February 2008 Archives

My last post was written in a fit of pique, and understandably someone took issue with part of how I expressed my frustration. Meredith Farkas commented that “To call the student an ‘obvious liar whose intent is to waste my time’ is really awful.” That’s quite possibly true and I should have been more gentle. However, there are other things that are awful as well. Lying is awful. Deception is awful. Using people as unknowing participants in human experimentation is awful. Treating people merely as means to your own ends is awful. Betraying the implied agreement behind a reference query is awful. I opined that sending out students to ask fake reference questions is an ethically dubious practice. Today I would like to elaborate by briefly exploring the issue. I’ll approach the practice from several ethical perspectives and you can decide whether you agree with me.

First, let’s consider the Kantian perspective. You may be familiar with Kant’s categorical imperative, which says that one should act in such a way that one can will the principle behind one’s action to be universal law. Basically, don’t do it unless you think everyone should do it, or in a briefer version of the Golden Rule, do as you would be done by. This principle would, I think, preclude lying, deception, and using people as unknowing participants in some psychological reference experiment. It would also, I think, preclude wasting the time of professional librarians on fake reference questions, just to see how they responded. Would these same students and their professors want to be lied to and deceived in order to further someone else’s ends?

The other part of Kant’s ethics says you should treat people as ends in themselves, and not just as means to your ends. What is the fake reference interaction doing but using the reference librarian as an unknowing means to someone else’s ends? Most people resent being used as merely a means to someone else’s end. It might seem that reference librarians in general are always merely means to someone else’s end, but that’s not the case. If I willingly agree to participate in a certain relationship as a reference librarian, this is different than if I am deceived or manipulated. I’m here to help people answer actual reference questions. My action wills that reference librarians should answer such questions. My action does not, however, will that I be used as an unwilling guinea pig in someone else’s reference experiment. There is an implied contract in a reference transaction. You have a real information need and I help you with it. When that contract is broken by deception, then my part is ended.

Next, let’s consider the utilitarian approach. The utilitarian dictum is that an action (or a rule behind an action, depending on whether one is an act- or a rule-utilitarian) is good if it leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number. This approach makes it less clear for this situation. Is the greatest happiness for the greatest number achieved by fake reference patrons lying to reference librarians? According to the felicific calculus, does the happiness of the fake reference patrons outweigh the resentment and unhappiness of the manipulated reference librarians?

Or we can expand this more broadly to a consequentialist approach. Instead of just considering happiness as the end, let’s consider the consequences of the action. What good consequences come from the lying and deception? Who benefits by a fake reference transaction? Does the student faking the transaction learn anything? And does this make up for the deception somehow? In my case the participant-observer approach was flawed because I spotted it. Asking an obviously fake question and then upbraiding me for not going along with the charade rankled. Thus, the fake patron didn’t learn how reference questions were answered, but instead learned how I deal with fake patrons trying to manipulate and deceive me. As the fake patron noted, things went quite well at first, but by the end the person was disappointed. We both were.

We should also consider the virtue ethics approach, derived from Aristotelian ethics. In this approach, ethics isn’t so much about rule following or calculating happiness, but about forming certain types of character in people. I think this approach makes more sense in terms of the ethical upbringing of children and the formation of character. We don’t people to have to stop and argue with themselves about whether they should lie or betray others. We want people who tell the truth and don’t betray others as a matter of habit. We want them to have a certain good character. We want people who as a matter of habit don’t deceive others just to obtain their own ends. We want reference librarians who willingly do all they can to answer legitimate reference questions or help with research problems, and we don’t want reference students who go out and lie to librarians. Is this the sort of character we want to develop in future reference librarians? You can probably see where I’m going with this, so I’ll move on.

I’d like to mention one other perspective. In his later work, Martin Heidegger discussed what he called technological thinking. Technological thinking involves considering everything that exists as a tool standing in reserve (bestand) to be used by human beings. This would include not only obvious tools such as hammers, but also the natural world as a whole. It doesn’t matter what happens to chickens or forests, for example, because they are just standing in reserve to be used by us. The ultimate problem with technological thinking is that eventually humans themselves come to be considered as tools or objects standing in reserve to be used by others at their will (consider the phrase “human resources”). This is related to Kant’s objections to considering other people as means to your ends rather than as ends in themselves. The technological thinker views everything and everyone as a tool standing in reserve to be used when appropriate. Thus, the hapless reference librarian becomes merely a tool or a means for the fake reference patron to achieve some other end.

