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Category: Libraries and Librarians

Musings on Periodicals

Published by Iris on Friday, February 8th, 2008

We’re in the midst of our biennial print periodicals review at the moment, and it’s gotten me thinking about how to be a good steward of our periodicals collection. Personally, I love electronic journals better than print journals in most cases. There’s just so much more you can do with them, none of which involve photocopying. (Photocopying is a sore topic with me, right now, for completely separate reasons, none of them interesting.) So faced with a list of journals and the choice to continue with the print subscription, flag them as candidates for e-access only, or cancel them entirely, I’d go with the electronic version in a heartbeat for many, many titles.

However (you knew there was a “however” coming), there are a couple of categories of things that I will not give up in print if I have anything to say about it. (And remember, I’m the librarian for Languages and Literature, so my views are biased in that direction.)

  • Periodicals that include ads or images that aren’t indexed or included in the electronic version. I spend enough time with my American Studies students (and my colleague spends even more time with her History students) finding ads and images that being forced to give up basically our only accessible copies of these ephemera makes me weep for the students of 20-years-from-now who will be basically prevented from pursuing whole swaths of research topics.
  • Periodicals that include or are primarily composed of fiction, poetry, or art. These genres are used in many ways, some of which is enhanced by electronic access, and some of which are decidedly NOT. I want to leave the door open for the later cases.
  • Periodicals that are routed and that a) don’t have good alerts built into the electronic version or b) are routed to people who don’t care for alerts because they and their workflows are set up to need the thing itself sitting and staring at them before they’ll be reminded that they actually did want to sit down and read for a while. I’m that way, myself, with somethings. Not with my professional journals, but with somethings, so I can entirely sympathize.

Assuming I’m looking at a periodical that doesn’t fall into one of these categories, the next things I’d want to know before jumping for the e-access-only option are:

  • Does the e-access include PDF full text? This is especially important if foreign characters (such as Greek, Russian, or Asian characters) are important, or graphs, or images, or really anything other than the text itself. It’s also easier for students to cite exact and original page numbers.
  • Do we get to retain perpetual access to the issues we’ve paid for? (This is a biggie, and possible from some vendors.)
  • Is the eJournal’s interface easily usable? Are the result lists for searches understandable?
  • Are there RSS and email alert options for searches and new issues?
  • It sure would be nice if we could still send articles to other libraries via Interlibrary Loan. (I still worry about the world’s libraries going e-only and cutting each other off from sharing their collections with each other and with smaller libraries.)

These are the things that run through my head as I page through the periodicals on my list. What other criteria should I be thinking about?

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Is “Traditional Reference” Dead?

Published by Iris on Monday, January 28th, 2008

I’ve been mulling over this question for the last couple of years, but I returned to it after reading these conference notes posted at A Wandering Eyre. (I know, I know, that was months ago. But I’ve been mulling, remember?) In particular, there were a couple of lines in those notes where “Jane” paraphrased Joe Janes and then added her own commentary in brackets.

Now there is a lot of stuff and people can find it or they can find something. There are lots of ways to get help. Traditional reference is not going to work. [Mr. Janes is exceptionally humorous, but he is right. Traditional reference is not going to serve the needs of our users.]

I wasn’t at that conference, and I’m not even directly responding to this passage. But this is a refrain I hear over and over among librarians, and every time I hear it, I think I must have missed something. I assume that “face to face” is implied by this form of reference, as well as “reference interview” and some form of question-resolving activity. And some form of these ingredients continues to make up a major portion of my work. Maybe the problem is that I’ve only been a reference librarian for almost 3 years. Maybe I never experienced this “traditional” form of my job that everyone thinks is breathing its last gasps.

But if we envision our service as one which helps students understand how to tackle questions and why tackling them in particular ways is might be important, is this “traditional” reference or something different? And if we notice growing numbers of students coming to us for this kind of help at the desk and in our offices, and if we’re hearing that students are coming to us because their professors or their roommates or their best friends suggested it, wouldn’t that mean that these services are, in fact, serving their needs?

The kinds of questions we get, and the way that students approach us leads me to believe that reference is not dead or even dying.* I think reference is alive and well just like the English language is alive and well. It isn’t bound by the same rules and expectations as it was once, and new rules have emerged over time, but that doesn’t mean that the basics have fundamentally shifted or become irrelevant. Rather than being gatekeepers of information, we’re now expert in weeding through too much information, but we’re still helping people fill their information needs. We’ve added new methods of communication over time (I imagine telephone reference was at one time regarded as new), but we’re still in the business of communicating with people to figure out what they need.

So if by “traditional reference” you mean “a service which requires people to approach a desk and ask a librarian a question, face to face, as their only method of posing a question, and a service which will respond to these questions by handing back factual answers,” then yes, I think that kind of service is has evolved and been subsumed into a much broader service. But it does not necessarily follow that desks, physical spaces, or even librarians are obsolete. These are just the tools, and only a subset of the tools available to us now; any tool can be put to good or bad use. The service that makes use of these tools is the key. And that service reinvents itself every time a new person presents us with a question, every time we work together to figure out how best to resolve the question, and every time present strategies and tips and, yes, even answers in a way that makes sense to for that question at that time in that context.

