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.

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.

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).

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…

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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.

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.

ACRLog - How did this pilot project come about?

Overfield – The primary reason was that we employ a satellite research office model where subject librarians, in this case in business and the sciences, operate from the library as well in various buildings across campus. Our remote locations, combined with our other obligations, made communication difficult.

ACRLog - Do you know of any other libraries using BlackBerries?

Overfield – I am not aware of specific cases that feature the dedicated use of mobile technology by academic librarians, though I have heard discussions about text reference via cell phone. I am certain that others must, or soon will, be following the same model. Our research support team shares a cell phone but it is only used whenever someone is both “on call” for research support backup and simultaneously not able to remain in their offices.

ACRLog - What were some of the reservations people had?

Overfield – One clear factor was cost and that limited us to three devices in the pilot. At this moment I have asked our telecommunications office to compare the annual costs of the BlackBerry and the desk phone because our wholesale adaptation of this idea will need to consider the bottom line as well as other factors. The other concern was that the participants would find themselves receiving and answering calls and emails all night, everynight, over holidays, and on vacation. I am also personally concerned with the possibility of losing the device. Desk phones are low risk and it is very difficult to misplace one.

ACRLog - Well, what about answering questions at all times of the day and night?

Overfield – The BlackBerry allows me to easily keep up with patrons. When I am unable or unwilling to make replies I simply leave them for my next opportunity. Everyone wants to be as available to students as possible, and the blackberry does accomplish this very well. The main thing is that it is very simple to read and reply to email, even at odd hours, because you can check your messages by pressing a single button. Laptops require an internet connection, a power supply, passwords, and time to load the applications. I have installed del.icio.us onto the BlackBerry and it is quite painless to cut and paste links into emails to students. Two of us in the pilot commute to campus using public transportation and we are normally able to read and respond to emails before we arrive at work.

ACRLog - What are the benefits of using a BlackBerry?

Overfield – Students, faculty, and colleagues can reach me at one telephone number, or via email, at any time, regardless of which building I am in, or whether or not I am even on campus. With emerging technology like Twitter I can make updates to my websites by simply texting them to my account. Students can also subscribe to “follow” my updates via text or email, so with the blackberry there is the potential to communicate with patrons without anyone having to be at a desk or in front of a computer.

I have dramatically reduced my response time to student questions. In cases were I cannot reply in an appropriately complete manner I am, at least, able to forward the email to someone who may be on campus or inside the library. My entire address book is loaded in the device so it is easy to reach any of my colleagues at any time. Again, response time is something we are very pleased with, and students have frequently been impressed with our shortened response times this semester.

ACRLog - The drawbacks?

Overfield – It is first and foremost a new technology for my colleagues and I, and we have had to spend ample time learning to use the device efficiently. I was confident with the device after a few weeks though I am still learning tricks after several months.

It is also very hard to type using the BlackBerry. Stated simply, the keys are small and our thumbs are large. The other significant draw back is that many websites are not optimized for mobile viewing. I have noticed that some academic libraries have developed a mobile version of their sites, but this adaptation ends when a user follows a link to a different website or database. The web browsing capability of the iPhone seems like it would be much better, and my hope is that other devices will soon catch up.

ACRLog - What’s the next step?

Our panel will meet to discuss our individual experiences using the device. We plan to review all of the pros and cons and will then report our findings back to our colleagues. At that point, if our experience has proven to be positive, we will conduct a cost benefit analysis to see whether or not the mobile phone, with its many abilities, is a viable alternative to sitting at one’s desk, next to one’s phone, in case it should ring.

It should be noted that our project would not have been possible without the endorsement of Joseph Lucia, University Librarian, and the participation and efforts of Linda Hauck, Research Support Librarian, and Alfred Fry, our Science Librarian.

Before we get to the statement let me share my source of inspiration. It involves revealing a guilty pleasure. I watch little television outside of the occasional sports event. But the one show I never miss since it began several seasons ago is Hell’s Kitchen. I have no rational explanation for this other then to say I get a kick out of shows involving restaurants; I never even watch food channel programs. I got hooked when I caught a few episodes of the short lived reality show featuring Rocco DiSpirito that chronicles his effort to open a restaurant. If you ever thought your job was stressful, demanding or just plain crazy, you are not even in the same league as to someone trying to open or run a restaurant.