Thus, we have a handful of ethical approaches, and it seems to me they all lead to the conclusion that lies and deception are bad things. Even if under some consequentialist approach one could justify the lies and deception and manipulation by some higher end, what is gained here? Do the fake patrons (or their professors who hand out these assignments) think that some higher end justifies lying to librarians and wasting their time? Do they think that reference librarians are so clueless that we can’t spot the faker? Do they think spotting the faker has no effect on the reference transaction? Do they think that other people are to be used as unwitting means to their own ends? That reference librarians aren’t there to help people with reference queries and research needs, but are just there as a little experimental tools for library school students to play with? Apparently, they do.

If students want to learn how I do reference, I’ll be happy to help (under the rule that it’s a good thing for librarians to willingly help library school students as I was willingly helped by librarians when I was a student). Shadow me. Interview me. Analyze my chat transcripts. See how I act when people approach me at the desk. Watch me from afar or a-close all you want. Read the reference behavioral guidelines that I helped write. But don’t lie to me and try to deceive me.

If however, after all this, you or your professor decide that your ends somehow justify using reference librarians as your tools and you still choose to lie and try to deceive them because they’re not worthy of respect as busy professionals or even as human beings and ends in themselves, then you should be a much better liar than this person was. Practice that lying and deception until you have it down to a fine art. It won’t make you much of a reference librarian or even a decent human being, but at least the librarian won’t be left feeling manipulated and betrayed and you might achieve whatever end you think justifies your means.

It’s not often that a professional interaction makes me angry. However, I had an odd experience tonight. During my regular Sunday evening chat reference shift I ended up being lectured by a library school student from an unnamed library school at a large public university in New Jersey about how my reference service needs improvement. As part of an assignment for a reference class, the library school student was supposed to go out and pester actual librarians with fake reference questions to see how they responded. I’ve read a bit about this ethically dubious practice, and in addition am able to spot a fake reference transaction pretty quickly. (Hint to library school students posing as fake reference patrons—I do this for a living. I can tell when you’re lying to me.) Something seemed fishy to me, so ultimately I responded with our standard line. Our reference service is for Princeton faculty and students or questions specific to the Princeton collection. Oh, and I don’t answer general reference questions from library school students at some other university. Then came the admission that the whole reference transaction was fake. What a surprise! And then the lecture. Spare me!

Is this what reference education is about these days? Are the students supposed to go out and waste the time of professional librarians? Because that was the impression I was left with. This student was a great big time-waster who had the erroneous opinion that a reference service at a private university should act as a general reference service for anyone in the entire world. I praised the librarians at the university the student attends and recommended the student approach them. Apparently, this wasn’t good enough. Instead, I should have played along with the game (which I suspected was a game) and spent a half hour of my time searching for items which no one actually wanted. That, apparently, is the sign of good reference service. So because I refused to help a fairly obvious liar, which is what this student was, somehow my reference service needs improvement?

What needs improvement is reference education, if this is what it has sunk to. Do teachers of reference think that librarians have nothing better to do than spend time answering fake reference questions from fake library patrons? Especially if those fake patrons more or less give the game away by saying they’re library school students at some other university who need help with a simplistic question a college sophomore would be able to answer? What else are we actual librarians to suspect given such information other than that we’re being conned? Reference librarians tend to be pretty savvy about these things. I don’t know about other reference librarians, but I resent being approached by obvious liars whose intent is to waste my time, especially when these liars are put up to their lies by their professors and then have the nerve to get self-righteous when I catch them and refuse to help them. I would be happy to help library school students or answer questions about what I do or allow students to see how I work. But that’s not what this practice is about. If students come in with obviously fake questions, it’s not my practice to play along with them. That’s not reference education. That’s a big waste of my time.

Attention, time wasters: please leave real librarians alone. Some of us have work to do.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a recent article discussing the results of yet another study of why there aren’t many conservatives in academia. David Horowitz tours the country making the standard right-wing argument that leftist professors are indoctrinating students. The hard core ideological professors might be busily trying to indoctrinate their students. The other 99.9% of professors try to teach their students something about their subject. The students ignore the indoctrination attempts and the earnest attempts to teach, instead choosing to drink more beer and hook up more often. It’s a fun game where everyone gets what they want.

