“Wait, this is information literacy?” a rhetorician at our workshop exclaimed in excited surprise. “But this is so cool!” And we wanted to respond “YES!” not only from joyful pride but also out of recognition. After all, we too had had very similar reactions to our own work with information literacy, and not that long ago. We too had realized that information literacy could be different than we had originally thought (or that the ACRL information literacy standards had led us to believe). Information literacy could be more alive and integrated within the discourse of academic work. It could be more applicable across disciplines and genres and rhetorical goals. And these revelations remapped our practice.

So begins the essay my colleagues Danya Leebaw, Heather Tompkins and I wrote for In the Library with the Lead Pipe that was published last night. It focuses on how our Information Literacy in Student Writing project has helped us learn more about information literacy and how that has influenced our teaching and our work with faculty and departments.

Imagine walking through the stacks in your favorite library. The slightly worn spines creating that familiar regular irregularity on each side, that distinctive smell of books and dust and filtered air, everything promising far more to explore than you could ever chart out in one lifetime, everything beckoning you toward its own particular rabbit hole of interconnected facts and ideas. Imagine pulling several books off the shelves to take with you, either to check out or to spread in front of you in the reading room.

After that? Well, I’ve already written with Steve Lawson about some ideas for staving off the insanity and steer us towards one model that might allow us to capitalize on the benefits of new formats without such potential for seeing white rabbits.

In my defense, I was young. In my defense, this is how it had been presented to me all the way up through library school.

In the past three years, I’ve been part of a project that really expanded my thinking and made me fall in love with what information literacy could be and with the ways in which it really is relevant to people and projects on my campus.

But let me back up.

All of our sophomores are required to submit a portfolio of their writing, and passing this assessment is a graduation requirement. When they submit their portfolios, they’re given the choice of designating that their writing can be used for research, which many of them do, and lately the college has been doing three large projects (that I know of) based on these writing portfolios.

1. Our quantitative initiative (QUiRK) reads a subset of the papers to determine how sophomores use quantitative evidence in their writing.*
2. The writing program and SERC are pairing up for the Tracer Project, which studies how faculty development (which includes writing portfolio assessment) impacts student learning.
3. And starting in 2008, we in the library have been reading portfolios to see how information literacy is revealed in academic writing at the sophomore level.

As part of that last one, my department had fascinating hours of discussion about what we could and couldn’t evaluate about information literacy when presented with a finished paper. One of the most interesting and useful of these discussions (for me) was the one which revealed that we could, in fact, assess evaluation of sources even when the paper didn’t use “outside” sources beyond primary sources or sources prescribed by the professor. We could watch students picking primary sources, even from assigned readings, that worked well together and could be used to make a compelling point, or we could see them cramming two such sources together and either treating them entirely separately or in other ways not using them instrumentally toward making a point. We also confirmed what we had always suspected: that implementation of attribution was about more than just mechanics, and that failures in attribution could often signal a fundamental misunderstandings of the sources the student was using or of the purpose of reporting evidence in the first place. And we articulated for ourselves some of the ways in which integrating evidence into a paper can help or hinder the student’s rhetorical goals.

We couldn’t assess much (if anything) about the actual steps in the process that resulted in the writing we had in front of us, but we could look for habits of mind associated with using evidence, and we could look for the ways in which conventions of communicating evidence manifest in sophomore level student writing.

In the end, after much testing and revision, we came up with a rubric for assessing information literacy in writing and sat down to score papers. And yesterday, we finally presented our work and some preliminary findings, handed around a sample of student writing and watched as the faculty and staff attendees pulled interesting and useful insights out of the writing and then all came up with exactly the same score on the rubric (inter-reader reliability!), and had a fun discussion about how this could be used on campus to build shared expectations for information literacy and to help inform our teaching.

For my part, participating in this project has fundamentally changed one of the major ways I think about my work. It was so liberating for me to realize in concrete fashion that “information literacy” does not equal “the research paper.” All of a sudden I discovered that I do have something to contribute to those parts of the curriculum that interest me but that don’t produce traditional research projects. All of a sudden I realized that I don’t have to help faculty squeeze research projects into courses where those projects don’t fit naturally, and that instead we could talk about context-building skills or source interpretation skills for thought-pieces, class discussions, and other non-research assignments.

For me, this project helped me realize that I actually do like the concept of information literacy and that it actually does have meaningfully deep and cross-cutting applications on a liberal arts college campus — that it’s not simply about making mini-librarians out of our students or about searching for searching’s sake. I’m hoping that as we open it up to include faculty readers this year, that same sense seeps through the campus. I hope this is something we can get behind and dig into and find interesting, and that what we learn from analyzing these portfolios will meaningfully inform our practice as teachers.

