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Category: Libraries and Librarians

"But Why Didn’t They Archive Their pre-1990 Web Pages?"

Published by Iris on Monday, October 9th, 2006

Most of my co-workers spend most of their time working with juniors and seniors. They teach classes for these more advanced students, and their appointment slots fill up with students needing complex data, high-level scientific research, or rare primary sources.

I, on the other hand, have spent my time this fall almost exclusively with freshmen. In fact, so far this term I’ve only had two appointments with seniors. And because I’m the liaison to the English department, and because most freshmen take various incarnations of English 109, I end up teaching classes mostly for freshmen. Consequently, I find myself teaching an entirely different genre of class than my co-workers do.

In some ways, I have it easier. I don’t have to worry about those left-field questions about SciFinder Scholar, and I don’t have to worry about my status as a non-expert in whatever field the students are studying. Hey, they haven’t even chosen majors yet!

On the other hand, though, these are hard classes to teach. The research topics range far and wide when the only requirement is to “write a research paper,” so it’s hard to choose a resource for them to learn that will benefit everyone in the class. The students are also inundated with introductory sessions for academic services, so they often come in prepared to be bored. And besides, what do you leave out when they need to learn about database searching and catalog searching and finding encyclopedia articles and evaluate web pages… All this and they don’t know how to read a call number, let alone understand that you can’t look up journal articles in the catalog. I also don’t get to delve into the really fun stuff – the advanced searching techniques, the specialized bibliographies, the thrill of the hunt.

Not only that, but the “everything’s on the web” attitude is now compounded with a new assumption: everything has always been on the web. Last week I had a student looking for government information from 1985-1990. The state government agency in question had digitized documents back to 1993, but not to 1990. “Why didn’t they archive their older web pages?” the girl asked me, bewildered. It took me a minute to realize that she was asking why all the wonderful documents that they’d put up online prior to 1990 had been taken down! As I explained that Google has only been around since 1997, and that the web was pretty much unusable by the general public before 1995, this poor freshman’s eyes got bigger and bigger.

In the face of such confusion, I’ve decided that I have a new mission at work. I’ve stopped being jealous that my co-workers get to prepare their students for complex research projects, and I’ve begun to realize that I have a special place in the library: not only am I perfectly positioned to reach more freshmen than my colleagues, but I actually enjoy the special challenge that these students present. So I will focus on reaching absolutely as many freshmen as I can. I will prepare them so that by the time my co-workers teach them in their advanced classes, these students will not only know the basics, but they will be empowered to experiment freely and ask for help unabashedly. These freshmen won’t know what hit them.

Or maybe I just like to play god. Bwa-ha-ha-ha.

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Baby Steps

Published by Iris on Sunday, October 8th, 2006

Remember last school year I said I wanted to shift my teaching? Yeah, well that hasn’t happened yet. Who knew it would be this hard?

And yet, things aren’t quite what they used to be, either. Tonight, as I planned out the class I’ll be teaching tomorrow, I realized that the way I think about and plan classes has changed. I’m not sure this has actually made any difference to the students I’m inflicting myself upon, but that’s a topic for another day (or another year… or another lifetime).

Anyway, last year my teaching notes were arranged according to the order in which I was going to introduce tools and strategies. “Searching the catalog; searching one database; searching another database; practice searching.” That’s my typical outline from last year. This year the notes are arranged around tasks, which I somehow started calling “blocks,” though I couldn’t tell you why. “Block One: Use Britannica – after an introduction to the encyclopedia, use the index to find entries related to your topic and record good looking citations for later; Block Two: To The Computers! – after an introduction to searching for books and journals, find out if we have the items you found in Britannica, then find the best possible article on your topic.” (I like having students justify the “best possible article” to each other. It opens the door to all sorts of wonderful evaluation topics.) I’m still introducing search tools and strategies, and they’re still in roughly the same order, but my focus has changed. Just a little.

Like I said, I’m still not sure this has changed my actual teaching very much, but it’s a baby step in the right direction, I think. Now, if I could just get my classes to mimic the messy non-order of actual research rather than this mythical progression from Reference Books to Books and Articles to Finished Research, Ta-Da!

Baby steps.

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More Staff Means More Service

Published by Iris on Friday, October 6th, 2006

Our library’s Annual Report was due yesterday afternoon, and I’ve gotta say, I’m very interested in one particular measure my supervisor included this year. She tracked the number of classes taught, students taught, and individual consultations held by each librarian for the last five years. Then she averaged the total by the number of librarians employed each year to show that adding staff directly impacted the services we provide.

For the first two years there were “only” five librarians and these librarians conducted quite a few individual consultations and classes per year, and they reached a lot of students. For the next two years there were six librarians, and each of these librarians conducted a few more consultations and classes per year, and they reached a few more students. Each librarian was, on average, more busy than the average librarian in the first two year. Last year, though, there were eight librarians, and each of us conducted LOTS of consultations that year and reached a LOT more students even though we taught only a few more classes than in previous years. Each “average” librarian was significantly more busy than the average librarian in any of the previous years. The graph doesn’t just slant up, it curves up quite steeply.

I think a few things have contributed to this change. Not only has our emphasis on transforming from a “faceless” institution to a “faced” institution begun to pay dividends, but we’ve begun to be perceived as accessible by the students, and we’ve begun to develop more individualized relationships with our faculty (both in pedagogical contexts and in campus social contexts). Best of all, even though we’re not faculty, we’re no longer seen as outsiders in faculty reading groups or campus committees. (Of course, I keep saying “we” but since I only joined this staff last year I can really only claim credit for riding the tidal wave. My co-workers are AWESOME.)

Not that we’re absolutely loved or completely trusted or anything. There’s a long way yet to go. But we’re beginning to see the fruits of our labors, and I am SO excited to be here to watch this tipping point in action.

And what’s in store this year? Well, I can’t speak for the rest of my co-workers (though I know they’re all teaching classes and holding consultations at a breathtaking rate). But even though I teach fewer classes and provide fewer consultations than most of my co-workers, I’ve already had more consultations this October than I had last October (and I’ve only gotten through one week of this October). This year we’re hearing a lot more students who say their professors recommended they come talk to us. And today I had my first instance of a student telling me, “I have a friend in a different major, and she keeps saying what a help her librarian is and asking me if I have a librarian. She keeps saying I should come see you.” Cool! I think our service is really taking hold.

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No Wonder We Felt Busy

Published by Iris on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006

A huge part of the librarians’ job at MPOW is spending time working individually with students, and we keep statistics about how many students, what class years they are, how long we spent, what their majors are, and such like. Well, we learned today that these numbers increased last year over the year before by 63%!

This is most important (to my life) because we’d just been told that these stats were actually down from the year before. But at the eleventh hour our reference associate discovered that the spreadsheet we were using wasn’t actually counting everything we put into it. As soon as we fixed the formula, our numbers jumped so high we spent quite a while trying to figure out how we’d gotten it wrong again. But it wasn’t wrong. We’d just been busy.

Funny how a couple little numbers can make you feel so much better about your work day.

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