We use Google Calendar to keep track of the library’s schedule (not just instruction, but reference, meetings, etc.), and I’m reasonably satisfied with it. It’s the process of scheduling classes and librarian instructors that I think could use some tweaking. In the past I’ve waited until a few days into the semester to get the final list of classes from the English Department (sometimes sections are added or canceled at the last minute, depending on enrollment). Then I’ve taken the class list and our calendar and slotted all of the sections into our library classroom schedule. And then I’ve tentatively assigned instruction librarians to the schedule, trying to make sure that no one is responsible for too many early morning, evening or weekend sessions. Once the instruction librarians have approved their schedules, each of us has contacted the English instructors for the library sessions we’re teaching. Occasionally there’s a bit of horsetrading when an English instructor requests a date change, but usually not too much.

This semester we tried something a bit different and asked the English faculty when in the semester they’d like their library session to be scheduled, emphasizing that we’d like their students to come to the session with a research topic in hand that they can use to practice searching for library and internet resources. I got a preliminary list of classes from the English department and contacted faculty a few days before classes began, but there were still a handful that I wasn’t able to get in touch with until the second week of classes. About two-thirds of the instructors responded with their preferred dates, and I was able to give most of them their first choice (I’d asked for 3 possibilities). I put the remainder of classes in our schedule as before and contacted those instructors to let them know. We also decided we’d try asking the instruction librarians to pick the classes they’d like to teach, so each of us chose our sections once the schedule was set.

I do think that scheduling went a bit smoother this semester, but it’s hard to know exactly why. We have significantly fewer sections of English Comp this spring than we had in the fall (64 rather than 126), which definitely impacts scheduling. But in some ways I feel like the amount of time spent scheduling hasn’t changed, it’s just been spread out more evenly: I’m fielding emails from faculty and putting sessions into the calendar in dribs and drabs over the course of the two weeks rather than in a couple of big, multi-hour scheduling binges. We’ll see if this method can hold up in the fall.

How does your library schedule instruction sessions? Are there any tips or tricks for streamlining the process that you can share?

I got to thinking about this after attending a recent webcast presentation sponsored by Library Journal and Serials Solution. The point of the webcast, Returning the Researcher to the Library, was to share ideas about how librarians could create a better return on their investment in electronic resources. With all the money we spend on electronic resources, who doesn’t want to create greater awareness about their availability and gather evidence that documents how students and faculty use the library’s e-resources for their research. The presenters shared some good ideas and research findings. One of the speakers shared her library’s experience with a recently implemented catalog overlay – you’d know it from its graphic/visual search functionality. After examining search logs the presenter pointed out that searches getting zero results in the old catalog did get results in the new catalog. What was the difference? The simplicity of the new overlay.

A good question was asked. Was there any analysis of the results from the searches in the new catalog? In other words, there were results but were they relevant? Other than one example involving a search that looked more like something a librarian rather than an end user concocted, the answer was no – there was no analysis of the results. All we really know is that the new, simpler interface provided some results whereas the old, complicated interface provided no results. That lead to the conclusion that from the user’s perspective “it’s better to find something than nothing”. Do you agree with that? Isn’t is possible that the something you’ll find is so irrelevant or worthless that it may be worse than finding nothing. Or the something found may only be one miniscule sample from a much greater body of information that will be completely ignored. “Oh great. I found something. Now I’m done with my research”. What you miss can often be much more significant than what you find. The results only show there were zero result searches in the old catalog. It tells you nothing about whether or not the searcher tried again or went and asked for help. In some cases finding nothing may lead the searcher to re-think the search and achieve improved results. Maybe you think I’m guilty of wishful thinking here.

I suppose what mostly had me puzzled was the suggestion that simple search interfaces, rather than instruction for research skill building, is the ultimate solution to better searching and research results. It’s true that at large research institutions it will be difficult to reach every student with instruction, and there are some strategies to tackle that problem. But here’s my issue with the assumption that simple search interfaces are the solution. I don’t care how simple the interface is, if a student lacks the ability to think critically about the search problem and construct a respectable search query it doesn’t matter what sort of simple overlay you offer, the results are still likely to be poor. Garbage in is still garbage out. That’s why library instruction still has considerable potential for improving student research in the long run.