I’m just so excited about this project, and so glad to be involved in it. It’s probably been the most eye-opening and practice-changing project I’ve participated in.

While we were all busy wondering what it means to be a librarian in the Age of Google, we got flanked. This is not the Age of Google after all. That was just a distraction — a clever and dazzling light show. Meanwhile, behind the curtain, a totally different age was gathering itself: The Age of Big Access.

And even though I’ve had a couple of months to ponder this stuff since drafting it, my last two sentences still stand: “I was pretty comfortable with my role as an instruction librarian in the Age of Google. I’m totally at sea trying to figure out my role as an instruction librarian in the Age of Big Access.” I want access like an addict wants a hit, but maybe it’s killing me.

This past summer I traveled to Chicago to hang out with librarians who were attending ALA Annual, but I took one day to ride the train out to the suburb I’d lived and danced in while living my previous life as teacher at the Academy of Movement and Music and a dancer and occasional choreographer for Momenta.

I’ve spent years trying desperately not to think about what life would have been like if I’d decided to pursue dance as a career, missing it so much that I didn’t even attend live dance performances for years. But I was finally ready to go back and immerse myself in the familiar sounds and smells of the old building, dig through the archived performance videos for hours and hours, and trace my favorite barre with my fingers (it was wobbly, and therefore forced me not to rely on it for balance).

Digging through archived performance videos is kind of a hit-or-miss affair. They’re labeled, helpfully, “summer dance festival 1999″ and “Evening 7/21/2001″ and the like, with no cataloging. (The librarian in me wanted to apply for a leave of absence to spend a few months making finding aids for them!) But in the end I was able to find three pieces that I’d choreographed. Over the last couple of days I’ve spent some time making them sharable online. And here’s one of them, choreographed in 2000 for some of the group of teachers and alumni who gather every summer to put on their own show. Some were and are professional dancers. Others (like me at the time) hadn’t danced in a long while, but still made yearly pilgrimages back to the Momenta studios to participate in this show.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled program. Thank you for indulging me.

It crossed my mind that maybe I should just put this thing out of its misery, but I don’t think I’m ready to follow in CavLec’s footsteps yet. So here I am again, and here’s a bit of what I’ve been up to since last I thought much about blogging.

We had an unusually busy Spring term at Carleton. Budgetary adventures, a new initiative to archive digital versions of all senior capstone projects, revising our strategic plan, and some internal restructuring took up a lot of time and brain space.

My sister got married, my cousin got married, and my youngest brother graduated from college (with honors!), all in the space of a month.

Then I took two weeks off of work to do as much of Nothing At All as I could. In case you missed it, that was TWO WHOLE WEEKS off. In a row. Bliss. During that time, I became a big fan of sitting on the porch with a book, a laptop, and some iced tea. (In fact, I’m reprising my role as a porch-sitter right now, thanks to early observance of Independence Day.) Coming back to work was kind of a shock to the system after that, let me tell you.

It’s been a weird few months in which many individual good things happened but the whole felt kind of awful. I was tired. I am tired. But I think things are starting to turn around. And while I’m not sure how frequently I’ll post or what I’ll write about, it’s nice to see this space sitting here and waiting for me.

First there was high school. I’d decided to continue being home schooled, which terrified me. How could I be sure that I’d learn enough to get into college if I stayed home? I couldn’t. So I learned absolutely as much as I could, fueled by a deep smoldering panic that I’d be horribly under-prepared for college. As it turns out, I wasn’t under-prepared. So I graduated from high school and went to college.

Then there was college. That terrified me. How could I possibly both figure out what I wanted to do with The Rest Of My Life (in my head that phrase was always in capital letters) and also learn enough to do whatever-that-was in only four years? As it turns out, I didn’t. And as it turns out, this is normal. So I graduated from college and, since I still didn’t quite know what I wanted to do for The Rest Of My Life, I went to grad school.

Grad school terrified me. All these smart people, all this work, all this pressure. I had no idea how I’d make it through the reading assignments, let alone the term papers that were twice as long as any I’d written before (with the exception of my college senior thesis). After two years of that, I’d learned enough to decide that English Professor was not going to be my title for The Rest Of My Life, so I skipped out with a masters and moved over to the School of Library and Information Science… which terrified me for a whole different set of reasons. The classes didn’t inspire me, and I’d never worked in a library, so I wondered what people did beyond sit at a desk and answer questions all day, which seemed like it could be unendingly dull. But just as I was going to quit and go back to the English Professor idea (the program had said I could come back any time), I got a job in a library and decided that this might suit me after all. As it turns out, it does suit me. So, after 2 years in English and 2 years in library school, I left graduate school and started my first job.

