The Library: It’s Boxy but It’s Good

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I’ve been reading a Time Magazine article on Starbuck’s attempt to freshen their brand: Starbucks Looks for a Fresh Jolt. There are library blogs out there that talk about marketing and branding and such, and I usually like to steer clear of business talk, but I was struck by a line from the past and current CEO of Starbucks.

From the article: “The three of us stand and look at the area by the cash register–a clutter of CDs, breath mints, chocolate-covered graham crackers, chewing gum and trail mixes. ‘There’s no story,’ Roberts says. Schultz adds, ‘We’re selling a lot, but the point is to take a step back and ask, Is it appropriate? We’ve been selling teddy bears, and we’ve been selling hundreds of thousands of them, but to what end?'”

The first thing I thought of was my own local Starbucks and the way I’ve seen it transform in the past few years from a coffeeshop into something resembling an upscale convenience store. The breath mints, the teddy bears, the special CDs–all with the Starbucks brand on them. It seems to offend some people, but I actually like Starbucks coffee, and while being only a moderate coffee drinker I’ve certainly bought my share of grande coffees over the years. What I haven’t liked is everything else. Sometimes I even get in a very un-Starbucks mood and wish the people in front of me would just order a cup of coffee instead of whatever fancy drink they ordered, not because I begrudged them their half-decaf, fruit-filled, skim mochaccino, but because I’m in a hurry and just want my straight cup of coffee. Most of the time, though, what I don’t like is being bombarded with all of the cutesy or cuddly non-coffee crap they also sell. So, I don’t go to Starbucks as often as I might.

After the brief meditation on my own Starbucks experience, which lasted less time than it took to write the previous paragraph, I thought about the many librarians trying to brand or perhaps rebrand the library. I blogged last year in Conceptual Incommensurability and Video Games criticizing attempts to turn the academic library into a social space. Libraries can open up pubs and hold square dances, but that will never make them any more popular qua libraries. The old library brand is, I suppose, Books. My library has millions of books and buys tens of thousands more every year, but Books doesn’t work well as a brand because it captures only a portion of what we do. Information is too broad. Perhaps Scholarly Research would be the best brand, because the library and its resources are central to and indispensable for scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences.

If Scholarly Research is the brand of the academic library (and I’m arguing it should be), then do we dilute our brand if we focus on other things? I think we do. Usually when I see discussions of the problem of branding, they’re talking about public libraries and trying to make the case that libraries have more than books. However, academic libraries have some of the same issue problems. Should we create blogs? Should we be on Facebook? How can we appeal to and more importantly communicate with students? Having a mission–Scholarly Research–helps answer some of these other questions. Should we have a space on Facebook? Sure, if it helps the mission, but not if it’s just to have a page up to show that we’re hep to the latest fashion. Should we blog? Definitely, if it serves the mission of scholarly research somehow. Our mission is scholarly research, and that should be central to how we brand ourselves.

Scholarly Research may sound like a humdrum or humorless mission, but it has to be the identity of the academic library. It might not appeal to 18-year-olds as much as something trendier, but the library is what it is, and the struggle of marketing is to make things popular, not to change the things into something else. We can experiment with and investigate trends and fads to see what might help us in our mission, as long as we remember the mission and don’t get caught up in frivolities that we think might make us more popular. It might be best for our image to sell scholarly research as the worthwhile endeavor we all think it is than hanker for something sexier. There’s an old Dudley Moore movie about an advertising executive who ends up in an asylum, Crazy People. One of the crazy ads he comes up with is, “Volvo: We’re Boxy But We’re Good.” We will probably be better off selling the library as what it is than trying to pretend it’s something else.

The Library: It’s Boxy but It’s Good.

Federated Searching Idiosyncrasies

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Last night I taught a BI session, and after demonstrating a couple of databases, a bright and impatient student asked if we had a way to search all of the databases simultaneously with the same search. We do in fact have a federated search function, which after three years is still labeled a pilot service on our website. (I would give you the link, but you wouldn’t even be able to see the page without being on the campus network.) I rarely mention the federated search engine because I haven’t found it very useful. I said that theoretically we did have a way to do this, but that I didn’t like to use it. However, let’s try a search and see what happens.

