Skip to content

Author: Iris

Budgets, Databases, and Trust

Published by Iris on Thursday, March 4th, 2010

It’s been an interesting week. We learned that the Bibliography of the History of Art will die at the end of the month due to lack of funding (Carleton’s news item on the topic), and we learned that back in January, CSA/ProQuest stopped providing Biology Digest because it was a free database and therefore not profitable to continue providing. They didn’t tell us they were going to do this — they just explained why our links didn’t work after the fact. But that’s not actually the point. The point is: the Great Recession Strikes Again. Also, Don’t Put Your Faith in Online Subscriptions. So that’s two points.

ANYWAY, all this made me rail briefly against the Big Vendors for not saving these great resources when the little institutions started drowning, and then I railed for a while against the Not For Profits for not doing more to ensure the continuation of things we rely on, and then I moved back to railing against money in general, which I don’t like and have never really understood. And now I wonder, who is best suited to run these projects? Is it the smaller and/or private institutions that seem to have more invested in having highly curated collections? Or is it the massive institutions/corporations that promise more stable hosting and possibly wider distribution and therefore clout? Who would I trust more with something like the Bibliography of the History of Art?

And reading over those questions, I wonder if they’re even the right questions, or built off of the right assumptions.  Basically, I’d like my databases to stop disappearing. Thanks.

3 Comments
Seeing Search Boxes

Seeing Search Boxes

Published by Iris on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

We’ve all heard that single search boxes are the only way to go when it comes to building search interfaces. We’ve probably also seen students who will bypass all relevant information or links on a page and zero in on whatever looks like a search box. But I never put these two pieces of knowledge together before. Not, that is, until just this morning as I was driving in to work. This morning I had a revelation:

Every page with a search box is a “single search box” page.

We may gripe about clutter. We may grouse about having not enough guidance surrounding our search boxes. It doesn’t matter. For people who are primed to search, they will only see the search box anyway. The other stuff may as well not be there. (For those of you getting hot under the collar like I would be if I were reading this right now? Hang on, I’ve got something for you in a minute.)

Here’s my Parable With Two Screenshots. We have several lists of electronic resources on our library’s website, each of which has a “Search” and “Browse” function at the top.

We’ve gently corrected students who started entering their topic keywords into the “search” box, but haven’t been able to get rid of the box entirely. “Oh those kids,” we thought. “Desperately seeking search boxes again.”

Then last week I had a professor call me in consternation that the library systems were telling her there was nothing on her topic. Turns out… she had entered her topic terms into that search box.

Ok, ok, so that one’s legitimately confusing. We’ve realized that while the existence of the box is out of our control, the wording next to it isn’t. Soon it’ll say something more like “find a database.” Still, this is only the first half of the parable, and probably not the most relevant half at that. It’s mostly relevant in that its proximity to the second half made everything come together in my head. And so, on to the second half…

For the past two weeks, I’ve also had students from a lit class coming to see me, all of whom want “something, anything from the last ten years written about [insert famous theme] and [insert famous piece of literature here].” Granted, searching for themes is hard. Even something standard like “performative identity” requires thinking up all kinds of synonyms (body, fashion, display, etc). But what struck me is that as soon as I set the date limiter on MLA International Bibliography, each student gasped in shock and surprise. This limiter is not hidden. It is three lines, or 1 inch, below the search boxes. And yet it had been totally invisible to my students as they focused all their energies on those tantalizing search boxes.

So now back to my revelation (and those of you who’ve been thinking “But we simply can’t do away with advanced search pages! Single search boxes aren’t always the way to go!!” can tune back in now). Here’s what I now think: We can feel free to have advanced search pages on any interface that we think functions better with all of those options laid out. It doesn’t matter. People who only want a single search box will only see that search box anyway. People who want the options will see and appreciate the options. Everybody happy.

7 Comments

Argh! Serial Review! Literary Journals! Tough Choices!