That said, I find it difficult to argue against the potential value of catalog and database search systems that will find something that can at least get someone started in their research. These simplified systems also offer potential for resource discovery, and we certainly want students and faculty to become aware of what may now be hidden collections. Despite the shortcomings we need to further explore these systems. At least one system I examined at ALA allows librarians to customize the relevancy ranking to continually fine tune the quality of the search results. But let’s not proceed to dismantle library instruction just yet. We need to constantly remind ourselves that creating simplicity is not the same as making search systems simplistic. Research is an inherently complex task. Instruction can help learners to master and appreciate complexity. Then, on their own they can achieve clarity when encountering complex research problems that require the use of complicated search systems. That, I think, is what we mean when we talk about lifelong learning.

How difficult is it to perform a search on Google? I’m not talking about the challenge of formulating a good query, interpreting the results, or revising your search strategy to reap better results. Those are all very complicated research skills, and few people excel at them.

Complicated research skills? If you take away those basic skills what is left to a search? Have we created a generation of search zombies who listlessly tap away at the keyboard with no strategy at all just hoping they’ll find some information, and then mindlessly settle for whatever their first Google page yields? On the positive side, this suggests to me that librarians are among the few professionals who do excel at these tasks. While it’s great to know we have an increasingly rare skill , I’d feel much better if, as a profession, we were making greater progress in helping more people to develop these basic search skills, or getting more recognition for what we can do.

This leaves me with two thoughts. First, if excellence in navigating the complexity of search (and mind you that Nielsen isn’t talking about library databases – he’s just referring to search engines) is a rarified skill, why the heck can’t we leverage our expertise to raise our profile in society. You would think that the ability to cut through the web wasteland would be a prized skill that people would seek out. Second, if everyone other than librarians lack these skills, then the state of searching and the public’s research ability must be far worse than we might have imagined. Perhaps the “good enough” (or is it now “barely good enough”) mentality has finally turned the masses into search zombies. What’s the cure for that?

I suggest to my students that one way to focus their research is to pay attention to clues that suggest where the open questions are and to concentrate their efforts there. Wilson points out that previously closed questions can become open when new information comes to light. In class, you can illustrate this and attempt some humor with the line, “when I was your age, Pluto was a planet!” Then proceed to explain how the planetary status of Pluto became an open question with the discovery of the Trans-Neptunian objects Quaor, Sedna, and Eris. Then follow this up with an example of an open question in the subject matter of the class you are teaching.

The term “research” is ambiguous. For some it means consulting some oracle–the Internet, the Library, the encyclopedia–finding out what some authority has said on a topic and then reporting on it. Fine, sometimes that’s what research is. That kind of research can be interesting, but it can also be pretty boring. What makes higher education thrilling is discovering live controversies and trying to make progress on them. Academic libraries are not only storehouses of established wisdom, they also reflect ongoing debates on questions that are unsettled, in dispute, very open, and very much alive.

The Cynefin (pronounced Ku-Nev-In) Framework can help us understand why students apply simple approaches to complex problems, and how that is a formula for poor research results. Cynefin is a Welsh word that signifies the many factors in our environment and experience that influence us in ways we can never understand. A recent Harvard Business Review piece by David Snowden and Mary Boone explains how the Cynefin Framework can help us to better match our process for problem solving to the actual context of any particular problem. In other words, as a decision maker – and being an effective researcher requires the making of any number of decisions (what database to use, what search terms to use, which results to explore, etc.) – one must understand the very context of the situation in order to think clearly about developing the appropriate decision. In their November 2007 HBR article “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making” Snowden and Boone help us to understand how to make better decisions in multiple contexts. Some might call this situational leadership.