We were searching theater (chin* AND theat* AND brecht as keywords was the search if you want to try this at home, boys and girls) and had found 313 records in the International Index to the Performing Arts using this search before narrowing the search some. The federated search on the theater database page simultaneously searches the IIPA, American Drama, MLA, JSTOR, Oxford Reference Online: Performing Arts, the Essay and General Literature Index, and the World Shakespeare Bibliography Online. The student was running the demonstration computer, so he did the search. Despite all the databases being selected, it searched only American Drama, and found nothing, naturally.

Then several other students did the same search, and each found a different result. The other students did all manage to get results from the IIPA. One got 64 results, another 101, another 152, and another 313, which is the number we got from the direct search. Needless to say, it was weird, but made my point that while there are some benefits to federated searching, there were also some problems. It’s possible not everyone was doing the same search, though they claimed to be.

It’s really too bad, because I was a proponent of the federated search feature before we implemented it, and it was only after using it more that I found it less helpful than I thought it would be. I wanted it because of the simplicity I thought it would bring to novice researchers. I had in mind just the sort of student who asked the question last night. If we take last night’s search, IIPA was an excellent place to begin, as I had already told them. The federated search (when it worked at all) was good for directing them to a database that was both searchable and appropriate. Even with the varying searches, IIPA always had more than all of them except JSTOR. But to narrow the search in IIPA, one still has to go into the IIPA itself. Even trying to view the record to see what descriptors might help narrow the search takes you out of the federated search engine and into the database. At this point, instead of this search engine, I’d just as soon have Google Scholar searching through all of our databases, that is, if Google Scholar worked better.

The Joy of Research

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April is the cruelest month for library instruction, and for me April started a week early. I have various pitches I make to students about the research process, and I’m not sure I agree with any of them. Sometimes I tell the students that the techniques and skills we’re learning aren’t really the interesting part of a research project. The goal is not just to keep finding books and articles, but to find the right books articles and then join the scholarly conversation on a topic, to do the work of analyzing, synthesizing, and creating scholarly works. What I’m teaching them is how to do this more efficiently so they can get to the harder work later. This is what I sometimes tell students in the first-year writing seminars to motivate them to pay attention to me for a while. Typically they pay attention to me anyway because I move around a lot and vary the pitch of my voice, but still.

I’m not sure I believe this, though. Certainly analysis, synthesis, and creation are the final paths and goals of scholarly research from the standpoint of the academy. Everyone is supposed to produce. Reading widely might be great, but if you don’t produce an essay to grade or an article to publish, you haven’t done your job. And, I suppose, for some people these are their actual motivations. Even full professors keep writing books and articles. But for a lot of people, the research process is an end in itself. Think about all those professors who read and teach and keep up on their fields, but don’t publish anymore. They’re certainly researchers and scholars, even if they never produce anything.

Librarianship is probably the profession that most attracts these kinds of people. I know it’s an attraction for me. I’ve published very little, though I read and write every day. One of the attractions of being a librarian is that I can follow my intellectual whims in relative ease and comfort. There’s no predicting what subject might catch my interest as I’m reading something else, and being a librarian makes it easy to track down a quick introduction to a topic and maybe a couple of articles and books. Then I read them and some other tangential topic sparks my interest, and I follow that one up, and along the way almost everything I need is provided by my own library. I sometimes wonder how people without ready access to research libraries get by. I would be very frustrated. In the humanities, I’m a jack of many trades and perhaps a master of none, though technically I’m a master of arts with a piece of paper somewhere to prove it, so I suppose I could call myself a master of English literature, not that I would ever do that.

For some reason I assume that most people are like this, only the topic varies, and that even students enjoy researching in at least some fashion topics they’re interested in. They want to know more about this pop singer or that television show or whatever. That’s probably just me wearing my librarian glasses, though. Sort of like to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail, or to a man controlling the most powerful conventional military on earth everything looks like a conventional war. To a librarian everything looks like research.

Still, I might try to make this pitch during my upcoming instruction season, to propose that the research process is so enjoyable that some people never abandon it for writing. It’s so much fun to track down one more article and find out just a little bit more about the topic that they may finally just have to go cold turkey with library research and sit down to the less enjoyable art of scholarly writing. For some the end is writing and publication, but for many the research is an end in itself. Sounds great for librarians, but for some reason I don’t think this would fly come grading or tenure time.

