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Category: Tools and Technology

Modes of Communication

Published by Iris on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Yesterday reference and instruction librarians from the five Oberlin Group libraries in Minnesota. I always love these meetings. They’re a chance to reconnect with our colleagues at other libraries, to think together about issues that will shape our futures, and to take large issues and examine how they map onto our particular experiences. This time the issue was the future of reference service. Just a little topic… but it was really interesting to see the range of strategies these five libraries are taking employing to continue their quest to serve their faculty and students.

Not surprisingly, an underlying theme of the presentations and discussion sessions was communication. How do you communicate effectively in new media? How do you communicate the worth and weight and legitimacy of a reference question to an embarrassed student? How do you communicate the value of the library to faculty at a liberal arts institution?

These are posts for another evening, though, because what’s been on my mind today started as a lunch-time conversation on a similar theme. I was talking to Barbara Fister (who writes in too many places to make name-linking easy, so I’ll just choose ACRLog for her this time) and two librarians from St. Olaf when the topic of professional communication came up. Specifically, where is the professional discussion about librarianship happening right now, and what’s happening with email lists?

And it got me thinking (again) about the modes of professional communication that work for me and the ones that don’t. And for me, for most things, email lists do not work. Something about writing a post to an email list intimidates me to my very core. This feels odd to say, since I happily write here for all to see. And yet, the though of all those “lurkers” on email lists paralyzes me. Maybe it’s because whatever I’d post to an email list will end up in somebody’s inbox. I’m shy about “spamming” people who may not know me or care about what I have to say, especially when I don’t know who I’m spamming. At least with this blog, I know that if you click on my URL or subscribe to my feed, you meant to do that. And if I get on your nerves you can just not read me any more. This sense that I’m not intentionally intruding on people’s inboxes seems to be the key to my being able to actually participate in a professional community.

I’ll write later about why I think multiple modes of communication are important, but it boils down to this: different people are shy about different things. I’m shy about intruding on people’s inboxes. Other people are not, and I always appreciate when people email me. (Hey, I never claimed to be logical!) Email lists just don’t work for me. I’m glad they work for others.

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What are Reference Works Good for in the Google Age?

Published by Iris on Friday, March 14th, 2008

Over the last couple of years, my co-workers and I have noticed steady and possibly even increasing use of our reference collection by our students. And while I love this (I mean… obviously… cuz I’m a reference librarian), I’m also always just a little bit surprised by it. I mean, they’ve got Wikipedia and Google, and goodness knows they use them for everything. Hey, even I use them umpteen thousand times per day, so I certainly can’t fault anyone.

Well, we recently had a meeting of area librarians at which we discussed the future of reference collections. Will they go all electronic? Will they become obsolete altogether? And how will our physical spaces in the library change over time? And all this got me to thinking about what the actual value of a reference collection is these days.

With a few exceptions, I think the value of a reference collection is not in the ability to locate facts. That’s what it used to be good for, but unless I’m looking for pretty specialized facts that I don’t think would get published on the web, or that would be hard to digest on a screen, I generally go to my friend Google. And while I’m sure that reference collections were never just about finding facts, that was one of their key roles before, and continues to be their perceived function. But, for me the reference collection is valuable in a completely different way these days. It’s not about discrete facts; it’s about context. It’s not a place to find what you need; it’s a place to find a beginning and get help interpreting result lists.

Built in bibliographies
One of the things that seems to resonate well with students is that they don’t have to dive into topics and build initial bibliographies from scratch. Just like they can consult their professors for starting points, they can consult an expert by turning to a subject encyclopedia and gleaning citations from there. Scholarship is all about building on other people’s scholarship, so take advantage of it an jump in like the real scholars do.

Term harvesting
I’ve already talked about how terms are crucial to search. While encyclopedias and dictionaries can’t help every time, they can be treasure-troves of terms, and they can help students deploy new terms by providing some disciplinary context for each new concept.

Managing result lists
And this brings me to the way that reference works serve us in this online age: they provide context that can help students look at a database result list and pick out likely items to open and explore further. We’ve all seen students who get overwhelmed by massive result lists and either just scrap the whole effort, open random items, or start doggedly opening every single result. (We have growing numbers of students who simply will not search things like ProQuest or JSTOR because there are too many results.) Disciplinary experts, on the other hand, scan for likely looking results and only open those that are related or that they’re pretty sure will help them figure out how to tweak their search. And reference works can help students develop the capacity to inch toward a more intelligent interpretation of and navigation through result list.

What else? As we think about collections and information needs shifting, where do reference collections fit?

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The Problem with Vocabulary

Published by Iris on Thursday, March 6th, 2008

There are a couple of things I really like about being primarily a subject librarian, and about having subject librarians easily accessible in a college library. For one thing, it sure helps when those crazy-hard questions come to the desk and you can say something helpful-sounding like “I can get you started with some of the basics, and then you should go see so-and-so for more in-depth help.” Of course, then there are those crazy-hard questions that come to the desk and are in my area, so I can’t pass them off… but we’ll forget about those for the moment.

But one of the things that’s most valuable about this division of labor in an undergraduate environment is that each librarian can concentrate on developing discipline-relevant vocabulary. I’m not talking about vocabulary in the “how to talk to students” sense at the moment, though that’s certainly very important. After all, even “primary source” means something different to each discipline. No, I’m just talking about terms and vocabularies associated with topics of research. When a student of literature comes and talks to me about rhizomatic narratives or the relationship between metaphor and ideology, I have a whole thesaurus in my head that opens to the correct spot and starts coming up with alternate search terms. I know where these things fit into umpteen different literary theorists’ perspectives, I can recognize key works referenced in the titles of scholarly papers. Not only can I employ these terms and names directly by adding them to my search, but I can recognize articles in a result list that might be relevant simply by calling on this mental map of the topic. Then I can open those results and use vocabulary I find there to create new searches.

Since search is fundamentally a character-matching game, with people supplying characters in a row (i.e. words) and computers matching those characters to the characters in its index, lack of vocabulary renders search essentially useless. I don’t know or recognize the terms that are central to, for example, the IMF. So I’m basically stuck with ineffective searches and only limited options for refining my searches. And I can’t help steer students to refine their terms because I have no mental map of this topic beyond “something to do with money, and something that’s international.”

If we don’t have access to mental maps, how do we build our students’ mental maps? And how do we generate search examples that will help them learn?

And how do I develop mental maps of all the research topics my students need help with?

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Backing up Your Blog

Published by Iris on Sunday, February 17th, 2008

And while I’m in a blog maintenance kind of a mood, here’s something else you might find useful. Blog Backup Online is a free service that will back up your blog on a daily basis and save it on their servers. (You can also download an XML file to your computer, if you want.) The free version allows you 50MB of space on their servers, but that goes a long way. This entire blog only takes up 2.64MB.

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