The debate over the politicization of academics has been hot at least since Tenured Radicals, which is the first book I read on the subject. This debate highlights one important difference between professors and academic librarians—that for librarians there’s little scope for politics. This is a good thing. Don’t get me wrong. I like politics, at least in theory. I read a lot about politics. I teach a writing seminar focused on politics. I follow campaigns. I even have an opinion about the Democratic primaries, but I won’t share it with you. I think most of the conservative scare about students being indoctrinated is malarkey, and I doubt any of the hundred “most dangerous professors” that Horowitz names are at all dangerous. But in a previous life I encountered the zeal of the political prophets and I didn’t like what I saw.

Fifteen or so years ago I entered graduate school in English at the University of Illinois. Because the program was one of those grad student mills that put the bulk of the teaching labor on the graduate students… sorry, that’s too harsh. I mean because learning to teach two sections of rhetoric while taking a full course load is very important training for the life of the itinerant adjunct that seemed to be the future of so many of the graduates because so few of them got tenure track jobs (that’s more diplomatic, I think), everyone entering the program went through a week long teaching boot camp, led by upper-level graduate students. I remember very well how a considerable portion of the discussions during that boot camp concerned not how to teach writing but how much trouble we were all going to have overcoming the conservatism of our students with our radical politics. Basically, they were trying to help us indoctrinate the students with leftist politics. Instead of teaching writing, the goal of many of the grad students was to teach the undergraduates how wrong they were about politics and how right we all were. I was pretty far left myself, but something struck me as wrong about the whole enterprise. First of all, it doesn’t work. Second of all, it’s a betrayal of a higher ideal than politics. The university is the church of reason, not the church of partisanship.

Years later I was working in the writing clinic on campus while in library school, and I recall that during a staff meeting one of the lily-white, suburban-bred, writing studies grad students went on at length about how she used her rhetoric classes to to politicize her students and show them how the bad education they had received in inner city Chicago was the fault of an unjust system. She got no argument from anyone, including me, about the unjustness of the system. But mainly she wanted to teach them to be angry. I thought that was easier than teaching them to write. She also said she more or less spent the class validating their poor writing because it was an authentic expression of their culture and because they were such victims. Standard English, after all, is just the idiom of the oppressive elite. I’m sure they appreciated all this anger and validation when they tried to write job application letters after college.

It was always the grad students, never the professors. The silliness of this grad student culture was one of the reasons I left the English department. The quotidian practicality of library school was refreshing after such nonsense.

Teachers have an opportunity to politically indoctrinate students, even though only the worst ones ever try to do it. One of the nice things about being a librarian is that the job offers little scope for politics, which is why nobody cares much that librarians in general probably skew more left than professors. It just doesn’t come up. There are plenty of political issues regarding libraries, but ultimately library research is good or bad regardless of your politics. The radical historian and the reactionary historian might interpret the historical record differently, but their research shouldn’t be determined in advance by political concerns. Scholars are supposed to hold a standard of research and evidence that transcends their political views, which is why books like Bellesiles’ Arming America cause scandals.

An important part of the job of academic librarians is teaching research skills and helping students avoid the sort of pitfalls politicized “scholarship” can lead to. There’s very little difference between a professor deciding to misquote letters and make up statistics to support an argument about guns in America and a student who says, “I’m writing a paper on X and I need five sources that prove my thesis.” If students are making arguments we disagree with, we don’t refuse to help them. We don’t provide students with sources on only one side of an issue. We want students to explore a subject in depth and form conclusions based upon the evidence, which is what most teachers want.

Collection development offers some scope for political bias, and I suppose there are slipshod librarians who refuse to buy conservative books or subscribe to conservative journals because they don’t agree with them, just as in the past there were plenty of librarians who wouldn’t collect radical literature. If we’re true to our mission, however, we don’t refuse to collect material because of its political view, whatever that is. Academic standards of reason, truth, and evidence are more important than promoting our political views. The best scholarship transcends the partisan hack work that emanates from the right and left in this country, because it’s based on higher standards of truth and evidence. The best teachers don’t try to indoctrinate; they try to persuade based on the evidence. The best librarians help supply the evidence. And, after all, if we’re right, the evidence should demonstrate that.