This Carleton job terrified me, so when I took it I promised myself that it need only be for four years. (After that, I planned to find a job closer to my family.) It was a job full of all kinds of opportunity, but also all kinds of responsibility. The people here were wonderful, but I worried that I’d be the weak link in their exhilarating, intense, and creative chain. As it turns out, our individual strengths and weaknesses seem to complement each other pretty well, so the job quickly grew to become my dream job. And so, as it turns out, I’m not looking for a job after my allotted four years.

And now, on this, the anniversary of the day I started here, I feel nearly qualified to hold the position I have. I’ve done a lot (started this blog, taught dozens of classes, met with hundreds of students, given conference talks, written articles and a book chapter). I’ve learned to negotiate tricky situations with at least outward confidence. And I’ve made fast friends for whom I’m continually grateful. These friends have talked me into confidence I’d never have found on my own, and they’ve talked me down when things seemed to be too much to handle. If it takes a village to raise a child, it apparently takes a sizable chunk of the internet and fair few face-to-face friends to raise a librarian, or at least this librarian.

I wonder what the next four years hold.

P.S. If 4 years seems about long enough to train up a librarian, I wonder how people like presidents feel.

I realize this isn’t actually so hard. I’ve done it before. Which left me wondering why I’m rather obsessively going back over details, shuffling things around, thinking up better examples, and then reworking things over and over and over and over. And as odd as it seems, I think it’s because I’m nervous.

I’m not nervous about presenting to the workshop attendees. Goodness, I do that nearly every day. I’m not nervous about my content, though I do think it’s probably of a different tone than most people will be expecting. No, I’m nervous about my co-presenters seeing me present. These are people I’ve looked up to for years. These are people that I look to for inspiration, for clarity, for affirmation. These are people I’ve come to consider friends. Who wouldn’t be nervous revealing their public-speaking selves to such an audience?

I can’t wait to see what the other authors wrote about, but I can tell you that Ann and I wrote about individual student consultations, how they fit into a research service alongside reference and instruction, and why we think they’re pretty amazing.

To be fair, the story started back in college, where I majored in English. English majors are eminently qualified to do just about anything, right? And besides, they get to earn degrees for reading and thinking about good writing. What was there to lose?

By the time I graduated, I still hadn’t figured out which part of “just about anything” I wanted to inhabit, though I was pretty sure I wanted to teach literature, so I managed to simultaneously stall and prepare myself for a possible future by going to grad school, where I got to earn another degree by reading and thinking about good writing. Not bad, right? Right. But I studied more than literature and literary theory while I was in grad school. I also studied the job of a professor of English, and I learned that I probably wasn’t cut out for that job as it exists in the real world. My personal Xanadu crumbled little by little as I watched my professors go about their lives.

I remember lying on the living room floor, stroking Toby the family dog, and talking to my mom about how I didn’t feel I’d fit well into my own future if I continued on as I was. Then, from her position near the kitchen sink and the dishes she was methodically washing, she said, “You know, you might consider being a librarian.”

Don’t laugh (too hard), but up until that day I hadn’t known that librarians needed special degrees to do what they did. Nor had I ever worked in a library, even as a shelver. Nor had I ever asked a librarian for help. The children’s librarian at the public library we’d used when I was very young had always been kind, and had saved new books about ballerinas for me whenever they arrived. But that was the extent of my interaction with librarians. (And remember, by this point I was nearly done with a masters degree.) And yet, I found myself applying to the LIS school at Milwaukee and beginning work on my degree there as soon as I’d successfully defended my masters thesis across campus. The next summer (and half-way into my degree program), I applied for part time work at a public library and an academic library, just to see what working in a library was actually like.

The one bump in the road was that public library. It’s toxic atmosphere nearly caused me to drop out of library school and cash in on the promise from the English department that they’d take me back into the Ph.D program there if I ever wanted to return. I spent sleepless nights wondering if I could just run away to New Zealand to help with the filming of the Lord of the Rings or something… anything to get out of what I was pretty sure was the worst decision of my life. Luckily for me, I’m too stubborn to quit something once I’ve invested that much time, energy, and money into it. So I decided to at least finish my degree, however miserable I was with the job and my classes. I could never have known at that point how lucky I would be just a year later, when I graduated and stumbled mostly blindly into the best job I could ever have wished for.

And here I am.

Now I want to know how Steve, Laura, Laura, and Dorothea got into library work.