I’m the RSS reader type who subscribes to a little bit of everything and then doesn’t really pay attention to which is which when skimming through the feeds (let’s just say “detail oriented” doesn’t go on my resume). Yet somehow in the melee of my reader, the Digital Reference blog keeps getting my attention. It’s not that Stephen’s posts are particularly controversial, but he just keeps hitting topics in a way that sparks my mind into motion. Most recently the one that got the wheels turning was “Referring patrons to open access resources.” Here’s what he had to say:

As I’ve been reading up on open access journals and open access archives (AKA open access repositories), I’ve been wondering to what extent I have been intentionally and unintentionally guiding patrons to these resources. I have to admit that I can’t remember a time when I explicitly referred a student to search for content in an open access archive or suggested they use a tool to locate articles in OA journals.

What got me in this paragraph was the “I have to admit” part, the feeling that this post is somehow an apology for not directing students to OA databases first. If that’s something to be sorry for then I’d better get in line, because I’ve never deliberately led a student to an OA resource. In my opinion, that would be something like suggesting a book on their topic because it was a nice color. Sure, I enjoy looking at a book with a pretty cover, but I’m sure as heck not going to select (er, judge) it on that point.

So here we go, into the “education vs. indoctrination” debate. Do we push tools and resources because we want to teach students to believe what we believe, or because they deliver what the student wants? Seems like a no-brainer, but even so early in my career I’ve been in a few situations where I wrestled with that question — such as the young boy who came in when I was at the public library and asked for books that support his pro-life opinion (can you have politics at 10?). I can remember some passionate debates on the subject in library school, and the issue reaches into all of higher education. Do a search on “education and indoctrination” anywhere you like and you’ll immediately find yourself in the thick of it. For instance, consider this comment in a Chronicle article by Jonathan Malesic entitled, “The Smell of Indoctrination in the Morning”:

In graduate school, I once overheard one teaching assistant tell another that she wanted to try to make her students into liberals before it was too late. Now, I think that having a few more liberals around, especially if they were strategically placed in swing states, would be a great thing for the republic. So in one sense, I sympathize with that TA. But I also know that to make students into liberals is an essentially illiberal act.

The fuzzy part of the issue is the question of where that line between education and indoctrination actually lies. Is it like pornography: you know it when you see it? Maybe. Or it could be even more tenuous and grey; an ever-shifting line that challenges us on a daily basis to uphold our own democratic values. It’s our privilege as librarians to know what the best information sources are, and to know what sources make for a healthy future of information. It is our challenge to communicate that knowledge to others. But is a reference interview the place to do so?

What do you think? Do you recommend resources based on need and relevance to the reference question, or do other factors come into play? In what circumstances do you (however subtly) push your values out to unsuspecting students? It’s a question worth asking ourselves periodically, and trying to measure how close we stand to that shifting, grey line.

A few weeks ago I questioned the value of a semester-long course on trend technologies along the lines of web 2.0 applications. I appreciated the comments to this post. ACRLog readers shared the value they received from LIS technology courses. More than a few people acknowledged the importance of technology courses for LIS students but made distinctions about the nature of the technology taught in those courses. Now what about LIS academic librarianship courses? Hopefully we all are in agreement that a course in academic librarianship is important for a future academic librarian.

I struggle with deciding what to include in the academic librarianship course I teach. At the Drexel LIS program the courses are only 10 weeks long (they are on the quarter system), so with a limited timeframe the content must be carefully selected. Though human resource management, budgeting and other administrative subjects are valuable to cover I find them necessary to skip; there just isn’t sufficient time. I think it’s more essential to focus on the critical subject areas my students will be likely to encounter as entry-level librarians. From my perspective, becoming well versed in the structure and operations of a higher education institution is critical; you need to understand the industry not just the library. To contribute to their employment prospects I also equip them to knowledgeably discuss the issues of the day.

Major topics covered in my course, and other academic library courses I’ve looked at, include higher education history, organizations and key concepts, library organizational structure, accreditation, tenure status, public services, technical services, information literacy, instruction, e-resource management, collection management, scholarly communications, library as place, community colleges, academic library futures, and then a variety of “hot” topics are scattered throughout and one session is devoted to the latest issues. That sounds like a good amount of content but I don’t doubt some important topics are missed. The overall goal is to prepare the student for the academic library setting, with the ability to keep learning as they enter that environment (thus additional attention is paid to “keeping up” in higher education and academic librarianship).