Are libraries doomed to extinction? I get the feeling from some articles and discussions on some blogs that a lot of people seem to think so. I won’t point to any particular discussions, but I do sometimes get the impression that some librarians think libraries have to change radically or die, that somehow contemporary libraries are so outdated that they will soon go the way of the buggy whip if they don’t adapt completely and immediately. If we don’t immediately adopt this gadget or re-engineer everything for the different styles of every cohort of students, then we’re all failures. As I said, I get this from reading blogs and articles, because nobody I know ever discusses the issue, at least not with me. If libraries are sinking rapidly, then my colleagues are models of grace under pressure. But is there any basis for that belief, if in fact anyone believes it?

Often the discussion is of technological change. It seems to me that libraries do adapt even to technological change, albeit slowly at times. I’d be willing to bet (not much, because I’m only a librarian) that librarians on average have been ahead of the public on average with lots of technological change. OCLC began 40 years ago. OPACs have been around for 20 years. Libraries were making information available online before most people even knew what online was. Popular IM programs appeared in the late 1990s, and within 3-5 years many libraries were setting up chat services. (That might seem slow, but I suspect it was decades from the invention of the telephone to the advent of telephone reference.)* Before I started library school, I wasn’t paying much attention to any online developments. To say that librarians fight change is to ignore the many real technological changes that libraries have been adopting for decades. Libraries are slow to adapt, possibly, but so are most non-commercial organizations.

If libraries do die, I’m not sure what will replace them. Infotopia, I suppose. Will there ever be a world where all information is digitized, freely available, and easily findable? This to me would be Infotopia, and I’d be happy for it, even if it meant the extinction of libraries. Does anyone see a trend toward this? Because I don’t. I see a world with increasingly more restrictive copyright laws and the commercialization and corporate control of information. Sure there’s a lot of information on the Internet and some activities, such as ready reference, might be dying. But plenty of information still isn’t freely available, and it’s not clear that it ever will be, even if the fight over open access is won by the good guys. A lot of the talk about social software and the ease of generating content means that a lot more information is available, but not necessarily information anyone wants. Anyone can publish a blog or set up a wiki, but at the moment these are of limited scholarly value compared to books and journals. And how many freely available data sets are out there?

Even if all information is ever freely available, which I doubt will ever happen, there’s still the problem of finding it. Our library has a huge amount of electronic information that is technically freely available to our users, but that doesn’t mean they can find everything. Much effort goes into the never-ending task of trying to select this information, purchase it, organize it, catalog it, promote it, and make it findable for both librarians and everyone else. Will these tasks just go away in the future? It seems unlikely.

From my limited perspective, it seems that the information universe grows vastly more complicated with every new digitization project or publishing venture, not to mention the good to be found on blogs and websites. Libraries try to make sense of this chaos. Even if they ultimately fail to control the information universe (which is inevitable), they still control enough of it to make it more useful for scholars that it would otherwise be. There’s also the personal element. A big part of my job could just be labeled Problem Solver. Librarians solve problems for their users, and not all problems can be solved with the click of a button. (One time I very much wanted to tell a problematic graduate student, “I solve problems, and right now the problem is you,” but I don’t think librarians sounding like Dirty Harry is a good thing.) Librarians communicate and interact with people in ways that can’t be replicated by machine. Will these problems go away in Infotopia? Will no one need to talk to someone in the library?

It could be, however, that the death-of-the-library discussion is more concerned with public libraries. If public libraries go extinct, it’ll be worse for us all, but if that dark, unlikely day ever comes I’ll be too concerned with making sure I don’t go extinct to worry about it.

*For an overview of phone reference and its relation to chat reference, see the following article by Kathleen Kern: “Have(n’t) We Been Here Before? Lessons from Telephone Reference.” The Reference Librarian no. 85 (2004) p. 1-17.

My official title is “General & Humanities Reference Librarian,” but I don’t use it much. Partly it’s because a goodly portion of my job is collection development, but that’s not the only reason. It’s a good title as these things go, and nothing to be ashamed of, but when I think “reference librarian,” one thing comes first to mind. Reference librarians sit at desks in rooms full of reference books and wait for questions. Sure, they do more, but they still do this. Whether this is a good thing depends upon your library, and I can’t say how much your library might be like mine. But as long as that’s part of being a reference librarian, then “reference librarian” seems outdated for a lot of librarians.

