ILL2.0

By IRIS Posted on by

So, in the bad old days, we shuttled books and articles back and forth between libraries.

Now, in the days of ILL2.0, where much of our collection is electronic and governed by license agreements, we shuttle people back and forth between libraries. “We’re sorry, you’ll have to actually go to St. Olaf to read that. No, we can’t have them print and send a copy. Yes, I know it’s sitting there online, and we have access to the internet from here, too. And yes, I know we’re a consortium with cooperative borrowing privileges. Even so…”

Awesome.

Focal Flexibility

By IRIS Posted on by

One of my favorite metaphors for humanistic inquiry is “unpacking.” Sometimes it feels like an over-full suite case springing open, scattering previously unseen clothing and toiletries all over the place and revealing that present that grandma brought for you nestled there in the center. Sometimes it feels like carefully and laboriously picking the infinitely delicate locks on a briefcase, not knowing if what you’ll find inside will be precious or just some long-forgotten trash.

Unpacking means finding and reveling in richness and awe-inspring reality. Facility with unpacking is a tantalizing scholarly goal.

Little wonder, then, that my students balk a bit when I force them away from that goal. During one session where the professor and I were trying to get students to plot the interrelationships of some articles by finding their commonalities (either topic or approach or theoretical underpinnings), one student complained that “it seems like we’re reducing these articles down to their least interesting, most simplistic components.”

And we were, in a way. We were doing the opposite of unpacking. We were packing them carefully into suitcases, shirts on one side and pants on another, with no thought to the color, weave, or provenance of the individual pieces.

FocalFlexibility

Focal Flexibility – by Iris Jastram

It hadn’t occurred to me before that moment how important focal flexibility is — the ability to see a given work in all its richness and unpackable complexity, and also see it as one of a constellation of other works — to be able to plot it dispassionately amongst its peers, and also gaze at its internal universes.

Holy paper reams, Batman

By IRIS Posted on by

The care and feeding of the library’s public printers takes a lot of our time, both in the library and in ITS. We have a special load-balancing set-up designed to keep individual printers from melting or going up in smoke. We have students who devote the bulk of their time to watching over the printers and emptying case after case of paper into them. A good portion of the meetings I attend and lead have printing somewhere on the agenda. Basically, printing is a big deal.

And now there are graphs to prove it.

libeprinting

There’s a lot of extraneous information in that chart for my purposes since it’s lifted from another report on Fall term printing. But I think the GIGANTIC MOUNTAIN OF PRINTED SHEETS in the middle pretty much speaks for itself.

Where do students print on campus? In the library, that’s where

(p.s. If you’re curious, that’s about 5,300 pages every day of the term, or about 7 pages every minute the library is open, which was a 36% reduction over last year.)

Dreaming of libraries

By IRIS Posted on by

There’s a recurring character in my dreams about work. He’s an independent researcher/hobbyist who’s obsessed with a particular artist. Both the researcher and the object of his obsession are fictional, as far as I know, but the fact that the artist doesn’t exist doesn’t seem to deter this non-existent researcher from being incredibly passionate about the research.

Often in my dreams the researcher is at a microfilm machine. Every once in a while in my dreams he comes to plead his case that we should acquire the definitive index of the artist’s work and of related criticism: Baker’s Index, or just “The Baker’s.” How can we consider ourselves a real library with out The Baker’s? Of course it’s expensive and unfortunately it’s out of print, but that shouldn’t deter us. His own work is crippled without it, and he’s sure many a student has turned away from important research paths for lack of ready access to The Baker’s. 

Last night in my dream, I was working at a microfilm machine, and he stood beside me until I finally asked what he needed. He launched into his familiar plea, and I countered (as usual) by reminding him that this is a curricular collection and that we don’t have any course-work related to his beloved artist. Important as the work may be, objectively, it simply doesn’t fall within our collection development policy. He brought over an encyclopedia that had an entry on his artist and showed me how pathetically inadequate that entry was, and the images of the artist’s work were so small that it was impossible to investigate them closely. I showed him ARTstor, and he railed against the fickleness of search.

“Search for ‘Is,’” he instructed.

“Really? Just the word ‘is?’” I asked, but did as he wanted.

Predictably, the results weren’t to his liking.

“What were you hoping for?” I asked.

“I was hoping it would bring back a famous photograph entitled ‘What is he doing, anyway.’ But your stupid search box is just completely unequal to the task, apparently.”

Since it turns out that he knew a lot about that photograph, I showed him the advanced search options only to look over and find that he was sketching out the various search boxes in red pen into the entry for his artist in the reviled encyclopedia.

At this point I stood up and said what I think I’ve been wanting to say to him in all previous dreams: “You are no longer welcome here. Please leave.” He had tested my patience through countless dreams, refused to listen to reason, and was so dismissive of our services and collection that he would rail at me while drawing in our encyclopedias. I’d had enough.

Such a feeling of righteous indignation, of spurned patience ending in entirely justified consequences that, in my dream at least, I had the authority to dispense on the spot. It was wonderful.