Without going into great detail about Hell’s Kitchen just know that in the first episode each aspiring chef must prepare and present his or her signature dish - which Gordon Ramsey promptly trashes in the most humiliating fashion possible. Nearer to the end of the show the surviving two contestants usually prepare their signature dish for a panel of food experts in one of their final competitions. A chef’s signature dish, according to Ramsey, defines the chef. It sums up in a single presentation all their skills, and expresses their creativity and accumulated experience. The signature dish says “this is who I am”.

I’ve not thought much about this idea until just recently when reading through the book Crucibles of Leadership by Robert J. Thomas. On page 80 Thomas briefly profiles Bill Russell, perhaps the greatest basketplayer of all time; Russell played center for the Celtics team that won eleven championships. In the book Russell reveals that his earliest source of inspiration was his public library. He recalls a fascination with art books. He realized he couldn’t draw or paint, but marveled at the works of famous artists. The valuable lesson that he took away from his reading was that all the world’s great artists had a distinctive quality that Russell thought of as the signature statement. While he didn’t become the next Michelangelo, he did create his own signature statement and applied it to his overpowering defensive style to become the dominating player of his era (you Wilt fans may beg to differ). No one else could capture Russell’s signature style.

I have never heard an academic librarian express his or her signature statement. It’s not uncommon, I believe, for educators to have a statement of teaching philosophy, but if we’re educators how come we have no way of concisely stating what defines us as a librarian or educator. So my humble proposal is that academic librarians should develop their own signature statement that provides insight into the distinctive characteristics that define them as a librarian. To guide you, consider Thomas’ definition: a phrase or sentiment that serves as a source of inspiration that guides both the heart and the mind. Since my personal philosophy is to avoid asking others to do something that I wouldn’t or haven’t done myself, it’s only fitting that I take a shot at my own signature statement. I think my passions for keeping up, blended librarianship and design thinking certainly contribute to my signature statement. So here’s what I came up with:

Ideas and innovation inspired by a desire to learn in the service of my community.

Well, just like most of those signature dishes, it needs some work. If you are willing to create a signature statement for yourself, share it as a comment.

I’m “borrowing” this post title from a fascinating book I read a number of years ago by Lucy Lippard, an art critic who wrote about the ways that we construct our identities from our surroundings. She writes:

Our personal relationships to history and place form us, as individuals and groups, and in reciprocal ways we form them. Land, history, and culture meet in a multicentered society that values place but cannot be limited to one view.

Many of us underestimate the reciprocal relationship between ourselves our our places, and relocate often enough that we lack the opportunity or desire to gain a deep knowledge of the place where we live NOW. This applies to everything around us: the landscape, the people and friendships we form, our local history, and the organizations to which we dedicate our time and skill.

Participation in a national organization such as ACRL is extremely valuable — I would be the last person to argue otherwise — but participation in a local library association is arguably even more important. On the local level we gain essential historical knowledge of our place; we develop relationships with the people who keep the libraries of all types in our area running; we learn the ways of the institutional, regional, and state boards that determine our funding. Most importantly, on the local level we can share the skills and knowledge we have gained from our national involvement to empower and improve the libraries in our region. We can collaborate and build our local communities together.

So perhaps my blog post has turned treatise, but I have come to see local participation as a privilege and a duty. I have been fortunate in the opportunities I have been offered within ALA and ACRL, and will continue to enjoy my national participation. Yet we are also physical people living in a physical places, and our identities are being formed around us. “Where are you from?,” asks everyone we meet at our national conferences.

What I say to that question is “Boise State University in Idaho.” But in truth my answer varies by the day, for each day I learn more about what it means to live and work as a librarian in Idaho, a place unique from any other. In our globalized world, living in the local is a whole new way of being, and one that brings unexpected rewards.

“We’re losing him! We’re going to lose him!” Chad Stark frantically clicks back and forth between two windows on his computer screen.

Stark is the sweater vest-wearing, 30-something Hyattsville librarian currently manning AskUsNow, a 24/7 online chat open to Maryland residents who need research help.

AskUsNow, developed four years ago, helps patrons find accurate online information so they don’t have to fumble blindly in Google. Librarians: reliably on the front lines of truth protection.

Stark types that he’d be happy to help, but he’s not fast enough for the user:

“dude u r boring me.”