Sitting at Desks

Reference librarians sit at desks in rooms full of reference books and wait for questions. Librarians have been arguing about the desk for years, but the reference desk still seems to figure prominently in libraries. I don’t know of any offhand that have gotten rid of theirs, and only a few places practicing the Brandeis model, though you probably know of more. On my last reference shift, I cleared a printer jam and refilled a stapler. The closest thing to a reference question I got was a visiting scholar asking me to look up an old communist newspaper in the catalog (which he’d already done, and which he knew we didn’t have). I then listened politely while he loudly told me how amazed and stunned he was that we didn’t have this on microfilm. No, perhaps the closest thing to a reference question was his follow-up question: WHY don’t you have this on microfilm? That’s one that with a little research and speculation I could probably answer. However, because of my knowledge of the reference interview, I know that’s not really the question he wanted answered. Is that an atypical desk shift? For some librarians it doesn’t matter. We sit and sit and sit and sit, and that’s what makes a reference librarian.

In Rooms Full of Reference Books

Reference librarians sit at desks in rooms full of reference books and wait for questions. Reference books seem to show no sign of diminishing in volume. There are specialized thises and concise thats on just about every topic under the sun. Some of these reference books are quite good, or at least I assume they are, because I couldn’t tell you the last time I consulted a reference book other than a foreign language dictionary. The only reference book anyone has asked me for recently is the Liddell-Scott lexicon. I do sometimes consult reference works, but typically only the large online sets. Smaller works are often most useful for answering quick factual questions, but I don’t get any quick factual questions, because everyone asking those just goes to Google or the Wikipedia. The background information and clarification of terms I need usually comes from just a handful of large online reference titles, and sometimes just from the Wikipedia for those subjects that traditional reference sources don’t handle well. (Whether contemporary British Islamic rap music is haram is a recent question that springs to mind. Is there a reference work with an entry on Fun-Da-Mental?) Some of my colleagues consult the books more often. One of my colleagues has been working in our reference room since I was three, and she’ll turn to the books and find great information. The question isn’t the usefulness of reference books, but whether the same information isn’t found more easily elsewhere. After a few years, not turning to reference books first became rarely turning to reference books at all.

I’m looking through my old reference textbook for all the kinds of books I don’t go to anymore. Directories? Never in print, almost never online. Almanacs? Typically only for historical questions. Atlases? Occasionally. Bibliographies? Years ago, I know librarians would write subject bibliographies. They might still write them, but I wouldn’t know because I never go to them. I used to try, but they were always dated. I’d find the perfect bibliography on some obscure subject only to realize it was written in 1974. So much of the information available only in reference books is now online for free or fee, and yet the reference books keep coming, and we keep buying them. Maybe that’s a good thing, but it seems like a fruitless attempt to control information by methods designed for a time when there was a lot less information to control.

Waiting for Questions

Reference librarians sit at desks in rooms full of reference books and wait for questions. I like to answer reference questions. I just rarely get any, at the desk. I’d be happy to get rid of the desk and hire a student to fill the staplers and search titles in the catalog. Sitting at a reference desk waiting patiently for the questions that never come—the questions using even a small portion of my research expertise—is a waste of my time.

What about the students? Don’t they need help? Yes, they do. I meet with a lot of students and answer a lot of emails from students, but they don’t come to the desk. They come to me because of my own outreach or instruction efforts, and that’s the case with much of the reference and research help done here. Students in the philosophy and religion departments know who I am and that they can come visit me because I go meet them all every year. The freshman writing seminars all have librarians assigned to them whose purpose is to help the students when they need help. So in any given semester, dozens of students of all years know they can contact me if they need library help, so they contact me directly. I much prefer this to the desk, because it gives them more personal and directed help. It also helps explain why they students don’t come to the desk as often. I help them get started or go farther on research essays; I help them find books and articles and other relevant material; I help them formulate research questions and get relevant background information. And I can help the advanced students more in arranged consultations in my office because I can prepare and learn something about the topics in advance. This is better for both of us than me trying to do it on the fly.

