This morning I was interviewed by approximately 15 students from Journalism 200. I was blown away by the quality of questions they asked–and really lucky that they had the foresight to send them to me in advance. There were some really tough questions for me to answer, not just because I am fairly new, but because they were well crafted and designed to elicit certain responses. Well done, J200!
I think that the interview, for my part, was a success. I managed to stay grounded in my own language and not become a mouthpiece for library rhetoric, which is something I think about often. I couldn’t possibly begin to recount what exactly we talked about, so instead I’ll give you my writeup on how I was hoping the interview would proceed. This is all writing I did last night so that I could focus on the kind of information they wanted and not show up today and totally waffle.
I did completely forget to talk about accreditation– I wish I had remembered to bring that up but hey, I can’t remember everything. I really wanted to give them the authentic shinylib, which means I wasn’t reading my notes from a paper.
The other thing I wish I’d remembered to say was that a student came to the reference desk this morning. He shared with me that earlier he’d been outside having a smoke and pondering the future of his assignment–he was apparently chatting with another smoker as well, and that other person told him to go see a reference librarian because, “They are the best search engine we’ve got.” How awesome is that?!
—-
How did you end up at PCC? Tell us a little about your background.
It’s not a very interesting story. I got my BA in Community Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz. I like to call it a degree in commie do-gooder studies. I spent several years focusing on advocacy for homeless teenagers there, but overall I was pretty unsatisfied. For completely unrelated reasons I moved to Portland in 2004 and about six months later I decided to apply to library schools. I think you’ll find that a lot of people become librarians as a second career and I am definitely in that group. I had no lifelong aspirations to be a librarian although I have definitely been a lifelong user of libraries.
While working on my master’s in library science I worked for another community college library doing reference work and working at the circulation desk. Ultimately I wanted to teach in addition to doing reference work and I feel really fortunate that I was able to come to PCC to do that teaching. I’m not going anywhere—so hopefully I’ll get a chance to work with some of you again.
How are students using the library?
Students use the library in a variety of ways, it’s pretty similar to the wide variety of reasons that students come to a community college. Some students come to work on learning English, others to learn how to weld the family tractor. Some students come to the library because they recognize it as a place they are comfortable being studious and others come because it’s a place of commune—they meet their friends and classmates there, whether in person or by using the computer.
How would you like to see them using it? What resources are they unaware of?
Honestly it’s not important how I would like to see students using the library. It’s their resource and I hope they use it in the way that makes the most sense to them. Sure there are some basic concepts and rules I need to enforce—don’t eatyour snacky foods in the library, for instance—but overall, I’m just happy to see them in the library. It’s really not my business whether they come in to check their MySpace account, find a book, or take a nap in the quiet study room.
I think that there are a lot of resources that students aren’t aware of. Many students are unfamiliar with a lot of our electronic resources and some of them are really cool—we recently purchased a product called BuildingGreen Suite, focusing on sustainable building and the resources to support that industry. I pointed this out to a student on Tuesday who had been really frustrated with the results he was finding in an “all purpose” database and he nearly came out of his skin he was so excited. The resources an individual is aware of are generally related to what she or he finds most interesting. It’s natural to seek out resources that excite you, often to the oversight of other really useful items.
What is a “faculty” librarian?
I love this question! In some ways it’s a meaningless term. People address me in any number of ways, and I’ll respond to most of them. Some of my favorites include hey lady, Ms. Librarian, and when people remember my name, Allie. In other ways the term is very important—it implies a certain amount of responsibility and obligation. I assume that you have expectations of the faculty you interact with on a daily basis, your instructors, but I don’t know whether you know you should have those same expectations of me.
The reason I use the term is because I’m new to PCC and since I am just getting to know people here I want them to know that I take my job seriously. I take great care to prepare for the classes I teach and I try to bring that much to the table for a library user who encounters me at the reference desk, even if I am adapting to their individual needs on the fly. I put a lot of thought into how I go about my job—so I think it’s not unreasonable to ask folks to understand that what I do is not so different from what the classroom instructors do, we are all faculty and our job is to support PCC’S mission. The heart of PCC’s mission is to provide quality education to the students.
Does the faculty fully utilize library resources?
Well, what does fully utilize mean? Does anyone fully utilize library resources? Just as with my student patrons, I hope my faculty patrons use the library in whatever way is most meaningful to them. Sometimes instructors reach out to the librarians for support in finding resources, doing research, and that sort of thing and sometimes we get the awesome honor of helping them develop assignments. I absolutely love when an instructor solicits my input on an assignment—sometimes a different perspective can be really beneficial. I have totally benefited from my interactions with the classroom faculty; I get great feedback on my teaching as well as the handouts and websites I create for each class.
What is the historical role of libraries? Are they changing?
Historically libraries have always been extremely important. I read on the DaVinci Institute website that libraries played a critical role in the preservation of the remaining works of Leonardo DaVinci. For a long time people needed libraries to be large buildings full of items, like a storehouse of information. Information exists in greater quantity than ever before, but so much less of it happens on a printed page than before.
If we are reading less and if print as a medium is dying, what is the future of libraries? What are their justifications for existence?
