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Category: Libraries and Librarians

What Are You Up To These Days?

Published by Iris on Monday, October 2nd, 2006

The Carleton College reference & instruction librarians are exploring information literacy instruction and student research needs, and we would love to hear about your experiences and perspectives on these topics. So we’ve created a short survey (only 8 questions) to try to get a sense of what’s being done in other libraries and of the current state of student research. The survey is anonymous unless you choose otherwise.

This is my first survey, so I’ll be crushed if we don’t get any responses (hint, hint).

[Update: Public librarians, you can respond, too, if you work with college-age patrons or do a lot of instruction. When you get to the question that asks what type of school you work at, just indicate “Other” and tell us that you’re at a public library.]

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Here’s Hoping

Published by Iris on Sunday, September 17th, 2006

Yesterday was rather a trying day.

It all started during the night. You see, I was up half of it worrying about the apartment building burning down because one of my neighbors decided to throw one of her all-night parties, complete with banshee-like screaming (which is really her trademark). Anyway, this time she terrified me by setting fire to her kids’ art work which had been hanging on her apartment door. I could imagine her and her drunken friends using lighters on all sorts of other things, many of which could smolder for hours before bursting into flames. So I couldn’t sleep. (And yes, police were involved.)

Then I dragged myself to work to finish preparing for the classes I was supposed to teach. They were particularly challenging for two reasons: almost all of my preparation time during the week had been eaten up by impossible questions (which ate up hours of time and generally turned out to be unanswerable), and they were both for groups rather than classes, so there was no assignment to help motivate them to pay attention. I was also competing with their natural sense that paying attention to a library session on a Saturday was optional at best. So I had to come up with brilliantly exciting classes without the benefit of much preparation. Great.

To make matters worse, the organizer of the harder of the two classes (for the 20 new TRIO students) insisted that they be introduced to EndNote (along with getting a “general library introduction” and a tour of the library). Did I mention that all this was to take place in the space of an hour?

Well, I sat down and started listing all the things you need to know before you can use EndNote. You need the know the difference between a journal, an article, a book, and an essay in a book. You need know now that citation is important. You need to know which fields in the EndNote records are necessary and which are optional. And the list went on and on. So I decided to structure the whole class around citation as a way to introduce all this stuff, make them familiar with articles and books, and use the catalog and a database (since we could capture citations from those places into EndNote). By the end of the class, they’d be able to understand what EndNote does, but more importantly, they’d know what’s available to them at the library and some of the major distinctions between types of sources.

So here’s what I did. I took them on a whirlwind tour (which started 8 minutes late because they didn’t show up on time), then we got to work. We discussed Scholarly Communication and I highlighted citation as the key to following and joining in the conversation of scholars. Then we collectively came up with the goals of citation (which they figured was “to point readers to the words and ideas you respond to in your piece of the scholarly conversation”). I then handed out 3 books and 3 journals and charged each group of students with coming up with their own citation style and with justifying why they included the information they used in their citation and why they excluded the information they left out. Then we compared each of their citations with MLA, APA, and Chicago Manual of Style citations.

All of this took a lot longer than I’d figured (which I should have expected, but I’m only a baby instructor), and we were running late to begin with, so we were left with only 15 minutes for EndNote introductions (including the database and catalog searches so that we could capture citations). But all in all, I’m thrilled with the discussions I overheard while the students were creating their citation styles. They were arguing for and against including ISSN and ISBN numbers, discussing whether or not including the publisher’s name and the place of publication had anything to do with following the words and ideas of the authors, and generally teaching themselves a lot about the books and articles I’d handed out. What fun!

So maybe we didn’t cover very much in the grand scope of library research skills, but I kept remembering back to Randy telling me that students remember the experience first and the skills second. These students had a good experience. They were questioning me and each other, they were joking with me (about my status as the murderer in the Murder Mystery the library puts on for freshmen), and a few of them thanked me more sincerely than I’m used to at the end of a class.