There are plenty of other options besides the desk, or even besides the outreach that I prefer. We also have a research consultation service. We have email reference. Oh, and there’s a page listing subject specialists people can contact directly. And all the databases-by-subject pages and research guides have names and contact information on them. And we have chat reference for those needing a quick answer. With all of the outreach, instruction, and easily available consultation, the reference desk fades in importance. I’d like to see it fade more, because I think there are better, more personal, and more efficient ways to provide research help.

But what about the small handful of people who wander up to the desk occasionally and expect a professional librarian to be sitting there ready to answer any complex question that they may have? What about that? I’ve heard that objection before, though not couched in quite those terms. The question is usually put more mildly, but that is the assumption behind the question. What about when someone has an immediate information need that can only be solved by a librarian? First, what are the chances that any given librarian sitting at a desk can solve every complex information problem? Low, I’d bet. Second, there are still librarians in the building. We can find one. Third, let’s check the stats. How often does this occur? Is there no cost-to-benefit ratio for the librarian’s time? If there are lots of reference questions, then staff the desk with reference librarians. But otherwise … .

I realize reference is different everywhere. Perhaps in your library the reference questions come fast and thick at the desk. At my library the questions often get filtered out before they make it to the desk. On the other hand, the reference desk is a great place to blog.

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. According to Aristotle, it’s finding the best available means of persuasion for any given case. According to Chaim Perelman, the “aim of argumentation is not to deduce consequences from given premises; it is rather to elicit or increase the adherence of the members of an audience to theses that are presented for their consent” (The Realm of Rhetoric, 9). I note this so everyone knows that when I discuss rhetoric, I don’t mean it in the sloppy popular sense of “empty verbiage.”

Librarians have much to learn from the art of rhetoric. Essentially, rhetoric is about communication, and with any communication there are at least three elements: the speaker, the message, and the audience. Most people, including librarians, are aware of themselves as speakers and often aware of their message, but too many times do not consider the audience, and the effect on the audience is crucially important. From a rhetorical point of view, for example, it doesn’t matter how right or logical you are, if you alienate your audience and fail to persuade them of your points, then you have a failed argument. Fret and bemoan your fate all you like, but the problem is you.

Today I want to consider three rhetorical situations many librarians often find themselves in and show the importance of audience: staff meetings, presentations, and library instruction.

If you are in a staff meeting discussing some controversial topic and want to persuade your opponents, the last thing you want to do is alienate them. Unfortunately, that’s easy to do. You can call their ideas stupid, or better yet say something like, “only an idiot would believe that.” You can aggressively state your views as if they were the only ones that mattered. You can interrupt your opponents with frequent hostile criticism. You can state from the beginning that you have no intention of changing your mind. All these behaviors alienate others. Some, like aggression and interruption, alienate because they threaten. Others, such as saying there’s no way you’ll change your mind, inform your listeners that this is not in fact a discussion or debate, because where there is no willingness to consider the opponent’s point of view, there is no dialog, and thus no point of continuing a discussion. By acting like this, you’ve notified them that you don’t give a damn about them or their ideas. Don’t act surprised when they reciprocate.

Try to remember presentations you have seen, either at conferences, on campus, in your library, wherever. Were the speakers aware of their audience and their fellow speakers? Was it an hour long talk that took an hour and a half? Did the speaker seem aware of appropriate time limits or the effect on the audience? Remembering a few simple rules can make your own presentations better, but the most basic rule of all is, think about other people. Do as you would be done by. If you’re on a panel and someone else hogs all the speaking time leaving you with five minutes to get in fifteen minutes’ worth of information and thus forcing you to cut and adapt extemporaneously, how would you feel? I can tell you, you’d most likely be angry, and understandably so.

When you perform library instruction (and I use the word perform deliberately, for it is a performance), do you stand like a lump in front of the class for an hour or more monotonously giving special attention to every nuance of your OPAC or selected database but no attention to your audience? Do you even care if the students are listening to you? If students are checking their email or Facebook or are nodding off, do you blame these kids today and their short attention spans, or yourself for being so boring? You should blame yourself. You’re boring. It doesn’t matter if every single bit of information you convey could potentially be useful to your students. If you don’t communicate with the audience, then the message fails, and the problem is most likely you.

I could offer some practical tips. Listen to your colleagues and acknowledge that you understand their points, even if you don’t agree with them. Don’t alienate people with your arrogance. Pay attention to time limits. Don’t read from your PowerPoint slides with your back to the audience. Don’t speak monotonously or too quickly. During library instruction, consider having a student run that presentation computer while you walk around engaging students and speaking. (They’ll be less like to tune you out or Facebook that way.)

