Monthly Archives: September 2007

Overwhelmed… Just a Little

By IRIS Posted on by

Just looking at my calendar makes my insides crumble. We’re in the middle of week 3 of our 10-week term, and I don’t think I’ll survive until week 10. So far, in 2 and a half weeks, I’ve had student appointments, classes, meetings, and presentations fill up all but 25 of my working hours. That means an average 1.9 hours each day to do all the preparations for those appointments, classes, meetings, and presentations, plus answering an unending stream of email. My next two and a half weeks are already similarly full, as well. No wonder I’ve had to do so much class prep and email answering in the evenings and on weekends! When you tally it up, it all makes sense. No wonder I’m feeling overwhelmed!

My worry is that with so much stuff scheduled like this, my students won’t be able to find a times when I can meet with them. It would be so discouraging for a student to realize that he or she was completely stumped, zoom over to my calendar, and see no more red “I’m Available” slots left between now and when the assignment is due. So discouraging.

And really, that’s the main thing that worries me. I enjoy my work enough that I don’t mind the being busy part. It sure beats being bored! I actually look forward to my work days (almost as much as I look forward to weekends, and that’s saying a lot!). I just wish I could spread the crunch that is Fall Term out into the surrounding terms just a little.

The Curse of Controlled Vocabulary

By IRIS Posted on by

Yesterday, as students filed in and out of my office in a continuous stream, two of them asked questions that made me thank my lucky stars I’d taken that elective cataloging and classification course back in library school. Without it, I would have been mostly stumped yesterday.

Here’s why. Not only did the experience of taking cataloging and classification force me to realize that I’m geeky enough to get a kick out of AACR2 and mapping it to MARC, but I also learned that I’m very very bad at classification. It’s not that I can’t figure out what books are about…most of the time. I just could never reconcile myself to the idea that, because of the historical need to save space on those catalog cards or print indexes, the rules for applying subject terms seem to inhibit that gathering function that Cutter listed among his 3 primary objectives for the catalog. (For my non-librarian friends, these objectives are: allowing people to locate particular books, help them gather together related items, and help them make informed decisions about what they want.) Specifically, the problem lies in the rule that states that if you have a hierarchically related set of subject terms, you must apply the most specific term that applies to the entire work. You may not also apply the broader terms higher up the hierarchical structure. Similarly, if two or more of the more specific terms apply to your work, you cannot apply both. Instead, you have to look upward in the hierarchical structure until you reach a term that can apply to the entire work.

So what does this have to do with my appointments yesterday? Well, twice yesterday I had students come in frustrated and worried that their topics weren’t viable (and these were the topics for their senior theses, so they were a little stressed). They’d plunked terms into the MLA International Bibliography and only retrieved 2 or 3 hits! Here’s an example that’s an amalgam of a couple of students yesterday. Try finding articles on Elena Garro and gender in the MLA-IB. A good student will know to flip the author’s name around and search it as a subject. A good student will also find some synonyms for “gender” (which I won’t list here for fear of Google). This good student will get about 3 hits from MLA. Three hits?!? How can you write a thesis with this little to go on? And this from the database that’s custom-made for searching literary topics.

These students correctly assumed that more must have been written on the topic. And finally, after poking around for a while, we discovered that more people were writing about Garro’s work and some aspect of gender… specifically, either the male or female gender. This means that the indexers who saw articles about Garro’s portrayal of femininity could not also add the subject term “gender” because, remember, you can’t have both narrow and broad terms describing the same work. This means that students interested in gender have to include narrow and broad terms in their search. In a Google-safe example, if you replace “gender” with “women OR femininity OR gender OR manhood OR masculinity”OR “men” you suddenly get 42 results. And if we probed for other gender-related words, I’m sure we’d get even more results.

My two students had the same reaction when I explained this phenomenon: “What?!? Crazy! Why can’t they add the other terms?” Why indeed? We aren’t restricted by those 3×5 cards any more. We aren’t publishing the MLA-IB as a yearly print index any more. We’re simply adding relationships in a database.

I’m thankful to these two students for reminding me of what I’d learned back in my cataloging class. Now that I’ve been reminded, I’m planning to include discussion and examples of this phenomenon in my next instruction session, and probably in many of my sessions in the future. I bet my own searching skills will be greatly improved from now on, as well. Funny how it takes a real-life frustration to teach me what I should have known all along…

Moodle, One Year Later

By IRIS Posted on by

Tomorrow I’m joining a panel made up of me, our resident web-app coder guru, a faculty member, and academic technologist, and a student to talk about how things have changed one year into our adoption of Moodle as our campus’ course management system. We’re presenting this as the first of the term’s LTC lunches (generally a weekly gathering at which someone or some group presents on a topic relevant to learning and teaching while the audience munches away). I’ve only presented at two other LTC events, so I’m a little nervous, but apparently not nervous enough to have carved time out of the last week to actually prepare. I mean, I’ve thought about it a little bit, but not actually prepared.

And now, tonight, I find myself a little on the burned out side. Fall term is just not a good time for sustained or creative thinking. Fall term is a time to put out fires as quickly as possible and not look back. So, sitting here, thinking to myself how much I’d prefer reading or writing blog posts to planning this 8 minute spiel, it suddenly occurred to me that I could con myself into preparing for tomorrow if I wrote it up as a blog post!