ALA Campaigning

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Tis the season for ALA elections, and thus for ALA campaigning, something which almost no one does. I have received some emails regarding the two people running for ALA president, touting what are no doubt their superior qualifications for the highest library organization office in the land, but otherwise I’ve seen no campaigning.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m running for two different offices within RUSA: RSS Vice-Chair / Chair-elect and CODES Member-at-Large. I have a history of losing RUSA elections. Whenever nominating committees want Person A to win, they need to find a plausible Person B to run against Person A. So someone approaches me at conference and says, “Person B, I want to ask you a question.” That’s B for Bivens-Tatum, I suppose. When I call them on this, they always swear it’s not the case, and since they’re always nice people I suppose I have no reason not to believe them.

Everyone writes up statements of purpose and fills out a biographical form, but there’s usually little campaigning. Even the campaigning for the top office always strikes me as odd. It’s not like being the president of ALA brings that many perks with it. You don’t get a salary and a house and Secret Service protection. At least, I don’t think you do. It seems like a lot of work not to at least get your own limo and bodyguard.

Campaigning for some of the lower offices would be amusing. I was introduced at an RSS all-committee meeting, and I thought it would be funny if I broke tradition and started making a campaign speech. I didn’t, of course, but I wanted to stand up and tell everyone how I was going to take control of RUSA away from the lobbyists and special interests and bring the power back to the people, or something like that. Then I could have gone around shaking everyone’s hand and asking if there were any babies to kiss. My Vice-Chair opponent has been a librarian a bit longer than me, so I could also say that this election should be about judgment and not experience (not that I’m questioning your judgment, Barb, if you’re reading this. If you’re not reading this, then it might be a different story!). I might also point out that I’m the taller candidate and have a lot more facial hair, which is important for representing RUSA-RSS on the world stage. My height and facial hair would also make it easier to heal the rifts between RUSA-RSS and various world leaders, with whom I would obviously be willing to meet and initiate diplomatic relations. I would also offer to debate on a range of issues from the RUSA strategic plan to how many RSS nametag ribbons we might need to give out at functions.

My third time up for one office (which I lost that time by two points), I did consider putting as a “statement of concern” that I was coming up for promotion and tenure and that being elected Member-at-Large would look very nice on my vita. In retrospect, I wonder if that would have given me the two votes I needed to win, or just made everyone who didn’t know me think I was such a jerk that they wouldn’t vote for me. Now, it doesn’t matter as much, since I have our equivalent of promotion and tenure. I guess I didn’t need that office, after all.

Of course because of the lack of campaigning we’re not overwhelmed with propaganda and disinformation about all the candidates, which for me is the most enjoyable portion of any political campaign and the sort of thing that makes me proud to be an American. Unfortunately, this means that unless we want to read all the statements and bios, which could mean a lot of time spent when we consider those counselor ballots, we have to just vote blind. Many ALA members have a simple system. Mine goes something like this. First, I vote for me. Then, I vote for people I know. Then I vote for academic librarians. Then I vote for people who have unusual names. So far I haven’t had to go below that level.

In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, not that I’m campaigning, but if you step into that ALA voting booth between now and whenever the elections end and you see my name, I wouldn’t be averse to getting your vote. I’m not saying, “go vote for me.” Just if you’re voting anyway, you might as well vote for me. You can even use my criteria. I’m me, and you at least know who I am, and I’m an academic librarian, and I certainly have an unusual name. And I’m pretty tall, don’t forget that. Not freakishly tall or anything, so don’t worry. I have some other qualifications, too, but those are all listed on the ballot. Keep all this in mind come election day.

God bless RUSA, and God bless you all!

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A Vision of K-12 Students Today

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There’s a Youtube video “A Vision of K-12 Students Today,” that seems to be the junior version of the vision of college students today video, only with less whiny students. At least college students have some choices, whereas most K-12 students are forced through the involuntary factory of public education.

The complaints are a bit different. All these students want to be “engaged,” of course, and engagement is apparently always the responsibility of the teacher and never the student. In many ways I’m quite sympathetic to these students. I’m sure many of their classrooms are boring and their teachers dull. I spent my pre-college years wondering whether the educational system was designed to do anything other than bore me into submission. As far as I can tell, it wasn’t. I’ve struggled to make sure my daughter doesn’t suffer the stultifying effects and methods of the typically dull educational system.

