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Month: October 2008

Nerves

Published by Iris on Monday, October 13th, 2008

I’ve been diligently getting ready for my part of the preconference workshop that Amanda Etches-Johnson, Jason Griffey, Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, Steve Lawson and I are doing at Internet Librarian. It’s been slow going. I’ve gotten so used to presenting in an instruction-like way, and that’s not what I’m going for with this presentation. I’ve also gotten use to sustaining a complex thought for about the length of a blog post. (Actually, no. I sustain a complex thought the length of a blog post on the good days. The rest of the time I think in one- or two-sentence bursts.) So here I am, trying to sustain a complex thought for an hour’s worth of speaking and trying to make it sound as simple as possible.

I realize this isn’t actually so hard. I’ve done it before. Which left me wondering why I’m rather obsessively going back over details, shuffling things around, thinking up better examples, and then reworking things over and over and over and over. And as odd as it seems, I think it’s because I’m nervous.

I’m not nervous about presenting to the workshop attendees. Goodness, I do that nearly every day. I’m not nervous about my content, though I do think it’s probably of a different tone than most people will be expecting. No, I’m nervous about my co-presenters seeing me present. These are people I’ve looked up to for years. These are people that I look to for inspiration, for clarity, for affirmation. These are people I’ve come to consider friends. Who wouldn’t be nervous revealing their public-speaking selves to such an audience?

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Why the Love for "Print" Sources?

Published by Iris on Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Last week one of my co-workers and I met with this year’s new writing tutors over the course of 5 small-group sessions. These sessions always present the unique challenge of building the students’ confidence and facility as tutors while at the same time covering library basics. We need to assume they don’t know these basics, but we also want to treat them as credible professionals.

In amongst all of this, we wanted to introduce them to the strategy of using Ulrich’s to determine if an article found online counts as a “print” source. And we thought we’d explain to them why professors continue to include this now-outdated terminology in their assignments even though they know that the vast majority of the library’s journal collection is online, and even though they will usually agree that even online-only journals count as print sources, and even though students have no context by which to distinguish online-but-count-print materials from unacceptably-online materials. As my co-worker and I thought about it, we realized that “print” is really short-hand for a whole set of assumptions about the publication, most of which have nothing to do with it’s actual format.

“Print” implies editorial oversight at the very least, if not peer-review. There’s a whole structure to the process of printing a journal that exists to protect the publication’s reputation by ensuring the quality of the publication’s contents as much as possible. This process also ensures that authors’ work is distributed by someone other than the author. This history, this structure, this process bestows a beautiful halo of enhanced credibility around those articles that make it through the vetting process and finally appear in print.

I’ve found, as I talk with professors who continue to require print sources, that what they’re really asking for is scholarship that has been inoculated by this process. Every professor I’ve talked to has agreed that even journals that were born-digital would count as legitimate sources for their assignments. “Print” simply stands in for all the layered assumptions.

Clearly we need new terminology because I wholeheartedly support the current assumptions.

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