Monthly Archives: October 2007

Alternatives to Instruction

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Since it’s Halloween, I thought I’d write about something scary, like getting rid of library instruction.

As is probably clear from the last post, I’ve never had much faith in traditional library instruction. At this point I’ve taught countless standard BI sessions (is that a hopelessly dated phrase?) and numerous other potentially innovative variations, and I’ve never been satisfied that any of them were worth my time.

My dissatisfaction isn’t with my own performance, necessarily. Without being immodest, I think I can say I’m a good public speaker, informative and even entertaining at times. I can hold the students attention and get them to participate in the process. The problem isn’t me so much as the general nature of the instruction. Two different possible alternatives to standard instruction come to mind based on my experience, but both have obstacles to overcome.

My most rewarding instruction experiences are with the religion juniors here (all juniors have to write independent papers, and all seniors have to write theses). When I first became the religion librarian I began targeting the juniors as a likely place to begin research instruction. I was allowed into their seminar, but only for a few minutes to introduce myself. My introduction consisted of me chatting them up, showing them what a good fellow I could be, and inviting them to set up appointments with me once they started on their research. Most of them did in fact set up individual appointments with me, and I’d sit in my office for an hour or more going over their paper topics, explaining what they needed to do, suggesting promising avenues of research, and searching for primary and secondary resources. Sometimes I met with them multiple times. It worked very well, and many students had good things to say about the process. Over the years I get more time in the seminar, but the individual consultations are still where I can give the best help to the student because the sessions are focused and I tailor the instruction to their needs and their questions. It’s also where I learn the most, because I always learn something new when preparing for a topic. I believe this is the ideal model of library instruction: focused individual consultations.

The problem is that most schools can’t afford this level of instruction. If you’re teaching in a large university with tens of thousands of students, most likely you don’t have enough librarians to devote to instruction this intensive and individualized. In a liberal arts college it might be possible, though. I also provide library instruction for a few freshmen writing seminars, and though I invite everyone to meet with me, only a small percentage do. I would probably be overwhelmed if I got the same response I get with juniors.

My second most rewarding instruction experiences are with my own writing students. When I act as my own librarian for my students, they get better instruction than they might otherwise, for a couple of reasons. First, I know exactly what they need. Second, they pay more attention to me because I’m also the instructor. Students know who has the power. Because of this, I have often considered a train-the-trainer model, where I prepare the instructors and they integrate research instruction into the class. This sort of seamless research instruction would probably be better for the students.

However, I see two problems with implementation. For one, the instructors would most likely balk, and for good reason. Just as I’ve given up keeping up with the latest trends in web design and resent it when some web developer expects me to master my job plus his, so the instructors would resent it if they’re expected to master their subject matter and mine as well. For the most basic level of library instruction, say, quick searching Proquest, this might be fine. But it’s undoubtedly true that I know more about general library research and approaches to teaching research skills to students than would any instructor. I should know more, that’s my job. Another objection is more selfish. If the instructors are also the librarians, then what need have we for librarians? If it’s so easy to assist students in their library research, what’s the point of having that staff of professional librarians who claim some expertise? Training the trainers might harm the already shaky status of librarians.

Obviously I have no firm objective in considering alternatives to instruction, and I have little control over the matter anyway. However, I still can’t help but think that the more personalized the service the better it will be for the students. The problem is how to sustain that.

Reference is the Best Instruction

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Today’s a reprint, because I’ve been rethinking the issue. What’s below originally appeared in LOEX News, Volume 28:1 (Spring 2001), 4, 8.

I’m trying to articulate what I think about reference and instruction, and this was an early pass at the issue. At the time I was playing around with a few catch phrases of the day (“just in time,” “point of need”) to argue that traditional BI wasn’t a good use of anyone’s time, and that reference provided better service to the students. I’m now coming to the conclusion that the reference service as traditionally provided is much less necessary than before, and I’d prefer an aggressive research consultation service and a train the trainer service, which I’m planning to write about during my next reference shift.

Still, for those curious about the reference and instruction views of a librarian just a year out of school at the time, read on. I like to think I’m a better writer these days, though.

Reference is the Best Instruction

What is the best library instruction? I think a case can be made that the best instruction for students comes just in time (when they need it), at the point of need (where they need it), and is individualized as much as possible (what they need). At my college, we try to make sure every professor who wants an instruction session has a particular assignment in mind, and we try to schedule the session within 2-3 weeks of the time the assignment is due. That way, the reasoning goes, the students will have a reason to pay attention in class. They won’t just be going through the motions of typing keywords into boxes on the screen, but will instead be earnestly trying to learn how to research effectively. After all, they have an assignment due in a couple of weeks.

