Author: Iris

I’m at least nominally a member of three online communities. Or, rather, I’m a member of three communities that have given themselves distinct names and spaces, and then there are a lot of people I interact with that also function as a community but with much fuzzier edges. Anyway, the Library Society of the World is one of these communities, and I’ve been a member since back before it was a community. It’s a place where I feel comfortable hanging out, trust people enough to have spirited debates with them, and understand a lot about where people are coming from, their jargon, and their jokes.

Just recently I joined two other communities, one where I was invested in figuring out the culture and in participating enough to build up trust and camaraderie with its members (or at least a subset of its members), and one where it’s likely I’ll never be an active participant. Right now I’m watching the first community mourn the death of one of its members, and I’m watching the other one hum along in a way that feels like an interesting but entirely foreign groove. And having both of these things as foils for my other hangout spots has set me to thinking quite a lot about what it means to be a community, and what this means for people who are hoping to build and maintain hang-out spots for groups of people.

I love it that my library is a community hang-out spot on campus. I love it that it has a culture and that there are both written and unwritten rules governing community participation there. And from what I’ve seen of the communities I’ve felt a part of in my adult life, these things are important for community building and maintenance. If these things aren’t explicitly shaped by some moderating force in the community, the community will come to these things on its own.

At the same time, I’m more aware than I was before that the very things that make a community feel like home to its denizens can also pose a barrier to entry for newcomers. Some barriers are higher than others, of course, but they’re barriers nevertheless. And since my job is to help usher my students into the community of academic scholarship, using my library as both a sub-community and a vehicle, I wish I knew how to see and overcome some of those initial barriers for my students. Because you know what? Belonging to these kinds of communities is a wonderful thing.

This morning my fellow instruction librarians and I launched into one of our animated discussions about the different instructional values of disciplinary databases and Google, when we start students out in one, when we start students out in another, how the two are changing, how our uses of both are changing, and student responses to each. It was a long discussion with many tangents, but here are the bits that keep rattling around in my head.

• We’re in the odd position of accomplishing two goals with every student: teaching them how to think like scholarly researchers in their chosen fields, and teaching them how to get access to the material they need. Depending on the student and the situation, we have to make snap judgments about which of these to privilege, and this often determines what kinds of tools we use with the students. Google (and Google Scholar and Google Books) is often mostly about access — disciplinary databases can be about that, but they are often mostly about epistemology and terminology. Google is a far more effective access tool if you know the epistemology and terminology of the field not only because you can search it more effectively but also because whereas the disciplinary databases do much of the selection and evaluation for you, Google requires that you be savvy enough to weed through gazillions of results (or change your strategy so that your results end up on the first couple of pages). While it’s not always needed, privileging the metadata over the text can sometimes be highly educational.
• Sometimes, metadata is content. The longitude and latitude fields in GeoRef, the historical period fields in Historical Abstracts, these bits of metadata allow researchers to do searches that are fundamentally impossible in other databases. You couldn’t get that stuff from free text searching. So I guess the indexing we pay for is even more fundamentally part of our collection than I’d thought of it before.

This wasn’t part of our discussion, but I’ve realized that while I don’t specialize in knowing the full disciplinary context of my students’ questions, I do specialize in knowing the metadata structures in the various tools at my disposal, and I guess a large part of what I do is choose between matching the metadata structure to the student or teaching the student a new metadata structure so that they can grow as a scholar. Content is usually accessible through more than one tool, so the trick becomes finding the most useful tool for the job.