. . . that you should know. She’s just started blogging for Inside Higher Ed. Woo hoo! She has an almost Dickensian flair for description (“that murky blob marked library on your campus map . . . the Great Grimpen Mire of academe”), but she also has a purpose in mind. She wants to help faculty set up more successful learning opportunities for their students by trouble shooting unanticipated failures encountered with student researchers.
Teaching faculty have immense persuasive power; we librarians do not. What we do have are sweeping views of what scholars are up to, a grasp of how researchers do their business and what evidence ensues, and a knack for identifying and locating that evidence. By and large faculty and academic librarians respect one another’s expertise and collaborate happily. But where and how do our apprentices—either undergraduates or graduate students — learn the process and logic of source seeking? That is the question that haunts me and inspires this blog.
The nexus of knowledge transmission, of teaching, is the assignment, the place where faculty intent becomes student incentive. One thing I hope to do in this blog is to suggest ways to invigorate library research assignments that don’t seem to be working.
Whether faculty will be willing to share their challenging moments, even anonymously, is an open question. It’s much easier to get people to share what has worked for them than what hasn’t. But let’s hope she’s able to coax some conversation out of faculty whose students get stuck in the Grimpen Mire.
In case you don’t know Mary, she’s a librarian at Princeton who is the author of The Elements of Library Research.
I second the Woo Hoo. I look forward to reading your blog, Mary! You’re a mentor of mine.