So for next time, I’ll plan less. But I think I’ll include database searching as part of the process of looking at citations to figure out what you’re actually seeing in a result list. MLA International Bibliography would be good for this because it included book chapters as well as articles. I will also remember that this whole exercise (from discussing scholarly communication to discussing and comparing citations) takes 25 minutes if you’ve got 20 kids and 6 items to be cited.

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Three Cheers for Collaboration!

Published by Iris on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

One of the greatest things about working where I do is the way I get to work with people from our IT department. Or rather, it’s the way that the idea of working with the IT department isn’t a big deal. I absolutely take it for granted that we have a combined service point (which we’ve named Research/IT… yeah, “research it”…) instead of a reference desk. I think nothing of calling down to Matt on the web team if I need something from our content management system that either isn’t there yet, or that is there but I can’t figure out. In any given week, it’s entirely possible that I’ll spend more time working on projects with IT people than I will with people from other departments in the library.

Well, today we had a half-day retreat for all library staff, all IT staff, the archivist, and the slide librarian. The first hour was filled with three- to five-minute descriptions of projects we’ve done in the last year that were collaborative across our department. May I say “Wow”? We’ve done everything from design and implement a new icon set for the different material types in our catalog, to planning for a new concept of data services that will provide much needed support for all the classes that need to find, manipulate, and analyze data sets.

There’s still room for improvement, but if there weren’t life would be boring. So for the next part of the retreat we broke into groups to talk about the future. What do we want to improve? Well it’s no surprise that we want to have a better handle on who knows what so that we can tap expertise whenever possible. We also want to think of ways to improve communication so that we aren’t so dependent on vast quantities email. We’d also like to develop of system of periodic short (half-hour or 45-minute) sessions of presentations and/or discussions focused on what we do, what we think about, projects we’re working on together, projects we’re working on separately, and anything else of interest. Oh, and they would be open to the entire campus. The faculty have this in place already via our amazing Learning and Teaching Center, but we’d like periodic sessions produced by us as well.

I’m so pumped!

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Experiencing Competence Theory

Published by Iris on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

Most of you probably weren’t reading this blog back when I talked about an article I read about Competence Theory. Well, now I’ve experienced it. I know it’s not the first time I’ve experienced it, and there’s absolutely no way it’ll be the last time unless I decide to give up being a thinking, breathing, learning being. (For those of you who didn’t follow the link I provided above, shame on you, and here’s the deal: those who are incompetent are incapable of telling when they do things poorly, are incapable of seeing the differences between their poor work and the work of experts, and are generally overconfident.)

Anyway, I’ve been happily building up my first web site and learning CSS and generally having a grand ol’ time mucking about with code. And in my defense, it’s not too shabby for a first try. (It’s also fun to have a space where I can experiment with cool new things like Meebo Me.) But I’ve learned two very important lessons: I don’t know what I’m doing (yet), and stealing borrowing code and learning from it is dangerous when you don’t know what good code looks like. You may very well “learn” to do some things that aren’t kosher.

Since I’m sure I’m not the only one out there who doesn’t know the rules of the HTML road, here’s one for you. You can only use standard tags. This is true even if the tags you make up seem to work just fine, and even if you see other people making up tags right and left. I still haven’t wrapped my head around why made-up tags are taboo even if they work, but I also remember wondering what the big deal was with Boolean searching when Google seemed to understand me just fine… so I won’t argue. I assume it has to do with the fact that some unenlightened people don’t use Firefox (yet).

I’ve looked through my code again, and I can’t see any more “non-standard” tags (non-standards sounds so much better than “fake”). I’ve come to terms with using the <'span'> tag with a defined class, even thought that’s so much uglier. And I’ve learned that whenever I learn a new, cool trick from someone, I need to run it past a known and identified expert in the field because I obviously can’t tell what’s what.

This is what I love about blogging. How would I ever have learned this stuff otherwise? I should be getting continuing education credits for this.

And thanks, Steve, for your help. You’re the best.

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