Category: Libraries and Librarians

Freshmen’s Questions About the Library

Published by Iris on Sunday, September 30th, 2007

For one class that I teach with a colleague every Fall term, the professor helps prepare her freshmen for their first library experience by having them read an article by Barbara Fister* and then write down questions they have of the librarians (me and a colleague, incidentally). Usually, these questions are very topic specific (“where would I find how much money was spent training fighter pilots in WWII,” for example). But this year, they had a discussion in class about the Fister article which generated a much different set of questions, which the professor then forwarded to my colleague and me. Here are a few that were particularly compelling:

Aren’t students supposed to be independent? Is asking for help appropriate?
When does help slide into collaboration? Do you ever worry about doing a student’s work for her?
What is the reference desk? Where is it? Who is there? What is the etiquette for approaching it/them?
How does one learn to use the library with an appropriate blend of asking for help and learning to fend for oneself?

Prompted by the clear uneasiness over our roles as librarians and over the broader question of how academic support fits into the academic world, my colleague and I decided to spend some time at the beginning of our library session trying to contextualize library assistance in an academic world. And here’s what we told them:

They are right: we are not here to hand over the perfect research each student will need for each paper. We’re here to help the students learn to figure out when they need to do research and then to find, evaluate, and use the sources they need. Just like we don’t believe that they are born knowing how to write at a college level so also we don’t believe that they were born knowing how to do library research. They don’t think that handing in drafts to their writing professor is cheating, and they don’t think that office hours with their professors will result in the professor doing their work for them. Instead, drafts are commonly seen as good writing practice and a chance to get feedback; office hours can be a great time to practice thinking like a scholar and, also, to get feedback. Well, meeting with librarians works the same way. They give you practice and feedback at this complicated and largely mysterious task of doing library research.

I hope that their other questions (such as “why use the library rather than search engines?” and “how do you pick quality sources out of huge numbers of hits” and the like) were answered in the normal course of our session. But I’m glad we got the chance to directly and explicitly address these more nebulous concerns.

Fister, Barbara. “Fear of Reference.” Chronicle of Higher Education. June 14th, 2002 (Or, for those who don’t have subscriptions to the Chronicle… click here.)

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On the Value of Feedback

Published by Iris on Saturday, September 29th, 2007

Every fall one of my co-workers and I teach a class for a bunch of students in a rather unique situation. They’re freshmen who are taking two “linked” courses, meaning that all students in each course have to take the other course as well. One is a history course and the other is a writing course, and between the two classes, there are between 5 and 6 assignments that our library session must prepare the students to accomplish.

Well, this past spring and summer, the library acquired several rich resources that seemed tailor-made for these classes. The problem is, there was simply not enough time to introduce all four of the resources that we considered most important. (There are LOTS of other resources that we gathered on a research guide for them, but we’d pared the class down to four and couldn’t in good conscience pare it down any farther.) So we thought we’d try something new.

Operating under the assumption that because these students see each other every single day they’d have plenty of time to help each other out, we split them into four groups, each of which had a set of tasks designed to teach them their particular resource. Then we spent the last part of class having each group teach a couple of important points to their classmates. And overall, we thought it went alright. We were crunched for time even as it was, but we were hopeful that we’d started discussions that could continue on the course’ Moodle forum and in subsequent classes.

Then the writing professor did something for which I am very grateful. She had each student write one thing they thought worked well in our session and one thing they thought didn’t work so well. To a person, every single student listed the splitting up into groups as the one and only thing they did not appreciate about the session. Wow! When do you EVER get 100% consistent results from a survey? Never, that’s when. Almost every student listed the time they had to work with their resources as one of the most valuable things about the class, but every single one of them wanted a chance to try the other resources, and most worried that they won’t learn what they need to know from their classmates.

This doesn’t mean that they might not end up being just fine, or that they might not be able to learn from their peers. But it does point out that maybe freshmen, overwhelmed by the prospect of their first college-level research paper, might appreciate a little bit more direction, a little bit more explicit instruction.

So next year, we’ll have to think up another creative solution. The writing professor has suggested that perhaps expanding to two library sessions is in order… we’ll have to see.

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The Curse of Controlled Vocabulary

Published by Iris on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

Yesterday, as students filed in and out of my office in a continuous stream, two of them asked questions that made me thank my lucky stars I’d taken that elective cataloging and classification course back in library school. Without it, I would have been mostly stumped yesterday.

Here’s why. Not only did the experience of taking cataloging and classification force me to realize that I’m geeky enough to get a kick out of AACR2 and mapping it to MARC, but I also learned that I’m very very bad at classification. It’s not that I can’t figure out what books are about…most of the time. I just could never reconcile myself to the idea that, because of the historical need to save space on those catalog cards or print indexes, the rules for applying subject terms seem to inhibit that gathering function that Cutter listed among his 3 primary objectives for the catalog. (For my non-librarian friends, these objectives are: allowing people to locate particular books, help them gather together related items, and help them make informed decisions about what they want.) Specifically, the problem lies in the rule that states that if you have a hierarchically related set of subject terms, you must apply the most specific term that applies to the entire work. You may not also apply the broader terms higher up the hierarchical structure. Similarly, if two or more of the more specific terms apply to your work, you cannot apply both. Instead, you have to look upward in the hierarchical structure until you reach a term that can apply to the entire work.

