CSI(L) Carleton: Forensic Librarians and Reflective Practices

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“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.

What does it mean to have a library?

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Unsurprisingly, a lot of my friends have been talking about the dismantling of the People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street, and it’s got me thinking about why the protesters set up the library and why people care so much that it’s gone. And why tiny towns have libraries, and why universities are judged on their libraries, and why tweed-coated English gentlemen built private libraries far larger than they could read through in a lifetime.

For lending libraries, of course there’s an economic benefit to the community that comes from sharing books. And I imagine that this was a core benefit to the People’s Library, too. It’s easy to see how the protesters would have wanted to carry out simple acts of sharing with all who were in want.

I think there’s also a nice metaphor of cultural exchange that happens with lending libraries. Ideally, more than one person will have read each book, and that means that those people will have experiences in common to discuss and build upon.

I think a library, any kind of library, is also a statement about belonging and longevity. “We are here,” they help us say, “and we plan to be here for a while.” And it’s not just belonging and longevity, but also a statement about progress. “We know things,” they help us say, “and we will continue to learn new things and add those things to this collection.”

I have been having a hard time feeling outrage about the dismantling of the People’s Library, but maybe it is in part because I have been thinking of it as a collection of books in a tent. Maybe it was more than that.

Leaving this mortal coil

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Google has been rolling out redesigns of its major web services, like Gmail and Google Reader, and like a docile citizen of the Internet, I’ve been waiting for my eyes to adjust and for my hands to quit directing the mouse to places where buttons used to be. It’ll happen. Sooner or later.

What I find fascinating is that the design changes that keep catching my eyes off guard seem to be more than updates to look and feel. They seem to embody a shifting focus or philosophy on Google’s part.

The new designs seem just enough divorced from any 3D metaphors to leave me feeling unanchored. I no longer look through digital windows or at pages on a digital desk. There aren’t enough edges for those things to exist any more, and what edges there are on the page are flat and insubstantial enough that my eye can’t interpret them as edges. They’re just lines. Even suggestions of the existence of friction (like the bumpy edges of messages that you could “grab” to drag) are gone.

What’s left is a denial of the physical. We’re not in Kansas any more. We’re not even “navigating” the digital world any more. Little by little, Google has stopped shipping information down to our world. Little by little, Google has started asking us to give up on gravity and friction and join it in the ever-shifting, edgeless, 2D existence of the digital cloud.

Coming to blows over books

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When I walked into the classroom today, several of the students were already there exploring the second edition of Jane Eyre that our special collections librarian had brought up for them. This had really no relation at all to what I’d be working on, specifically, except that we were talking about context-building at a college level, and the second edition of Jane Eyre certainly adds a little to their context for the work.

What I hadn’t expected was that the professor had to tear the students away from a spontaneous but very heated debate over the importance of the book as a physical thing vs an intangible narrative. Does it actually matter if you hold a book in your hands? Is there something about that experience that matters? Or is it simply a waste of resources and space to go about printing mass quantities of things that could exist as bytes instead?

The most vehement ebook advocate raged against “self-righteous book smellers” while the greatest advocate for printed books talked about how it was important to be able to capture pieces of history not just in the text of the novel itself but in construction and display as well. At one point I threw a wrench into the “it’s economically unconscionable to ship printed material around” argument by telling them the 2 second version of ebook lending woes in libraries and the digital divide (I couldn’t resist). At another point the professor and I had to step in when things got heated to the point of ad hominem attacks. It’s pretty safe to say that I haven’t been involved in another class where the students were passionate almost to the point of blows.

What was the resolution? We decided that it’s complicated, that neither side is categorically right, but that self-righteousness doesn’t get anyone very far.

Pretty interesting for a totally peripheral 10-minute piece of a library session.

(My next favorite part of the class was the audible gasp when I said “Well, if I were getting started on this assignment [on the Great Gatsby and the Jazz Age] I’d probably start with Wikipedia.” Bwa-ha-ha-ha)

Arguments wear clothing

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A couple of weeks ago Bryan Garsten came to give a convocation speech here. The speech consisted primarily of a tale of several conversations in which his cast of semi-fictional characters hashed out what they thought college was for. But before he began that tale, he started with a beautiful little metaphor.

Arguments wear clothes, he said. When you bring an argument out into the world, it should be clothed for the appropriate occasion. There do exist argument nudist colonies, but in the end these remain on the margines. Appropriately clothed arguments, on the other hand, have power and sway in all areas of society.