What I’m not particularly sympathetic to or impressed by is the assumption that the problem with all of their schooling is that they don’t use “technology” enough. It seems to be a tragedy that most of their teachers haven’t used blogs or wikis, because, you see, these students are “digital learners.” They hold up signs saying “If we learn by doing” and “What are we learning sitting here?”

But what does that mean, we learn by doing? Is that always the case? One learns to be a historian by “doing history,” I suppose, but that’s not necessarily the way one learns about history. It’s how one learns to write poetry, but one doesn’t need “technology” for that. It’s not necessarily how one learns to be a citizen. It is how one learns to make a wiki, but is making a wiki at all difficult? As a sometime teacher as well, I question this logic. I teach writing in the context of political philosophy. Whether I know how to use blogs and wikis is irrelevant to this activity. Class discussion of difficult texts doesn’t require “digital engagement,” and yet they are a cornerstone of a liberal education.

One student asks, “How do you learn?” A better question might be, what are you learning? “What kind of education would you want me to have?” “If I were your son?” “Your Daughter?”

I can answer this one quite easily, since I in fact have a K-12 daughter. What I want for my daughter is a sound liberal education, because I believe that liberal education will prepare her best to be a satisfied human being, a concerned citizen, and a person eminently capable of adapting to the changing circumstances of the world. What I want might be partially understood by referring to Common Core or in this text, Beyond the Basics, or Dorothy Sayer’s “The Lost Tools of Learning,” or just a good liberal arts curriculum. This video seems to imply that the various digital technologies they want to use are at all difficult to use, as if anything that doesn’t use digital technologies is somehow inadequate for them. I’ve had no trouble adapting quickly to technology or changing circumstances, but I think that’s best explained by a long and rigorous liberal education. Using technology for these “digital natives” is all fine, but what are they using the technology to teach? A bigger problem with their education is probably the aggressive standardized testing they’re subjected to and their relatively insubstantial curriculum than the fact that they can’t make a wiki for class.

Some of the comments seem odd. For example, we’re told that soon the largest English-speaking country will be China, and then that there are more honor students in China than there are people in North America. Okay. I wonder if all those honor students in China are buckling down with their laptops and iPods, and that’s why they’re learning so much English. Really, I don’t wonder at all, because I don’t see the connection between this and anything else in the video, especially the very next frame where the sign reads “But only 1/2 of us will graduate from high school.” The “But” implies that somehow this is related to the previous statements on China, as if there being so many honors students in China somehow leads to half of American students not graduating from high school in some sort of bizarre intercontinental zero-sum high school graduation game. I also wonder where they got these statistics. According to the census data, in 2001 the number of high school graduates per 100 17-year-olds was 72.5, not great, but not 50% either. And according to this census study, the percent of Americans 25 and older with a high school education in 2003 was 83.2 and is projected to be 87.3 by 2028, and this is the “low projection.” The high projection is 91.0. I have no idea whether this is correct, but I’m at least citing the source.

This confusion may be designed to put the next statements into perspective: “Teach me to think.” “To Create.” “To Analyze.” “To Evaluate.” “To Apply.” All of these actions are necessary to take the statements on China and American high school graduation rates and make any sense of them whatsoever. But then comes, “Teach me to think. Let me use the WWW.” I posit that using the WWW and learning to think have no necessary connection with each other, and that in fact the conceptual clarity and analytical agility that these students need would be better served by a strong liberal arts curriculum or a good course in logic, and they don’t need computers or digital cameras for either of these.

If there is any sense to the comparison of China and American high school students, what might it be? One relation might be increasing globalization or cultural diversification, or perhaps the need to be able to communicate with and understand those of different countries and cultures. What makes this sort of communication or understanding more likely: being able to manipulate digital images, or a grounding in world history and foreign languages? Or perhaps they’re trying to imply that Chinese students just work harder than American students? That might certainly be the case, but what does this have to do with being digital learners? Who wrote the script for this thing, anyway?

Sometimes I hesitate even to make arguments like this, because opponents will too easily assume that anyone who doesn’t fall in line with the “digital learning” argument is somehow opposed to such technology. This is hardly the case for me. I’m immersed in digital technology at work and at home. My daughter’s school has a classical curriculum and no computers. She loves it, and somehow, shockingly, she manages to learn. Videos like this imply that something like a miracle must be occurring if this is so. Does this mean she won’t grow up sufficiently “digital” to make her way in life? I doubt it. She’s got the family desktop, her own OLPC laptop, her iPod, and various other playthings. She spends plenty of time on various digital activities. These are easy things to do, which is why an 8-year-old can do them so easily.

