Category Archives: libraries and librarians

Teaching Print Journals

By IRIS Posted on by

Taking down shelving

I’m pretty excited that our current periodicals are moving to join their bound brethren.  The current print periodicals (which no longer actually reflect our current periodical holdings, now that by far the majority of our current issues are online) were housed in a huge, beautiful room on long white shelves, and they were shelved alphabetically by title (which I always hated because it assumed that you knew what you were looking for before you got there).

Now they’re shelved with their LC-classified backfiles! (And now we have a huge, beautiful room for studying in!)

This will make my life easier when I teach because when I teach using print journals (which isn’t always), it’s usually for one of four reasons:

New furniture being unpacked and arranged

  1. I’m teaching stack browsing, and point out that a call number means a topic, and that this means that if you find a great subject encyclopedia in the reference collection and note its general call number, you’ll find lots of books on related topics in the book collection, and you’ll find journals on related topics in the periodicals collection. Before I always used to hedge saying that they should go over to the bound periodical collection, write down names of journals, and then check the current periodicals to see current issues. Now I can skip that last bit.
  2. I’m teaching topic-selection. Most early-career students tend to think in book-sized topics, and we browse periodicals in their fields to get a sense of what a paper-sized topic looks like. That will be no harder to do now, and might be easier since all the discipline’s journals will be classified together.

    3. What we're up to

  3. When I’m teaching online browsing. It’s easier to see that scholarly journal issues usually have a stated or implied theme for every issue when you’re looking at the print version. Then I can stress the importance of browsing the online version to see if the great article they just found is part of a themed issue. Again, this won’t change.
  4. When students will need to use some type of periodical. It’s easier to see the difference between a magazine and a disciplinary journal in print. This won’t change.

So for me, this is all gain and no loss. I hope it’s that way for the rest of the campus, too.

That’ll be Different

By IRIS Posted on by

I'm flying! At a conference!

Tomorrow and the next day, I’m attending a conference.

A virtual conference.

A virtual conference in a Second Life environment.

I’ve heard of having newbie orientation to large conferences (ALA and ACRL do this, for example), but I’ve never attended those. I did, however, attend the newbie orientation session for this conference and learned such useful things as how to talk to people, how to sit, how to jump (“in case you get stuck behind a bench or something”), and how to wear clothes.

During this orientation session, the people around me would randomly dress and undress, grow or shrink, or suddenly start flying. During this orientation session, the most confusing thing for everyone was how to talk to everyone else either publicly, within the group, or privately.

This should be interesting.

The Crazy Thing about Linguistic Research

By IRIS Posted on by

Just when you think you have something nailed down, turns out you were holding a cherry tomato and the nail just made the whole thing explode.

I’m constantly figuring out how to be a better librarian to the disciplines I serve. I have pretty deep knowledge of the ways of literary research, since that was my own field, but the rest of it I’m still figuring out. And recently, the Linguistics department (finally a department in its own right, here!) has been ramping up the research requirements, and my involvement in those requirements. Which is great! And I have a lot to learn.

Today, for example, I had a student coming to me for help with a paper for his phonology class. He’d come yesterday, too, and we’d found a tiny smattering of research on his topic, but nothing that seemed like viable material for the foundations of a paper. I gave him my speech about sometimes needing to broaden out the search to related topics and apply what he learned from them to his current topic. A speech which went over about a well as it ever does, which is to say, not very. In a compressed term, that kind of research takes more time than most students (or professors) leave room for. We both pledged to do some more digging and scheduled a follow-up meeting for today.

In between yesterday and today, I remembered something I’d heard years ago but never really understood: that linguistic descriptions of individual languages are more like ethnographies than studies as far as the position they have in the field goes. They’re done once, and then that’s done. People propose tweaks, examine implications, explain why patterns exist the way they do, but a comprehensive description of Nepali phonology? That probably won’t get redone even once a half century. Like ethnography, the description from the 50s and 60s is probably still the description, no matter its gaps and flaws. Today we found him a whole collection of sources, now that we both knew to look for older things and to look for books.

And that’s where I find Linguistics research interesting, taken as a whole. On the one hand, it’s got a foot in ethnography, where the publication date hardly matters when deciding if the thing in hand is valid for study and citing. On the other hand, it’s got its foot in brain processing research, where publication matters a whole lot. When figuring out how people process and store words, imagine the difference between studies done before and after fMRI was prevalent. And that’s just the technology. What’s known about what, exactly, people see when they look at fMRI images is evolving day by day.

