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Month: August 2008

These are a few of my favorite things

Published by Iris on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

I found myself listing my three favorite e-resources today. Usually I have trouble coming up with my favorite of anything, but these three popped into my head with little effort.

Ulrich’s
I hate trying to figure out where an obscure serial has been indexed, but Ulrich’s makes this easy (most of the time). But even beyond that, I absolutely love it for solving a major problem for my students. For the last two years, I’ve taught this as a cheat sheet of “print sources.” I had the hardest time coming up with an easy way to explain how to tell if what you’ve found online (on the free web or through our bibliographic databases) counts as a “print source” when print vs online is becoming a more and more murky distinction every year, and really makes no sense at all to students (or librarians, really). Students were paralyzed thinking they couldn’t use eJournals because their professors had banned “web sources,” and professors wondered why their students were using out-of-date and only-barely-relevant journal sources in their papers. It was because their poor students had been confining themselves to our print journal collection, which is only a fraction of our total journal collection. So now I get up in front of a class and show them the cheat sheet. If you can find a publication name (and I show them how to hunt one down), look it up in Ulrich’s. If it is listed, it counts as a “print source.” Problem solved.

OED
I love word histories, and this is the most comprehensive dictionary of word histories. Ever. I don’t often have much call to use it in my day-to-day work, but I love it for all those late-night “I wonder when we started using ‘research’ as an intransitive verb” moments I have. It has also solved many a word squabble in my family (which has at least 4 discussions about word usage, etymology, or relationship over the dinner table each week).

MLA International Bibliography
I love this because it’s such a treasure-trove of articles, and (please don’t laugh) because it’s incredibly quirky. I know that we’re supposed to love it when students can use resources on their own. You know… usability and stuff. But this thing is a bear to use well, and I’m pretty comfortable with it, which makes me feel useful. And I love feeling useful.

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Library 3.0

Published by Iris on Friday, August 15th, 2008

Friends, Romans, countrymen. I am here to tell you that we are, yet again, behind the times. There are people out there who are still talking about Library 2.0 and spending great amounts of energy figuring out a) what that is, b) how that differs from the Library 1.0 that must have existed even though it was never named, and c) how to put it into practice.

This is no longer enough.

I don’t care if we still haven’t even agreed if there is such a thing as Library 2.0. I don’t care if we haven’t figured out quite how to do it. If we don’t drop everything and run, we’ll miss the Library 3.0 train. Forget about your 23 things, your webinars (who invented that term, anyway?), and your virtual worlds. Those are so 2007.

“But what are we to do, oh wise Pegasus?” you ask. In answer to that I say, I have absolutely no idea. Apparently we’re supposed to be more semantic and stuff, so go do that. Also, Wikipedia offers up this definition of the web analogy to Library 3.0 thusly:

Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called ‘the intelligent Web’—such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies—which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.

Since I’m already fluent in “natural language,” I think I’ll just check that one right off my list. And last I checked, we had several hulking cabinets full of microformats, so I’m going to declare that one done, too. I’m also pretty good at recommending things, though people rarely seem to pay attention. Their loss.

All in all, we’ve probably got our foot in the door on this one, thank goodness. Still, we might want to start taking sides now, just to save time later. We’ll need some volunteers for the “This will devalue Library 2.0” camp, and a “this is silly, don’t talk to me about it” camp. Of course, we’ll need the “3.0 evangelist” camp, but if you’ve already had a turn as a 2.0 Evangelist, please be aware that you may be needed in the “This will devalue Library 2.0” camp. You can’t be the stars of the show every time.

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Who Knew You Could Study Zombies for Real?

"Training" Does Not Equal Teaching or Learning

Published by Iris on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

I hate being trained. I hate training people. I’m not good at either one. And yet I love teaching and learning, and I’m decently good at both of those. Don’t get me wrong. I recognize the value and often even the necessity of training. I just wish I didn’t have to have any part in it. Ever.

Here’s what I think of when I think of “training.”

  • Massive lists of “things you’ll need to know”
  • Boredom covered under a veneer of note-taking
  • Confused faces and no notion of whether those looks mean “I don’t get it,” or “I hope they think that this face means that I’m paying attention, because I’m not but I don’t want to be rude.”
  • Necessary evil. After all, I want to be able to do what-ever-it-is I’m being trained on.
  • Did I mention the massive lists of things to know? Simply the act of making a longer and longer list does not, in fact, mean that you’re a more thorough trainer.

I’m lucky that I’m not in a job that requires constant training of this sort, or that requires me to inflict it on other innocent people who really haven’t done anything to deserve such treatment. And yes, I can say this even though I do library instruction, and even though I used to conduct instruction sessions as if they were library training sessions, and even though there are bits and pieces of training in any given interaction with a student.

I guess that little by little, my whole approach to and concept of teaching has changed. I’ve thought a lot about the power of story, about solving one key problem rather than all the possible problems, and about the relative luxury of having a safety net for my more minimalist instruction built right into my environment. Unlike many other people, the nature of my job removes the pressure to teach “everything they’ll need to know because this is your one shot and you’d better not leave anything out or they’ll be completely lost.” Thanks in a large part to the Subversive Handout and our consultation model, students come and talk to me about specifics they need to know when they need to know it, or they can come to the reference desk, or they can (and do) email me at all hours of the day or night, or they’ll get some other little tidbit of “stuff they need to know” from another librarian in another class. All in all, I almost never feel like I have to cover all the bases anymore.

Unfortunately, this makes me resent having to participate in training (either giving or receiving) even more than I used to. Massive lists of things to know kill my soul.

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