You’ve probably figured out by now that this model of library instruction, like all the others, has its problems. Of course the students should pay attention in class, and learn how to find research articles on their topic or background information in a reference book. Somehow it doesn’t always work out that way. I see many students from these sessions come back to the reference desk apparently clueless about what they were taught in class. Some may argue that if nothing else they learned they should go to the reference desk for help, but that tidbit of information is a bad trade for my time, if you ask me. I used to resent this, but then I realized that the students were acting on the philosophy we used to justify our instruction classes. We want to be there at the point of need. We want them to know what they need to know just in time to do their research. And we want to individualize the session as much as possible.

But the students are coming to the reference desk at the point of their need (even if it is a little late by our standards). At the reference desk we are giving them what they need just in time. And only at the reference desk do the students get just what they want, and what they think they need. For the individual student who needs to learn how to research a particular topic, which is the most effective: a library instruction session or a one-on-one encounter at the reference desk? Who would argue that the former is usually more effective? Put this way, the question arises: is reference the best instruction?

When the students go to a BI session, they may or may not be interested. Sometimes it seems the students are all but ready to fall asleep. This could be a comment on my teaching style, but I don’t think so. Most of the students just aren’t interested, no matter how politely they go through the motions. The general student opinion seems to be that library instruction is boring. We all know that isn’t true. Or we don’t want to believe it’s true. Either way, the students may think it’s boring because the session doesn’t meet their need when they actually feel their need. The student has nothing to do with scheduling an instruction session. The timing of the session is up the course instructor, sometime with a little negotiation with the librarian. If we want the student to “own” the instruction, then we should present it when they feel the need, which is usually right before they come to the reference desk. How often do students at the reference desk seem uninterested in what they’re being taught? It happens, but not as often as in the classroom.

The reference interaction provides the students with the help they need just in time. Sure, students often begin their research too late. They may do bad research because they don’t have time to take advantage of interlibrary loan. They don’t find the best resources. But the students will be doing that regardless of the instruction session. The motivated students won’t wait for the library instruction, and the rest will come up at the last minute. The last minute students may learn an important lesson about good research, a lesson they won’t learn just because we tell them to do their research early.

Finally, the reference encounter is the most individualized instruction possible. Some may counter that students may not like one-on-one encounters, or that the reference librarian may never really know what the student needs. That’s possible. But the negotiation at the reference desk is more likely to identify the individual needs of the student than the general BI session is.

But compelling reasons exist to focus energy on traditional instruction rather than traditional reference.

One reason is limited resources. Let’s say we teach an hour-long BI class to 15 students. To give each of them an hour would be just too much time. Even if each of them really needed only 20 minutes, that’s still 5 times the number of hours of a BI session. I can think of 2 possible objections to this excellent assertion. One, the time later spent at the reference desk helping those students who didn’t get it the first time should count against the total hours. Two, the reference encounter still provides the better service to the student. Which is more important, time or the student? In any real library, compromises have to be made, but I think the option that best serves the student is the one to try for.

Another good objection argues that the students need to know the overall scheme of research, and not just the exact particulars that help their immediate research. A BI session for an entire class makes sure they all understand the general organization of information for their topic. They know about good reference books, good databases, good bibliographies, even if they don’t use any of them for their own research. They have a broader understanding of a knowledge base.

I’m not sure how realistic this objection is. As librarians, we know the importance of understanding the organization of a field of knowledge, but for the students who don’t care, all our teaching is for naught. If they ever learn such a thing, the most likely way is through building up the knowledge step by step through work on individual projects.

One could also argue that the students may never get any instruction if left on their own. This is definitely possible, and they’re a couple of responses. The cynical response is, so what? They’re in college, and they need to learn how to do research on their own. This view has some appeal for me, but usually after a long day. The generous response is to publicize the reference desk more. Many students don’t know what reference librarians do, and they should. Instruction classes are certainly a great way to publicize reference services, but there are other good ways, and we would be helping our students by finding them.

I’m certainly not saying that anyone should give up traditional instruction. But I do want people to consider that some of the best instruction students may get happens at the reference desk. There may be reference librarians who don’t teach formal BI classes and think they don’t do instruction. But the reference desk is a great teaching environment. Some instruction librarians insist that we’re always doing library instruction, whether in the classroom, at the reference desk, or chatting with faculty about databases. I don’t want to fall prey to that variety of instruction monomania, but there’s a bit of truth to the statement. I don’t think there is any one best way to provide instruction, because the contexts for learning differ so much by student, librarian, institution, etc. But if our criterion for effective instruction is giving the students what they need when and where they need it, then reference might be the best instruction.

