In the messy transitions implied by the introductions of new names that overlap with and build on concepts that came before, what do we gain? What do we lose?

I think we gain opportunities and motivation to examine our practice, to have difficult discussions, to encourage and pull stragglers along, to mollify and reign in renegades, and to shift emphasis from one point to another in the vast matrix of professional goals.

I think we lose a sense of the complexity of our past. New concepts or emphases do not spring fully formed into being, and new pedagogies retain large portions of old pedagogies, but a new name assignes concepts and pedagogies an artificial start date.

To complicate this even further, new names in pedagogical concepts seem usually to have the foundational goal of eradicating ineffective teaching, but the reality is that there will always be ineffective teachers. That’s an entirely separate issue. This goal, then, will never be realized but yet will spur the shifting of the old name’s layers of meaning to emphasize outdatedness, simplicity, lack of imagination, homogeneity.

Names are shorthand, simplified or problematized from moment to moment depending on context.

What’s in a name? People’s hopes, and people’s fears. No small thing.

Generalization? Admittedly. But try as I might, I can’t see how aiming for transferable skills is any different from what we’ve been doing for years.

Here’s how I see it. Years ago, library instruction was called “Bibliographic Instruction.” Typically, when people think of Bibliographic Instruction, they think of librarians teaching students “here is how you use an index, and here are the 4 best indexes for your topic, and here is the library catalog and here are the important parts of the library catalog.” Typically, people think of it as being very much about teaching the few, finite ways to find sources.

Then about 20 years ago a bunch of us said “enough of this, let’s do Information Literacy, which is about teaching students how to recognize that they need information, find it, evaluate it, and use it well. And we want them to grapple with the politics of information production and publication, and we want them to be able to apply these skills to all kinds of tasks. We want them learn to be life-long learners!” Now, some people were more on board with this than others, so some people or institutions have really continued to do something much closer to Bibliographic Instruction while adopting the name Information Literacy. Meanwhile, other people have almost entirely dispensed with teaching specific databases and catalogs in favor of teaching concepts and processes. And, of course, there’s everything in between.

Then last year or the year before, some people coined the term Transliteracy, which focuses on transferable skills and (they say) does this rather than teaching tools. I contend, however, that Information Literacy was never primarily about teaching the tools and always about transferable skills. Telling me that I should stop doing that stuffy old Information Literacy, with its emphasis on where exactly to click in which databases, tells me that you never really understood Information Literacy in the first place. It’s not called Database Literacy for a reason, you know.

A lot of what I find frustrating about some of the expectations that float across our professional lives has to do with confusing process for product. The stereotype of boring library instruction, all about exactly where to click in order to be a good researcher, is one of these. The assumption that good organization equals good customer service is another. And let’s not forget collaboration and curricular integration equalling library success.

And this thing with the literature review is incredibly tied in with issues I’ve been working through in my teaching, where “teach students about literature reviews” is partially about locating and accessing sources but a lot more about understanding why you’re even doing that in the first place and then constructing a claim that’s grounded in those sources but reaches beyond them. Quantifying results is only one of many many evaluative actions, and it’s only good for certain kinds of arguments, and even then it’s usually the least interesting and least informative option.

By the end of the term, we will have met 4 times, sometimes for as little as 10 or 15 minutes, and sometimes for as long as the full class period. And in every case, what I’ll work with them on is simultaneously part of an advanced information literacy “curriculum” of sorts as well as timed to help the students accomplish an upcoming assignment.

Here’s the overview:

1. Presearch — identifying and preparing to join scholarly conversations
2. Bibliography as an intellectual product
3. The Literature Review — mapping your scholarly conversation
4. Creativity in Constraint

Session one went for 50 minutes, which is about half the class period for a Tuesday/Thursday class like this one, and it was almost entirely discussion-based and, after a brief introduction from the professor and from me, started with a discussion of genre. The professor had previously primed them with a quick look at MLA International Bibliography and with repeated references to and discussions about the concept of the scholarly conversation.

Key points from the introduction:

The importance of participating in a conversation according to conventional rules of conversations (i.e. not simply repeating your interlocutors, not bringing in totally off-topic ideas without bracketing them out somehow, non-verbals that all interlocutors understand, etc). Conversations are a genre of communication, and interlocutors are expected to follow the genre’s conventions or incur the displeasure of their interlocutors (and possibly being snubbed).

Genre:

The course is about Latino/a poetry. How would you describe that genre? What is it trying to do? Who are its audiences? What kinds of evidence does it use to accomplish its goals? What rhetorical moves does it make? (As we discussed this genre, the professor and I kept track of key characteristics on the blackboard.)