The four main contexts are simple, complicated, complex and chaotic, but here I’ll deal with just simplicity and complexity. Simple decisions have their place. It depends on the context of the problem situation. We resolve them by using patterns and processes that have delivered past success. In other words we approach simple problems by using personal best practices. The right answer is clear, evident and without dispute. There is no uncertainty. The danger lies in what the authors call “entrained thinking”. When managers and leaders approach a problem the natural reaction is to use familiar strategies and methods to seek the one right solution – the ones we have trained ourselves to use because they typically succeed. While those entrained methods may work well in simple contexts they may lead to disatrous results when the context is complex. The point of the article is that managers and leaders must first analyze the situation at hand to determine its true context, and then use decision-making strategies that effectively fit that context. In some situations that are extremely complex, the authors say that no leader may be able to devise an effective solution and that those involved in the situation must allow a solution to emerge. Great leaders recognize these dilemmas, and are able to construct the environment that generates discussion that leads to the generation of ideas.

Students come to our academic institutions after 15 or so years of research methods that may have always worked in their previous simple contexts. I need to know the names of Britanny Spears’ children…I use Google to find the answer. I need to know what year the War of 1812 started…I use Ask.com to find the answer. I need to know the reasons the American Revolution began…I use Wikipedia to find the answer. In these simple contexts there is always a right answer that can be easily obtained. If these strategies have served our students well, what do we think they’ll do when they get their first challenging research assignments? Right! They’ll apply their decision-making process that has previously led to great success. So what can we do about this? How can we help our students to understand that when it comes to college-level research they must first examine and understand the context of the decisions they will need to make before taking any action?

I propose that we add “identify and understand the context of the research problem and choose a decision-making style that matches that context” to that long list of information literacy skills that many of us list in some planning document. And it should be near the top of the list. There are times when a research question has but one correct answer and the simple context demands a simple research method. Go ahead and search Google. But when the research challenge is vague, involves uncertainty and requires navigating some complex issues, then students need to recognize it and overcome their temptation to seek out simple solutions. I’d like to think that if we can get students to think in terms of context it might help them to increase the effectiveness of their research skills. This skill could prove to be valuable for achieving academic success, but also for the many decisions our students will need to make in their post-college careers.

“Simplicity is an important trend we are focused on. Technology has this way of becoming overly complex, but simplicity was one of the reasons that people gravitated to Google initially. This complexity is an issue that has to be solved for online technologies, for devices, for computers, and it’s very difficult. Success will come from simplicity. Look at Apple, the success they have had, and what they are doing. We are focused on features, not products. We eliminated future products that would have made the complexity problem worse. We don’t want to have 20 different products that work in 20 different ways. I was getting lost at our site keeping track of everything. I would rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features.”

Sergey Brin, Co-Founder of Google, from a recent Business 2.0 feature on “How to Succeed in 2007″

“Despite an entire industry now doing ‘professional development’ in technology, keeping up with every technology has been declared impossible by the kids. In their words: “You’ll only look stupid.” So what’s a teacher to do?…Relax, you do not have to learn to actually use any of the new technologies. The kids can use these technologies far better than you or I ever will, no matter how hard we try. Our job as educators…is to become familiar enough with the results that the technologies produce to help our learners evaluate good quality from bad. In the case of search engines and Wikipedia, for example, the lessons are the difference between “search” which means finding everything, and “research” as we have defined it over hundreds of years, which means using multiple sources and understanding the relative value of those sources…Teachers should let the kids do the work, and figure out and teach the key lessons beneath the obvious.”

Marc Prensky in an essay titled “The Train Won’t Stop” that appears on p. 80 of the November-December 2006 issue of Educational Technology.

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This snippet from a Business Week article got me thinking:

“In fact, the advertising [in MySpace] can be so subtle that kids don’t distinguish it from content. ‘It’s what our users want,’ says Anderson.”

Most users of this generation claim they can tell when someone wants to sell them something — and it puts them off. But this blurring of the lines makes me question just how much they really can tell, and how much they mind. In a similar way, TV stations which identify their programs as “news” are in fact offering documentary and even “infotainment”, while staunchly clinging to the “news” designator. This is, of course, one of the tasks of information fluency librarians: to alert folks to the ways the lines are blurred.

