I would dearly love not to be here tonight. I would much prefer to be in Denver getting ready for LCOW. But I’m not there. I’m here. And I could almost cry.
2 CommentsLearning in Libraries and Loving It
Author: Iris
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 And we thought we’d explain to them why professors continue to include this now-outdated terminology in their assignments even though they know that the vast majority of the library’s journal collection is online, and even though they will usually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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Running around like a chicken with her head cut off, that’s where. And sick. (There’s nothing like putting on a good imitation of an enthusiastic librarian while wondering if that sick feeling will finally manifest as a full-blown stomach flu in the middle of a class, let me tell you.) Yes, Fall term has risen up from its lair and beaten me to a pulp while somehow leaving me feeling slightly elated.
As many of you know, I keep a calendar of “available” time so that students can see when I’ll be in my office. Here’s what this week looked like.
Yes, those were the only unscheduled hours I had this week. Those were the hours in which I prepped the 6 classes I taught, figured out how to help a student find broadcast TV news footage from the beginning of the current Iraq war, figured out how to help another student find the possible connotations surrounding beds in Melville’s time, and then did all the other stuff that I’d normally do in a week at work… while battling the flu. No wonder it seemed like 2 or 3 weeks rather than just one.
Luckily, the classes all went really well, and I’m really pleased that the faculty in my departments have started to call on me so readily. So even though I’m far too tired to celebrate, I will sit here and smile for a minute or two before getting back to the business of being incredibly, bone-jarringly, head-swimmingly tired.
Tomorrow I will do no work before noon. None. I will sit on my couch, hang out online, and watch a DVD. After that I can start getting ready for a class I’m teaching on Monday morning (at 8:30 no less) and getting my act together for Internet Librarian.
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There is a very industrious spider that has made her web across my patio door. She started it in July, and very carefully stretched it from a couple of inches into the screen of the door to a couple of inches into the brick of the wall.
Unfortunately for her, I have to open that door nearly every day to water the plants, or sit on the porch, or pick up the porch chair the blows over in storms. So nearly every day I’d split her admittedly rather shabby web in half. And nearly every day she’d repair it. And after the first couple of weeks we both stopped caring too much about the process. I no longer thought twice about opening the door, and she no longer freaked out or waited very long to get back to the business of building her web. She never seemed to care that if she’d moved the entire operation three inches to the left, her life would have been so much less tiring.
All this has set me to thinking. What are the things that I could shift three inches to the left in my life? Are there things in the library that we don’t feel we have control over, but that we actually do control, and that we could shift ever so slightly?
For me, for today, it means not getting too emotionally involved in stuff, and taking a walk over my lunch break, and sending off an email I’ve been dreading for no good reason.
Picture originally uploaded to flickr by Swaminathan.
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