Category: Random Thoughts

We spent about one day in library school talking about The Reference Interview. I remember writing an exam essay on the topic of Compromised Questions.* I remember not reading the assigned chapter from Katz’s seminal Introduction to Reference Work** and not feeling like I’d missed much. I remember doodling in my notebook. After all, how much theory do you need when your goal is to figure out what a student needs when the student approaches the reference desk? Not a whole lot, I figured. You just ask them.

It wasn’t until I’d worked at a reference desk for a while that I gained any appreciation at all for the thing. Time and time again, the mostly idle chit chat that filled the time while we walked to the stacks to get the book the student had asked for resulted in us going back up to the desk and starting down new paths. Time and time again, it turned out that the book the student wanted wasn’t the best way to get at the real question, it was just the thing the student had felt was the right thing to ask about. As it turns out, “the reference interview” is really code for “figure out what the person really needs, especially when they ask for something else.”

And then I started joining committees and task forces in the library and on campus. And as it turns out, we all suggest changes to policies and procedures and practices and tools all the time, changes that sometimes can’t be accommodated or don’t go over well. But often, if we back up and really lay out the actual problem that we want to solve, the actual root of frustration, we could come up with a change that would address that and that can be accommodated, or that will go over well. Sometimes the actual problem is nothing like the problem we thought we were solving. Sometimes recognizing the actual problem means that those of us who were against the change now see the need for it. Nearly always, if we solve that actual problem, everyone comes away satisfied rather than chafing at compromises. So now, when meetings start heading toward stalemate, I try to remember the reference interview, remind myself that any question can be a compromised question, and start probing for the real problem.

It’s an odd thing when one of the topics I most consciously blew off in school turns out to be the thing I rely on most heavily, day in and day out.

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Running out of space to shelve in reference means a push to weed in reference, and now that I’ve made a first pass through the actual reference shelves in my care, I’m doing a quick look at the stacks just to find reference-y titles that might have been moved there but that we don’t need any more.

I’m finding the best stuff.

Friday I found a bibliography of bibliographies. Then I discovered a couple more bibliographies of bibliographies. I think I’ll compile a bibliography of bibliographies of bibliographies.

Sunday I found this (and be sure to take a look at the chapter titles).

Today I found an unopened bottle of Smirnoff Ice, appropriately shelved in (ok, behind) the PGs. I weeded that right outta there.

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Collection development is kind of like the study of philosophy, for me: I know just enough to be dangerous, it’s not a big enough part of my job for me to get enough practice to improve, and I’m pretty sure it’s at the heart of a lot of stuff I care about, but it’s a bit of a mystery to me.

Well, this year we ran out of room to shelve new books in our reference collection, which is the only part of the collection my department selects for in any systematic way (and I, for one, have neglected my piece of it rather shamefully, particularly given my penchant for teaching there). Not being able to shelve new books is a pain, so we decided to weed. I’ve been meaning to do that since I got here. Every summer it’s on my summer projects list. Every summer other things squeeze it out. Every Fall I get back to teaching and hope that nobody notices. “I’ll be sure to get to it next summer,” I tell myself. “This time I really will.”

Well, now I am. And it’s kind of fun.

It’s also kind of funny. I’m the liaison for literature and languages, so the Ps are my kingdom, and I can tell just how foreign a foreign language is by how many dictionaries we have for that language. We have a fair few for English what with the etymology dictionaries and the representatives from the big name dictionaries and the OED and the slang dictionaries and the dictionaries for regionalisms and… you get the idea. We have a similarly useful complement of French and Spanish dictionaries. Then we have several shelves of Russian dictionaries, and shelves upon shelves of Asian language dictionaries.

And I know why! You can’t just sit down, pick up a book, and say, “Oh, an etymology dictionary — we need one of those. Oh, three thesauri — we only need one of those.” You have to do a whole lot of work just to figure out what it is that you’re holding. And then a whole bunch more work to see how it compares to the other things you’ve got. And I’m still not at all sure how to figure out which dictionaries are the “important” ones beyond seeing how many WorldCat libraries hold that title. So the inclination is just to leave them all there unless they’re damaged.

But if you actually start doing some of the sleuthing, you find interesting things. Like several multi-volume dictionaries where we only own the first third of the alphabet, for example. Or indexes to sets where we don’t own the actual set. And so my shelves are slowly but steadily thinning out after all.

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This week, the lunch session put on by the Learning and Teaching Center was called Harvesting Our Mistakes, and featured frank discussions about courses or parts of courses that had gone wrong, and what the faculty had learned from that. Some learned that even when it’s a bit artificial, there needs to be some coherent thread to a course (the lower the level, the more coherent the thread). Others talked about developing the confidence to make mistakes boldly and in public so that their students could participate in fixing the mistakes and also see that mistakes happen. Many agreed that it takes 3 tries to get a course right: the first time being a grand experiment, the second time overcompensating for the first time’s mistakes, and the third time settling into the right groove. And most people talked about how they exert far greater control over their classes (plan more, talk more, and generally bulldoze information into their students more) when they’re having a bad day, and how it’s a lot easier to go with the flow on a good day. Boy do I ever have that experience!

Well, I had a class go pretty poorly the day before sitting in on this discussion, so I was right there with the group. I was ready for the self-flagellation. I was ready for the moaning and gnashing of teeth. There were a couple of people who were talking about mistakes being good for students, but I figured I could safely skip over those comments as they weren’t really on topic. My topic. My Class Had Failed — I Had Failed. That was the topic.

But I got to wondering why I was having a hard time seeing an up-side to my failure. Maybe it was because it had been of the “I was having a bad day and therefore babbled at the students in incoherent loops, periodically asking them pathetically, hopefully, ‘Does that make sense?’ and taking very little comfort from their dazed head nods” kind of a class. Maybe it was because I was working with a professor I’d never worked with before and therefore left the class pretty sure I’d never hear from him again. Maybe it was because I’m pretty sure that one of my biggest failings (aside from being too tired to cede any control over to the students) was having so little sense of a coherent thread to the session that I’m sure the students had no idea why we were there. Complete failure of learning goals, there, and it was ALL MY FAULT.

But as it turns out, there are a couple of useful things I’ve learned from this and similar experiences. For one thing, I’ve learned that I really should always have the talk I’ve had with a few professors so far, saying up front that this is the first iteration of the class, and that afterward we should talk about what worked and what didn’t so that the next time we work together things go better. I don’t know quite why I get shy about that talk, but it always makes things go better.  I think I also need to think of these classes less as one-shots and more as iterations. That’s how I think of them when they’re going well (one-shot plus follow up with students in my office plus work with the professor to hone the next iteration, etc), so why do I lose sight of that when things go poorly? And finally, I think I need to come up with a plan for what to do when this happens next time. If I were their professor I’d come back the next session and say “So, last time was kind of confusing, and this time I thought we’d go back and untangle some of those threads.” So what can I do if I’m not going back into their classroom? Surely there’s some option.

Of course, all this is complicated by the very real constraints of being a visitor to the class. I don’t get to start fixing my mistakes in the next class session, and since these were first year students it’s possible I soured them on librarians in general. But if there’s one thing that I learned from the lunch session this week, it’s that I’m not the only one who’s failed recently. We’re all human.

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