Skip to content

Category: Libraries and Librarians

Investments in the Term Economy

Published by Iris on Monday, October 4th, 2010

Search is all about term matching, and several times in the last couple of weeks I’ve had students think there was nothing on their topics simply because we hadn’t found the right terms yet. Once we’d dug enough to find some useful search terms, we uncovered previously hidden worlds of scholarship which could in turn point us toward related works as we ruthlessly mined them for even more terms, their bibliographies, and their “cited by” works.

Finding the right terms is hard. It takes empathy with the author, it takes some knowledge of the field, it takes some knowledge of related fields (particularly if you’re in an interdisciplinary database and can’t figure out why you’re getting chemistry results in your humanities search), and it usually just plain takes reading. Reading carefully and with an eye toward learning vocabulary. Reading lots. And there are very few shortcuts.

And then comes full text searching of historical documents (something I’m going to be teaching tomorrow). That’s another whole layer of complexity, and I really love what Timothy Burke had to say about that recently. He makes it clear that you really have to read, and read a lot, before you can start searching through historical texts, and he makes it clear that developing a familiarity with other rhetorics is vital to scholarship.

Searching sometimes feels like the modern way and browsing like the legacy way of doing research. But in some sense, search is impossible without a hefty dose of browsing.

6 Comments

Maybe Not Something You Outgrow in Four Years

Published by Iris on Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

Yesterday I taught two classes pretty much back to back. The first was to senior English majors embarking on their thesis projects, and the second was for first year students taking an English 100 course. At the beginning of the first class we talked about what the seniors were most worried about as they started their theses, and nearly all of them worried about defining the scope of their project so that it would be long enough, short enough, or completable in the given time. The second class was all about picking a topic, but the atmosphere in the room was quite a bit more apprehensive than it had been when I went to teach them about finding sources.

And it struck me that maybe finding a researchable topic that’s of appropriate scope for your aims is one thing that’s only learnable to a point. Maybe it’s just always hard. Maybe there’s something about it that, if it were easy, would actually make things worse. Maybe that struggle is actually one of the central pieces of scholarship — the thing that makes it work in the first place.

Comments closed

The benefits of uncertainty

Published by Iris on Sunday, September 12th, 2010

School starts on Monday, and with it comes a brand new set of graduation requirements for all first year students. The new requirement that most affects me is the required Argument and Inquiry seminars that all first year students take in their first term at college, and this seminar includes the first cross-curricular mandatory information literacy requirement we’ve ever had.

Obviously I’d think this is a good thing. But what I hadn’t realized was what I’d find most good about this good thing: the major pay-off of this new requirement may be the conversations I’ve had with several faculty in the last couple of months as they develop their A&I seminars for this fall. Just the fact that the seminars are new and that they’re a little intimidating to teach means that we’ve felt at liberty to completely mess with “normal.”

“What if we do away with the ‘library class,'” I ask, and they don’t look at me like I’m growing horns. They say, “What would that look like?”

Another professor came to see if I thought she was completely bonkers for wanting me to come in 4 or 5 times for 15-20 minutes each rather than just once, and I could say “Not at all! Here are the kinds of ways we’re doing that with these other classes.”

And these are professors I’ve never worked with before and professors I’ve worked with consistently over the years — creative and thoughtful professors, all — but it feels totally different because we’re both pretty uncertain about how we’ll make these seminars work. We’re brainstorming and upending the status quo with wild abandon, and nothing feels taboo. And sometimes we settle back on a format similar to the more normal class: assignment-specific instruction for 50 minutes. But when we do, we do so with more confidence that this format suites the course’s learning goals rather than just being What We’ve Done Before.

4 Comments

On Not Attending Conferences

Published by Iris on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

I realized today that I haven’t attended a conference since the fall of 2008. This brought me up short. I think of myself as attending about two national conferences per year, but apparently that’s not the case any more and hasn’t been for quite a while. I’ve heard from others who haven’t traveled to a conference in a few years because of budget cuts, so I know I’m not the only one who’s mostly stayed home for a while, but I hadn’t really thought about it until just today because I was never told I couldn’t travel — I just started deciding with each new announcement of an upcoming conference that I could skip that one that year, that there would be other conferences. And now here I am. I’ve skipped them all.

I miss seeing my libraryland friends face to face, I miss seeing other places that I don’t otherwise visit, and I miss the dedicated time to think about libraries without actually working in one right that second. But what I haven’t lost is the networking, discussion, and general information sharing that keep me up to date with the world of libraries. That’s all still going on every day in my computer, thanks to the Library Society of the World and its FriendFeed room.

I hope sometime soon I can get the full conference experience again, and I kind of hope that the next conference I attend will be an LSW unconference (hint hint, people!), but I’m really glad to have stumbled in with this crew of top notch people.

2 Comments