Author Archives: Wayne Bivens-Tatum

Reading the Times

Posted on by

The NYT reported on a new study from the National Endowment of the Arts demonstrating that people who don’t read don’t do well on reading tests. I’m glad we have the NEA around to point these things out to us.

While the reading news nationally may be discouraging, I will give thanks as we move to Thanksgiving that my own child seems to have the right environment for academic success. I wrote earlier how I believe just having books around encourages reading and thinking. Even math seems to improve, which surprised me some. According to the NYT article:

“In examining the average 2005 math scores of 12th graders who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books, an analysis of federal Education Department statistics found that those students scored much lower than those who lived in homes with more than 100 books. Although some of those results could be attributed to income gaps, Mr. Iyengar noted that students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books.”

With a few master’s degrees and 2-3000 books around the house, maybe my daughter’s math scores will even be good.

This news is relevant to higher education for obvious reasons, since students who read and do math well will probably succeed in college, but what should also be obvious to us all is that reading ability is necessary for all sorts of jobs, especially jobs that pay enough to eek out a middle class existence. 75% of those employing people with 2 years of college, and 90% of those employing people with 4 years of college said reading comprehension was very important for their workers.

The article notes that reading better means more money. “In an analysis of Education Department statistics looking at eight weekly income brackets, the data showed that 7 percent of full-time workers who scored at levels deemed “below basic” on reading tests earned $850 to $1,149 a week, the fourth-highest income bracket, while 20 percent of workers who had scored at reading levels deemed “proficient” earned such wages.”

However, I assume that is an average, because I know of a lot of people with PhDs, who presumably can read well, who don’t earn $1,149 per week. The Times also reported this week that non-tenure-track adjuncts outnumber tenure-track faculty at colleges and universities nationwide now. This trend hasn’t been news to anyone in academia for years. The story profiles one adjunct teaching six courses at four different schools. With that schedule, I hope she earns $1,149 a week, but I doubt it.

This leads to a different question about reading ability and jobs. It puzzles me why so many people, especially in the humanities, are willing to work for years on a PhD knowing their chance of a tenure-track job at a decent school is very slim. Here are thousands of presumably well educated people who end up working for several schools teaching courses for a couple thousand dollars each per semester. The Times article quotes a lot of people complaining about the lack of tenure track jobs, and how students who take more classes with adjuncts don’t do as well because the adjuncts aren’t around for them since they teach several classes a semester. I don’t think the problem is with the lack of tenure so much as the treatment of adjuncts, which is deplorable in most places. I was discussing this at lunch with a friend of mine, and his opinion was that the two-tiered class system created by the miserable treatment of adjuncts was worse than the lack of tenure, and I agree. It’s not the absence of tenure, it’s the absence of decent treatment and pay of adjuncts that rankles the most.

On the other hand, it still puzzles me why people are willing to put up with that treatment. Scholarship and teaching is often seen as a vocation, and understandably so, but teaching 5-6 courses a semester to make half of what a tenure-track professor might make and never having any job security can hardly be considered a vocation. Based on the people I know, it seems that after 5-10 years of grad school people seem unable to think of doing anything else, and living like a grad student for the rest of their life seems more noble than trying to work for a corporation. Regardless, with the glut of PhDs willing to work for peanuts, there’s no financial incentive to create more tenure-track jobs, and the situation at most schools is unlikely to change in the adjuncts favor. I like teaching a lot, but I think I’d rather be a librarian at Princeton than a professor at most other schools or an adjunct anywhere at all. I always thought I might be willing to sell my soul to some corporation for a ton of money, but it turns out no rich corporations are interested in my soul, so I’ll probably stay a librarian. I’ll just be thankful I’m a librarian with a good job and not an adjunct teaching 10-12 classes a year to stay alive. Sometimes life is good.

The Kindle

Posted on by

If you were reading around in the library blogs today, it was hard to escape at least one discussion of the Kindle, the new ebook reader from Amazon profiled in Newsweek.

I skimmed the Newsweek article and listened the accompanying video review. The Kindle does look like it’s slightly better than some previous efforts, but I don’t think I’ll be buying one.

