and also considered the work of Turkle to understand the (sometimes competing and conflicting) roles of technology, public space design, and “presentation anxiety.” They next considered the work of Kuh to consider practices that would increase student engagement and retention.

The lobby space they redesigned is both beautiful and highly functional. It’s evident that they conducted a lot of student focus groups and library user research to blend technology and space in a highly effective way. I’d love to pull together more images of their space, it’s phenomenal.

Keynote: Clinton Kelly

Lots of dissent among the librarians as to whether this was an appropriate closing keynote choice. The logic from ACRL is that in his show What Not to Wear Kelly confronts people who are in the midst of change, so perhaps he’s adept at talking to librarians about change. I’d suggest the verdict was: not really, but it was amusing to listen to librarians pleading for fashion advice.

7 rules for change from Clinton Kelly: 1. Admit it, style matters. 2. Stop making excuses. 3. Honor your body. 4. Get out of fantasyland. 5. Lose the haters. 6. Shut up. 7. Shop with purpose.

come work with me!

Portland Community College is seeking to hire three full-time librarians.  These are faculty positions and placement will be at one of the three libraries located at Cascade, Sylvania or Rock Creek Campus.

Minimum qualifications:

• Master’s degree in Library Science or Information Science from an ALA accredited program required.
• One year of teaching experience is required.

Preferred qualifications:

• Demonstrated experience working effectively with faculty members in multiple disciplines to: create, develop and deliver course-specific research instruction using a variety of presentation and teaching modalities (e.g., face-to-face, online); to collect relevant library resources; and to meet the needs of students, faculty, and other members of the academic community.
• Demonstrated ability to teach students, individually and in classroom settings, whose learning styles, levels of academic preparedness and backgrounds vary greatly.
• Demonstrated knowledge of current and emerging technologies and their application to all functions of an academic library.
• Knowledge of and experience in developing and maintaining library collections in a discipline, including: analyzing current holdings, identifying gaps in a collection, and working with members of the college community to optimally develop the collection.
• Demonstrated ability to contribute positively to a collegial environment based on mutual respect, commitment to public service, open communication and cooperation within complex organizations (e.g., a multi-campus setting, geographically-distributed entity, or online environment)
• Evidence of professional commitment through research and/or professional service, and to a praxis of ongoing learning and development.
• Demonstrated success in leading user-centered development and delivery of responsive services, including successful liaison and outreach relationships, and the creation of a library environment that provides memorable experiences for current and future patrons

For more information and to apply see Jobs at PCC in the Quick Links menu, or go directly to the application: jobs.pcc.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=53314

Deadline for application is April 5, 2011