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Category: Libraries and Librarians

Working with our Writing Center

Published by Iris on Sunday, November 11th, 2007

I’ve written before about working with writing centers. About a year and a half ago the director of our writing center invited me to a joint meeting of writing center professionals and librarians. As is usual with such things, the meeting was great, but the conversations that our campus’ writing center professionals and I had on the way to and from the meeting was even better. In fact, it resulted in my being invited to make a 10 minute appearance in the writing consultant orientation the next fall, and for our two services to exchange publicity materials and generally start talking to each other in a new way.

Well, this fall things progressed much further. Rather than repeat my 10-minute appearance at the tutor orientation, the WC director generously handed over a full week of their fall mentor group sessions. (Writing consultants here don’t take a course prior to working in our writing center. Instead, they gather for one Saturday early in the term, and then for the rest of the term they meet in small “mentor groups” each week for an hour, during which time they discuss a reading with their writing center mentor. One week may be “Working with ESL students,” and another may take on plagiarism. This year, one of the weeks was library week.)

Preparing for these sessions proved to be challenging for several reasons. First, there were logistics. 5 sections of a class in the space of a week puts quite a dent in my calendar, and this year there were some scheduling snafus which will hopefully be ironed out next time we do this. Then there was the challenge of finding a reading that would be appropriate for students, that would give them some touchstone issues to discuss that would be relevant to their work, and that would encapsulated the practical and epistemological worth of the library on an academic campus. Turns out, our profession doesn’t really write such thought-pieces in a way that is appropriate for students. Either that or I just couldn’t find what was out there. So I assigned a piece James Elmborg had written about writing centers and libraries and how we’re a good match.* And finally, I realized that I’ve become completely dependent on preparing library sessions with an assignment in mind. Not having an assignment stymied my efforts to put this thing together for quite some time. I hadn’t realized how dependent I am on using the assignment as a way to prioritize what gets included in a session.

Anyway, at the advice of a co-worker, I finally decided to build the session around a theme of “how we are similar.” I hoped that this would give them something to latch onto (since they lacked the grounding force of an assignment, too), and that it would give me a way to work out my own uncertainties about turf.

Yes, I said “turf.” Here I am, going around believing that if we librarians feel the need to “own” Information Literacy, we lock ourselves into an unsustainable, less-than-perfectly effective, and ultimately untenable position. Not only are we insufficiently staffed to be the sole purveyors of Information Literacy to our population of undergraduates, but our students need to learn these skills in the context of their other learning if they’re to develop any kind of facility or nuanced understanding of the research process. What’s more, how can we make the claim that IL is an essential part of a liberal arts education, that it is inherently intertwined with learning on many levels, and then sequester it in the safe confines of the library? And yet, here was I, worried about turning these writing consultants into mini-librarians.

Luckily, my co-workers have wise heads on their shoulders and pointed out that I was worrying for very little reason. The best outcome possible would be to equip these consultants to help their peers think through research problems at point of need, and that they would know enough about what we do to feel comfortable making the decision to refer writers to us when needed.

So these sessions stressed our similarities. Just as consultants “work with to develop writers, not writings,” so librarians work to develop good researchers rather than hand over the perfect research. We both deal with citation, so we talked about resources for that and when consultants could, perhaps, want to steer students our way. We both deal with “it’s due tomorrow” issues, so we talked through strategies for dealing with these students. Of course, we also covered a few library basics, the “how do I know if this counts as a print source” conundrum (they loved the idea of Ulrich’s as a giant cheat sheet of “print” resources), and where to find the research guides that we create for most classes we support.

All of this seemed to go over well, so next term we’re stepping it up a notch. The writing center director and I are coordinating support for the “writing rich” courses on campus so that each librarian can know if classes they’ve been asked to support also have a dedicated writing assistant. If there is a WA, we’ll invite them to the course’s instruction session so that the WA will have the same understanding of the research involved as do the students we’ll all be serving.

Meanwhile, I’m going to try my own little pilot project. I’m going to arm one of my WAs with a reverse sign-up sheet. This way, the WA can identify students would could benefit from an individual session with me, provide me with the students’ names, and I can follow up and schedule one-on-one appointments. We’ll see how that goes.

*Elmborg, James K. “Locating the Center: Libraries, Writing Centers, and Information Literacy.” Writing Lab Newsletter. March, 2006. (Available Online)

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Making Connections on Our Campuses: MnObe Ref Fall Round Robin

Published by Iris on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

Yesterday 20 or so reference librarians from the 5 Minnesota Oberlin libraries got together for one of our 3-ish annual meetings. This one was our informal “round robin” gathering where each school reports on what they’ve been doing recently, generally revolving around a theme. This time’s theme was that of connecting with people, organizations, and services on campus. These discussions are always fascinating. In fact, I tend to prefer them to the more formal presentations we do at the other meetings. Throughout this meeting I sat there taking notes on all the cool things the other libraries are doing to connect with their campuses while thinking to myself how lucky I am to have such fascinating, engaged, and imaginative colleagues.

One school has a set of faculty representatives whose job it is to act as a conduit between their fellow faculty members and the librarians. This school is also getting involved in the orientation for study abroad students, setting up library orientation for parents during new student week, and has created an online game (much like Clue) for new students to do before classes start. And that’s just one school! Another one gets 25% of their reference questions via a brand new chat reference service.  Here at Carleton we’ve been involved with campus curricular initiatives, the Writing Center, an ethnographic study on student and faculty use of visual materials, and our re-accreditation process. Several of us talked about ways in which we’re integrating library services into course management systems.