So what does this have to do with my appointments yesterday? Well, twice yesterday I had students come in frustrated and worried that their topics weren’t viable (and these were the topics for their senior theses, so they were a little stressed). They’d plunked terms into the MLA International Bibliography and only retrieved 2 or 3 hits! Here’s an example that’s an amalgam of a couple of students yesterday. Try finding articles on Elena Garro and gender in the MLA-IB. A good student will know to flip the author’s name around and search it as a subject. A good student will also find some synonyms for “gender” (which I won’t list here for fear of Google). This good student will get about 3 hits from MLA. Three hits?!? How can you write a thesis with this little to go on? And this from the database that’s custom-made for searching literary topics.

These students correctly assumed that more must have been written on the topic. And finally, after poking around for a while, we discovered that more people were writing about Garro’s work and some aspect of gender… specifically, either the male or female gender. This means that the indexers who saw articles about Garro’s portrayal of femininity could not also add the subject term “gender” because, remember, you can’t have both narrow and broad terms describing the same work. This means that students interested in gender have to include narrow and broad terms in their search. In a Google-safe example, if you replace “gender” with “women OR femininity OR gender OR manhood OR masculinity”OR “men” you suddenly get 42 results. And if we probed for other gender-related words, I’m sure we’d get even more results.

My two students had the same reaction when I explained this phenomenon: “What?!? Crazy! Why can’t they add the other terms?” Why indeed? We aren’t restricted by those 3×5 cards any more. We aren’t publishing the MLA-IB as a yearly print index any more. We’re simply adding relationships in a database.

I’m thankful to these two students for reminding me of what I’d learned back in my cataloging class. Now that I’ve been reminded, I’m planning to include discussion and examples of this phenomenon in my next instruction session, and probably in many of my sessions in the future. I bet my own searching skills will be greatly improved from now on, as well. Funny how it takes a real-life frustration to teach me what I should have known all along…

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Moodle, One Year Later

Published by Iris on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

Tomorrow I’m joining a panel made up of me, our resident web-app coder guru, a faculty member, and academic technologist, and a student to talk about how things have changed one year into our adoption of Moodle as our campus’ course management system. We’re presenting this as the first of the term’s LTC lunches (generally a weekly gathering at which someone or some group presents on a topic relevant to learning and teaching while the audience munches away). I’ve only presented at two other LTC events, so I’m a little nervous, but apparently not nervous enough to have carved time out of the last week to actually prepare. I mean, I’ve thought about it a little bit, but not actually prepared.

And now, tonight, I find myself a little on the burned out side. Fall term is just not a good time for sustained or creative thinking. Fall term is a time to put out fires as quickly as possible and not look back. So, sitting here, thinking to myself how much I’d prefer reading or writing blog posts to planning this 8 minute spiel, it suddenly occurred to me that I could con myself into preparing for tomorrow if I wrote it up as a blog post!

So, here are my thoughts about how Moodle has affected the library, one year into implementation:

Moodle and Teaching

Preparing for classes: For those classes where the instructor makes use of Moodle, we librarians can now supplement the information the professor gives us about the class with direct observation of the readings students have been assigned, the context into which our sessions fall, and even the over-arching themes and questions that are important to the class. There are a lot of ways to tie our sessions to the course content, with the goal that they will interrupt the flow of the course content as little as possible. Everything from the examples we pick to the discussions we lead to the actual content of our sessions can be tailored to fit into the themes and goals of the course. When this happens, library sessions can actually augment rather than simply supplement course content.
Class logistics: Moodle makes it easy to find the exact course title, the number of students enrolled, and what students have been told about where to meet us, and other such useful information. I’ve also been able to compare lists of registered students to see if any in next week’s class already heard me speak last week. And if so, I work extra hard to make sure they’ll get as much out of the second session as they did out of the first.
Interacting with Students: Including contact information on a course’s sidebar (now made easier due to some custom coding which allows professors to simply turn on their librarian’s contact information), setting up shop in a class’ forum, or (though this hasn’t been tried) joining the class’ skype buddy list are all good ways of meeting our students where they are when they’re doing their assignments. Now, if I could just get my MeeboMe widget in there… but that’s probably asking a lot.

Moodle and My Other Work

Hey look, it’s an easy intranet! Whether it’s collecting useful information and links or hosting departmental discussions and schedules, Moodle has offered an easy way to set up quick and dirty intranets. The liaisons have one, the Library Leadership Group has one, the SCIC workers have one… and that means that we can manage our work easily. It’s made the biggest difference in the case of the SCIC site because now the SCIC students and the librarians they work with all have a common place to communicate, norm our expectations, and gather information.
Working with librarians at St. Olaf: Since we share a catalog but do not share network space, we and the St. Olaf librarians really benefit from an online space where we can house our meeting minutes, operational records, and other such useful stuff.
Project Management: We’re using our Moodle spaces to manage fairly complex projects. Not only are all the standard features (forums, places to keep documents, wikis, calendars, etc) important, but a couple of less standard features have come in very useful. One example is our newly formed eResources group. They’ve realized that very few people in the library operate with the same terminology when they’re thinking and talking about eResources, so one of their first projects this year is to create and define a uniform eResources vocabulary. To do this, they’re using Moodle’s glossary feature. They’ve divided the key terms among themselves, assigning themselves those terms in the glossary by categorizing the glossary entries according to their initials. And once the terms are defined, anywhere they’re used in that Moodle site they’ll appear highlighted with available definitions if you hover over the word.

So I think that’s what I’m going to talk about tomorrow, unless inspiration hits at the 11th hour. It seems like a representative sampling of the key ways that Moodle has impacted our librarian-ish existences in the past year.

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