shinylib

random info lit stuff from MPOW

Received some questions from a local library school student. Since I took the time to type it out I figured I’d put it here as well; it’s really just me rambling.

How many books, how many serial subscriptions, how many computers, etc. does PCC hold, to your knowledge?

The library (remember we’re really one library at 3 campuses) has different ways of counting things and depending on precisely whom you ask you’ll get different numbers. I am definitely not a collection development librarian so these are some ballpark figures from 2008.

Monographs, serial back files, and other paper goods: 128,691

E-books: 40,533

Serial subscriptions: 29,600

Aggregated databases: 75

You might also want to run some numbers/comparisons on community college library statistics via NCES:  http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/libraries/

In your opinion, what are the strengths and/or weaknesses, if any, of information literacy classes offered in the curriculum at PCC?  Are the library staff, administration, and faculty working together to create awareness of information literacy within the libraries?

Well, I want to give a small caveat that although I’m a teaching librarian, I am definitely not the one tracking information literacy efforts statewide, or even districtwide for PCC, to be honest. Having said that, I do have opinions, sure…

For starters, we don’t have dedicated teaching staff, everyone who is a librarian here is expected to teach, perform collection development and management on a number of subject areas, maintain research guides, and perform a zillion other duties. This causes positive and negative impact.

Positively, all of our librarians have had hands-on experience with teaching at PCC. Our “spread” if you will is pretty great, because we all interface with different classroom faculty (how we refer to the instructors, since we are all faculty) on a regular basis.

Negatively, it means that there’s relatively little cohesion. If you take my Writing 121 research methods class it could differ significantly from what you might learn in Librarian X’s Writing 121 research methods class. This is because we teach predominantly in the “one shot” model, meaning the classroom faculty brings his/her class to us, allegedly at their point of need, and we teach them how to perform research tasks associated with their classroom assignments.

In reality it doesn’t work out this way. In an 11 week quarter, the “point of need” is relatively the same across the board – there is no way to only teach during the 3 weeks before midterm papers are due and the 3 weeks before final papers are due. This means that we see students all the time who have no context, no point of need, no reason to pay attention or think critically. Often we see students weeks before they’ve even had the research project assigned to them (because that’s when we could fit the class in).

Are there any opportunities for librarians to teach information literacy courses to students or faculty?

We teach the incredibly insane array of one shots targeted at specific assignments, we also teach a 1 credit class. When I say we, in that case, I mean librarians who are not me teach a credit class.  I try to avoid anything that involves me giving official grades. (:

The only class where, as a district, we teach across the board IL is at the Biology 101 level – in theory every student enrolled in BI101 will have a 50 minute library tour, class, and orientation. BI101 is biology for non-science majors.

Let me see if I can pull together a few numbers for you…these are only for the Sylvania campus, we generally teach the most but the other campuses won’t be far behind in their numbers.

So, who’s not in these numbers? Distance students! We do offer our 1 credit class (LIB101) online, but that’s really the only place distance students are getting that interaction. We’re not embedded inside Blackboard; we totally don’t have the staff for that. This is a major problem and is only going to become more so.

What do you feel are current trends of information literacy curricula in community colleges, today?

The big discussion in Oregon right now can be tracked very easily via ILAGO at http://ilago.wordpress.com/. Basically, the backstory is that in 2007, various participants from around Oregon got together to develop a set of 8 proficiencies (different from, but reflective of, the ACRL standards) which every student in the first two years of college must attain in order to succeed in the following two years of advanced education. They keep meeting and discussing, but I don’t get too involved. If you wanted more about their happenings you could contact Robin Shapiro at – she’s a librarian at the Rock Creek campus. (:

ILAGO says it best on their “History” page: “The group made clear Information Literacy must not be a single course in the curriculum but must be a part of every discipline in the lower division.”

I would call that a trend, but not all librarians would. There are plenty of librarians (in my particularly irreverent way, I call them “old school” librarians, who believe that information literacy is the library’s cheese and it shouldn’t be moved, particularly in this era where our other most-branded item (the book) seem to have dubious value and staying power.

I waver back and forth on this view. Myself personally, I’m not a big fan of the “train the trainer” (or teacher, in this case) model. If I thought that everyone who was qualified to teach was qualified to teach everything under the sun I wouldn’t have become an academic librarian…I would, like, teach philosophy for some fancy pants university (this is laughable, I hate philosophy and know nothing about it!). So to say that you can teach has nothing to do with teaching info lit.

Having said that, there are lots of obvious crossovers. It shouldn’t take a Herculean effort to get a writing/composition instructor up to speed on incorporating IL elements into their lectures, for example. I would imagine the same of communications faculty, social sciences faculty, and other particularly interdisciplinary practitioners. The trend in this area tends to be to rewrite the information literacy competencies in such a way that they can be taught by multiple subject faculty. For instance, rather than saying “information literacy” the language is very often about “critical thinking” and “evaluating” and “choosing” – that sort of thing. Non-library specific, basically.

