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’…

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. (:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Much of the discussion centers on the belief that DDC is a step “backward” for students coming to the community college environment and that it inadequately prepares them for transfer to a 4-year university. I was particularly struck by the notion that using DDC keeps students “stuck in public library/high school mode”. I feel that this is a great disservice to public libraries and to the classification system itself. There is an implicit belief that academic libraries are somehow better than public or high school libraries and I think that kind of divisive thinking sets us at odds with one another and with our shared professional goals.

Having worked in both classification systems at different community colleges it is my belief that students are ultimately adaptable and will do just fine. And if they’re not–well what on Earth have we been doing to prepare them?

An example from a completely different arena: in one of my many committee meetings we’ve been debating restructuring the admissions and add/drop forms. For years the add/drop form has been purple and everyone has called it “the purple form”. Now that the form is printed on different colored stock the concern is that students won’t know which form to use. Imagine the collective shock when I, as the only library representative, suggested that we stop creating idiots who don’t read forms. If a student can’t be bothered to read the tops of the forms and select the one that says “add/drop” then I think we’ve done them a great disservice with the hand-holding and color-coding.

I feel the same way about classification systems and transferability. We can’t teach students that everywhere they go in this life will cater to what is most comfortable to the individual–it’s going to be a rude shock when they discover otherwise. What we can do is teach them that information and instruction professionals will be available to see them through the rough spots, provided they want to learn. This is a transferable ideology–from grade school to 4-year universities.