And yet again I remember the little “how to evaluate a source” check lists that I got in library school and how they are so terribly inadequate to describe the full scope of research values. In linguistics, date matters one moment, and not the next.

What is Information Literacy Anyway?

By IRIS Posted on by

Tomorrow I’m supposed to stand up in front of a group of faculty, all of whom are considering teaching one of the college’s new curriculum-wide freshman seminars next year, all of which must include some explicit practice developing information literacy. My task: explain information literacy to them in 10 easy minutes so that they can start thinking of ways to build it into their syllabi.

I wish I knew what information literacy is.

My co-workers have heard me say that I’m particularly confused by two things about information literacy: “information” and “literacy.” “Information” can refer to everything from color and smell to poetry to data to formal research articles. And while all of these things could be included in the definition of “information literacy,” for the most part we mean something more specific than that, something more like “facts or approaches or primary sources or secondary sources.” I know, I know, there are exceptions to that. But really, we don’t mean “the amount of the data after data compression” (Shu-Kun), or many of the other meanings proposed by Wikipedians. And “literacy” feels like a remedial skill to me, whereas I tend to think of sophistication in this area as a combination of concrete skills and an omnipresent habit of mind, both of which are useful in and out of the classroom and research contexts.

But this doesn’t really help me with my presentation, so I looked back at a couple of the position documents my department has produced in the last couple of years: Information Literacy in the Liberal Arts and the List of 6 and more. Then my co-workers and I plagiarized the second one, tweaked it a little, and came up with a list of questions that would be useful for first year students. This we developed into a handout for the presentation: Finding, Evaluating, and Ethically Using Information.

For my purposes tomorrow, these questions sketch out the habit of mind that information literate people exhibit. They don’t cover “knowing you need information,” and they don’t cover concrete search skills or strategies, but they are a start.

[edit: I should have linked to Steve's post and didn't, so here are his thoughts on the topic.]

Shu-Kun Lin (2008). ‘Gibbs Paradox and the Concepts of Information, Symmetry, Similarity and Their Relationship’, Entropy, 10 (1), 1-5. Available online at Entropy journal website.

Low-Key Cooperative Continual Professional Development

By IRIS Posted on by

A few years ago, my library decided to start a cooperative blog where we’d alert each other to developments in the wider world of librarianship, highlight interesting things we’d learned, and generally help each other keep up. There was enthusiasm, there was drive, there was an interesting blog… and then it died.

As far as I can tell, it died for three reasons: some people weren’t comfortable writing posts for it, people who rely on RSS to read blogs couldn’t deal with a blog that was locked down and therefore had no RSS option (one of those people was me me… no matter how useful, the site was dead to me without RSS), and everyone found they couldn’t get in the habit of clicking that bookmark and logging in to see if anything new had been posted recently.

Meanwhile, each of us continued to keep up with our own corners of the profession, some through email lists, some through professional journals, some through online social networks and blogs, and most through some combination of the three. But we all missed out on the richness that can come from hearing about things that affect our own worlds but originate in another person’s, and we all went back to been less and less aware of what interests and inspires our colleagues.

So this year we’re learning from the mistakes of our past effort and trying again, this time with more flexibility. I’ve set up a portal (still very much in progress) for those of us that really want a “home base” to check. There’s also a bookmarklet that will let people send annotated screenshots of web pages directly to my email account (using ToRead) for people who like that method of marking what they find, a Delicious tag for people who already use Delicious, and a general invitation to email me or pop in and tell me about interesting things that have come up.

So hopefully the collection piece will give people enough options that they don’t have to either conform or not participate. Hopefully there’s at least one option that will fit into each person’s existing habits, and people who are interested in experimenting with new-to-them options can do so without feeling locked into those options for all time.

Meanwhile, I’ll take whatever comes up and write a periodic blog post that glosses the things we’ve found (and behind the scenes, I’m going to see about getting password protected web-pub space on the college network so that I can link from the wide open blog to locked down documents that we aren’t comfortable sharing beyond ourselves). People can either subscribe to this newsletter via RSS or email, depending on their newsletter-reading preferences and workflow. It’ll also get fed into the portal for the “home base” folks. Just to round out our options, we’ll have low-key, face-to-face, brown bag lunch sessions once or twice a term for people who really prefer to discuss rather than read.

So hopefully the dissemination piece will also have enough options that people can work this seamlessly into their existing information-gathering processes.

The biggest challenge, then, will be striking the right balance between having a broad range of topics in each post/newsletter without overwhelming people with too many things that aren’t applicable to them. The idea is to have this be fun and interesting, not irrelevant and overwhelming. Wish me luck!