But I’d like to know what you think are the most important topics to cover in an academic library course. I’ve prepared a brief survey for those who’d like to share their priorities. There are four questions. The first two are simple background information queries. The third question asks you to rate 30 topics/activities as either essential, important, marginal or unnecessary. With the fourth open-ended question you can add additional topics that you think are important. I hope you will take a few moments to complete the survey. I’ll report the results in a week or two.

Well, I can now add “conference attendance” to my professional resume: I just got back from attending the LOEX Conference in Oak Brook, IL. Not that this is my first conference; I did attend the 2006 ALA Annual in New Orleans and the Louisiana Library Association Conference while in grad school. But as some of you might agree, I found it to be a quite difference experience now that I’m a librarian. As a student, I had trouble focusing in on which sessions would be the most beneficial. Now that I have a job, it’s a little easier; I can go to the sessions that correspond with my position and/or professional interests (which are, admittedly, somewhat varied). This was easy at LOEX, as everything had to do with library instruction and information literacy!

This conference came at a perfect time for me. Since there aren’t many summer classes offered at my university, I will get a break from teaching and have time to focus my energies on various projects that I’ve been adding to a list throughout the year. Among other things, I would like to find ways of improving our instruction program, and more specifically, how we can better engage students.

The theme of this year’s LOEX was “Librarian as Architect: Planning, Building, & Renewing,” which fits in quite nicely with my goals for the upcoming academic year. While I was very pleased with all of the sessions I attended (and believe me, it was hard to narrow it down!), I think my favorite was one entitled “The Art of Questioning in Instruction.” The presenter, Michelle Dubaj, from SUNY Fredonia, had attendees complete various activities designed to have us examine our current instructional styles. We brainstormed ways of passively/actively engaging with students prior to classes, took a quiz to see how often we recognize which students fall under different different categories (i.e. “are conversation hogs,” “are lost on their assignment,” or “will kill the mojo of group work”), and drew diagrams of our instructional spaces to see where our “active zones” and “blind spots” are. She also had the entire group come up with a list of possible questions to ask during instruction sessions, which she graciously offered to compile and send to us.

I will definitely be using Michelle’s suggestions and techniques when my next instruction sessions roll around. However, I don’t think the “art of questioning” has to be limited to instruction. Many of us engage students all day long, whether it’s in a reference transaction, at the circulation desk, or just walking around the library. And, going back to the title of the session, I do believe that questioning is an art, not a science. It can be hard and cumbersome to engage students, but this doesn’t mean it should be neglected. It may take a few questions and some gentle probing to get an answer, but in the end, I think the act of questioning makes our interactions with students much more worthwhile (on both sides).

Great news from ACRL (via LJ’s Academic Newswire)! The members-only preview of forthcoming articles in CR&L will now be available to everyone, not just members. This means you can not only read them yourself, you can blog about them, link to them, send them to people who you think may be interested - in short, they can be read and circulated, and that’s good for the field. About time, too, given we’ve urged this on other disciplines.

Also, in the Chron, Jennifer Howard reports on a high-powered initiative to bring humanities scholarship into the open. According to the story,

Scholars in the sciences have been light-years ahead of their peers in the humanities in exploring the possibilities of open-access publishing. But a new venture with prominent academic backers, the Open Humanities Press, wants to help humanists close the gap.

The nonprofit operation—described by those involved…

To continue reading this premium article, you must have a Chronicle account AND a subscription or an online pass.

Whoops, sorry. I’ll gloss it for you. The Open Humanities Press will use ibiblio - a publishing platform based at UNC Chapel Hill that sees itself as a “conservancy” of quality texts online - and the leverage of prestige. It has enlisted the old guard (formerly known as the Young Turks) - including philosopher Alan Badiou, theorists Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and J. Hillis Miller; even Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar who, as president of MLA, nudged his colleagues to stop seeing the book as the one and only acceptable merit badge for tenure. With these big names behind it, who can be against it? Oh, and Peter Suber is also on the board, so at least one of them will know how to frame the argument in plain English. It will start by pulling together seven open access journals and plans to build from there.

Why has it taken humanities longer to get on the bandwagon? Partly, it’s cultural. Humanists (and I’m one of them) value printed texts and their special affordances. Partly, we’re not quite the practical nerds that scientists are. Largely, the sense of authorship in the humanities is simply more individualistic. Intertextuality notwithstanding, humanists seem far less inclined than scientist to see themselves as part of a shared, massive effort to collectively move us closer to the truth. We’re more inclined to stop in our tracks and parse what “truth” means, if anything. Humanists take pride in developing their own voice, and tend to view their ideas and their expression as unique, whereas scientists are more inclined to subsume their individuality of voice into a recognizable and predictable pattern. You know exactly where to find the methods and the results, and there are no puns in the title.