This isn’t because I’m anti-ebook. Far from it. I became an enthusiastic devotee of ebooks three years ago when I loaded Mobipocket onto my then new Dell Axim. The convenience and portability are great, and I love the Mobipocket interface. I also like the ability to create Mobipocket files from Word or text documents, so I can essentially take any text content I find on the web and turn it into a uniform ebook file. Since I don’t buy a lot of new books, it works very well for me. I can download and read plenty of classics from Project Gutenberg and create my own files if I find something I like. This past summer I got a Samsung Blackjack and loaded Mobipocket on it as well, and still love the convenience. Being able to carry several hundred books in my pocket at all times means I never have to be without something good to read.

But I wouldn’t buy the Kindle (or the Sony reader either) for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t want a separate tool. I like my Mobipocket because I have the ebook reader along with the email, calender, feed reader, browser, chess program, camera, and everything else fitting nicely in my pocket. If the iPhone ever holds enough music, I’d be willing to add in the iPod as well, but I want fewer devices that do more rather than a separate device for everything. It seems like the things the Kindle can do, I can do now on my phone, and even though the screen might be smaller, the text is very clear.

It also bothers me how rigidly controlled commercial ebooks are. Ebook readers want to try to emulate the book, but only in the reading experience. Ebook readers and publishers are trying to stop many of the other ways people use books. In general, I don’t like the way digital rights issues interfere with ebooks in a way they don’t with paper books. I might be willing to buy a book, since I buy books now, but after I buy the book I want to do with it what I please. If I want to lend it to a friend, regift it to an acquaintance, donate it to a library, or sell it to a used bookstore, I want the freedom to do that. Publishers naturally want to keep me from doing that, though they never could with paper books, and paper books have long sold even though libraries, used bookstores, and reading friends exist.

The stranglehold on information will be difficult to maintain, but as long as it will be illegal for me to do with digital books what I now do with print books, I’ll resist buying them. I have bought a few, mostly reference works, but my ereading is mostly confined to those texts I can get and trade for free. What that means for publishing, I have no idea, but if ebooks are restricted in the way that paper books aren’t, then they’re not as much good to me. I’m surprised publishers don’t start suing used bookstores for reselling their books. One could argue that iTunes does the same thing with music, and one would of course be right. However, even with my iPod I prefer to copy my own CDs rather than buy from iTunes whenever possible. Regardless, as long as I can buy used CDs or legally obtain free music, then I can legally still control what I purchase in a way I can’t with iTunes purchases.

With the Kindle, one can also subscribe to newspapers and blogs for a fee, but again, I can read these things on my phone for free. The idea of paying to subscribe to a blog is bizarre, and perhaps I read that part wrong.

Anyway, I hope for a day when I can do with ebooks all the things I can do with paper books now, but I know that won’t be the case if publishers have their way. If we have ebooks without the freedom to lend, give, resell, or donate them, then in many ways we’ll have a bleaker book future than we could have. This isn’t a complaint against ebooks, as much as I like traditional print books, but it is a complaint against the commercial restrictions that may dominate the future of copyrighted books.

I should add one more reason. 400 bucks? What, are they kidding me?

C-I-L-L My OPAC

Posted on by

Last week was very busy, which explains the lack of posting. It was one of those weeks when working two jobs starts to take its toll. In addition to a lot of student conferences and consultations and instruction sessions, I ended the week twisting my knee somehow so that I had to spend a couple of days with my leg elevated and an icepack on my knee, so traumatized by the whole thing that I couldn’t do anything but sit in the den playing with Legos and watching hours of the Addams Family on DVD with my daughter. It will probably be weeks before that theme song leaves my head.

The most bothersome and even embarrassing part of last week were the instruction sessions, especially the portion devoted to finding books. I’ve just grown more and more irritated by OPACs over the years. I know that for our library the OPAC is still the best way to verify if we own something. It used to be the case that when teaching freshmen, as I was last week, I relied exclusively upon the OPAC to teach the students to find books. Why should I complicate the information world any more than I need to? This year I’ve finally given up the ruse of simplicity, and teach Worldcat and Google Books along with the catalog. Inevitably, when we do identical keyword searches in the OPAC and Worldcat, Worldcat has roughly 10 times what our library has, and Princeton, as you might imagine, has a good sized library. That, however, isn’t the bothersome part, since we deliberately don’t buy lots of material out there. The more bothersome part is that at least twice as many titles as found in our OPAC show up in Worldcat as being owned by Princeton, typically because the Worldcat catalog records contain more information, and thus are more likely to show up in keyword results.