So, here are my thoughts about how Moodle has affected the library, one year into implementation:

Moodle and Teaching

  • Preparing for classes: For those classes where the instructor makes use of Moodle, we librarians can now supplement the information the professor gives us about the class with direct observation of the readings students have been assigned, the context into which our sessions fall, and even the over-arching themes and questions that are important to the class. There are a lot of ways to tie our sessions to the course content, with the goal that they will interrupt the flow of the course content as little as possible. Everything from the examples we pick to the discussions we lead to the actual content of our sessions can be tailored to fit into the themes and goals of the course. When this happens, library sessions can actually augment rather than simply supplement course content.
  • Class logistics: Moodle makes it easy to find the exact course title, the number of students enrolled, and what students have been told about where to meet us, and other such useful information. I’ve also been able to compare lists of registered students to see if any in next week’s class already heard me speak last week. And if so, I work extra hard to make sure they’ll get as much out of the second session as they did out of the first.
  • Interacting with Students: Including contact information on a course’s sidebar (now made easier due to some custom coding which allows professors to simply turn on their librarian’s contact information), setting up shop in a class’ forum, or (though this hasn’t been tried) joining the class’ skype buddy list are all good ways of meeting our students where they are when they’re doing their assignments. Now, if I could just get my MeeboMe widget in there… but that’s probably asking a lot.

Moodle and My Other Work

  • Hey look, it’s an easy intranet! Whether it’s collecting useful information and links or hosting departmental discussions and schedules, Moodle has offered an easy way to set up quick and dirty intranets. The liaisons have one, the Library Leadership Group has one, the SCIC workers have one… and that means that we can manage our work easily. It’s made the biggest difference in the case of the SCIC site because now the SCIC students and the librarians they work with all have a common place to communicate, norm our expectations, and gather information.
  • Working with librarians at St. Olaf: Since we share a catalog but do not share network space, we and the St. Olaf librarians really benefit from an online space where we can house our meeting minutes, operational records, and other such useful stuff.
  • Project Management: We’re using our Moodle spaces to manage fairly complex projects. Not only are all the standard features (forums, places to keep documents, wikis, calendars, etc) important, but a couple of less standard features have come in very useful. One example is our newly formed eResources group. They’ve realized that very few people in the library operate with the same terminology when they’re thinking and talking about eResources, so one of their first projects this year is to create and define a uniform eResources vocabulary. To do this, they’re using Moodle’s glossary feature. They’ve divided the key terms among themselves, assigning themselves those terms in the glossary by categorizing the glossary entries according to their initials. And once the terms are defined, anywhere they’re used in that Moodle site they’ll appear highlighted with available definitions if you hover over the word.

So I think that’s what I’m going to talk about tomorrow, unless inspiration hits at the 11th hour. It seems like a representative sampling of the key ways that Moodle has impacted our librarian-ish existences in the past year.

Managing My Bookmark Toolbar

By IRIS Posted on by

Like most people, I keep a variety of bookmarks and bookmarklets on my browser’s bookmarks toolbar. But ever since sites started associating cute little icons with their URLs, I’ve developed a kind of complicated method of managing this toolbar. You see, I’m an icon kind of a gal. My eye gravitates towards the cute picture rather than the words describing it.

The problem? Most bookmarklets don’t come with an icon. So you just get the little blank piece of paper and some practically useless words (like the “toread” bookmarklet in this image).

So here’s my multi-step process. Bookmark the website associated with the bookmarklet (in the case of my urlTea bookmarklet I bookmarked urltea.com). Then click on your new bookmark so that it gathers the proper icon from the site and looks all pretty. Meanwhile, drag the bookmarklet to the toolbar. (Ok, I know you can’t do this “meanwhile,” but it sounded good.) Now view the properties of the bookmarklet, copy the javascript in the “location” box, and then paste it into the “location” box of the now-former bookmark to the site. Now you can delete the un-beautiful bookmarklet because, well, you don’t need two bookmarklets, do you?

My last step is to enclose the names of my bookmarklets in square brackets. This way I can tell at a glance which buttons do something and which are simply bookmarks.

The Problem of Literary Research

By IRIS Posted on by

Two years into being a lit librarian (as well as 6 years of studying literature and writing literary criticism of various sorts and levels), I finally realized what makes literary research so hard. All these poor students are looking for research about their literary works, and they want examples of criticism that approach those works from particular theoretical frameworks. But the MLA International Bibliography and other databases for literary research don’t index by theoretical perspective. I can’t ask it for New Historicist readings of Daisy Miller, for example. And because of this I can’t easily figure out quite what New Historicism is, or who the key scholars were/are, or flesh out a “history of criticism on this piece” kind of literature review.

And I can understand why this is the case. I mean, can you imagine the overhead involved in making decisions about what theory/theories are represented in an article, applying this to a databases as massive as the MLA International Bibliography, or updating the constantly changing terminology associated with literary theory? And yet, this is one of the three primary query-types I’m asked to help with (the other two being “things interpreting this work” and “things characterizing this author.”)

It strikes me that this could be one of those perfect uses for social tagging in research databases. But until then, these poor students are in for a long and frustrating stint of following up on citations, using Web of Knowledge to develop a better feel for the network of scholars writing from a particular theoretical framework, and generally having to move beyond the now-normal task of picking articles with interesting titles from result lists.

In other words, I think that in many ways, the skills required for good literary research are still some of the least translatable into the electronic world. And these skills will probably continue to be much more based on building up vast internal schemata of authors and publishers then on boolean searching until a) databases add indexing about theoretical frameworks or b) MLA (and others) goes social and let us help them describe these works of criticism in ways that are useful to literary critics.