Category Archives: professional development

THATcamp Denver Takeaways

By IRIS Posted on by

I’ve been watching blog posts trickle out of THATcamps for years, and this fall I finally got a chance to attend one. As luck would have it, just as Carleton signed onto a Mellon Digital Humanities planning grant with Macalester and St. Olaf, a THATcamp popped up focused specifically on Digital Humanities and Libraries.

What a rich experience. It was populated by such a range of participants: people from large research universities, university presses, centers for digital humanities, OCLC research, major digital libraries, regular old librarians like me, and some disciplinary faculty, and some graduate students. It was a great opportunity to hear from people who are a few years ahead of where we are, to hear what questions they have now, what confusions exist that maybe we can head off before they become issues here, what workflows they’ve arrived at, what kinds of projects may be coming down the pike.

It was also an exhausting experience because the whole time I had to listen not so much to what, exactly, people were saying (since that was usually mostly irrelevant to me) but to patterns underlying the conversations: what kinds of services do institutions provide, are people mostly working in teams or alone, are the teams institutionalized or ad hoc, how do they negotiate the class differences between disciplinary faculty and library or IT partners, where do student research assistants fit into current work, what terminology do people use and where do confusions in terms exist… So many things to listen for and translate into my own context. And often I’d realize that information I’d dismissed earlier as totally irrelevant to me suddenly fit into a new pattern I was noticing, so by the end of the day I was pretty fried.

So what were some of the things that stood out as interesting or important themes or patterns? Well…

Have a Process — Allow for Exceptions

One session was about libraries becoming more involved as publishers since they often house the tools or manage the preservation and access to digital humanities projects. In my case, those tools would probably come from our IT department rather than the library. It was still really interesting, though, to hear the conversation slowly gravitate toward the consensus that in an ideal world institutions would have both a formal publication/preservation process and then also a sort of sandbox publishing process. This second process would accommodate projects that didn’t fit well into the formal containers (journals, books, wikis) or that couldn’t be evaluated in the same way prior to publication (peer review, for example). As one person said, often you have to build a thing before you know if it’s going to be worth anything, so the before-hand evaluation for publication process is largely impossible in these cases.

And in fact this became one of the major themes of the day for me. It seems that in order to support digital humanities projects, the goal is always to have the project based in tools, support structures, and data that are already present and ready for that kind of project. But there are also a lot of projects that simply won’t fit into existing structures, and so many programs provided capacity to work on these “boutique” projects. One woman had a phrase I really liked, saying that she looked at these as “first of a kind projects, rather than one of a kind projects.” The idea is to use these boutique projects to develop tools or services that the become part of the standard suite of support options, therefore taking less effort the next time.

Collaboration is Difficult and Necessary

This has been a theme not just of this gathering, but of every digital-humanities-related gathering I’ve attended or heard of. One humanist at St. Olaf said point blank that the humanities have traditionally been a realm of solo work so humanists don’t really know how to play well with others. They lose control of the process, the timeline, and the outcome, and the conclusions aren’t necessarily fully their own. Another humanist at a conference hosted this fall at Carleton spoke bluntly about how this “go it alone” attitude can easily translated into almost a master/servant relationship when collaborations mix faculty and staff because this relationship fits more easily into disciplinary practices that privilege solo work. “This is my project. Please make this thing happen in the way I want.”

Library Disciplinarity

While I was at THATcamp, I started thinking that one way to think about these projects so that they maintained their collaborative nature would be to think of it almost as interdisciplinary work, where the library is a discipline more than it is a service. The library has hundreds of years of disciplinary experience with finding, organizing, using, preserving, and making accessible digital and physical items. We study the rich complexity of the interstitial spaces between discrete pieces of instantiated knowledge. We study the socio-cultural practices that develop in these spaces and that draw dynamic connections between the items. To think of ourselves as “just” a service organization is to sell ourselves short and to relegate ourselves to perpetual outsiders in these ideally collaborative pursuits.