Librarians have been known to stand for many noble things, reading, learning, free speech, and now truth! Although it may feel like we are the orchestra that supposedly played on while the Titanic was sinking, there are worse ways to go down. I wrote about librarians and truth in a book review here; for more on librarians and truth see Don Fallis’s work on social epistemology.

The article goes on to raise the issue of the distinction between information and knowledge, which I have always found more puzzling than helpful. The most useful discussion of this I’ve read recently is in Dominique Foray’s Economics of Knowledge. Foray points out that the main distinction between information and knowledge is that knowledge depends on human cognition, whereas information can simply be words on a page. Information can be reproduced quickly and cheaply with a copy machine, but reproducing knowledge is far more expensive and time consuming because, well, teaching others is hard. Here’s Foray:

These means of reproducing knowledge may remain at the heart of many professions and traditions, but they can easily fail to operate when social ties unravel, when contact is broken between older and younger generations, and when professional communities lose their capacity in stabilizing, preserving, and transmitting knowledge. In such cases, reproduction grinds to a halt and the knowledge in question is in imminent danger of being lost and forgotten.

Can we use the distinction between information and knowledge to articulate a role for libraries and librarians in the digital age? Although information is bountiful and some of it seemingly cheap, tons of knowledge is being lost and forgotten everyday. Academic libraries and librarians are part of institutions that help to stabilize, preserve, and transmit knowledge as opposed to information. Hmm, how’s that? Good start, maybe, but needs work.

The article goes on to raise disturbing questions about the psychology of knowledge acquisition, noting that even when people are told repeatedly that something is false, the fact that they have heard it somewhere makes them think it is true. Politics immediately comes to mind here, but this raises a serious concern with all the new media that allow for the rapid reproduction of bits of information.

Quite thought provoking for a newspaper article, but once again reading the news gives me the feeling that we are doomed.

Rachel Gordon Singer found that Generation X and Generation Y librarians have a negative view of managment…the amount of time a library director devotes to the position is potentially a turn-off; younger librarians do not want to detract from time spent with family and friends..One of Gordon’s respondents stated “There is no amount of money or prestige that would entice us to sacrifice our families, our home lives, and our sanity for the long hours and Sisyphean ordeal of a directorship.”

That led to some interesting discussion and thoughtful reactions, both pro and con. One director said this was all well and good but that the current generation of directors needed to give their nextgen colleagues a dose of reality. Getting the job done, said the director, requires certain personal sacrifices, and that a work-life imbalance, staying late, working weekends, getting emergency calls in the middle of the night, is occasionally necessary. Bottom line: you can’t have it all. But another director expressed concerns about the blurring of work life and personal life in an increasingly 24/7 connected society. This director thought that library administrators needed to be more sensitive to the next generation’s desires for the work-life balance. If the work-life practices and behavior of the current generation of directors establishes a model upon which the next generation forms its attitudes towards library administration then today’s library directors, as part of their effort to recruit and shape the next generation of leaders, needs to live and promote an image that will attract the best and brightest to academic library leadership.

Not unexpectedly, there was no clear resolution on how to best attract the nextgen librarian to the library directorship. What we do know is that perceptions are important. As long as nextgens see the current crop of directors working long hours without a clear sense of the potential rewards, it’s unlikely they’ll be motivated to enter into directorships. The current generation of academic library directors need to better communicate that their jobs do occasionally involve long hours, but that there can be great rewards. Chief among those rewards is fulfilling a vision about how an academic library can best serve the needs of its constituents. Here’s my message to those nextgens who diss their director and whose own vision is in conflict with what they see coming out the contemporary’s academic library director’s office: You may be the best person to become a library director; there’s no better way to fulfill your vision of what an academic library can and should be for your community. And if you can do it while creating a better work-life balance for yourself and your next generation of leaders then go out and create some change.

I finished my talk with a quote to emphasize that today’s library leaders do have a responsibility to the next generation of leaders. It comes from the book Crucibles of Leadership:

As the scholar Noel Tichy argues, leaders must be teachers - and the leaders in this chapter offer precisely what Tichy calls a “teachable point of view.” He argues that leaders’ responsibility is not only to provide direction and judgment in the moment, but to strive continuously to develop leadership in others, now and into the future.

So you could argue that it is incumbent upon the current generation of leaders to help the next generation to learn about leadership. Today’s library directors must think more clearly about how their leadership style and the examples they set send a message of learning to our next generation of leaders.