I wonder if I’ll ever dream of him again.

What do I teach, anyway?

By IRIS Posted on by

This morning I got an email from a librarian wondering what kinds of concepts I teach, particularly in 300-level courses, beyond how to search. As it turns out, that’s something I think about a lot! Here is what I wrote:

Well, I’m not sure I have much to add that isn’t on my blog already, so I’ll include a bunch of links here, but contextualize them a bit. And probably the closest I can come to telling you about 300-level courses is a four-part post on highest level course I teach before their thesis. Another class that I’ve written up is Critical Methods. These are both for the English department, but I’ve done very similar things for American Studies and languages. The concepts are pretty flexible, and I’m coming to think of them as some of the core info lit concepts for most non-laboratory research. They probably aren’t the ONLY concepts, but they may give you some ideas. Essentially, I have come to think of Information Literacy as being highly related to rhetoric, where the point is to participate as an expert insider within a discourse community, using evidence that makes sense within that community in ways that resonate with the community in order to add to the community’s understanding in some way.

Also, a concept that I flesh out and emphasize differently depending on the level (but which I teach more and more often due to the feedback I get and the research we’ve done) is a circular research process that appears in the middle of this post.
With upper level courses I emphasize that there is a ton of actual reading involved because they’re developing a sense of the scholarly conversation, mapping in out (here’s where mindmapping can come in), feeling out its boundaries, and learning its vocabulary. Sometimes we practice what I call Instrumental Reading and what Booth breaks down into three types of reading (in his Craft of Research, pages 91-96 of the 2003 edition).

And finally, I should say that I teach an awful lot about searching, but I frame it as if I’m not teaching searching, but teaching something more conceptual. Boolean and limiters and all those things come up with the examples we do together in class or examples I’m showing when I’m actually teaching them something else, and I’ll digress briefly to make sure everyone understands why I just wrote OR there before moving on. I say this just because when I first started moving away from “how to” teaching I felt guilty whenever I ended up showing those things, but now I think it’s the best way. The “how to” serves the higher order concepts, and they need both.

So that’s where I am right now in my teaching. I didn’t arrive here all at once, and I hope I’ll keep evolving and learning how to teach because there are a whole lot of rough edges yet. But for me it has been liberating and satisfying to think more and more about information literacy’s relationship to rhetoric and about the deep concepts that interest ME about information literacy. If I’m interested in what I’m teaching, I have a much better chance of interesting my students, and a FAR better chance of feeling fulfilled in my work.

~Iris
And since I’m a librarian at heart, here is a bibliography of my current favorite/formative readings on the topic.
  • Bean, John. Engaging Ideas. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011.
  • Bennett, Scott. “Libraries and Learning: A History of Paradigm Change.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy 9, no. 2 (2009): 181–197.
  • Bizup, Joseph. “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing.” Rhetoric Review 27, no. 1 (January 4, 2008): 72–86.
  • Elmborg, James. “Critical Information Literacy: Implications for Instructional Practice.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 32, no. 2 (2006): 192–199.
  • Elmborg, James K. “Libraries in the Contact Zone: On the Creation of Educational Space.” English 46, no. 1 (2006): 56–64.
  • Fister, Barbara. “Teaching the Rhetorical Dimensions of Research.” Research Strategies 11, no. 4 (1993): 211–219.
  • Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2006.
  • Head, Alison J. Learning Curve: How College Graduates Solve Information Problems Once They Join the Workplace, 2012. http://projectinfolit.org/pdfs/PIL_fall2012_workplaceStudy_FullReport.pdf.
  • Kapitzke, Cushla. “Information Literacy : A Review and Poststructural Critique.” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy no. July (2001).
  • Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning. “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 6 (1999): 1121–1134.
  • Leckie, Gloria J. “Desperately Seeking Citations: Uncovering Faculty Assumptions About the Undergraduate Research.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 22, no. 3 (1996): 201.
  • Lloyd, Annemaree. Information Literacy Landscapes: Information Literacy in Education, Workplace, and Everyday Contexts. Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2010.
  • Norgaard, Rolf. “Writing Information Literacy in the Classroom: Pedagogical Enactments and Implications.” Reference and User Services Quarterly 43, no. 3 (2004): 220–226.
  • ———. “Writing Information Literacy: Contributions to a Concept.” Reference and User Services Quarterly 43, no. 2 (2003): 124–130.
  • Oakleaf, Megan. The Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report. Review Literature And Arts Of The Americas. Chicago, 2010.
  • Saunders, Laura. “The Future of Information Literacy in Academic Libraries : A Delphi Study.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy 9, no. 1 (2009): 99–114.
  • Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. “Communication Problems at Level A.” In Mathematical Theory of Communication, 9–12. U of Illinois P, n.d.
  • Simmons, Michelle Holschuh. “Librarians as Disciplinary Discourse Mediators: Using Genre Theory to Move Toward Critical Information Literacy.” Portal: Libraries and the Academy 5, no. 3 (2005): 297–311.
  • Wiggins, Grant P. Assessing Student Performance. Vol. 15. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1993.