Academic Research and Writing

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Scholarly librarians help students with research better than unscholarly librarians, I believe, but sometimes, pace the old chestnut that those who can’t do, teach, librarians who not only know how to write but how to teach writing have an advantage over those who don’t.
Right now I’m glancing through Studying Students: the Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester. At the end of chapter 1 I was stuck by this sentence:

“Last but not least, the faculty interviews made clear the need for librarians to understand
the pedagogy of writing in order to assist students through the final steps of preparing
a well-crafted research paper.” (15) I couldn’t agree more. This led some of the librarians at Rochester to train to be writing consultants and work regular shifts in their writing center.

Without hesitation I can say that training in writing pedagogy makes me a better librarian. The English program at UIUC wasn’t very good about placing their graduate students in decent tenure track jobs, but it was outstanding in training those graduate students to teach writing, and reinforcing that training by requiring most of the students to teach two sections of rhetoric every semester in order to survive. (Do I sound bitter? It’s probably just heartburn.) I taught a dozen sections of rhetoric at UIUC as a graduate student and later as an adjunct, worked for five semesters as a writing consultant in the writing clinic there, and am teaching my fifth writing seminar at Princeton. All of this is valuable training for helping students with research essays.

It’s hard to articulate just how it helps, at least within the confines of a blog post. Teaching basic research skills is easy enough, but what librarians rarely see are the results of student writing. The librarians are concerned with locating resources, and we understand how complex the information world currently is, but professors want good essays, not just well researched ones.

According to the study, “when discussing their expectations, faculty commented more extensively on the problems of writing and critical thinking than on those related to locating the right sources. Evaluating and interpreting the information appear much more difficult for students than finding it.” Another source of complaint was that “students tend to summarize readings instead of reflecting upon them and writing critical, thoughtful papers.” And, “finally, all interviewed faculty complained about mechanical problems that plague students’ writing: ‘florid, overwrought language, jumbled and verbose’; ‘grammar declining over the years’; spelling mistakes; lack of clarity; poor organization of the text; inappropriate style for the discipline or intended audience. In the faculty’s opinion, bad writing is an acute problem that turns out to be the main obstacle to students’ success in research” (5). In other words, research is the least of these students’ problems.

In one sense, librarians have done their job. One way or another, students often find at least some resources for their essays, but they just don’t know what to do with them once they’ve found them. Unfortunately, these skills aren’t taught in regular classes. Professors expect students to know what to do with sources, but typically don’t spend much class time addressing these issues because that takes time away from the content of the class, which might also be why most professors don’t schedule library research sessions.

Teaching writing and research skills is the most fundamental part of academic preparation, and the least glamorous. That’s why librarians and rhetoric instructors are usually at the bottom of the academic hierarchy. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s still important, especially for the students who won’t pick these skills up on their own, i.e., most students.

Because of my experience teaching writing and working on research essays from possible research question to final revision, I understand what students are expected to do and where they may have problems. My research consultations often become to some extent writing consultations, and it would be difficult for me to separate the two. As a writing consultant, I would have appointments with students. They would come with anything from an idea to a finished draft, and within 30-60 minutes I’d have to read and comprehend their writing and be able to suggest possible areas for revision. I worked as a writing consultant and a reference graduate assistant all through library school, and I noticed that as I got better at reference my writing consultation skills for research essays improved.

The opposite is also true. Though I rarely read their writing, my research consultations with students often incorporate many of the same skills. I find myself asking questions about their research, discussing their topics with them, pointing out pitfalls they might encounter, suggesting alternative ways of looking at a topic that might be more fruitful for their research question (and thus their library research). I can do this because I’m trained to do it and have done it on and off for 15 years, and I also think that the students benefit more from it, rather than having a writing center that might be able to discuss ideas unrelated to possible paths of research, or a librarian who can discuss ways to find sources but doesn’t think of how these sources will be used in writing the research paper. It’s also why I’m my own librarian for my writing seminars, because I’ve found that my intimate knowledge of the subject and the expectations of the students allows me to give them the best research consultations. Often I’ve thought that librarians should help train the instructors and let the instructors train the students.

Academic writing and research are necessarily and fundamentally entwined, and the more we know about each the more we’ll be able to help students write good research essays.

To Facebook or Not to Facebook

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It’s clear I don’t like silly ways to engage students, such as trying to act their age, but obviously there are non-comical ways to try to engage students, to go out to them without trying to be like them. Chat reference is one way. Facebook might be another.

Today in class we briefly discussed Facebook and the fact that they and many other students spend a great deal of time every day “Facebooking.” I tried to pin down just what Facebooking entailed for them, but clearly it was just about everything social these days, from communicating with friends to playing games to stalking people. It surprised me just a little because Princeton is a relatively small, completely residential campus with around 5,000 students and the opportunities for non-virtual interaction are plentiful.