Published by Iris on Thursday, February 25th, 2010

It’s time for our biennial serial review. This one feels kind of like being kicked when down because we did a big review to sync up Carleton and St. Olaf last winter, and then we did a voluntary cut last spring when the stock market decided to have a bigger say than usual in our collection development projects.

I only have to review the serials that were originally requested by the library (as opposed to those requested by departments, of which there are many), and only those that fall within the areas I serve (so literature, languages, music, American Studies, and linguistics). And this time around we have to make cuts again. And this time around we’ve already cut the low-hanging fruit so pretty much everything we still subscribe to is stuff I’d like to continue to subscribe to. So last time around I came up with some criteria that really helped, and this time I’m having to come up with newer, less definitive criteria.

Today’s project was literary journals. We subscribe to several, six of which fall under my care, none of which I wanted to cut, some of which I have to cut. The two that we’ve had since the Beginning of Time I’m keeping, just on principle (well, and because they’re good). These are Contemporary Review and Granta. For the rest, I’m checking the catalogs of our peer institutions, reading reviews in Ulrich’s, paging through recent issues, reading their web sites, and generally mourning the fact that I even have to decide.

I’m also rankling a little at the current model for journal subscriptions that make paying for bundled packages so much easier than paying for individual subscriptions, but make backing out of bits and pieces of the bundle impossible. If I need to cut, I’m cutting the stuff we actually selected rather than the fluff that’s padding those bundles. What a pain.

2 Comments

Credo

Published by Iris on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

This I believe:

  • The classroom is about learning, not teaching.
  • Learning happens best when it is directly and explicitly tied to and relevant to a project at hand.
  • Learning happens best when it builds on existing knowledge. This is why getting some sense of where the students are (such as talking to them before launching into a session as Steve does) is so important.
  • Teaching that sets out to be “everything these students will need to know about the library, just in case we never get to teach them again” isn’t teaching — it’s inoculation. Teaching isn’t a vaccine. Also, remember that teaching isn’t as important as learning, so it doesn’t matter how much you hope to convey — it matters how much you think your students can actually learn in a given amount of time. I didn’t quite believe the people at Immersion that 2-3 learning goals is all you can do in an hour, but it’s one of the things that has really stuck with me and fundamentally changed the way I approach the classroom.
  • One-shot instruction is never “just” one-shot instruction. One of the most important but rarely stated learning goals of every instruction session is that the librarian is helpful and knowledgeable and approachable. If I only have time to teach citation mining (which, by the way, gives me a chance to VERY quickly open up our catalog and our Journals list and give a brief overview of how scholars index their own literature and the difference between book and journal citations) I can leave that mini-class knowing that those students will be more likely to seek out my help with other research-related problems now that they’ve met me (particularly since I leave them with hints embedded in their class-specific subversive handout). Each one-shot is therefore more of a launching point than an ending point.
  • Teaching lower level classes is harder than teaching upper-level courses. There’s just so much context to build, and such a diverse audience.
  • Believing all of this doesn’t make it happen. Some classes fail. Many classes are just so-so. Usually it’s my fault for trying to do too much teaching.

These musings brought to you by a very interesting FriendFeed discussion.

I’m not saying some good tutorials might not be useful for the BI part of IL instruction. I just think that teaching how to find stuff isn’t all that I do, that I can’t do it in an hour anyway, and that teaching to evaluate stuff and to approach research as an intellectual process rather than a mechanically linear set of steps (arguably the most important pieces of what I do) is too context specific to each research topic to work well in tutorial form. Is this being a “special snowflake”? Yes. And to the extent that we’re focused on meeting students where they are and building supportive relationships with them, I think that’s a good thing.

Another idea came up during that discussion that I’ve been planning to implement for a few months now. My experiences with sharing within my department and then our local “mini-Immersion” made me think that a repository of ideas for teaching might be really useful. I know there are some other wikis out there, but I thought that a more focused one, and one attached to a vibrant online community (the Library Society of the World) might possibly be more successful. Maybe it’s time to set that up. Maybe next week? What do you think? Would this be useful?

1 Comment