For this reason, I also really appreciated the ways that some institutions have “Digital Scholarship” programs rather than “Digital Humanities” programs. From the CS and Library perspectives, we bring very similar portions of our disciplinary training to projects from the Humanities and the Social Sciences, so there is really no need to have separate programs to support the various disciplines. (No need, that is, after the humanities have had a chance to acclimatize themselves to this new realm of scholarship. I can absolutely see how having dedicated energies directed to the humanities is important when first getting digital humanities off the ground.)

Some Practicalities

People at THATcamp were justifiably concerned about the sustainability and scalability of their programs. Some had decided that they would provide consulting support only or that they would cap the number of active digital humanities projects they could support at any given time (with a wait list for people once an active project graduated or died). Several found that they were in high demand to help scholars develop data management plans now that humanities scholars were applying for grants that require those, and that this had been an unanticipated and heavy demand on their time. And other libraries pointed out that rather than being all things to all projects, they would specialize — so Library A might specialize in text analysis and Library B might specialize in GIS applications for humanities. Most make use of graduate student work (we intend to employ undergraduates here).

It also became clear that initial conversations in the planning stages for a project should include some discussion of how permanent the end result is intended to be. Is this something closer to an item in our “circulating collection” that can be weeded when use dwindles and space gets tight? Or is this more like an item in “special collections” that requires greater commitment to long-term care? Who will be responsible for the server space and upgrades? Who is the intended audience and how will we get it to them? If it is interactive, how much of a change log should be available, and how much control do we exert over the kind and type of interactivity? Questions like this are not just procedural, it turns out, but can actually shape the project itself on a fundamental level.

And finally, it turns out that most projects need (but do not have) good graphic design. This is especially important for projects that involve crowdsourcing. And if you’re after interactivity, you’d best have thought about how to get people to participate (I’m reminded of Riedl’s research for this problem).

On Not Attending Conferences

By IRIS Posted on by

I realized today that I haven’t attended a conference since the fall of 2008. This brought me up short. I think of myself as attending about two national conferences per year, but apparently that’s not the case any more and hasn’t been for quite a while. I’ve heard from others who haven’t traveled to a conference in a few years because of budget cuts, so I know I’m not the only one who’s mostly stayed home for a while, but I hadn’t really thought about it until just today because I was never told I couldn’t travel — I just started deciding with each new announcement of an upcoming conference that I could skip that one that year, that there would be other conferences. And now here I am. I’ve skipped them all.

I miss seeing my libraryland friends face to face, I miss seeing other places that I don’t otherwise visit, and I miss the dedicated time to think about libraries without actually working in one right that second. But what I haven’t lost is the networking, discussion, and general information sharing that keep me up to date with the world of libraries. That’s all still going on every day in my computer, thanks to the Library Society of the World and its FriendFeed room.

I hope sometime soon I can get the full conference experience again, and I kind of hope that the next conference I attend will be an LSW unconference (hint hint, people!), but I’m really glad to have stumbled in with this crew of top notch people.

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.

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!

Mini-Immersion: A Shameless “How We Done Good” Post

By IRIS Posted on by

Well, last night ended up being un-fun and not very restful, and today started out with a low-grade fever (now gone, so things are looking up). So while I’m confining myself to laziness for the rest of the day, I thought I’d lay out this Mini-Immersion idea in its more logistical details.

The Two-Fold Inspiration

Many of us in the MnObe libraries have been to Immersion, but not all of us, so we thought it might be nice to spread the benefits a little bit. Think of it as a really intensive conference report where the audience has to recreate the conference for themselves.

Then last year, the instruction librarians at my library got together and shared teaching modules and strategies with each other, and ended up surprising ourselves at the wealth of experiences, approaches, and practicalities that we had to share with each other. Those days still stand out as my favorite days of the entire summer last year even though we’d all gone into it wondering just what the point was, exactly, since we thought we had a pretty good idea of what each of us did. Boy were we wrong! And the only thing better than the librarians of one liberal arts college library teaching each other how to teach? The librarians of five liberal arts colleges teaching each other how to teach, of course!