I admitted to them that I had a Facebook profile that I don’t do much with, and one student whipped out his iPhone, found my profile, and sent me a friend invitation within about 30 seconds. “You see how much time I must spend on Facebook,” he said. I joined Facebook only because a colleague here sent me an invitation to join. Since I like him, I went ahead and created a minimal profile. I’ve never sent a friend request, but once I joined several other colleagues noted it and sent them to me. That was fine. I’m not sure they’re all friends, but they’re certainly people I’m friendly with and like. Then came old friends from past lives who discovered me. That’s one thing I do like about it. Though it doesn’t help me keep up with them any better, it lets us both know we think of the other sometimes.

Then came the friend request from a librarian I’d never met nor heard of, or at least didn’t remember. Had I met this person before? Were we in library school together? Met at a conference? Served on a committee together? I didn’t think so. But I didn’t want to offend by turning down the request, and it’s not like I’m Stephen Fry, so bombarded with these requests that they would overwhelm me. Also, I realize that it doesn’t matter if Facebook friends are real friends. So I accepted. It so much easier to be undiscriminating online. I’d probably even accept a request from you if you sent one.

But what about the students? Would I use Facebook to communicate with them? To tell them more about myself or find out more about them? I’ve mentioned how freaked out some of them seemed when I told them I’d looked them all up on Facebook before the semester began to find out more about them. It seemed like I was stalking them in their own environment. If I encouraged students to “befriend” me, would they see it as appropriate, or just creepy?

I’m coming to the conclusion that it might seem more inappropriate than not. It would be encroaching on their territory, as if I had walked into their dorm room or something. They have a space apart from old people, and if there had been Facebook when I was a freshman in college, I doubt I’d have wanted old people to invade my space. So while I would gladly accept any friend request from a student, and do occasionally actually befriend students, I would never encourage students to make me their “friends” so I can communicate with them and keep track of their lives and tell them all about the library. I don’t want to be socially connected to students in this way, and I don’t think they would like it either, especially since my profile page is so boring.

Relating to Students

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Watching the vision of students video last week got me thinking about ways to engage students. This led me to consider as well ways in which I don’t think we should try to engage students. Here I’m thinking mostly of engaging students in the classroom by trying to identify with them as kids in some way or to show them that we’re on their level somehow, to show them that we’re fun or relevant, to treat scholarship and learning like a bitter pill that needs a coating of fun to make it palatable.

Some ways to make ourselves fun I see as completely inappropriate. One comical way in which librarians sometimes try to be “fun” is by engaging in pop culture references allegedly appropriate to teenagers. If the librarian is young enough, this might work for a while, but inevitably the pop culture references date too quickly. What I might remember as a recent hit song might have been a hit when a student was 9. And how likely is it that any of us watch the same movies as teenagers today? I would probably have better luck making pop culture reference appropriate for someone twice my age than half my age. This might make it seem like only I would be ridiculous making pop culture references, but unless one has a teenager around the house how likely is it that teen pop culture references come to hand easily?

Another comical way is to try to talk like the kids do today, using their slang. Perhaps it works for you, but it would never work for me, because I don’t know the slang and I rarely use slang anyway, especially with students. Slang is a great way for a cohort to communicate amongst itself, but outside of that context is often hinders communication. Regardless, slang is so quickly out of date and teen historical memories are so short. Just today in class a student was referring to some slang term I’d never heard. I said, “you kids today, with all your slang. I just can’t keep up. Everything’s the bee’s knees or groovy or whatever.” Another student asked if that was slang from my day, and I don’t think he was kidding.

I can’t relate to the teens as teens, and I would never try. I try to be witty and clever and even funny sometimes, but being funny is different from being funny in the same ways their friends would be funny. I want to show them that being a scholar isn’t the same as being a grind, but it’s also different from being their buddy.

Other librarians and teachers try to be relevant in different ways, but this can also backfire, because we’re not always sure what is relevant to teenagers, and our job isn’t to be relevant to where they are now, but to show them how anything can be relevant or interesting if approached from the right perspective. (On a semi-related note, read this article in the Chronicle on teaching a course at UMass about the Grateful Dead. Here I think it’s not the professor trying to be relevant, but a critic of the professor demonstrating how out of touch he is. The course about the Grateful Dead is criticized “as the latest example of modern higher education pandering to consumers.” Is the Grateful Dead what college students are pandering for these days?)

