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Author: Iris

"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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Really really really, I can help you. Please Believe Me!

Published by Iris on Monday, August 11th, 2008

I’ve been composing an email to the new faculty members in the departments I serve this afternoon, and another librarian I know has been composing a similar email to faculty in a particular program at her library. And you know what? These emails are hard. I want to come across as helpful and practical and not the least bit overwhelming or pushy or beggy.

I don’t really need a response from these people or anything, but I’d hate to see this email just get deleted and forgotten. There’s good stuff in there. Or at least I think so, though I may be a tad biased. Still, I know that I’m competing with a deluge of similarly information-full emails from other places on campus, not to mention the mountain of getting-hired paperwork, or the chaos of moving to a new town. So I’ve decided that the key is to start with the one or two things that are most likely worrying these new faculty. After that, the rest will probably fall into place on its own, but this first interaction has to be about them and their upcoming instructional challenges, not about me and my work. If they read no more than the first sentence or two, what will grab their attention and let them know that I have their interests at heart, not my own?

In this case I think that “I have to fit all this into ten weeks?!?” is probably foremost on these new faculty members’ minds. So I’ll start off by saying something about how I can help them fit research projects into a ten-week term without derailing their course content.

But I think that as I move forward, I’ll try to keep this shift from “here’s what I can do” to “here’s how I can help solve this problem you have” in mind whenever I write these emails. When I first started here, I wanted to prove to people that I could help them, so I gave lots of details about all the various kinds of help I could give. Then I shifted towards giving a couple of examples that illustrated many things, or that would spark people’s imaginations. And I still like using specific examples, but I’ve gone off the idea of telling them Everything They Must Know (here and in my instruction). No, my goal now is much more modest: I would like them to know at least one thing they really wanted to know. After that, details seem to work themselves out and they end up learning what they need as they need it. At least, I hope they do.

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How I Became a Librarian

Published by Iris on Friday, August 8th, 2008

I’ve been tagged to tell you how I became a librarian, and so, as I wait for the broadcast of the Olympic opening ceremonies to start, I’m sitting here with a smile on my face as I remember the moment it first occurred to me to get into this line of work.

To be fair, the story started back in college, where I majored in English. English majors are eminently qualified to do just about anything, right? And besides, they get to earn degrees for reading and thinking about good writing. What was there to lose?

By the time I graduated, I still hadn’t figured out which part of “just about anything” I wanted to inhabit, though I was pretty sure I wanted to teach literature, so I managed to simultaneously stall and prepare myself for a possible future by going to grad school, where I got to earn another degree by reading and thinking about good writing. Not bad, right? Right. But I studied more than literature and literary theory while I was in grad school. I also studied the job of a professor of English, and I learned that I probably wasn’t cut out for that job as it exists in the real world. My personal Xanadu crumbled little by little as I watched my professors go about their lives.

I remember lying on the living room floor, stroking Toby the family dog, and talking to my mom about how I didn’t feel I’d fit well into my own future if I continued on as I was. Then, from her position near the kitchen sink and the dishes she was methodically washing, she said, “You know, you might consider being a librarian.”

Don’t laugh (too hard), but up until that day I hadn’t known that librarians needed special degrees to do what they did. Nor had I ever worked in a library, even as a shelver. Nor had I ever asked a librarian for help. The children’s librarian at the public library we’d used when I was very young had always been kind, and had saved new books about ballerinas for me whenever they arrived. But that was the extent of my interaction with librarians. (And remember, by this point I was nearly done with a masters degree.) And yet, I found myself applying to the LIS school at Milwaukee and beginning work on my degree there as soon as I’d successfully defended my masters thesis across campus. The next summer (and half-way into my degree program), I applied for part time work at a public library and an academic library, just to see what working in a library was actually like.

The one bump in the road was that public library. It’s toxic atmosphere nearly caused me to drop out of library school and cash in on the promise from the English department that they’d take me back into the Ph.D program there if I ever wanted to return. I spent sleepless nights wondering if I could just run away to New Zealand to help with the filming of the Lord of the Rings or something… anything to get out of what I was pretty sure was the worst decision of my life. Luckily for me, I’m too stubborn to quit something once I’ve invested that much time, energy, and money into it. So I decided to at least finish my degree, however miserable I was with the job and my classes. I could never have known at that point how lucky I would be just a year later, when I graduated and stumbled mostly blindly into the best job I could ever have wished for.

And here I am.

Now I want to know how Steve, Laura, Laura, and Dorothea got into library work.

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Free Book Covers for Libraries!!!

Published by Iris on Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Way back in the day, we got all excited when people (Tim Spalding among them) started working on the idea of an open repository of book covers. Wouldn’t it be nice, we thought, if we didn’t have to pay for these things, or follow Amazon’s restrictions about where images had to link.

Well, today Tim and LibraryThing have made that dream come true, or at least begin to come true. He lays out all the details (how to do it, what you’ll get, and what you should know before getting started) in this blog post.

Libraries of the world, Rejoice!!!

[Update 8/12: They raised the limit on the number of covers you can pull in per day.]
[Update 8/13: The LibraryLaw Blog thinks about the copyright implications of LibraryThing’s project. Don’t worry, Mary doesn’t slam the project. She just wonders about it, and presents us with section 113(c) as the possible best exception to exclusive rights for LibraryThing’s purposes.]

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