So the idea this year was to recreate a Good Parts Version of Immersion just for ourselves, emphasizing particularly the parts that are relevant for smallish private schools with similar missions and goals, squeezing it into one day, and acknowledging the wealth of expertise that’s housed among our colleagues, and spending some quality time teaching each other how to teach.

The Logistics

We picked a day (August 6th) and a place (Gustavus Adolphus) and met from 9 to 4. (In retrospect, building in some breaks would have been a good idea, but we were all so gung-ho!) All the presentations ended up being about half and half, lecture and discussion, which worked out really well.

  • 9am: Gather for coffee, conversation, and introductions
  • 9:30-10:15: Presentation — Information Literacy in the Liberal Arts (Barbara Fister)
  • 10:20-11:05: Presentation — Changing Paradigms: Shifting the emphasis from Teaching to Learning (Iris Jastram and Aaron Albertson)
  • 11:10-11:55: Presentation — Best Practices in Effective Instruction (LeAnn Suchy and Ken Johnson)
  • Noon-1pm: Lunch
  • 1-3: Instruction Workshops (small groups of 4–6 people)
  • 3-4: wrap-up discussion

Participants had two assignments:

  1. Plan out a SHORT presentation for the afternoon workshop (5-7 minutes) .
    This should be a snippet from instruction that you do or are planning to do and could either be something that works particularly well or that hasn’t worked as well as you’d like it to work. This could also be a narrative about a portion of a class that you are planning. Remember, you’ll be surrounded by experts who can help you, so take advantage of the opportunity! I strongly encourage you to plan to do these presentations without props of any kind. There will be projection equipment there that you can use if needed, but this exercise works best if the emphasis is on you and your teaching rather than a screen.
  2. Read the two articles below.
    Think of these readings not as prescriptive but as food for thought as you enter a full day of thinking about the kinds of instruction we do at our institutions. How do they work for you? How don’t they work? What aspects of your own instruction style and content do they make you think about (something that they show to be either a strength of yours or a potential weakness)?

    1. “Teaching the Library: Best Practices” by Laura Saunders, published in the Spring 2002 issue of Library Philosophy and Practice, available here: http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/saunders.html
      This is a short overview of best practices in library instruction. Many of these ideas we may have heard before or think about when we plan library instruction, but we want you to read this and think about your own instruction. How do you try to accommodate different learning styles? What supplemental materials do you provide for your class? Do you try to incorporate humor into your instruction? Bring examples of your own instruction, or ideas you come up with as you read this, to share with all of us on Immersion Day.
    2. “So, What’s a Learning Outcome Anyway?” by Mark Battersby, published in 1999 as an ERIC document, available here: http://tinyurl.com/nbkjby
      This article attempts a definition of Learning Outcomes that foregrounds this concept as an approach or set of attitudes rather than as a formula for classroom instruction. How well do concepts such as “generic abilities” fit with liberal arts education in general and library instruction in particular? How do we break down the big picture end result of multiple “generic abilities” to things to be taught in a library instruction session? And, how do we relate them to the library tools we feel students must learn about, like the library catalog?

The articles were chosen by the presenters of the morning sessions and gave us some concrete things to agree or disagree with early in the morning. And there was a lot of disagreeing, but in the most constructive way possible, of course.

The whole day cost $10 per participant to cover lunch, coffee, and snacks.

I should note that the entire day required a grand total of an hour and fifteen minutes of meetings on the part of the organizing committee, and all but about half an hour of that were 15–minute telephone conference calls. So really, this isn’t that hard to set up. The hardest part was finding people to step forward and present, so the steering committee ended up doing two of the three presentations ourselves.

I guess the point is this: it’s really not hard, and though it may look either too serious or too hokey or too whatever, you might enjoy it more than you think.

And now, I think I’ll take a nap.