I want to engage students not by going to them but by bringing them to me. It’s no use me trying to find out what interests them, because it will never work. I’m not a teenager or a college student, and my memories of what it was like to be one are necessarily partial and limited by my own experience. But that’s okay, because it doesn’t matter what interests them now; what matters is whether I can make what I’m doing interesting to them. Admittedly this is more difficult for me in a library instruction session than in the ordinary classroom. I can make political philosophy interesting more easily than database searching, but I still try to make library sessions interesting. Research is a problem to be solved, and we engage students by showing how the problem presents interesting challenges, how it’s not just searching Google or searching the catalog or searching a subject specific index. Research is a complex endeavor that many enjoy for its own sake. Finding sources, relating sources, solving problems, answering questions, creating new questions, entering into a scholarly conversation about a subject and the give and take of debate–these are worthy and intellectually challenging activities. If we’re trying to train scholars, even junior scholars, we don’t need to go to their world. We need to bring them into our world.

Are we trying to become like students, or make the students become like scholars? The classroom is a stage, and like it or not we’re performers. Teaching is a performance, and we should carefully consider the personas we create. Do we create a persona of a teacher who desperately wants to be relevant to student life? I fear that way disappointment lies. Instead, we should create the persona we want students to model. We should show them a world beyond their world, a world of intelligent and educated and even witty people who are thoughtful and like to learn, who question the world and who take scholarship seriously. People with the historical and moral imagination that makes learning about the wider world an invigorating challenge. We don’t need to make scholarship or learning fun or relevant to them now. We need to mold them into people who instead find enjoyment in scholarship and learning.

Visions of Students Today

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I ran across this YouTube video: A Vision of Students Today (found via It’s All Good). It came out of an intro anthropology class at Kansas State University. I’m not sure what we’re supposed to learn from it. Based on a collaborative semi-survey, students hold up signs talking about their lives, with the overall point (I think) that university education isn’t “relevant” to their lives. Students have been chanting that mantra since at least the 1960s, but now the education is irrelevant in different ways.

It seems to me that one of the biggest criticisms is of the large lecture format, and I couldn’t agree more. One student holds up a sign saying her average class size is 115 students, and another that 18% of her teachers knows her name. It’s no wonder that students get discouraged in this environment. I’ve never taught a lecture class, but I did used to TA for one on early British literature, and it was deadly (except for my discussion sections, which of course were delightful). Right now I teach 12 students, and know all of their names, but I know that even here some of the students have very large lectures and grow bored in them. The large lecture format should probably die, but there never seem to be enough teachers and money to teach everyone in small seminars.

Some of the other criticisms seem more like whining and less like constructive criticism. One student sign reads “I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me.” What are we to make of this? Lots of students don’t read course materials. Lots of students also don’t make good grades. How is that the fault of anyone but the student? Or is she saying that the professors assign readings irrelevant to the subject? That could be a problem. But she then follows that sign with another saying “only 26% are relevant to my life.” To which I would want to respond, so what? Is a university there to teach only classes relevant to the lives of late teens, or there to broaden the knowledge and understanding of those teens by trying to educate them?

Another students signs that she “will read 8 books this year, 2300 web pages & 1281 Facebook profiles.” Does that mean that professors should no longer assign books, but instead teach the content of Facebook?

Another signs that she will “write 42 pages for class this semester but over 500 pages of email.” I teach writing, but don’t see the relevance. Those 500 pages of email have no obligation to be clear, thoughtful, and coherent. They don’t necessarily teach you to order your thoughts about a complex subject and make a compelling argument. I don’t know what kind of writing there is for this course, but writing 40 pages of argumentative prose is very different from writing a lot of emails, unless you write long emails arguing difficult questions with lots of citations and careful analysis and use of evidence.

Several students hold up signs saying how much time they spend on various activities each day: 2 hours on the phone, 1.5 hours watching TV, 2 hours eating, 3 hours listening to music, 3.5 hours online, 7 hours sleeping, etc. It adds up to 26.5 hours, and there’s not even any mention of drinking or hooking up. Another sign reads, “I’m a multitasker,” then “I have to be.” But one doesn’t have to talk on the phone for 2 hours or watch TV at all, and I’m not sure listening to music while surfing the web should count as multi-tasking anyway. Still, I agree that educational methods that encourage students to sit in a lecture hall while IMing and listening to music are problematic. The solution is smaller classes that engage students in the content of the course, but also students who want to learn. (Based on my experience, I don’t think online classes are any answer. I had to take one in library school because no one on campus would teach gov docs. The fact that I could eat my dinner, play my guitar, and still participate in class didn’t impress me with the format much.)

Another signs about having a job after graduation that probably won’t exist today, leading another student to hold up what I think is a Scantron sheet with writing on the back saying, “Filling out this won’t help me get there.” In some ways I sympathize with the student. Filling out bubbles on a test sheet won’t get the student a job. I would be more concerned, though, that it won’t help the student get an education. I balk at the notion that the goal of a university is strictly to get people jobs. That seems to be a common factor with many students, but the failure isn’t that of the education, but of their understanding of the purpose of that education. The students frustrated that not all the readings are relevant to their lives and not all the classes will help them get jobs might be more happy with vocational training. No wonder they’re bored out of their minds in these classes. Colleges need to engage students more, but students need to want to learn. Both are necessary for the best college experience.