I think this blurring is an offshoot of “continuous partial attention” (from the Pew study on the Internet and the U.S.). While multitasking can be useful, there is still value in the ability to focus on one task, and educators have a role in conveying that message. A group of students told me that the one thing they’d find most challenging about the voluntary simplicity movement was not giving up things. It was spending time alone to think, relax, and get to know themselves and their values. I was startled, but it quickly made sense to me. If their lives are so hyperconnected, solitude could be very threatening. And what does this mean for those members of this generation who are solitary beings by inclination?

–Marilyn R. Pukkila

Not for everyone perhaps but I’m keeping an eye on Laws of Simplicity, a new blog by John Maeda (MIT Media Lab) that is based on his new book The Laws of Simplicity. The book focuses on Maeda’s 10 laws of simplicity, and the blog expands on these laws as well as other ways to design simplicity into services, resources, products, and other areas of life and business. Law number 5 in particular is one I need to read more about: simplicity and complexity need each other. I have previously thought of these two as relative but not dependent on one another. The book should tell me more.

Collaboration – A Good Idea That Doesn’t Work

There is ongoing buzz about Surowiecki’s “wisdom of crowds” concept that suggests that groups of people make better decisions than individuals. It’s the thinking behind social collaboration bookmark sites as well, and again suggests that following the crowd’s bookmarks may be a better way to locate information than doing one’s own searching in an engine or library database. An article titled “What’s Next: The Idiocy of Crowds” by David Freedman suggests that while collaboration is a great idea it doesn’t work. I think there are two different ways in which we can think about collaboration. The one Freedman claims is more about groupthink is sometimes evident in the blogiverse. A blogger writes about the genius of a blog post and then before you know it 10 or 20 other bloggers are saying the same thing. The big problem says Freedman is that a lone dissenter is likely to fear voicing his or her opinion because with technology tools backlash can be magnified and distributed far more quickly. So even if there are some flaws in the post – a lone dissenter is unlikely to make that known for fear of instant backlash. The other type of collaboration I recognize is the kind that occurs on our campuses when we collaborate with faculty, colleagues and other academic professionals. In this case I endorse collaboration strongly because I think we accomplish more as partners than as individuals. This type of collaboration, I believe, is really about taking action and getting things done, than just promoting ideas with the intent of getting everyone to think the same way.

Satisfying The New Consumers

According to this article there is a new generation referred to as the Connected Generation, but it sounds a lot like the Millennial Generation to me. Similarities aside, the Connected Generation is identified in this article (part one of two) as having 10 consumer cravings. These include things such as extreme personalization, the importance of design and brands, and adventure. These “10 cravings” come from a new book on this topic. Although the book appears to be geared to corporate marketers it may be a worthwhile read for us as we always need to find better ways to promote our services and resources to our new generations of library users.

When Good Enough Seems Sensible

Jane of “See Jane Compute” has a good post on “Embracing Good Enough“. The gist of the post is that there are times when doing good enough work (in her case it’s teaching) is all right. Jane warns about the problems we create when striving for perfection causes us to miss sight of getting something important done. I think there’s something to be said for recognizing when good enough efforts can make sense. I still don’t think that should be the case for certain types of student research, especially when faculty have worked collaboratively with a librarian to design an effective assignment that demands some challenging work. From my perspective condoning “good enough” student research does a disservice to students even if we think it saves them and us time.

This seems to me a stunningly smart move – finally. Making the “find in your library” link available (for some books) through search engines was a good move, but for the casual searcher the link tended to be buried, not on the first page of search results. Linking it from Google Book Search was also a good move, though publishers who submit their work generally only have booksellers linked from their content and last I checked Google will only say they’re considering adding the library link. (It’s quite likely publishers don’t care for the idea.)

But here’s a question for academic librarians: how do we use this? It doesn’t have the advanced search options of our subscription WorldCat, and the free site points this out.

Many of our member libraries let you search WorldCat from their own Web sites or from inside the library using the FirstSearch reference service. Although the basic identifying information you’ll find on this Web site can fulfill most needs, WorldCat at your library includes extra features such as advanced search and “similar items” capabilities, as well as published reviews and excerpts to help you better evaluate an item.

