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Category: Libraries and Librarians

CSI(L) Carleton: Forensic Librarians and Reflective Practices

Published by Iris on Thursday, December 15th, 2011

“Wait, this is information literacy?” a rhetorician at our workshop exclaimed in excited surprise. “But this is so cool!” And we wanted to respond “YES!” not only from joyful pride but also out of recognition. After all, we too had had very similar reactions to our own work with information literacy, and not that long ago. We too had realized that information literacy could be different than we had originally thought (or that the ACRL information literacy standards had led us to believe). Information literacy could be more alive and integrated within the discourse of academic work. It could be more applicable across disciplines and genres and rhetorical goals. And these revelations remapped our practice.

So begins the essay my colleagues Danya Leebaw, Heather Tompkins and I wrote for In the Library with the Lead Pipe that was published last night. It focuses on how our Information Literacy in Student Writing project has helped us learn more about information literacy and how that has influenced our teaching and our work with faculty and departments.

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Coming to blows over books

Published by Iris on Friday, October 7th, 2011

When I walked into the classroom today, several of the students were already there exploring the second edition of Jane Eyre that our special collections librarian had brought up for them. This had really no relation at all to what I’d be working on, specifically, except that we were talking about context-building at a college level, and the second edition of Jane Eyre certainly adds a little to their context for the work.

What I hadn’t expected was that the professor had to tear the students away from a spontaneous but very heated debate over the importance of the book as a physical thing vs an intangible narrative. Does it actually matter if you hold a book in your hands? Is there something about that experience that matters? Or is it simply a waste of resources and space to go about printing mass quantities of things that could exist as bytes instead?

The most vehement ebook advocate raged against “self-righteous book smellers” while the greatest advocate for printed books talked about how it was important to be able to capture pieces of history not just in the text of the novel itself but in construction and display as well. At one point I threw a wrench into the “it’s economically unconscionable to ship printed material around” argument by telling them the 2 second version of ebook lending woes in libraries and the digital divide (I couldn’t resist). At another point the professor and I had to step in when things got heated to the point of ad hominem attacks. It’s pretty safe to say that I haven’t been involved in another class where the students were passionate almost to the point of blows.

What was the resolution? We decided that it’s complicated, that neither side is categorically right, but that self-righteousness doesn’t get anyone very far.

Pretty interesting for a totally peripheral 10-minute piece of a library session.

(My next favorite part of the class was the audible gasp when I said “Well, if I were getting started on this assignment [on the Great Gatsby and the Jazz Age] I’d probably start with Wikipedia.” Bwa-ha-ha-ha)

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ebooks blah blah blah

Published by Iris on Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

I’m finding it harder and harder not to tune out on ebook topics. It’s all too broken and I can’t fix it.

“How do I use an ebook,” one of my faculty asked me this week. “I see them listed in the catalog, but then what?”

Turns out he has and loves his Kindle, but library ebooks are impossible. “Well, you see,” I start explaining, “You have to use it on a browser because this particular kind of ebook comes from EBSCO, which doesn’t work with your Kindle, and which doesn’t actually work with YOUR browser because EBSCO uses its own PDF reader that doesn’t work with Firefox on a Mac unless you download this extra plugin that you haven’t downloaded yet because otherwise yes, you’ll have to download single page by single page and open them in Preview. So let’s go find that, and now we have to restart your browser, and shoot… it’s still not working. I wonder why. I’ll look into that for you. For now why don’t we try it in Safari. So yeah, now we know that if you go to Safari, and be sure to log in for off-campus access, and THEN go to the catalog and find your book… shoot… it checked that book out to your other browser that wouldn’t open the book. So you’ll have to wait until tomorrow and then use Safari and log in for off campus access and find the book in the catalog and click the link. Then it should work.”

But this is not actually my definition of “work” unless you mean the kind of work that people pay you to do. But no, this is the kind of “work” that I pay for, and that still isn’t easy or fun, even though he owns an ebook reader he loves.

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Philosophy of librarianship: sketch of a draft

Published by Iris on Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

Some people were talking about their philosophies of librarianship recently. I’ve never had to write one up formally (and I hope I never have to). But some points I might include keep floating through my head in vague but important-feeling ways.

Librarianship is collaborative by nature. Nothing we have or do makes any sense at all unless it’s connected with our community’s needs (however “community” is defined). The more separate and distinct it is, the less vitality it has. In my world, all of this means that my work matters to the degree that I work with faculty, students, staff, and my library colleagues, and the degree to which they work with me.

I specialize a little bit, but I think there’s great strength in specializing in general research support. On a college campus, it can be hard to make a case for that kind of strength, but often when I feel I’m contributing most to the mission of the college it’s when I’m speaking from the position of generalist. I see students from all over the curriculum every day. That’s a different kind of knowledge of the campus.

Librarianship has to balance access and preservation. I want as much of each as possible, but sometimes they don’t get along very well in the real world of budgets and finite space and license agreements.

Librarians teach. Some are hired particularly for this purpose, so they spend a lot of time working at honing those skills and building up teacher expertise, but everyone teaches to some degree or another, directly or indirectly, in whatever capacity they serve in the library.

Librarians are kind of the Keepers of the Light of Information Literacy. And yet, ideally Information Literacy happens outside of librarianship. What’s better than me being good at this stuff? My students and colleagues being good at this stuff while doing work that matters to them, that’s what. So it behooves me to work creatively with people to see how close to that ideal we can come as a community.

So that’s a start. Now if I could just get the vague but important-feeling ideas about my philosophy of information literacy to coalesce a bit more… but that will have to wait for another time.

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