If they’re so bored, and if so much is so irrelevant to their concerns, then why are they there? Why don’t they quit and do something else? I know why they don’t, because they believe that a college degree is necessary to get a job that will allow them to almost have a decent middle class lifestyle these days. I think they’re right, but it’s not the presence of the degree that will fit them for challenging and constantly changing knowledge economy, but the knowledge, skills, and habits of mind that come with learning.

Guitar Heroes, Juke Box Heroes, and Scholars

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I think I will make another irrelevant and grasping video game analogy for today because this is an issue I’ve been thinking about for a while. Some of you may be familiar with the video game Guitar Hero. My nephew and his friend were telling me about this game. It’s played with a controller that looks vaguely like a Gibson SG, only without any strings or frets and without looking cool. The game plays rock music, and you’re supposed to press buttons at different parts of the song and act like a guitar hero. I haven’t played, but the description on the Wikipedia makes it sound like a rock version of that game Simple Simon, only with a different controller. I told them I didn’t think I would like it, since I know how to play a real guitar. If I wanted to pretend to be a guitar hero, I could pick up my Strat and start playing some rock music. At one point in my life I wanted to be a Juke Box Hero, and even bought a beat up six string in a second hand store. Eventually I realized that I like reading and research and ideas, and didn’t like working with other people in a band.

This contrast between the Guitar Hero and the Juke Box Hero makes me question the training we give students and whether it has anything to do with what they want or need. Academic librarians (and I think a lot of professors as well) want students to be juke box heroes, but the students only want to be guitar heroes. We want them to train them to be scholars, but they just want to play at being scholarly.

In one of the encyclopedias of library science there’s a distinction between liberal and conservative reference service. Liberal service is giving the patron the answer, and conservative service is teaching the patron how to find the answer. Obviously it varies within context, but usually for students I take the conservative approach. The idea is to make them independent scholars, able to locate and evaluate scholarly resources for their work. Some students enjoy this a lot. They want to be the scholarly equivalent of the juke box hero, with a book in their hand and their laptop slung low. I get the feeling that a lot of the students would rather be guitar heroes, going through the motions and putting on a good show, or in this case writing a decent paper, but they don’t want to be independent scholars. They want someone to hand them the resources and they’ll play the game.

Professors tend to like the students who are most interested in their discipline, and they love creating future scholars. I think librarians are similar. I like to encourage students to do research and see it as part of a life of learning rather than a chore for an essay assignment. However, one might question how realistic it is to think that most students have any interest in scholarship. And here I’m talking about very bright and well prepared college students, since based on my experience at a big state university and a mediocre liberal arts college, at many places most students have almost no scholarly inclination and are interested mainly in getting a diploma in any way they can because they think this will get them a job. It’s possible our research instruction falls mostly on deaf ears because the majority of students don’t want or need what we have to give. We want the students to be juke box heroes, passionate about scholarship, interested in research, but they want to be guitar heroes. I don’t see this as a problem, because our purpose isn’t necessarily to help all students equally, but to aid and further scholarship and scholars.

Second Life, Pac Man, and Computer Chess

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Recently, I was asked my professional opinion about Second Life, and this is one answer.

When I give periodic talks about Google, I demo Google Gadgets and show the variety of them, including ones that are games such as Space Invaders or Pac Man. Usually I make a joke about how great this is, because now I don’t have to be bored at work anymore, that I’m ranked in the top 100 of Space Invaders, but with another slow semester I’ll probably make the top 10. It usually gets at least a chuckle from the audience. I made the joke in a talk to the university community, and some of my colleagues then claimed I’d told a hundred university employees that I sit around all day playing Space Invaders instead of working, thus making librarians look bad. One colleague actually asked me if I sat in my office all day playing Space Invaders. With as straight a face as I could muster, I told her that no, I usually played Asteroids instead. The irony is I don’t even like computer games.