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* Of course, it may just be that my particular circumstances and community keep reference a vital part of what I do. As students here have grown to rely on the other two prongs of our service (instruction and individual appointments), we’ve noticed that they bring more and more “long” questions to the reference desk. They’re perfectly able to find many of the answers to fact-based questions on their own (which is why our “short” question total has diminished over time), but they come to the desk for in-depth help, research strategy development, or just plain old help getting started in an unfamiliar research territory. I’ve also already talked about why our particular library benefits from a centralized location where a librarian can be found at predictable hours and how we supplement that service with our appointment model and with a low-key IM reference service. But these are outgrowths of our particular institution and our students’ culture, so I understand that generalization is difficult in practice, however wonderful in theory.

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Subversive Handouts: One Librarian’s Secret Weapon

Published by Iris on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

I’ve recently (within the last year and a half) taken to the idea of handouts. Real, printed, paper handouts. I almost never list specific resources on those handouts, though, since I save that kind of thing for the online guide that goes with each class (unless I have a good reason to think the class will want a paper cheat-sheet). That kind of handout works well with some teachers and some students, but I’ve never been able to pull it off to my satisfaction. Instead I create what I’ve affectionately termed “subversive handouts.”

Before you get too worried, I should say that the name came from my very first incarnation of this thing and is no longer an accurate description of the genre. I’d been asked one too many times to do an “everything the class will need to know about research in 10-15 minutes, please” session. All efforts to get more time failed, so instead I paired the class down to the two small tasks that I thought the students would need most… and I created my very first subversive handout. This listed the two things they’d learn that day at the top, continued with a lengthy list of catchy and interesting/important sounding skills they could ask me about later, and concluded with my contact information and the URL for my calendar at the bottom.

The idea was threefold:
1) Students would still get a little concrete information and a chance to see my face (invaluable if they’re supposed to come make individual appointments with me later).
2) They’d have their imaginations jogged about the kinds of things they didn’t know were possible, or the skills they didn’t know they needed to learn.
3) The professor would see that “everything they need to know” encompassed a whole lot more than the library catalog and finding journal articles. And I won’t lie; in this original case, this third point was the most important to me.

And you know what? It worked. I ended up staying 15 minutes past time as the professor and students asked me questions off of that handout during class time. That meant I had effectively doubled my face-to-face time for with that class, and everyone was engaged and asking questions.

Since then I’ve used the “Here’s what we learned today… Here’s what you can ask me about any time… Here’s how you can get help…” handout in many, many classes. And while they’re useful for lots of kinds of classes, they’re particularly good for two kinds of sessions: those like the one I described above, and those where the professors know full well that the primary goal of a short session is to introduce their students to me so that the students will be more likely to come see me with their research conundrums later. And my original experience of having professors and students alike ask questions from the handout while still in class has held true of almost every session for which I’ve created one of these. (Here’s an example of one I created for English major thesis students.)

Even though I almost never create these handouts with the primary goal of educating the professor any more, the name has stuck. It’s just so fun to knuckle down to the task of creating a handout and be able to rub my fingers together and imagine myself scheming minor subversion. (Imagine shifty eyes and a monologue populated with mutterings such as “They didn’t know they’d want to know about THIS…. Mwa-ha-ha-ha.”) This little bit of fiction is all it takes to make a mundane task feel interesting every single time. Which I suppose means that I’m easily amused.

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The Joys of Journal Searching in the MLA International Bibliography.

Published by Iris on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

This morning’s class was one of those typical classes: Teach these students how to find journal articles in the MLA International Bibliography, please. Nothing very remarkable in that. But for some reason, today’s class went remarkably well. It was one of those classes where you leave feeling all glowy and like you’d actually made a real difference. And you know what I discovered? Of all things, I love teaching the MLA International Bibliography and citation best.

The MLA-IB is such a difficult-to-use database, and yet it’s the bedrock of almost all of the research done in language and literature (the disciplines that I serve). So to have finally figured out how to unlock it for my students has been such a huge relief! It took me more than two years of working with it and with my students to figure out how to tease information out of it and how to explain that process to students, but I think I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can say with confidence that I’m covering the important concepts and significantly changing my students’ searching capabilities in the process. I’ll even go so far as to say that I can usually pull this off in an interesting way… which is probably the glowy feeling talking, but I’ll go with it.

I can’t even describe how happy this makes me. I’ve struggled for a while to figure out what unique skills I bring to the amazing group I work with, and I think at long last I can say with confidence that there ARE search skills and strategies that are unique to my disciplines and that I now have some expertise in deploying.

I’ve also discovered another secret weapon, The Subversive Handout, which I’ll write about later. (How’s that for a librarian cliff-hanger?) ;-)

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