The other major genre you’ll be dealing with in this course is the thesis-driven paper — specifically a piece of literary criticism — and in this case you’ll be asked to produce this genre. So what job is this genre doing? Who are its audiences? What kinds of evidence does it employ? What rhetorical moves does it make? (Again, we kept track of key features on the blackboard.)

One more genre, and pre-search:

Probably unbeknownst to you, you’ll also be working with a third genre in this course: the database. (Did a quick search to reveal a result list from MLA International Bibliography.) At this point in the circular research process, when you’re choosing a topic, you have to do a lot of listening in on the scholarly conversations that are happening in order to decide which to join yourself. This will involve doing many probing searches in databases and catalogs, “reading” the result lists and maybe the full records of results that look particularly interesting, slowly building up a map of the conversations you find, learning to vocabulary of those conversations and the key players, and then using all of this to build future searches and further refine your map of the scholarly conversation(s). Thinking of the database as a genre can help you “read” result lists in this concept-mapping way, and to think of searches as expeditions on the mapping quest rather than as end-points.

So, if a result list is a genre, what meaning does a list as a whole convey? Who is the audience? What “evidence” is it using to help its audience reach conclusions? What are the rhetorical moves it makes (think of layout and privileging of certain information as a rhetorical move).

Given all of this, what might finding “nothing on my topic” mean? Are there intellectual/rhetorical moves you can make in that situation (given that you’re talking about very contemporary poetry, it’s likely that you won’t find anything on your particular poem, after all)? [We discussed making arguments from analogy, using work from another poet/poem to illuminate your topic, and we discussed creating a theoretical base on which to ground your own work.] How might you recognize an “interesting question” to pursue? What kinds of things should you keep track of in your research notes that will help you map out the various conversations you find (I provide some templates under “Keeping Useful Notes” here)?

All too soon, our time was up.

Next time: Bibliographies as Intellectual Products.

As I think on this, here are some of the voices I’ve heard giving compelling answers or asking compelling questions about these fundamental questions.

Do Librarians Work Hard Enough? by Barbara Fister

“We have never tried to corner the market on information or drive any other organization out of business. We’re the opposite of empire builders. We’re trying to preserve access to common ground where ideas can be shared openly, not a trading pit for buyers and sellers. We’re not serving customers, we represent the will of the people so they can help themselves and be part of a community that learns.”

The Last Enclosures by Timothy Burke

“I think it’s fairly simple. You know the classic “First they came for the X, then they came for the Y, and I did nothing, and then they came for me?” schtick? This is one of those stories. In fact, it’s the end of one of those stories. They already came for the doctors and the psychiatrists. They already came for the lawyers. They already came for the accountants and auditors. They already came for all the professions. Professors are the last to be broken on the wheel, the last to be put at their station in the new assembly lines of the 21st Century Service Economy.”

Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week to Keep Our Sanity by Sara Robinson

“Odds are good that you probably turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work; and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering e-mail, making phone calls, and so on. You can stay longer if your boss asks; but after six hours, all he’s really got left is a butt in a chair. Your brain has already clocked out and gone home.”

Kathrine Rowe, while talking to Carleton humanities seniors yesterday about how their skills prepare them for work, in this case the work of software development.

“I have spent my life, my career, apprenticing myself to the study of acts of expression.”

“Humanists are trained to enquire if the questions being asked are the right questions and if the assumptions being made are the right assumptions.”

What’s more, we’re also friends. Most of us, anyway. There are a few people I don’t really know or understand over there and I’m sure the same is true when they think of us. But really, I’m going to movie night at one of their houses tonight and another one and I have swapped books and another and I meet to knit together nearly every Saturday morning. We confide in each other. We’re friends.

So yes, things are good. But as with any relationship, things are also complex.

We had a joint retreat recently, and one of the questions several of us raised in our breakout groups — the question that’s kicked around in my head since then — is how to have a truly collaborative relationship when the library is about 90% customer of IT and 10% collaborator with IT. We have complex systems that they support. We have weird old fashioned printers (i.e. label printers) that we really need but that don’t work most of the time. Our web presence is complicated. Our need for public technology infrastructure (and bandwidth) just keeps increasing. Some of us want to tinker with all kinds of geeky stuff, and some of us need help copying and pasting. I don’t know if we’re their most complicated customers on campus, but we’re probably right up there.

So there’s a weird power dynamic there, and potential for either side to get resentful: us if we think they’re not helping us enough and them if they think we’re demanding too much time or resources. And we wondered how to even out that power differential a bit in hopes of keeping a good thing going and making it even better and more sustainable. What is it that we offer them?

Currently, we’re one of the best places on campus to test equipment and software. We’re a high traffic building and one of the few on campus that’s frequented by faculty, staff, and students. And we’re also pretty good at soliciting and communicating feedback. So when the college was deciding on a campus-wide printer/scanner/copier model, we were the main test site. When they institute new software or interfaces, we can usually tell them how it’s being received by our students.