But it is a version our students will be able to use anywhere after graduation. What will you do?

You see, the piece I originally started writing was about this same theme – being honest with your community. How did I come to that? It began with Godin discussing how products are traditionally marketed – mostly with lies. I wrote:

Grodin explains it is not about the product, it’s about the story marketers sell people that makes them believe they need the product. So the market leader is often the one who tells the best story – even if it masks the truth. At least that’s the paradigm that has worked in the past. That’s not what made Google a huge success. Google is wildly successful because they give people their own story to tell. They give people something to talk about. Every Google user loves to tell a story about something they found with Google that was impossible to find anywhere else. Why do you think Google came up with the idea to feature librarians in a movie? To celebrate our genius? Heck no! It’s to demonstrate that the most reliable, dependable researchers on the planet have great stories to tell about Google, and if these people who have access to more information than anyone else can tell better stories about Google than any of those other information resources they use then so can anyone else.

So what does this have to do with our user communities, and McGovern’s essay? It’s about being honest with them. In the past I’ve discussed something I call Googlelization. By this I mean actions librarians and our associated information vendors take to make our electronic resources look, act, and feel more like Google. It makes good sense. If our library users prefer Google when they search for information, then it follows they will like our library resoruces better if they too are just like Google. We see this all the time in the world of consumer products. If one company makes a product, an SUV, frozen food, whatever, its competitors will imitate that product in hopes of attracting more customers and making more sales. Put another way, we want to give our user communities a Google experience in hopes of luring them back to the library. When librarians decide that imitating Google is the way to get students and faculty to use the library’s databases, web site, and other electronic resources, they are telling a lie.

The reason it’s a lie is because the user has only been given a Google façade. What lies behind the façade is nothing like Google. Instant gratification is not always a given. Instead of constant simplicity there may be some complexity. Instead of things being completely obvious and transparent, choices may need to be made among subtle shades of gray. And when all we do is imitate search engines the biggest lie we present is to create a mirage for the library user that no critical thought is required. When you think about it that is no different than any other marketer who lies about their product so consumers will think they need it because it will make them attractive, smart, healthy, etc. But the truth is that research (”re-search” – first you search, then you search again – it requires time and thought*) may indeed require some critical thought. Why are we afraid to tell the truth?

That’s where McGovern comes in. In his essay he tells those who develop web content that it’s better to be honest with your community even if it may cause some pain or cause you to look worse than your competitor. As an example he identifies firms that allow poor reviews of their products to co-exist with the good ones. Knowing that the reviews come from typical users and not marketers, people would be rather suspicious to find nothing but glowing reviews. McGovern says:

Much marketing and advertising is about association. We see cool, happy and beautiful people using a particular product. The association is that if we buy this product we too will become cool, happy and beautiful.The Web is different. Not totally different, but different all the same. The Web is where people go to be informed. We’re on the Web because we don’t believe the hype, because we want to get some more facts. We’re driven by logic not by impulse.

Honest websites are not better because they are morally superior but because they are more believable and trustworthy. The customer has matured. The customer is better educated, better informed.

Why does any of this matter? It matters because academic librarians exert great effort to create information environments that help our user communities achieve success in resolving their information needs. It matters because we operate a learning enterprise, and getting exposed to reality and authentic practice is critical to deep learning. Rather than trying to steal or copy Google’s story we need to create our own story. That’s the story I call the library experience. It will start by telling the truth about the potential complexity that can accompany research. We will tell people it may take them longer than 60 seconds to find valuable information. We will tell them our library databases are not the same as Google instead of trying to pull the wool over their eyes with a Google search box. What we can learn from the Googles, Godins and McGoverns of the world is that we need to honestly tell people our story and in turn give them a story to tell others. We can give them an experience they’ll want to tell others about. We can’t succeed by trying to copy what Google does. It’s just never going to happen. Let’s instead commit to telling the truth and learning how to create a good story about it. It’s time for some truth in advertising in academic libraries.

* I give credit to Susan Cheney, a colleague at St. Joseph’s University, for sharing this with me