It snowed today. Just a little. Not enough to leave any evidence. … It’s too soon for such things.
Comments closedLearning in Libraries and Loving It
It snowed today. Just a little. Not enough to leave any evidence. … It’s too soon for such things.
Comments closedIt’s been kind of a rough Fall Term for me. Beginning a month before classes started, I’ve been swamped. Then classes actually started…. Not pretty. For a few weeks there I came as close to being truly overwhelmed as I ever have. And according to the normal order of things, that’s precisely when more deadlines appeared and my support systems crumbled. But I survived. I’m out of shape, I’ve had a lingering cold for a month now, and I feel like I could sleep for a week, but I survived.
The term (which ends in two weeks) wasn’t all bad, though. There were exhilarating moments, happy moments, and moments of clarity where isolated incidents gelled into identifiable trends. I also started to feel, for the first time, that I might be on the verge of understanding where I fit into the constellation of people and functions and services on my campus. By necessity, my skin is thicker than it was 8 weeks ago; I’ve learned to bury certain fears deep inside of me in order to get things done, only freeing them once I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, replaying my day for analysis, critique, and release. All in all, the prospect of upcoming classes on unfamiliar research topics, or that late-night email from a student in desperate need of help with some impossible research question, or even the task of telling a professor to trust me that students can’t possibly learn everything there is to know about library research in 20 minutes… these things used to paralyze me. Now they cause some anxiety, but nothing to bowl me over.
At this point, I think I’m finally almost qualified to hold the job that I have. And I mean that in all seriousness. My first year here, my amazing co-workers held my hand through everything from class-planning to composing emails. My second year I was able to teach and meet with students and sit at the reference desk with more ease, but I still felt a little like I was pretending to be a librarian and that at any point a student might stand up in the middle of the room and accuse me of being the impostor that I was. And how would I deny it? By showing my diploma? This year, I’ve finally begun to feel that I contribute to the team I work with. I no longer feel like it’s evidence against me if I can’t answer a question; it’s just part of life and reason to thank my lucky stars that I have amazing co-workers to whom I can refer the question.
I can’t wait until qualification blooms into expertise. It’ll happen, but it’ll take time. I’m schooling myself to patience.
2 Comments… The more you grow as a professional, the more often you’ll end up referring questions to others.
Comments closedI’ve been doing a lot more teaching and research consulting this term than ever before, and lately I’ve kind of fallen into a different way of teaching complex searches. I used to be more explicit about using boolean to build those wonderful long strings, complete with parentheses and all that jazz. Unsurprisingly, this method left students impressed, but slightly baffled.
Lately, I’ve started “teaching the computer” each of my concepts in turn, and then using the search history to combine the concepts. This started with my senior thesis writers who needed ways to manage immense strings of MLA International Bibliography controlled vocabulary terms. I’d teach them to mine the thesaurus for broad and narrow terms for each of the concepts, explaining why the rules of indexing require that they include even the narrowest terms they could find (which I talked about here). And then, after we’d gathered as many broad and narrow terms as we could for each major concept, we’d hop over to the search history and combine the concepts. Et voila! Beautiful search results (most of the time).
Now I’m trying this out on less advanced students who are having trouble with the concept of combining terms. I help them “teach the computer” each of their concepts and then combine concepts. So, in ProQuest (for example) I might have the student brainstorm all the possible words associated with the concept “poverty” and string them across the top search box using OR “to let the computer know that any one of these could fit my concept.” Then move the cursor to the next search box and start stringing together words associated with illness and health care, again putting an OR between each term. Suddenly, our result set has tons of good articles about the relationship between poverty and disease.
Something about the process of describing a concept to a computer and then having the computer find the overlap between concepts seems to be easier to grasp than the more technical process of combining terms and groups of terms. Maybe it means that we have to juggle fewer terms and concepts in our short-term memories. Maybe it means that we can chunk up the process into easier steps rather than thinking of the search as one massive and frustrating step. Who knows… I’m not a cognitive psychologist. But my advanced students especially seem to reach that “ah-ha” moment pretty quickly and move on to adapt it to their own needs. It’s early days yet with my less advanced students, but so far I’ve seen a few of them repeating the process without a hitch. And several times, I’ve gotten the feeling that my consultations were shorter because the students reached that point of feeling able to go and try this on their own more quickly.
Unfortunately for my ego, this leaves students less impressed with my librarian-ish super powers… after all, anybody can think up words that describe a concept. Ah well. I suppose there’s some value in having people think they could do this without my help. :)
4 Comments