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’…

how do you keep track of tacit knowledge and collaborative stuff?

I’m part of a two-librarian team tasked with research solutions for what we’re calling a knowledge bank or internal repository.

What kind of solutions do you implement at your library for this? We’re currently using a shared network drive but it has many problems and doesn’t meet our needs. Shared files are constantly deleted or misplaced (inadvertently) by users. The network isn’t accessible from off-campus. People can’t really share narrative, short of creating a word document and putting some thoughts in it and hoping people intuit from the file name why it might be useful.

Tools already under consideration (or nixed from our list): Drupal, WordPress, various wiki products, NING, CONTENTdm. What am I missing?

Full disclosure: I just want it to be Drupal, but due diligence means I gotta consider some alternatives. (:

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.

Autopilot…not so much FTW!

Man, sometimes you just get on autopilot and there’s nothin’ to be done for it.

I prepped for a reading class tonight and when I went to teach the class I was told, “But that’s not their assignment!” It was however the assignment the instructor had sent me…twice.

So, I pretty much had to make it up on the fly. Banned books and censorship…not so difficult, but still.

Every so often I’d find words related to the original prep I’d done tumbling out of my mouth. I was able to wrap it all in, but the occasional blurb on Thoreau and Civil Disobedience would just come out unbidden.

Regardless, the instructor just came down and said how wonderful she thought the session was. I did not really concur.

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. Continue reading…

Outbursts and such…

I taught this writing class last night and had a really awesome time. The students were very with it and into what was going on. Y’know, the type who actually respond when you ask them stuff.

But this one guy was especially interesting.* He was prone to outbursts as well as various mutterings.

I can’t for the life of me recall what he said but it was out there. My response was, “Well…that was a radical interpretation of the text.” We all paused for a moment before resetting and moving on.

I asked another student to tell me about the source of the article he found, who he thought the intended audience was. He thought for a while and the proclaimed, “poor people!” I foolishly attempted to extract an explanation but it just didn’t track. Hey, at least he gave it some consideration.

*By interesting I mean I later discovered he’d changed the desktop of the computer he was at to a picture of me.

Small group instruction

I have been thinking about instruction a lot recently. I’m the kind of nerd who actively thinks about teaching when she’s not doing it. This relates directly to why I don’t have a life, but that’s kind of outside the box. Anyway, I was thinking about the nursing students in particular over the summer because I was fretting about taking over that collection this year. I’m not really sure what kind of relationship the past librarians who collected for nursing had to the department, but I tend to think of myself as “the nursing librarian” much more than “the nursing selector”. As of this year that’s pretty much how I introduce myself to them when I teach their classes in the library.

They are an interesting bunch in that they have the chance to come and see us every term, but not all of them do. We book standing classes for them the first three days of the first week of every term.  They aren’t required to attend a class and thus we have that self-selection thing going on.  The students we see are like info literacy and research sponges. They eagerly absorb anything I put out there and have awesome questions—but we only have 50 minutes to an hour.

This got me thinking that those particular students would probably come back if I created a space and invited them. They are intensely busy, it’s true, but I think they see the long-term savings in time. I also think they might advertise to their peers who, understandably, hadn’t had time to figure out why they needed us by the first or second day of the term.

Recently I read an email on the information literacy instruction list about a librarian offering small group instruction sessions. Basically if 5 or more students commit to the session the librarian will teach it.  This particular librarian (at Spokane CC, if I recall) works with a lot of nursing students so this caught my attention. Nursing students are a great target bunch for all kinds of library services because they have such focused research needs, at specific and predictable times of the year.

I’m not surprised that the small group offerings were well received—but I’m still hesitant to start offering such a thing at our library. We recently started offering a 1 credit class and I don’t want to offer small group sessions and derail the 1 credit class. We need steadyish enrollment to keep it going, I’m sure.

I spoke to nursing faculty at the start of the term and they were into the idea of a customized LIB 101 nursing-specific 1 credit course. Ideally I’d like them to make the course mandatory for their students, but that comes later. I gave them my card and have been waiting for them to call or email, but I haven’t heard from anyone yet.  Yet another reason I want to hold off on the small group offerings. I don’t want to devalue the credit course in the eyes of the nursing faculty, it really would be perfect for the students. Also we spend a lot of desk time with nursing students. Which is fine, but you know…

Our class is designed to start several weeks after the term has begun. We also don’t assign a research project, it’s up to the student to have one of their own. We start late enough in the term that they’ve already been assigned something for their writing class or biology class or perhaps some assignment that didn’t even come from faculty at our college—whatever. They bring their assignment to class and we work through the entire process over several weeks rather than 50 minutes. All of the assignments we give should further the research goals related to their assignment. So I think it could work very well with nursing because the students progress through their classes in a specified order. It’s easy to select a time when research and “library” skills will be easily integrated with their coursework. We can focus on APA specifically, because that’s what they need and use. I have also been pushing Refworks to these students pretty heavily so it would be awesome to integrate that into the class (maybe nursing can help pay for it one day, ahem).