I’m less impressed by what the Google Books searches bring up except for more esoteric topics, but I can imagine a more refined Google search with tens of millions of digitized books and slightly more subject control being far superior to any current catalog.

I know there are slightly more sophisticated catalogs out there right now, but we don’t have one. Three were recently demonstrated, but none met with enough approval for adoption. That might be just as well. The effort and expense necessary to move from a barely adequate present to a imperfect, experimental present might not have been worth it. No wonder people used to better search engines balk at OPACs, where you have to spell exactly, put searches in the right word order for the best results, know how to think like a librarian to get the most out of them. I tell the students that to use the catalog effectively, they’ll need to think like a librarian, and that I feel their pain but it’s the way the world works here for a while to come.

In the meantime, I can’t help but recall one of my favorite bits of doggerel every time I have to show some clueless student how to navigate the muddy waters of the catalog. You might remember the halcyon days of Saturday Night Live, back when a young Joe Piscopo taught us how to laugh. In those days SNL would host one of my favorite poets, the inimitable Tyrone Green. How he feels about his landlord is how I often feel about my OPAC. Thus, I leave you with a bit of poetry for the day.

IMAGES by Tyrone Green

Dark and lonely on a summer night
Kill my landlord, kill my landlord
The watchdog barkin’, do he bite?
Kill my landlord, kill my landlord
I slip in the window
I break his neck
Then his house I start to wreck.
Got no reason, what the heck.
Kill my landlord, kill my landlord.
C-I-L-L my landlord.

Library Leadership

Posted on by

ACRLog had a thought provoking post yesterday on creating library leaders for the future, asking what libraries are doing to create those leaders. A commenter wrote: “As a library administrator who tries to be intentional about nurturing the leadership skills of my staff, I have to admit that the thought of conflating “leadership” with “administration” gives me the willies.” I didn’t get the willies, but the post does tend to conflate administration with leadership. This conflation is evident in the following question: “Ask newer members of the profession if they plan to seek an administrative position and too often the answer is ‘no.’ Are there good models this profession could follow for developing its future leaders?”

I would have to agree with the commenter that leadership isn’t the same as administration. If it were, then all administrators would be leaders and all leaders administrators, which we know not to be the case. Library administrators might lead, but they can be just as effective in recognizing and supporting the talents of others and letting them lead change. According to my extensive research on leadership, one way to look at the difference between management and leadership is that “management involves power by position” while “leadership involves power by influence.” When position and influence coincide, one has a great manager, but there will always still be leaders who influence others regardless of their position, for both good and bad reasons. Scandalmongers and gossips might lead a library into decay. Creative innovators and collaborators might lead it into glory. But neither need to be administrators. I once had a terrible experience with an administrator who could neither administrate nor lead very well, and as I look around the profession these days, the people influencing how I think about libraries and where I think they should be going aren’t necessarily administrators, but frontline librarians trying to find new and creative ways to solve old problems.

Still, what struck me most about the post was the assertion that if we “ask newer members of the profession if they plan to seek an administrative position and too often the answer is ‘no.'” I don’t usually ask newer members of the profession this, but I can understand the “no.” I’m not sure if I’m a newer member of the profession anymore (I’ve been a librarian for 8 years, which seems long to me sometimes, but is considerably less than many of my colleagues), but I can speculate on some reasons why librarians wouldn’t want to be administrators.

First, job satisfaction. A lot of academic librarians like the academic part of academic librarianship. I like being involved, however tangentially, with the intellectual and scholarly life of the university. I like developing the collection as well as using it myself, and I like helping students use it as well. Last week I had a research consultation with a student I’ve worked with before, and at the end he said he thought I had a great job. I asked why, and he said because I got to learn so many different things especially during the research consultations, and he was right. In many ways I do have a great job, and one of the things I like most is the preparatory research before consultations, where I study whatever the students are working on so that I can give them the best help. I’m intellectually interested in philosophy and religion, and doing my job well means I read philosophy and religion books and articles, which I would be doing anyway.

