Skip to content

Category: Libraries and Librarians

The P Word

Published by Iris on Thursday, September 25th, 2008

I must have missed the privacy class in library school. I’ll admit to having been pretty taken aback the first time I heard heated privacy debates once I was out and librarianating. As far as I can tell, the two edges of the range of opinions on the topic are: “Privacy is a fundamental right and we are the champions of that right” on the one hand and “Privacy is dead, get over it” on the other. I have problems with both of these positions. The former seems paternalistic and the latter seems cavalier.

So do we, in fact, have a mandate to protect patron privacy regardless of the patron’s views on the topic? Personally, I don’t think so. I consider it part of my job to help people understand when they’re giving up pieces of their private lives, but then let them decide if they care or not. In fact, I think that holding on too tightly to the “guard everyone’s privacy with your lives” philosophy directly contradicts some of the other bedrocks of librarianship, such as making information easily findable, for example. How can we gush about comments, tags, ratings, and other user-generated content and at the same time prophesy in the name of privacy? How can we recommend social bookmarking? At an even higher level, how can we acknowledge that things like smart interfaces and personalized relevance ranking are the way to go (especially on mobile devices where space is at a premium and browsing result lists is painfully slow) while we simultaneously forbid our systems from using data about researcher-behavior?

No, privacy isn’t dead. And yes, I think education about this kind of thing is an important part of protecting the research process. But I think we can no longer afford the simplicity of preemptively guarding everyone’s privacy in every situation. I think we live in an opt-in or opt-out world. Whichever of those we choose as our default, the “opt” part of it should be clearly presented to our patrons so that they rather than we take control of their research experience. I also think that our jurisdiction over their privacy becomes even more tenuous when it spreads beyond the research experience.

Maybe it’s my experience as one who is fairly comfortable living online, maybe it’s my life as an educator in a beautiful Midwestern Ivory Tower. Who knows. But at least for today, my position is that we exist to educate people rather than to take away their choices.

2 Comments

Best End-Of-Class Question Ever

Published by Iris on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

Today I was teaching 6 upper-level linguistics students the ins and outs of Linguistics & Language Behavior abstracts, the crazy rules indexers have to follow that force the rest of us to OR together broad and narrow terms, using what you have to find bunches of other things you might need, and the Web of Knowledge.

It was a pretty good class, if I do say so myself, but the best bit was the very last 2 minutes when the very last question of the day went like this:

Student: “Do you really love being a librarian?”
Me: “Yes! [insert mini-blurb about what I love so much about it and how I got here in 2 sentences or less]”
Student: “How do you become one? Is there a special degree for it?”
Me: “Yes, there is. It’s a master’s degree. [insert mini-plug for being a librarian]”

I love my job.

Comments closed

eJournals, Blessing and Curse

Published by Iris on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

I love electronic access to journal articles. I admit to being a teensy bit annoyed if I have traipse downstairs (one floor down and all of 100 feet over from my desk) to get the hard copy of an article. I’m even more reluctant to ILL articles, though I know how easy it is and how incredibly speedy compared to my past ILL experiences. Point and click is the way to go (as long as it’s not one of those nasty “HTML full text” articles, by which they mean “we’ll give you the text but none of the foreign characters or charts or images that you’ll need to understand the text… oh, and we won’t give you the original pagination either… mwa-ha-ha-ha…”).

And I’m certainly not alone in this. Students seem to have an even more marked preference than I do, and the faculty helped us move to being much more of an e-only library during the biennial serial review we completed last spring. More than half of our budget was spent on a electronic resources last year, and our stats show downloads are up by over 60%. We’ve tipped over that point, folks. And for the most part, there is great rejoicing in the land.

I say “for the most part” because all of a sudden, people are having to deal with an overly complex system of getting to our stuff from off campus. The new faculty were, understandably, confused and rather frustrated. Most of the systems we have in place (LibX, a proxy server, telling Google Scholar about our holdings, etc) work for most of our resources. But that doesn’t mean that things are any easier because these new faculty use Google, we don’t always subscribe through the publisher web site, and yet publishers put tantalizing web sites up for Google to find. The professor finds a great article via Google, clicks on it, and is told to log in or subscribe when, in fact, the library does subscribe, just through another source.

Sure, there are browser extensions that can help with that. We could OpenURL-ify everything under the sun if people would download extensions and remember to log into the proxy server whenever they sit at their computers. But that’s a pain. We mentioned this kind of thing at new faculty orientation and were met with weary stares.

There’s got to be a better way.

p.s. I’ve also talked before about the problem of eJournals when it comes to copyright and ILL (here).

1 Comment

Rethinking Instruction … Again

Published by Iris on Sunday, September 14th, 2008

One of my favorite things about teaching is that I never feel like I’ve figured out how to do it well. There’s always something new to try, or something old to tweak, or something tried and true to throw out because as it turns out, the students don’t need it any more. All of this means that I’m never bored, and that I’ve never taught the same session twice.

Of course, this also means that I’m always a little uncertain about what I’m doing, how effective it was, and how meaningful it was. So far, no assessment I’ve done has completely set these nagging uncertainties to rest.

But uncertainties notwithstanding, I’m going to try something new this fall. When and where appropriate, I’m going to combine the idea of the Knowledge Survey* with classroom clickers.

I’ve been hearing about clickers for years and have experience their effectiveness myself. Quite against my own will, and in spite of feeling that I was participating in something as corny as any of those team building exercises I always hated (like falling backwards and getting caught), I found myself being sucked in and engaged in the activity at hand. If that could happen to me against my will, maybe I can use it to sucker some nearly sleeping freshmen into my sessions with a couple of well-placed participatory activities.

Still, my innate aversion to gimmicky things kept me from getting too excited until after I heard about Knowledge Surveys. Those things are amazing! Students get an accurate assessment of their own abilities (the Macalester Geology department has found incredibly high correlations between the responses on knowledge surveys and the students’ actual abilities), but I get a quick way to assess students, and I get a less-gimmicky way of encouraging participation and curiosity.

Now, if I could only get the stupid clickers to work, that’d be a great first step. So far, they hang at the “sending” notification whenever I test them, and never make it through to the actual recording of a response. I’ll have to get someone to help me figure out if they’re actually not working or if I’ve set something up wrong.

* I’ve heard Karl Wirth speak about these surveys three times, now, and ever time I came away thinking that there’s got to be a way to incorporate these things into my teaching somehow. Here’s a paper he and Dexter Perkins wrote on the topic.

Comments closed