What troubles me is that plenty of students aren’t going to take a 1 credit class, won’t have the benefit of a class with an instructor who believes in scheduling IL instruction sessions with librarians, or are otherwise not getting the benefit of our instructional services.  So when I see them milling about, in need, should I make them an offer they might actually take? When you look at it this way it seems kind of goofy not to. There are limits to how much we can do on an individual basis and perhaps encourgaing students to organize their own classes is part of the solution.  Students whose instructors don’t bring them in for a class with us often remark that they wish their class came to the library.  Add to this the recent addition of prerequisites and we have a rapidly changing educational environment in terms of basic research proficiency. I remember when I worked at MHCC and they were implementing prerequisites, the counter-argument was always “students have the right to fail!” Egad.

Perhaps in a few years prerequisites really will work as intended and students won’t find themselves adrift in research-heavy classes for which they are totally unprepared. I’m skeptical, as I am about most things, so we’ll just have to see. In the interim I still have to work out how best to help all of the students. I’m generally fairly day-by-day with this but it seems some long-range planning may be in order.

But not tonight. There’s a two hour long Einstein special on History. Sweet.

Year 2 Starts Out with a Bang!

Man. It’s been a while since I’ve had much to say…or more to the point, since I’ve had time to say anything.

We’re just entering week 2 of the Fall term here. Our instruction schedule is just a wee bit scary, although certainly not unmanageable. There’s been a lot of speculation about what’s driving the current instruction boom, I’ll be interested to see if we can find out some of the real factors.

Despite all of my well-intentioned proclamations, my list of professional obligations for which I do not receive a paycheck is growing and growing. I’m on the Oregon Library Association planning committee for the upcoming conference. I’ve agreed to be on a panel presenting at said upcoming conference (April, I think). I was just asked to join the OLA president’s Vision 2020 committee (planning and visioning for libraries in Oregon, etc.). I won’t even bother listing off the national obligations, but they are mighty.

In spite of it all I’m still striving for some work-life balance this year. Let’s hope I can find it.

Quotable moment. At the end of a one-shot with the first year nursing students I ask if there are any questions. A young man raises his hand and asks me this, “How much caffeine are you ON?”

He was kinda shocked when I told him that I don’t consume caffeine. He said, “That’s nuts!” before shaking his head and wandering off.

I like those nursing students…moxie.

Meme: Passion Quilt

I had been ignoring the passion quilt meme for the most part, but Ellie <3 libraries prompted me to think about how to use this meme to sum up some of my thoughts on my IL instruction process. Maybe this will get me off my rump and moving forward on that article I should be writing…

When I taught my first “library instruction” (BI, IL, whatever you want to call them) classes I really struggled with how to connect with the students. They arrive in the classroom certain that they’re going to hear what they’ve already heard, which they didn’t find especially useful the first time. Many of them are pretty sure they rank amongst the best Googlin’ experts and, while they may not know what one is, many are certain they don’t need an article database. Some students groan, “Dude! I’ve had this EBSCO class 4 times this year,” and I don’t doubt it. I don’t blame them and I’m not offended—after all, Google and the like haven’t let them down when it comes to finding playoff scores, movie times, and sometimes their next date.

Despite all of that, community college students coming to a 50 minute one-shot in the library are surrounded by things they don’t know—unfortunately many haven’t been exposed to that concept in a way that doesn’t insult, bore, or intimidate. Even more baffling is the idea that there are things they don’t know about Google!

In library school we learn about sensemaking and “the gap”. The principle issues here are that there are things we don’t know, gaps in our knowledge. In order to acquire the knowledge we need we have to somehow figure out what it is that we don’t know, acquire the language to search for information on what we don’t know, and then absorb and interpret information to help us fill in those gaps in our knowledge. Like a great many theoretical pieces of library school, I don’t always think about these ideas while I am teaching.

With that and an assignment brought to me by a writing instructor I started developing a research exercise I think of as Mind the Gap (although the handout just says Research Exercise, heh), where I shove the students into various resources and then discuss the tips n’ tricks after. It seems to work fairly well, the students are more interested in my schpiel about Google advanced search, page rank, or other facets of the popular search engine once they realize they can’t readily identify three scholarly sources from the first page of a Google results list.

Interested in seeing what the other two people who read this have to share.

The rules are simple:

1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.