However, I do play a lot of games with my computer, though rarely at work. I especially like abstract strategy board games and know how to play many different ones, though I also play backgammon and cribbage. A few years ago I was trying to play games with my daughter and yet escape the living hell that is Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders, so I started researching games we could play together with no chance involved. She was a bit young for chess, but I taught her some. However, I’ve also taught her checkers, reversi, go, gomoku, ninuki-renju, mancala, Cathedral, Blokus, connect 4, fox and hounds, nine men’s morris, chinese checkers, alquerque, tafl, surakarta, and probably a few more I’ve forgotton. The last three were so obscure I had to make the boards myself. (By the way, I highly recommend surakarta for small children; it’s a checkers-like game where one captures by moving pieces around big loops on the corner of the board.) I have computer programs that play almost all of these games, and I rely upon Fritz 10 and Hoyle Backgammon as ways to relax of an evening. I find these applications invaluable for playing, practicing, and even learning the games. I taught myself to play chess with the Chessmaster. But I don’t like computer games.

Okay, so what am I talking about and how is it relevant to Second Life or librarianship? For my purposes here, I’m considering computer games to be games that one couldn’t play without a computer, games that were born in a computerized environment. This would include such relatively simple games as Asteroids or Pacman to such complex games as World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs. I don’t like them. I never liked them. I gave away my Atari as a child. I didn’t hang out in arcades. I just found them all boring. However, I love computer chess because the computer program allows me to do better something I like to do in real life. I don’t like World of Warcraft because exploring strange worlds and fighting monsters isn’t something I want to do in real life, and even if it was, this game wouldn’t make me any better at it. Wielding a virtual sword just isn’t the same as wielding a real one, and I should know since I just bought a sword, the primary purpose of which is to give my wife something to look at me and shake her head about.

This is how I at least relate to various kinds of social software. I like the ones that help me do something more efficiently that I was already doing. Recently, I set up a wiki for our reference department because I was trying to capture in one accessible shared place all the information we had in files folders or post it notes or hard drives or email folders that we need to do reference work. We were already keeping this sort of information, just not in a convenient form. Thus, I like this wiki. It makes real life easier, and I consider this the best reason to persuade people to use it.

But so far, I don’t see how Second Life helps me do anything better that I’d ever want to do away from the computer. This may change in the future, and I’m open to development, but so far it bores me. From what I’ve read, virtual shopping and virtual pornography are the most popular things in Second Life. I do almost all of my shopping online, but that’s because I can shop for real things more efficiently. I don’t want to do any virtual shopping. I don’t like to shop at all. I’ve also visited a lot of islands that might be of interest to me, but I couldn’t find anyone there, including the chess island. I wouldn’t go to Second Life to hang out with my friends, because none of my friends visit there.

Thus, while I realize that there may be academic uses to Second Life, so far I’m skeptical of its usefulness. It still seems more like a computer game to me, something that one does mainly for fun and can only do with a computer. It doesn’t seem to build on real life so much as provide a fun alternative to it. It is purposeless, like games and even perhaps like the humanities themselves. I don’t consider this a criticism. Reading a poem is purposeless, yet nonetheless valuable and enjoyable, at least if it’s a good poem. Second Like, like a game, provides an end in itself, but so far it’s just not an end I value. If I found it more utilitarian, I’d have a higher professional opinion of it.

Controlling Our Information

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Recently, I attended a meeting where we discussed a growing problem for our library–the inability to get all of the electronic resources we subscribe to in our catalog, especially the ejournals. Part of the problem is staffing; I’m not sure we have enough people to treat these journals as we do print journals. Part of the problem is sheer quantity. We purchase a journal package, and suddenly that’s a thousand new titles, and perhaps they don’t have easily available MARC records. The catalog has always traditionally been the place of record for what the library owns or has access to, and if it could still be that I’d be happy, too, but clearly it’s not. People are finding journal articles through Google Scholar that, according to our OPAC, we don’t subscribe to, and yet obviously we do subscribe to them because otherwise the patron wouldn’t be able to access some of them through Google.

I’m torn in the debate. I like the idea of the catalog of record. I’m comfortable searching the catalog and teaching others to. I like the power over information that a perfect catalog can give me. And I know that admitting that the catalog can no longer function that way and that alternative searching methods are inevitable means giving up a lot of the control we have over our own resources–control which we have very good reasons for wanting. It means we have a lot of uncertainty that doesn’t benefit us or the patrons, but which may be inevitable.

Yet I still wonder if we’re fighting a Sisyphean battle. We roll those MARC records up the hill into the catalog and think it’s complete, and along comes another thousand journals unaccounted for. (I know that was a bit strange, but I was trying to figure out what Sisyphus would do with a MARC record.) Increasingly, I have the nagging feeling that trying to catalog every item we own or have access to is analogous to trying to catalog the Internet. I just don’t see how it can be done. (Perhaps that’s what the elusive semantic web is supposed to be able to do some day, but I won’t comment because I’m not sure I understand the issues well enough.)