Education is certainly about more than conforming the students to No Child Left Behind, but it’s also about more than “digital learning,” and learning can take place without the digital. There are numerous problems with the public education system, but whether the students are digitally engaged is a lesser problem than the content of the curriculum, the control of teachers over the classroom, union opposition to pay for performance, or various other things. Students need to learn to read and do math, but they also need to learn about history and the arts. They need to know about their own and other cultures. They need to learn to speak and write effectively. And of course they need to learn to think, create, analyze, evaluate, and apply. It’s very possible that they would develop these skills more in debate class than they would in any number of “digital media.”

Digital learning or digital nativism have little to do with the many problems facing American education today. If students can’t think, create, analyze, evaluate, or apply, the problem is most likely not that they are “digital natives” and that all their old fogey teachers don’t know how to make wikis. That argument implies that children today are incapable of learning unless they are learning “digitally,” but this argument can be turned around. If students are incapable of learning by reading books or engaging in discussion or approaching difficult subjects logically as well as analogicallly, this isn’t necessarily the fault of the teachers of the educational system. It just shows that these students aren’t very intelligent or adaptable, which is probably not the case.

They note in the video that their parents use email, but that they IM and text. So be it. But if these students are as unadaptable as this video implies, and are incapable of adjusting to the common world and communicating across generations, it might be surprising if they don’t graduate from high school, but it will hardly be surprising if they don’t finish college or get jobs. Part of a liberal education is learning what has come before, especially the best that has been thought and said, and adapting it to changing circumstances. As Heidegger noted, we are thrown into being, and as Wittgenstein argued, there is no private language. We are immersed from birth in what has come before, and struggle to adapt ourselves to a culture, history, and language that precedes us. To imply that because children today text while their parents email we are encountering some sea change in what it means to be a human being and that the newer humans we call students can’t adapt to a common world that preexists them and we can’t communicate properly with them is to do both the students and ourselves a disservice.

As academic librarians, we face the recent products of the educational system every year. What would make it easier for students to be able to do library research? More digital learning, or a good liberal education. Are those two things incompatible? Certainly not. But I’m skeptical that the discussion seems to be around the medium and not around the content, as if introducing more blogs, wikis, and digital media into classrooms would somehow solve our educational problems.

On Verifying the Nonexistence of Nonabsurd Reference Objects

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Like most reference librarians, I don’t like it when I can’t answer a question or find a source someone needs. I try not to be one of those librarians who keeps plying the patron with more and more sources until they start backing away from me with a look of terror, but I don’t like people to go away empty-handed.

Last week I had two occurrences of empty-handedness, and both led to the same feeling of frustration I always get when this happens. One student was looking for recent articles responding to a particular chapter of a 30-year-old philosophy book. This is still a standard work by a very prominent legal philosopher, but I could find no evidence of anyone ever responding to this particular chapter, much less anything recent. Another patron wanted some biographical information about an obscure German artist. (Actually, the query began, “I want an obituary for X person.”) The artist was so obscure there’s hardly a mention on the entire web, and no available biographical information in English or German, as far as I can tell.

As far as I can tell. Ay, there’s the rub. For ultimately, how far can we tell? At what point can we say with certainty that something doesn’t exist, at least something that isn’t inherently contradictory. If someone wanted help to find a squared circle, I might point them to Thomas Hobbes’ claims to have squared the circle, but I certainly couldn’t find a squared circle or any other absurd thing. But these reference objects aren’t inherently absurd. There very well could be biographical information about this obscure German artist, or a recent article responding to a particular chapter of a 30-year-old philosophy book. These things aren’t self-contradictory. They’re not impossible, just improbable. And so the reference transaction ends, as it must, with my saying that while I can’t confirm that such a reference object does not exist, I have exhausted the known resources without being able to find the thing.

I think what we reference librarians need is a reference source that lists all of the questions for which we know there is no answer. Then I could go to this source, look up the obscure German artist, and say, “See, it says here that no biographical information exists on this person, and this is the authoritative reference source on the nonexistence of nonabsurd reference objects. Do you have any other questions?” A source like this would let me rest easier after a fruitless search. It could be, though, that this reference source already exists, and I just can’t find it. If only I could know for sure.