Like a lot of people, I became a librarian after I’d done some other things. To give you an idea of the other things, I sold out to become a librarian. In library school, I talked to a lot of librarians and decided that initially at least the best library job for me would be a reference/bibliographer position working with philosophy and religion at a research university, preferably not at a state university because I wanted to avoid the tenure-track hoops I saw so many librarians going through (and have since seen so many old friends from library school go through). Two years out of library school, I had that job and liked it. If I moved into an administrative job, a lot of what I like doing would go away, and I’m not sure how I’d feel about that. Administrators should be there to support the work of others, not do that work, but I like doing the work. A professor who’d given up being a dean once told me he went back to being a professor because he wanted to be out doing the sorts of projects he was helping to support as a dean. There’s an administrative position open at a fine university nearby, a head of reference sort of position I’ve been tempted to apply for. I don’t know how competitive I would be, but I think I could be great at the job. But I hesitate because I like so much of what I do now, and I fear the loss of good things.

Another reason might be the expectations of libraries. I see a lot of job ads for department heads that expect the applicants to already have several years of supervisory experience before they consider the person qualified. I’ve talked to librarians frustrated by this old Catch-22. Many libraries seem unwilling to take a chance on someone who has the capacity for good management but not the experience. There seems to be the assumption that because someone has supervised before, that they must be good at it, and that unless they have supervised before they are a completely unknown quantity. I don’t know how accurate those assumptions are, but it seems to me that some libraries are better at rewarding degrees or experience than talent. Based on how many open administrative searches there seem to be right now in academic libraries, I think libraries are either going to have to change their expectations for some of these jobs. Notice I didn’t say “lower” their expectations. But for the reference librarian who wants to be a head of reference, how does that person break through the “supervisory experience required.” And at what point does one just give up seeking such jobs?

Some people might also want to avoid administrative positions because of the lack of financial incentive. Good managers aren’t compensated as well in libraries as they would be in the private sector. One might say that no academic librarians are compensated as well as they might be in the private sector, but that argument only goes so far. For example, I can’t do what I do with a large academic library. What I do isn’t just finding information, but has an integral relationship with information in specific fields communicated in specific ways that I also have an intellectual interest in. But management is a more universal trade. One can be a good administrator without knowing much about the specifics of much of the work. Good library directors don’t necessarily know how to catalog or answer reference questions or select materials any more. Management has some claim to being an art and science of its own. But out in the world good management is compensated, whereas in libraries one gets the burdens of administration without as many of the financial benefits. Some schools are worse than others, but not too long ago I talked to someone on a search committee for an AUL position at a university library in a major east coast city who said they planned to offer a salary in the mid-50s, which is the same or less than a lot of non-administrative academic librarians make already, especially on the east coast. That was an extreme, but I have noticed in those job ads that post salary ranges that the salaries for administrative positions aren’t significantly higher than the position just below it. For someone reluctant to apply for an administrative job, would the possibility of a few extra thousand a year (before taxes) be much of an incentive? Probably not. They’d have to want to be in charge.

But what makes people want to be in charge? If they’re good leaders already and they have power through influence, they might already be getting things done they want to get done. Why take on the hassle of performance reviews and solving people’s problems when one can instead work collaboratively and yet still somewhat independently to get things done?

Unfortunately, I suspect that the best reason might be because of already existing bad administrators, administrators who aren’t interested in recognizing their talented employees and supporting their efforts. I know some librarians who want to be in charge because they believe the people in charge at their libraries are just doing a terrible job, and they want to take over and set things right. Setting things right is a powerful incentive.

Finally, though, I wonder whether this is even a problem. If the management vacuum that seems to be emerging continues as more librarians retire, libraries will have to either flatten their organizations and promote creativity and initiative in their frontline staff, or they will have to take chances on people who might not have had the traditional preparation, but who still might make great department heads and directors. Or they may just promote incompetents, but let’s hope that doesn’t happen often.

There’s at least one other possibility as well, a faint hope or a daring dream. Libraries will always have leaders, but there may come a time when they have very few administrators. Thoreau wrote that that government is best which governs least, and concludes that if this is true then that government is best which governs not at all, and that when people are prepared for it, that will be the sort of government they will have. As power disperses and communication changes and librarians are more empowered because their jobs demand creativity and flexibility and initiative, less library administration might be not just a necessity brought on by circumstance, but a good thing. A library of motivated, dedicated librarians with creativity and initiative who lead and exert power through influence might need no administration at all.