Some of us are understandably bothered that we have resources we don’t control, or that people can find our own journals through Google but not through the OPAC. I think this is where I part company with some of my colleagues. As much as I would appreciate the perfect OPAC, I don’t think it’s possible anymore, and it doesn’t bother me that people find resources through other methods. It’s enough for me if people find the information they need, and if they find information we provide but not with tools we provide, I’m fine with that. It’s possible that librarians are the only ones bothered by this, and the fact that people are already accessing our journals through Google in the first place is an indication this might be true.

I also know there are other next generation catalogs that attempt to do some of this stuff. We don’t have one of those, though. And even with these I wonder whether there can any longer be one-stop shopping for library resources.

If there can’t be, and clearly there isn’t now, then it causes obvious problems, especially perhaps for reference services. If we can no longer depend on having a catalog of record, how can we verify what we have? Is the catalog even useful if we can’t trust it? I’m certainly not arguing that the catalog isn’t still useful, only that it’s usefulness is limited in yet another way, and that we must use alternative ways to find information, even information we’ve purchased. The world of information is a great big mess these days, and I appreciate the problems as much as anyone, but if problems can’t be solved, then worrying about them doesn’t help much. Sisyphus might have been better off if he’d left that MARC record at the bottom of the hill and searched Google instead.

Using Our Own Services

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Teaching a writing seminar this semester means I’m working two jobs, and during some weeks it feels like three. Why do I do it? Purely so I can have something to blog about.

Librarians would probably be better librarians if they occasionally used the library as a non-librarian. It’s very easy to become library-centric and to think the library is the most important institution on campus. It’s undeniably an important campus institution, but it’s not necessarily the most important one to faculty and students most of the time. The collections and services are important, but the library as a building is of secondary importance to many scholars.

Last week I had a problem with one of the library services related to my seminar, a service which is normally very reliable but which I thought had performed unsatisfactorily in this instance. After an email exchange, the problem was fixed, but I knew the person fixing the problem would rather not have done so right now, because this particular service is very busy around this point in the semester, and any extra demands interrupt the already hectic flow of work. As a fellow librarian, I sympathize; even as a fellow human being, I sympathize; but as an instructor relying upon this service to teach, I needed the problem fixed and I wasn’t going to stop until it was.

Our library has an article delivery service for faculty that many librarians think is extravagant. The service attempts to deliver electronically within 48 hours any article requested by any professor, whether it’s an ILL article or one in a journal sitting on a shelf in the library, which might mean only a short trip to the library for the professor to retrieve. Needless to say, this service is very popular and heavily used. Is it expensive? I assume so, but I’ve never seen any figures. Is it extravagant? Not to the users of the service, it isn’t. They don’t want to make even a short trip to the library if they don’t have to. Being in the library itself has no value for them. The collection has value, and if they can get to the collection without coming to the building, that’s fine by them. Librarians work in libraries. They’re in the building all day. It’s their business to be there. A lot of professors work in the library, but the library is a support to their work, not their primary work. Their business isn’t hanging out in libraries; their business is teaching and research, and the library is there to support that. If the library makes their job easier, then it’s doing a better job than if it doesn’t make their job easier. Librarians who don’t rely on the library for their scholarship or teaching and who don’t work in the library might not appreciate the usefulness of the service. The scholar’s main business is using the resources to produce scholarship, not schlepping over to the library to do some photocopying.

Our library also, as you might imagine, has a lot of electronic resources. Our pockets aren’t bottomless, and we could always use more money, but our collections budget is substantial and we subscribe to or purchase hundreds of databases and e-collections (or perhaps thousands by now, I lose count). Often these resources duplicate items we already have in print or microform, and some librarians make the argument that we shouldn’t pay to have electronic access to this material. After all, it’s just sitting here in the library, or perhaps in offsite storage. Interested scholars can just walk over to the library. Why cater to their laziness, especially if they are students? But most scholars don’t spend all day in the library, and many scholars don’t even work on campus all the time. Some have even been known to work when the library isn’t even open. Research isn’t necessarily something scholars just stop doing when they leave campus at 5pm or leave town for a few days or go on holiday. Just for my own research or teaching I know how delightful it is to be able to retrieve that article on New Year’s Day when I’m 500 miles away from the library building. I can understand not being able to afford certain electronic resources, but I don’t think it’s much of an argument to say we shouldn’t buy something just because we already have it in a different and less useful format. Only librarians who do little research or teaching would find this a compelling argument. Again, it’s the collection that’s important and supportive to research, not walking over to the library.

Most librarians probably already agree with me that the library’s job is to support research and teaching and save the time of scholars and teachers, and when they don’t agree with me I always suspect they’re thinking as librarians who don’t use libraries very much, rather than thinking as library users. Our job isn’t to make things easier for ourselves, but for the library users, and it’s easier to see that if we also, at least occasionally, are put in the place of the non-librarian library user.