Practical tips are easy to find online, though, and there are plenty of them. However, the primary rule is always to consider your audience. Pay attention to what they’re doing. When you speak, do your colleagues roll their eyes or purse their lips while glaring at you? Then maybe you should tone down your aggression and be more sensitive to their views. During a presentation, do audience members check their watches frequently? Think about time, and how bored you’d be if someone prattled on too long. Do you notice jerky heads as people nod off to sleep but pop back awake as their chins hit their chest? Then speed it up, change the tone of your voice, change topic, do something to engage them. Do students come out of your instruction sessions thinking librarians are bores who want to teach everyone to be librarians? Can they still not research very well because they tuned you out as soon as it was obvious you had no intention of engaging them? Then change your approach, engage students more, don’t try to teach them everything.

Teaching and speaking are performances, and performances are designed for audiences. The best performances should teach and delight. This certainly doesn’t mean we all have to act like clowns or stand-up comics, though I’m never afraid to say something silly or make a joke if I think it will keep the audience paying attention. A bit of wit can carry an audience through a lot of dull business. But we have to keep in mind that public speaking is a performance, and the person up their speaking isn’t us. It’s a persona called Librarian, and part of that persona is an awareness of others.

Considering other people is always difficult. Having an awareness of how our speaking affects those around us, the audience at a big talk or the students at a small BI session, takes practice. Moreover, it takes deliberate consciousness of what we are saying and how we say it, which a lot of people can’t seem to master. Some people are nervous enough just standing up in front of audiences and speaking. I know how it can be. I’ve been teaching and speaking to groups for 15 years, and I’m pretty good at both, but every time I feel sick in the minutes before beginning. Some people mistakenly believe that it’s what they say that’s important, not how the audience hears what they say. Those people don’t usually feel the same way when they’re part of an audience, though.

The most important thing is to communicate our point, to persuade our colleagues, to win the adherence of the audience to our ideas, to get our students to understand a bit about library research and about what librarians can do for them. By alienating or boring your audience, your message is lost, and you have only yourself to blame.

Stephanie Willen Brown’s post at ACRLog on teaching Dialog in a reference course both puzzled and intrigued me.

First, the puzzlement. My first thought was, how quaint. That must be the first thought of a lot of librarians, or the apologetic post would not have been necessary. However, that was also my first thought when I encountered Dialog for the first and last time in my own basic reference class at the University of Illinois ten years ago. It was a summer reference class, and I don’t remember much about it, except being taught Dialog. In 1998 this seemed quaint, and that was before Google tricked the world into thinking search was always simple. The odd queries, the per search payment, the pre-search calculations of what might be effective—all these already seemed old fashioned to me, and I wasn’t even a librarian yet. After ten years of reference work, it seems even more old fashioned. In general, I’m not opposed to old fashioned, and in fact am quite comfortable with it, but nevertheless that’s how my Dialog training struck me.

Then, the intrigue. But wait, maybe the problem is me. I’ll be the first to admit that with things I don’t quite understand. Is it that I’m an academic librarian and don’t do any fee-based searching, so I can just be as sloppy as I like? Or did those couple of weeks on Dialog teach me important lessons on searching databases? I’m not the best reference librarian I’ve ever worked with, but I’m pretty good at searching databases effectively. Did the exposure to Dialog help? Reflecting on this, I’d still have to say, no. It may teach “how databases are structured beneath the hood,” but I got that lesson without doing much Dialog searching.

To digress slightly, though, I’m not sure how much I got out of that reference course. My best reference class was a humanities reference class, and the best training was a year and a half at the information desk in the UIUC Main Library and the intensive apprenticeship we all underwent. Maybe if we’d worked with Dialog there, I’d have fonder memories of it. I learned much of what I know about reference there, so if I can’t search Dialog effectively I have only Beth Woodard to blame.

Brown also linked to a 2001 essay by Carol Tenopir on all the lessons Dialog can easily teach LIS students, lessons on indexing, boolean operators, proximity operators, controlled vocabulary, etc. All important, undoubtedly. But is Dialog the best way to teach such things? Possibly, but it still seems quaint to me. Then again, maybe that’s why nobody asks me to teach reference.