Postmodern Librarians as Bricoleurs

Posted on by

Fortunately Stephanie the CogSci Librarian commented on a post of mine last week, or I wouldn’t have discovered the debate regarding better instruction or better interfaces that was going on within Facebook last week. Maybe I should hop onto the Facebook bandwagon and try to make more Facebook librarian friends. On the other hand, while the debate was going on I was helping prepare a Halloween party for my daughter. When it comes to an interesting library discussions versus party planning, I’m not sure where my loyalties lie.

My own preference would be for better interfaces, but it seems we have so little control over them. The world of information is so chaotic these days that sometimes I don’t even think better instruction will work well. A couple of weeks ago I gave research introductions to some juniors as they prepare to begin researching their independent junior papers, and unfortunately I had to acquaint them with the chaos without providing much order. I’m not cynical enough to think they all want to search nothing but Google, because I don’t find that to be the case with students I talk to. They perhaps all want to search Proquest and JSTOR, but even then they’ve moved beyond thinking that everything is on the free Web. Then I had to bring them back to the Web to show them how to find what we couldn’t find with traditional tools.

Teaching the traditional tools doesn’t bother me, either. Librarians for decades have tried to bring order to chaos, and scholars are familiar with catalogs, subject headings, and other standard library fare. The traditional tools still work up to a point, and they have to be taught, because otherwise much will be missed. In the world of printed books, still of great importance in the humanities, catalogs still serve a useful function unlikely to be usurped anytime soon. The structure of traditional indexes still works to some advantage. As painful as it might be for students, and I share their pain, to find some resources efficiently it’s still necessary to think like a librarian.

Add to this all the other useful ways to find books and scholarly information, from web-searching to footnote-chasing, and it’s easy to understand why students may be overwhelmed and want simpler, better, more powerful interfaces that organize information more effective. I do, too. I just don’t see how that can come about for a long time, if ever, what with so much undigitized information, so much proprietary information, so much expensive information, so much information, period.

It was typical that in a demonstrative search on one of the juniors’ topics we found a great article indexed in Worldwide Political Science Abstracts that wasn’t in full-text, and that the library didn’t subscribe to, and that didn’t show up in Google Scholar, but which did show up in Google and turned out to be in an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. What lesson does this teach us?

The only hope might be more and better instruction, and even then the battle might be a losing one, because to thoroughly search these days requires becoming a Juke Box Hero, not a Guitar Hero, and who besides the serious scholars have the stamina for that? Most students have no desire to be serious scholars, and they never will be. I don’t think we can blame them for that. Try as we might, there’s only so much of the chaos we can teach students to control. That’s not a reason to get rid of instruction, just because it’s not perfect, but it might be a consolation for our inevitable failure to turn everyone into a human search engine.

As a postmodern librarian might say, or might have said back before we gave up postmodernism for whatever we have now, the grand librarian narrative that made sense of information has collapsed, and we live among the wreckage. One of the few useful terms I picked up from my mostly wasted years of studying postmodern theory was the concept of bricolage. Here’s the definition from the Wikipedia, which might be as good as any:

“Bricolage … is a term used in several disciplines…to refer to:

  • the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things which happen to be available;
  • a work created by such a process.

It is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler – equivalent to the English “do-it-yourself”, the core meaning in French being, however, ‘fiddle, tinker’ and, by extension, ‘make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand (regardless of their original purpose).’

Bricolage as a design approach – in the sense of building by trial and error – is often contrasted to engineering: theory-based construction.

A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur: someone who invents his or her own strategies for using existing materials in a creative, resourceful, and original way.”

We are the postmodern, or perhaps post-postmodern, librarians. Of necessity we are bricoleurs. We use what tools we can and build where we are able, putting pieces of the information universe haphazardly together for each research project, organizing the chaos where we can, inventing our own strategies in creative and resourceful ways because we no longer have the safety of using only the old, known ways. Despite improving interfaces, my suspicion–neither a fear nor a hope–is that this will be true for a long time to come, until the World Brain digests and organizes all knowledge.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Bricoleurs can be artists practicing a useful trade or creating masterpieces. But it does mean giving up some amount of authority and control, which is alien to the librarian mindset. We like authority and control over information, but if such authority and control are these days necessarily limited, it does us no good to bemoan the fact. Rather than nostalgia for the days when we could master (or pretend to master) the information universe, instead we can get satisfaction from our bricolage, knowing that we’re doing what we can.

Alternatives to Instruction

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.