Alternatives to Deception

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A couple of posts ago I took a stance that was apparently controversial. That’s not like me. I usually save my controversial opinions for lunchtime conversation after making sure I’m not being recorded surreptitiously. After I criticized lies and deception in fake reference, someone very rightly asked if I meant just the particular type of deception that particular library school student tried to use on me, which had nothing to do with assessment as such, or did I instead mean to question the value of all so-called unobtrusive reference assessment that makes use of such deception. Just to clarify, I am definitely questioning the value of such assessment, and indeed do not believe that the end (producing a research article that might or might not be useful) justifies the means (lying to and deceiving people). I believe such practices are ethically suspect, as should be clear by now.

The commenter, Steven Chabot, rightly notes that “unobtrusive evaluation of reference services is a generally accepted methodology when investigating questions of the quality of reference service. Are we then to say that all of these useful studies completed by actual librarians and scholars in the field are wasting librarians’ time?”

Such deception is indeed a generally accepted methodology, but I think it should not be. Fraud is fraud, and I don’t see how the means justifies the end here. If the end is vitally important and can be achieved by no other means, then just maybe, but such is not the case here. Such lies and deception are ethically unsound and are unnecessary to boot.

And yes, they are a waste of librarians’ time, which is why it doesn’t surprise me that every one of these unobtrusive studies that I’ve read has been conducted by non-librarians. Perhaps we should have librarians posing as fake students in library school courses evaluating the teaching effectiveness and feedback on assignments. Then we can all have a discussion on the ethics and effectiveness of deception.

He apparently had a similar assignment in library school, and “had to cite relevant other unobtrusive studies, such as the classic by Hernon and McClure (1986) which posited the whole ’55 percent rule’: that only 55% of transactions are satisfying to the user. How are we to improve that statistic without precise measurement of it first?”

Here we get into tricky ground, indeed. I have to disagree on so many levels. Perhaps this is heresy among librarians, but I will boldly state first, that I don’t think the so-called “55% Rule” tells us much about the state of reference in any given library; second, that I don’t think such studies in general provide a “precise measurement” of anything useful; and third, that there are ways to assess reference without resorting to lies and deception.

What follows is primarily an excerpt from an annotated bibliography I wrote on reference assessment a couple of years ago. If you want to read the whole thing, you can find it here:

“Best of the Literature: Reference Assessment.” Public Services Quarterly. 2: 2/3 (July 2006), 215-220.

Part of my opinion of the 55% Rule, which I never completely trusted, was formed by the following article:

Hubbertz, Andrew. “The Design and Interpretation of Unobtrusive Evaluations.” Reference & User Services Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 327-35.

Hubbertz provides an excellent, sustained critique of the normal methods of unobtrusive evaluation of reference services, arguing that for the evaluations to be useful and meaningful the subjects need to be given uniform tests, that the results need to be interpreted to provide a comparison rather than an overall assessment of reference service quality, and that the one area in which such observations may be useful is to evaluate the ways libraries organize their collections and deliver services. His analysis of various published studies of unobtrusive evaluations shows them to be inconsistent and “for practical purposes, nearly worthless.” Not administering uniform tests “may be a principal culprit for these perplexing and disappointing results.” He criticizes in particular the domination of the “55 percent rule,” arguing clearly that such evaluations are designed specifically to generate middle range results, and in fact test reference questions that almost no one or almost everyone answers are excluded from the evaluations. Thus, the evaluations are designed to generate something like a 55% success rate. Hubbertz amusingly shows how we can design the tests to improve the rate of reference success. While middle range results may be useful for comparing the services of different libraries or different ways of providing reference service in the same library, they are useless for determining the overall quality of reference service. He concludes that in the future unobtrusive evaluations may have some use, but they “must be properly implemented, with a uniform test and an adequate sample and [their] application must be limited to the assessment of how best to manage library resources.”

Another article questioning the use of deceptive (err, unobtrusive) evaluation is the following article:

Jensen, Bruce. “The Case for Non-Intrusive Research: A Virtual Reference Librarian’s Perspective.” The Reference Librarian 85 (2004): 139-49.