The future of libraries really depends on the user. Our job, my job, is to adapt to you, to enable you to make sense of the library’s resources. The help page for a particular database won’t rewrite itself because you’re a visual learner or present analogies to help you understand the difference between East and West Egg in The Great Gatsby, I can do those things.
There’s a misconception that my job is about knowing lots of facts, figures, and other cool stuff like that—and while to some extent it’s true that I am a storehouse of random information—my real merit, at least I hope my patrons feel this way, is in my ability to adapt. This should be true of any librarian. My goal is to empower you to use all of the tools available to you. It may sound pretty hokey, but it’s true.
Does PCC Sylvania really need a library? Is it a dinosaur? Or is it adapting and evolving? If so, how? Could it be smaller? Or should it be larger?
Well, in really simple terms, PCC has to have a library, staffed by qualified professional librarians. Without this, PCC doesn’t pass accreditation. There are also some dozen-or-more programs that have specific library requirements for those programs to pass accreditation as well. Nursing and Dental Hygiene are examples of the types of programs with such requirements.
Putting aside those reasons, I would really like to ask these questions of the students. I think PCC needs a library and I know that we all work really hard to adapt. The tricky part about adaptation involves knowing when to respond to a changing trend and when to dismiss it as a fad. For example, there was a big library fad for a while there to create library blogs. The perception was that students were living increasingly online lives and therefore would respond to a library blog. The reality was more like: most students don’t care to read about the library on a blog.
We don’t think of it in terms of individual campus libraries. The library is a system—that’s why you don’t have to drive to Rock Creek to check out a book that’s housed there. It’s just one library spread across multiple locations and we try to make the walls as invisible as possible. Sure it takes a day to get that book from Rock Creek to you at Sylvania, but that’s really pretty reasonable.
Larger and smaller are relative to space. The library will grow to fit the collection and the numbers of students who need to come in to interact with that collection, as long as there is a physical collection to house. But the library is so much more than books and magazines and students in chairs.
PCC has increasing numbers of distance learning students who never come to the library and it is our challenge to adapt to meet their needs as well as those of the students attending physical classes. This is where you’re going to see some exciting things from the library in the coming years, I think. We already provide e-mail reference and telephone service and participate in L-net, which provides 24 hour chat reference. We also have tons of resources on our website—tutorials, research help pages, handouts for databases— a lot of stuff.
I just got an e-mail the other day telling me that you can now read the entire APA style guide in PDF format, just by searching in our online catalog. How crazy is that? I love it. That happened in response to what students need; how students perceive the catalog and what its function should be.
How much does our Sylvania library spend on books? Is there a trend in spending? How much does it spend on computers and related materials?
Systemwide we currently spend about $135,000 on items such as books, videos, DVDs—that kind of stuff—and something like $165,000 on subscription resources like databases, print journals, and streaming videos. The trend in spending definitely shows a shift from print resources, especially for the reference collection, to electronic resources. Aside from the reference collection, I’m still convinced that people like to read with books in their hands.
Another trend, nationwide, is toward joining library consortia or bargaining groups. We belong to a consortium and that allows us to use the Summit catalog to search for materials in something like 35 colleges and universities in the Pacific
Northwest. Membership has its costs, and I’m honestly not well informed about them, but the benefits outweigh them whatever they are. We take this into consideration when we purchase items for our collection. If there are a number of local schools with the resource and we don’t need it on campus to support a particular curricular need we can put our money to better use and rest assured that we can still get it in 3 business days.
How do you decide what books, periodicals and other materials to buy and what to get rid of?
The library has a collection development policy. It’s a pretty lengthy document and you can find it on our website, but the short version is that we buy resources that support the curriculum. This is true of community colleges in general, so you’ll find our collections tend to have a shorter shelf life than other types of libraries. Nursing students have no real use for outdated materials and in the nursing literature outdated can mean anything from 2-5 years.
In libraryspeak, getting rid of stuff is called weeding, and we decide what to weed based on circulation or use statistics (are people using it) but we also rely on the experience of librarians and other library staff to speak for resources that they know have merit. Anecdotes and stories can be as important as statistics, depending on the resource. For example, I buy for the Microelectronics Technology collection and if there was a question about whether to keep an item in the MT collection, I would probably be involved in the decision at some level.
What is the annual budget for the PCC Sylvania library? Where does the money go? Staff? Materials ,etc.?
I honestly have no idea. Something that I love about being faculty and not management is that I don’t have to know this information. I know that we have a dedicated, professional, and ethical administration and I leave those budgetary matters to them. I’m not sure if the budget is a public document, but you are always welcome to stop in the library and ask.
Envision what our library will look like ten years from now.
I think that I can spend a lot of time envisioning the future, but it’s all for naught. The future of the library is ultimately in your hands, the students. If you feel that print is a dying medium and that we need to take a hard shift toward electronic resources, you need to be the voice for that. If you still find that print is relevant and you want to support that physical aspect of the library’s collection you need to speak up. We shift based on your needs, which are directly tied to the core needs of the curriculum at PCC. Those course offerings are based on what the students need. So it’s a big cycle, but in some capacity the student is always driving that process.