But all differences aside, humanists want to be read. They want their ideas to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the world. They want to connect. Developments like these will help - at a time when sustaining our old way of doing things is growing more and more challenging.

We have much in common. Academics have a core commitment to sharing that not only helps share their work, but their methods of inquiry. As John Ziman has said in an essay about science (”Is Science Losing its Objectivity?” Nature 382 (29 August 1996): 751-754) a communal norm requires that “the fruits of research should be regarded as ‘public knowledge.’ It covers all the practices involved in the communication of research results to other scientists, to students and to society at large. But this has philosophical implications. By insisting on the pooling of personal knowledge gained from individual experience, it stresses the role of observation and experiment in science and underpins scientific realism and empiricism” (751).

Though empirical “observation and experiment” may not be exactly how the humanities works, the methods scholars use to get at truth are not haphazard or self-interested. By making scholarship public knowledge, humanists can foster knowledge beyond our narrow institutional and individual perspectives. We can do better than address our work to a tiny cadre of specialists.

This seems as good a time as any to point out that the Sparky Awards (co-sponsored by SPARC and ACRL) invite students to create a short video on the value of sharing information. You can view last year’s winners or find shareable materials here.

I had the great honor recently to be invited to speak to a class at my alma mater (the LEEP Program at the University of Illinois). The Instruction class, taught by Melissa Wong, was finishing up their work and had myself and Chad Kahl of Illinois State University dialed in for a little Q & A on the realities of instruction in academic libraries. I was definitely filling the “new guy” role, as Chad’s program at ISU has already reached the kinds of goals we’re still trying to aim for here at Norwich. But I’m fine playing the rookie, since I’m not too far removed from library school myself, and it has caused me (like Brett Bonfield recently) to marvel at what a long, strange year of transition it’s been.

The discussion varied from Chad and I each describing the kind of instruction we do and the programs at our schools, to the things we’ve learned along the way and our humorous anecdotes/war stories. We had questions on how we found ourselves in the profession, how we stay active and involved, and also what we enjoyed best about library school. The best question we received was asking the opposite, however: what was found to be missing from our library school experience as we moved into professional jobs?

The various thorny issues regarding the academic environment kept coming up as Chad and I each outlined our experiences in providing information literacy instruction at our separate institutions, but this question gave us the opportunity to speak directly to the fact that neither of us had a class that helped provide some kind of general academic library overview. We then got talking about what that class would look like, and about what aspects of working in academic libraries aren’t really covered in most library school classes. The scholarly publishing and research aspect should be covered a little by just being in a graduate-level program, and I personally learned a lot about how academic libraries work by just having a non-professional job at one while in school, so we returned to one main issue: working with faculty. We agreed that trying to make inroads with faculty regarding your instructional services and resources was one of the hardest parts of our jobs, and the part we were the least prepared for coming out of school. I remarked that when I started last fall I had assumed that I would be announced as the new Humanities Department Liaison, and then friendly faculty from the department would drop by the library to introduce themselves and chat about what kind of research help they and their students would need, possibly even taking me out to lunch after we’d been talking too long in my office. LOL, indeed.

Chad and I agreed that just having a few champions of library services can go a long way, but that being an effective academic librarian requires a lot of hard work in making your case with faculty again and again. I’ve learned, as simple as it sounds, that you really have to think about where they’re coming from and what’s important to them, and these are things that I’ve had to learn on the job and in the moment. I’m not certain that a library school class could be as effective as work experience, but it would be very valuable to incoming academic librarians to have more of a background in how the university environment functions (administration issues, inter- and intra-departmental issues, research versus teaching, budgets, faculty assumptions, campus hierarchy, etc.), as well as how librarians fit into the picture. Admittedly, the environment isn’t the same everywhere, but it’s a strange world that you will be thrust into at a whole new level (I worked in an academic library for almost four years but have a completely new perspective now that I’m a full capital-L Librarian) very quickly after graduation.

So, yes, it’s been a very fast and full first year for me. I wished the class good luck on their job searches, thankful that I’m through that uncertain phase and facing other challenges, including now serving on a search committee myself. And, I’ve got some faculty I need to sit down with before they disappear for the summer. I may get in a few more cracks before next fall’s crop of new academic librarian bloggers starts in, but thanks for reading if this is my final post.