We also offer a space where IT can have direct contact with students who are in the midst of doing their work. The main lab in the library is the reference room, with the joint Research/IT service desk and the two busiest printers on campus. One thing that our IT department doesn’t have much of right now is very direct connections to the curriculum and student engagement with their academic work on campus, and since that’s really the core of the campus’ mission and ethos, figuring out how to engage with that enterprise would be a great step. (There is a group of academic technologists that consults with faculty and students about curricular matters, but for the most part they are separate from the main help desk.)

Right now, they’ve come through several years of several iterations of major reorganizations, so I suppose we can offer a sense of stability if we’re in collaborations with them and other departments or individuals.

But what else? Surely there are ways to offer more tangible support for colleagues that we value and that make our work possible. What are some of the things that you offer your IT departments?

Harvard Library Reading Room

Libraries have always been many things, but one thing they’ve generally focused on is providing materials and places to read and engage with those materials. Shelves and desks.

With more and more of our collections moving online, an internet connection is now the equivalent of a shelf for our electronic collections, browsers and computer desktops are now the places to read and engage with those materials.

This hit home for us in a big way when our wifi infrastructure crumbled under the ever-increasing demands on its resources (thank heavens for smart and dedicated IT folks!) and when “use one of the library computers” wasn’t an alternative any more because they were all in use. All three labs of them.

I used to think of wifi and computer access in libraries more as amenities. People come here to do their academic work, so isn’t it great that they can stay here and actually do their work. But over the last few years I’ve decided that our collections and the assignments that our faculty require have evolved such that it’s no longer useful to think of these and things like them as “extras.” These are our shelves. These are our desks. These are part of our core mission. We provide materials and ways of engaging with those materials, just as we have always done.

Aaaahhhhhh!!!!!!!!!

The bad news comes in two parts. First, it turns out that “Good Vibrations” is actually stamped onto the pager — a pager that vibrates exuberantly. This is… not what I really want to be wearing on my belt buckle as I go about my librarianly work. We covered the phrase over with a slip of paper that says “Reference Pager.” Imaginative, I know, but I’m all for utterly useful things at service points.

The second part of the bad news was the extreme exuberance with which this pager vibrates. You can hear it vibrating away from across the main floor of the library, followed immediately by the poor on-call librarian’s startled scream. And at the beginning of every shift, you can watch as the librarian on duty gingerly unplugs the pager from its charger, turns it on, and cringes as it gives 4 excessively happy “I’M FUNCTIONING AND I’VE MISSED YOU AND I’M SO READY TO WORK TODAY” vibrating pulses.

I’m on call this afternoon while all my other colleagues are either working off campus, at a conference, or on vacation. If this thing goes off and I have a coronary, nobody will know what happened until everyone returns tomorrow to find my cold, dead hand clutching the maniacally vibrating pager.

p.s. Here’s the thing’s “I’m awake” war cry. (Surgeon General’s Warning: turn down your volume if you value your ears.)

• 944 Mac OS X
• 915 Apple iPod, iPhone or iPad
• 640 Microsoft Windows Vista/7 or Server 2008
• 340 Mac OS X Lion
• 133 Generic Android
• 69 Microsoft Windows XP
• 26 OEMed Wireless Router
• 11 Slingbox
• 11 DD-WRT Router
• 9 Ubuntu 11.04
• 9 HP Printer
• 8 LaCie NAS
• 7 Samsung Android
• 7 Playstation 2
• 5 Nokia Internet Tablet (udhcpc client)
• 5 Android Tablet
• 3 Ubuntu/Debian 5/Knoppix 6
• 3 Motorola Android
• 3 Debian-based Linux
• 2 Xbox 360
• 2 OS/2 Warp (actually BlackBerry, I think)
• 2 Microsoft Windows 8
• 2 Gentoo Linux
• 2 Epson Projectors
• 1 Symbian OS
• 1 Fedora 15 or 16 based distro
• 1 Chrome OS
• 1 Brother Printer

Coming after the recent Chronicle of Higher Ed article on how Tablet Ownership Triples Among College Students (apologies for the pay wall), it’s very interesting to see iOS connections outnumber all Windows connections.

A professor that I work with often was teaching one of the 100-level Writing Seminars that get offered with some regularity. He’d set up the class so that students would have practice doing a variety of kinds of writing (observational, persuasive, etc), and they’d be reading a lot of op ed kinds of things (as well as They Say / I Say by Graff and Birkenstein) along the way to seed discussions and to model their writing on. Pretty typical first year writing seminar fare.

