Skip to content

Category: Libraries and Librarians

The Whirlwind Class

Published by Iris on Friday, May 2nd, 2008

After my first year here, when I realized that I needed to sell the power of a library instruction session from the inside rather than the outside (meaning, by actually teaching rather than begging for time) to those departments that hadn’t made much use of my services, I came up with a plan. The plan was to point out that students would come seek me out for help if they knew my face and could see that I’m a real person and not scary or mean or intimidating or any of those things. I pointed out that if professors were structuring their classes in a way that relied on their students coming to me rather than having me come to their class, they’d have to give me at least a little face time.

For reasons I’ve described before, this mini-class idea was especially important to the language departments, but it wasn’t just them. In a 10-week term, pretty much every professor is jealous not of hours, but of minutes of class time. It’s been one of the most interesting challenges of my time here to figure out a) when library sessions really are important and how to explain that to faculty, and b) when they’re not as important, and how to get students the help they need without the structure of a classroom.

So here I was, offering whirlwind sessions of 10, 15, or 20 minutes here and there. I’d bop in, hand out my trading cards and maybe a subversive handout, explain how to find my Availability Calendar, and then teach the class one thing that so boggled their minds that they’d realize I might be worth coming to see with questions later. My goal was to teach something that the teacher wouldn’t have known. Something flashy. Something so pithy and assignment-relevant that if this was the only thing these students learned all term, I’d be ok with that. And you know what? This is very very hard to do. I put more time into preparing these mini classes than I do into most of my hour-long classes.

And for the most part, I’ve been very pleased with them, and several of them have grown over the years into either longer sessions, or into more sessions over the course of the term. But they’re certainly not good for every situation, or even most situations. They’re really only good if several conditions are met:

  • It’s an upper-level class
    I have zero time to cover the basics.
  • Students will be working on wildly different topics
    I’ve had times when students did come to me after my whirlwind class, but I spent the first half-hour of every appointment going over the very same processes and resources… NOT a good use of anyone’s time.
  • I get the first portion of the class period, not the last
    Even when I finish my bit on time, the sessions usually stretch on as the professor and/or students ask questions. Of course, this leaves me in the odd position of having professors who think I accomplished a lot in 15 minutes, when really I was in their classrooms for twice that long.
  • I don’t have too many of them in a term
    They take a long time to prepare, and I would never have time to see every student in every class in every department I serve as an individual appointment.

Still, they do serve their purpose sometimes, and if nothing else, it’s a foot in the door. Still, I’m becoming a little bit uncomfortable with the thought that I might become known as “the one who can do a 15 minute class.” In reality, this is not enough time, and students do struggle with this stuff, and accessing and deploying the literature of a field is an integral part of becoming a scholar in that field. Simply plunking keywords into databases is only the first baby steps in that process. And really, if professors work with me and tell me what their course goals and readings are, I can craft a longer session that isn’t just an add-on to the class. They can be chalk full of course content and therefore not actually take much away from the incredibly precious minutes in a 10-week term. And I don’t want to undermine the efforts of my colleagues as they also struggle with ways to make their content and expertise an integral part of the classroom experience in their departments.

p.s. Yes… I know… I’ve been tagged. I’ll work on it. Really I will.

2 Comments

Support

Published by Iris on Saturday, April 19th, 2008

In my library, we hear two phrases all the time: “Tech Support” and “Research Support.” But don’t you think these should be “Tech User Support” and “Researcher Support”?

Not only do these new phrases more accurately reflect what we actually do on a day to day basis, but they also keep increasing numbers of technological devices and applications and increasing numbers of research resources from sounding quite as overwhelming. For me, they also help me assess when problems are actually problems or when I can stop worrying so much that we don’t have something or that something doesn’t work quite right. On the flip side of that, it helps me know when I’ve done a good job. If I helped that researcher accomplish that goal, that’s a success.

Comments closed

The Difficulty of Making Students Care About Open Access

Published by Iris on Thursday, April 17th, 2008

This week Gavin Baker came to talk to us and our students about open access. I wasn’t able to attend his formal talk, unfortunately, but the discussion session in the morning got me thinking… Why, when I hear that we should make sure students understand the benefits of open access, do I immediately think that it’s going to be a tough battle? After all, OA is free — students like free stuff — should be a no-brainer, right?

Wrong. Students have a hard time caring that OA is free because to them, everything is free. All our wonderful IP range subscriptions even populate Google links with juicy full text. So one answer might be to somehow make it clear which links uncover full text because the library paid through the nose for it to work that way, and which full text would be free no matter what the library does.

While there is some merit to that idea, I think there are some problems with it, too. For one thing, lots of our vendors would probably disown us if we broadcast what we pay them. They prefer to keep everyone guessing what a “good deal” actually looks like by keeping us from sharing information. But even if we could have a resource say “brought to you by your library for somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 dollars per year,” I’m not convinced this would be enough of a motivator for students to care about open access because most of them don’t realize that they’ll want access to this kind of thing later. They don’t associate “access to journal articles” with warm fuzzies, wonder, awe, or gratitude. They associate it with completing assignments. With this attitude, it makes perfect sense to them that the college would provide the materials they need to complete coursework, no matter the cost, just like the college provides professors and classrooms and projection equipment and academic support and all the other “free” things that they know full well cost money. So what we need to do is readjust the attitudes that students have about journal literature. We need to get them to associate it with something larger than coursework.

Actually, I think that it’s this problem of attitude that might be the trickiest to navigate. I spend my days trying to instill a sense of the wonder and joy of research into my students. I want them to see a great article and have them thrill to the possibilities of putting it to use. And they have to get to this point before they can possibly care that they won’t have access later, or that other people don’t have easy access now. So here I am, helping students fall in love with journal literature, but I know I also have to make the complicated move of problematizing journal publishers and arousing righteous indignation in my students that less privileged individuals simply cannot afford access to these treasure troves of research.

Combine all this with the reality that librarians (at least as we function here at my library) are almost purely opportunistic teachers, and the situation seems even more difficult. We don’t have very many built in soapboxes from which to trumpet the benefits and complexities of Open Access in any systematic way. I’m not saying it’s impossible, and I’m certainly not saying it’s not worth the effort. I’m just trying to wrap my head around the difficulties.

I’d love to learn if anyone else has been able to navigate these issues effectively.

2 Comments