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Month: October 2006

Baby Steps

Published by Iris on Sunday, October 8th, 2006

Remember last school year I said I wanted to shift my teaching? Yeah, well that hasn’t happened yet. Who knew it would be this hard?

And yet, things aren’t quite what they used to be, either. Tonight, as I planned out the class I’ll be teaching tomorrow, I realized that the way I think about and plan classes has changed. I’m not sure this has actually made any difference to the students I’m inflicting myself upon, but that’s a topic for another day (or another year… or another lifetime).

Anyway, last year my teaching notes were arranged according to the order in which I was going to introduce tools and strategies. “Searching the catalog; searching one database; searching another database; practice searching.” That’s my typical outline from last year. This year the notes are arranged around tasks, which I somehow started calling “blocks,” though I couldn’t tell you why. “Block One: Use Britannica – after an introduction to the encyclopedia, use the index to find entries related to your topic and record good looking citations for later; Block Two: To The Computers! – after an introduction to searching for books and journals, find out if we have the items you found in Britannica, then find the best possible article on your topic.” (I like having students justify the “best possible article” to each other. It opens the door to all sorts of wonderful evaluation topics.) I’m still introducing search tools and strategies, and they’re still in roughly the same order, but my focus has changed. Just a little.

Like I said, I’m still not sure this has changed my actual teaching very much, but it’s a baby step in the right direction, I think. Now, if I could just get my classes to mimic the messy non-order of actual research rather than this mythical progression from Reference Books to Books and Articles to Finished Research, Ta-Da!

Baby steps.

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More Staff Means More Service

Published by Iris on Friday, October 6th, 2006

Our library’s Annual Report was due yesterday afternoon, and I’ve gotta say, I’m very interested in one particular measure my supervisor included this year. She tracked the number of classes taught, students taught, and individual consultations held by each librarian for the last five years. Then she averaged the total by the number of librarians employed each year to show that adding staff directly impacted the services we provide.

For the first two years there were “only” five librarians and these librarians conducted quite a few individual consultations and classes per year, and they reached a lot of students. For the next two years there were six librarians, and each of these librarians conducted a few more consultations and classes per year, and they reached a few more students. Each librarian was, on average, more busy than the average librarian in the first two year. Last year, though, there were eight librarians, and each of us conducted LOTS of consultations that year and reached a LOT more students even though we taught only a few more classes than in previous years. Each “average” librarian was significantly more busy than the average librarian in any of the previous years. The graph doesn’t just slant up, it curves up quite steeply.

I think a few things have contributed to this change. Not only has our emphasis on transforming from a “faceless” institution to a “faced” institution begun to pay dividends, but we’ve begun to be perceived as accessible by the students, and we’ve begun to develop more individualized relationships with our faculty (both in pedagogical contexts and in campus social contexts). Best of all, even though we’re not faculty, we’re no longer seen as outsiders in faculty reading groups or campus committees. (Of course, I keep saying “we” but since I only joined this staff last year I can really only claim credit for riding the tidal wave. My co-workers are AWESOME.)

Not that we’re absolutely loved or completely trusted or anything. There’s a long way yet to go. But we’re beginning to see the fruits of our labors, and I am SO excited to be here to watch this tipping point in action.

And what’s in store this year? Well, I can’t speak for the rest of my co-workers (though I know they’re all teaching classes and holding consultations at a breathtaking rate). But even though I teach fewer classes and provide fewer consultations than most of my co-workers, I’ve already had more consultations this October than I had last October (and I’ve only gotten through one week of this October). This year we’re hearing a lot more students who say their professors recommended they come talk to us. And today I had my first instance of a student telling me, “I have a friend in a different major, and she keeps saying what a help her librarian is and asking me if I have a librarian. She keeps saying I should come see you.” Cool! I think our service is really taking hold.

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Blogarific Developments

Published by Iris on Friday, October 6th, 2006

As part of the strategic plan development we went through at the end of last year, the library staff decided to go about watching trends and developments in library land more intentionally than we have been so far. Like most librarians, we do our best to keep up with developments, but we wanted a way to learn from each other and to make sure that we collectively watch topics that are of interest to the library as a whole. So each department came up with a list of potential “watch list” topics and then we narrowed it down to “only” 38 topics. Now all we needed was a place to gather all of our watching and learning in one place.

Enter the Library Watch List Blog. (I would link to it, but it’s password protected, so there’s no point.) We had an all-staff training session on basic WordPress blogging and then divvied up the topics so that even though we can each write about any topic, we also have someone responsible for each of the topics. And today, I posted to it for the first time (and I’m the 8th post).

I sure hope this blog takes off, not only because it’ll be a fabulous resource but also because it’ll give us a chance to learn collaboratively from each other while simultaneously practicing some social software use. It may be hard for some people, though. It takes a good bit of time, and blogging is completely foreign to some staff members (I know that I would have been pretty hesitant a year ago). Still, I think there’s a good chance that some people will really take to it, and I look forward to learning from my co-workers.

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