He was also working in formal drafts by having papers due and graded, and then having the term’s final paper be a reworking of one of those papers, using it as a glorified draft. And here’s where things got kind of interesting.

They didn’t really need me early on in the course. He wasn’t asking for more than could be found on the open web up until the time of the final paper, so having me come early would have been a waste of everyone’s time as they wondered what they were doing with me, I wondered what I was doing with them, and we all promptly forgot about the whole thing. But then by the time they might need me, they’d already written a pretty good version of their papers.

“That’s fine!” I said, “They need to know that the research process isn’t linear anyway, so let’s really and truly demonstrate going back to the research steps after having thought critically about their papers.” And so we did. Here’s how it went (it was a 2-hour class session):

Class Discussion

They spent the first third of class discussing the days’ reading, Evgeny Morozov’s “The Death of the Cyberflâneur” from the New York Times. As they did so, I noted down the phrases from the work that they were referencing, the related topics that they were connecting this work to, etc. (I also participated in the discussion a bit, because it was fascinating and lively.)

Following Up and Website Evaluation

As the discussion was wrapping up, the professor asked me, “How would we find out more about Morozov? Is he respected? Has he written other things?”

Chalkboard after class

So I, of course, started from his Wikipedia page, which always gives us a chance to talk about the uses and misuses of Wikipedia, which leads into a nice discussion of authority and how we determine it, which always ends with us agreeing that finding out who caused something to be put up online has a lot to do with how much weight we give to whatever it is we’re looking at. As we found things, I also started a little mindmap on the chalk board of the kinds of topics Morozov publishes on as well as the related terms/topics that had come up during their discussion.

(This is actually not the best example of how this mind-map worked because we did a lot of talking and I did less writing, so you can’t really see that we were using it not just to visualize the topic but also to come up with related terms to use for later search. But more on that in a bit)

(Break)

Research and your final paper

The professor and I both talked a bit about the process of looking critically at your drafts to identify where your reader may need you to give them some evidence before they’ll be willing to follow you along from point A to point B. Evidence is like a bridge that you construct to fill the gap between where your reader is and where you’d like them to be.

Circular research process

Furthermore, this process of having a really good draft in hand, reading it critically, and then finding new evidence to fill gaps you didn’t see before is perfectly normal. In fact, it’s great! The research process is circular, so trying to hammer it out flat will often get you less great results.

See? It looks like this. You are currently re-examining your topic. Again. And ideally you’ll do it often.

At this point we had them pair off, exchange their drafts, and work together to identify places where either hard evidence or other external voices might help them make their papers more effective. Then they reported on their discussions and we all brainstormed together where those kinds of sources might have been published — books? newspapers? scholarly articles? blogs?

They were pretty invested in also talking about readability and tone and stuff, which wasn’t really the point of the exercise, but which I pointed out also has an impact on the kinds of sources you might choose. If you’re going for a very coloquial tone, you might not need an analysis of a massive World Bank data set. Maybe you could just find a journalist reporting summary figures.

Anyway, from here we went into actual searching. We listed off the major kinds of sources that people said they’d need (predictably it was newspapers, census statistics, articles and books). I told them that the strategies were were going to use to find newspaper articles and to find scholarly articles would also help them find books and more web sources (free text vs indexing searching, but I didn’t say that). We worked from their research guide and we used the Cyberflâneur article’s topic (already somewhat mindmapped and already fully discussed in class) as our example.

Taking terms that we’d already seen used in the day’s readings and in Mozorov’s wikipedia article and in our mind map, clumped them into topics, so that we could say “If I’m doing research on social networking, relevant articles may not have used that term but may have talked about the names of specific social networks, like Facebook or Twitter. And if I’m talking about individualism in this context, other terms like privacy or performativity or “personal data” might be useful.” (This part of the class is always highly interactive, with them supplying nearly all of the terms and me putting them on the board or into our search boxes.) Then I do my brief venn diagram of Boolean to show how to teach the computer what we mean by “social networks” and “individualism,” and then we do that on the screen. We talk through the weirdness of the computer not understanding words, just matching letters in a row, so our job is to come up with words that would likely appear in a useful article but would likely not appear in all articles. (If this process of using terms in our readings to help us generate searches, yes, this is the Term Economy and Instrumental Reading at work.) Then we look at our results, map the interesting ones, glean the interesting terms, and make another search.

The class wraps up with them doing this on their own topics, using the Term Diary to track the useful terms they’re finding, and then reporting back to us some of the more useful/interesting terms they found that they wouldn’t have thought to search on in the first place.

And there you have it. My first experiment with teaching for students who had already written their papers. I really have to hand it to the professor for setting things up this way, and for starting us off with a discussion the way he did. He got their participatory juices flowing and I just road that momentum, but it sure made for a fun class session.