Jensen argues against applying typical methods of unobtrusive reference evaluation to virtual reference services, because of both practical and ethical concerns. Practically, having pseudo-patrons ask fake questions online does not take advantage of the wealth of transcripts of virtual reference questions available to researchers. Ethically, such evaluation is “an irresponsible misuse of the time of librarians and research assistants” and can degrade the service, though, he notes, “there will always be researchers convinced that their own work somehow trumps the work and lives of the people under study.” This argument both further develops and contrasts with that of Hubbertz, developing the ethical critique of unobtrusive evaluation more and extending the criticism to the evaluation of virtual reference, but not considering the problems with typical unobtrusive evaluation of traditional reference services. He concludes with a call for more research on virtual reference that takes advantage of the wealth of transcripts available, shares the research findings with the objects of study, and does not attempt to deceive virtual reference librarians with pseudo-patrons and false questions.

Curiously, Jensen deems acceptable such methods to evaluate traditional reference services as “the price that must be paid for an intimate view of the reference desk from the user’s side.” Only here do I disagree with Jensen, since I don’t believe deception and time-wasting are worth the price to be paid.

Arnold and Kaske give us an example of such a study based on transcripts:

Arnold, Julie, and Neal Kaske. “Evaluating the Quality of a Chat Service.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 5, no. 2 (2005): 177-193.

Arnold and Kaske establish a clear criterion by which to evaluate their chat reference service: providing correct answers. Using the categories of reference questions supplied by William Katz in his Introduction to Reference Work, the authors analyze 419 questions in 351 transcripts of chat reference transactions at the University of Maryland and provide a model for assessing the value of that service. After coding and classifying the questions, they studied what types of users (students, faculty, other campus persons, outsiders, etc.) asked which types of questions (directional, ready reference, specific search, research, policy and procedural, and holdings/do you own?) and how often those users got a correct answer. Policy and procedural questions topped the list of almost all user groups and represented 41.25% of the total, followed by “specific search (19.66 percent), holdings/do you own (15.59 percent), ready reference (14.15 percent), directional (6.24 percent), and research (3.12 percent).” “Students (41.3 percent), outsiders (25.1 percent), [and] other UM individuals (22.0 percent)” asked the bulk of the questions, and the librarians staffing the service answered the questions correctly 91.72% of the time. Different user groups tended to ask different types of questions. Since other studies of reference transactions have claimed that reference questions are correctly answered about 55% of the time, the authors conclude that future research should study this apparent discrepancy. However, in light of Hubbertz’s study the discrepancy may be less puzzling.

Thus, it would seem that I’m certainly not the only one who believes that deception is ethically tolerable for assessing chat reference. However, there’s still the reference desk. Is deception ethically tolerable there? Certainly not. But is it even necessary?

For an alternative to the deceptive model of reference desk assessment, see the following article:

Moysa, Susan. “Evaluation of Customer Service Behaviour at the Reference Desk in an Academic Library.” Feliciter 50, no. 2 (2004): 60-63.

Moysa describes in a concise and readable article the process used by her library to evaluate their librarians’ customer service behaviors. Basing its criteria upon the ALA Reference and User Services Association’s “Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Services Professionals” (1996) [ed. note: rev. in 2004, referenced above], the reference department used a combination of self-assessment and observation. Moysa considers both the ethical problems of unobtrusive evaluation and the practical problem that normal observation affects behavior. She concludes that the literature indicates that observation over a sustained time eliminates many of the negative practical effects and notes that having the reference staff participate in the process of creating this evaluation model from the beginning mitigates most of the ethical objections. Moysa has described a method of evaluation and assessment that deliberately avoids lies and deception, and for the reference desk at that, so it would seem that we both disagree with Jensen that deception is the price we pay for reference assessment.

Thus, there are other ways to assess reference. Then the question becomes, how are we to improve the quality of reference. Rather than (or at least in addition to) these sorts of ethically sound assessment tools, we should spend much more time thinking about the education, training, and culture of reference, and especially of the proper character required of a good reference librarian. If we have reference librarians with the proper ethos, the character appropriate to their profession–educated, intellectually curious, driven by a desire and equipped with a capacity to solve information problems, practiced in the appropriate ways to respond to various audiences, adaptable to changing circumstances–and a culture that supports them, then we won’t need such reference assessment, because good reference will take care of itself.

The Ethics of Fake Reference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attention, Time-Wasters

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

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

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

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

[Since this post has been getting some new hits lately, readers should see the two follow-up posts: The Ethics of Fake Reference, and Alternatives to Deception.]

Little Scope for Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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