I could probably write a book on the cool things these MnObe schools are trying.  We’re all building or borrowing online tools, and we’re all thinking of ways to simultaneously get our content (and ourselves) out of the library and get our communities to come to the library (physically or otherwise).

But at least as interesting as the topics we covered was the feeling of the conversation. When I first started attending these meetings 3 years ago, even the round robin meeting was pretty formal. Each school had an alloted time period and most people brought handouts or powerpoint slides. Now we’ve gotten to know each other so much better that we happily sit around a table and spend a couple of hours in informal but productive discussion.

p.s. I’m publishing this from Flock, so we’ll see what how it looks.

Blogged with Flock

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“Teaching the Computer” and Other Fun Substitutes for Boolean Searching

Published by Iris on Thursday, November 1st, 2007

I’ve been doing a lot more teaching and research consulting this term than ever before, and lately I’ve kind of fallen into a different way of teaching complex searches. I used to be more explicit about using boolean to build those wonderful long strings, complete with parentheses and all that jazz. Unsurprisingly, this method left students impressed, but slightly baffled.

Lately, I’ve started “teaching the computer” each of my concepts in turn, and then using the search history to combine the concepts. This started with my senior thesis writers who needed ways to manage immense strings of MLA International Bibliography controlled vocabulary terms. I’d teach them to mine the thesaurus for broad and narrow terms for each of the concepts, explaining why the rules of indexing require that they include even the narrowest terms they could find (which I talked about here). And then, after we’d gathered as many broad and narrow terms as we could for each major concept, we’d hop over to the search history and combine the concepts. Et voila! Beautiful search results (most of the time).

Now I’m trying this out on less advanced students who are having trouble with the concept of combining terms. I help them “teach the computer” each of their concepts and then combine concepts. So, in ProQuest (for example) I might have the student brainstorm all the possible words associated with the concept “poverty” and string them across the top search box using OR “to let the computer know that any one of these could fit my concept.” Then move the cursor to the next search box and start stringing together words associated with illness and health care, again putting an OR between each term. Suddenly, our result set has tons of good articles about the relationship between poverty and disease.

Something about the process of describing a concept to a computer and then having the computer find the overlap between concepts seems to be easier to grasp than the more technical process of combining terms and groups of terms. Maybe it means that we have to juggle fewer terms and concepts in our short-term memories. Maybe it means that we can chunk up the process into easier steps rather than thinking of the search as one massive and frustrating step. Who knows… I’m not a cognitive psychologist. But my advanced students especially seem to reach that “ah-ha” moment pretty quickly and move on to adapt it to their own needs. It’s early days yet with my less advanced students, but so far I’ve seen a few of them repeating the process without a hitch. And several times, I’ve gotten the feeling that my consultations were shorter because the students reached that point of feeling able to go and try this on their own more quickly.

Unfortunately for my ego, this leaves students less impressed with my librarian-ish super powers… after all, anybody can think up words that describe a concept. Ah well. I suppose there’s some value in having people think they could do this without my help. :)

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Becoming a Music Librarian, Part 2

Published by Iris on Monday, October 29th, 2007

Tomorrow I teach my first real music research class, so I’ve spent the last couple of days putting together what I’ve affectionately termed the Longest Research Guide Ever (link will be live until Dec. 2007, after which time you can contact me if, for some strange reason, you really want to see this monstrous thing). On the one hand, I’m really proud of this guide. It represents the sum total of what I know about finding sources for music research (except that it doesn’t list a couple of important bibliographic databases… Sad that this would be the sum total, but there you have it. After all, I only learned this stuff myself 10 days ago…). On the other hand, it also represents all that I try to avoid in a course research guide, and so I feel kind of guilty even showing it to my students tomorrow.

Here’s what I don’t like about the guide: it’s long. It’s a long block of text. There’s nothing to lessen the unrelenting, overwhelming length of the thing. I’ve tried to mitigate this by including a sort of table of contents at the beginning, blockish indents, and bulleted lists. But still, the thing is just plain long, and the whole point of a course research guide as opposed to a subject research guide is that it’s supposed to be neatly tailored to the needs of a specific course or even a specific assignment. … This is no neatly tailored piece of writing; it’s a dissertation on how to find specific content in the library.

But this particular course guide is long for three very good reasons.

  • First and probably most important, I’m not yet familiar enough with the subject, its research methods, or the students in that department to know what kind of detail is appropriate or helpful. When this happens, my nature is to write lots and then cut back later. This may not be the best method of attack, but it’s the only way I can wrap my head around the subject myself. So really, this is the guide that I need rather than the guide my students need.
  • Second, the teacher wanted the students to be able to “see the possibilities” that exist for music research (including access editions, manuscripts, (auto)biography, recordings, reviews, criticism, etc.). For their final oral presentation, the students will then be asked to take a piece of music and demonstrate to the class the kinds of artifacts that could be used to learn more about that piece.
  • Which leads to the third reason: the only commonality between the possible student topics will be that they’re pieces composed for piano, and there are a lot of pieces composed for piano… quite a lot. So I felt I had to somehow cover all the bases that would be possible for any piece, any composer.

Whether this ends up being a success or not, I hope that at the very least the students learn as much by using the guide as I learned to create it. I also anticipate stealing most of the content from this thing to work into the research guide for the whole department, and probably 4 or 5 littler handouts for the music faculty.

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