One-shot to make a first impression: a three-act library story

Act 1:

Last month, a professor contacted me to lead an instruction session for her undergraduate public health class. It was a class that hadn’t hosted a library instruction session before, but the task was simple enough—help students navigate the library databases to find articles for a grant proposal project. The class was one week out, there were around twenty students, and I’d have 45-minutes to speak with them about finding supporting evidence for their grant proposal.

I communicated my learning objectives to the professor and asked if she’d like to add anything. I created a lesson plan. I even concocted a quick LibGuide to aid in the process.

I’m currently working on a grant funded project with my county’s public health district and figured it would be a good example to use during my demonstration. I brainstormed keywords and looked up relevant controlled vocabulary in the databases I planned to show the students (Medline and Academic Search Complete). I came up with an active learning assignment and printed out materials to share.

In short, I was prepared.

Act 2:

The day of the instruction session arrived. I packed up my laptop and handouts and walked from the library, outside along the Fountain Mall, and to the academic building where the class was held. As I stepped into the building and navigated to the classroom, I felt my nerves pick up.

The room was a small lecture theatre. The students were poised in curved rows that seemed to trail up and up, as their serious gazes fixed upon me. I shook hands with the professor. She was warm and kind, and explained that she’d introduce me to the class, then sit in the back row to learn along with her students. I awkwardly tried to fit my things onto the room’s small podium and opened a browser window to project my LibGuide.

I realized that my hands were trembling as my nerves ramped up even more. I’d taught dozens of classes before, both in my previous semester and as an assistant instructor in grad school—why was my body suddenly betraying me like this? I took a deep breath and smiled up at the students. They stared back blankly at me.

After the instructor introduced me to the class and I began to speak, to my surprise, I felt the words in my mouth coming out confident and strong. I presented the short session’s learning objectives. I spelled out the importance of generating keywords, synonyms, and looking for controlled vocabulary terms. I briefly talked about Boolean operators and explained that I’d show the students an example search first, and then we’d work on their own topics together.

But then—things began to turn sideways.  

As I walked over to the podium and started typing on the computer, some rogue version of myself lurched to take over. We weren’t going to search in Medline or Academic Search Complete like I had practiced ahead of time—no! We were going to use Web of Science! I clicked on the link and opened the purple interface that I used much less often than the other resources I had practiced with. And we weren’t going to search for articles related to the public health project I was currently working on. No! We were going to search for articles about intergenerational crafting projects to combat loneliness in older adults!

On top of that, we were going to go straight to the advanced page, and I wasn’t going to build my search concept by concept using the search history as I normally did. Rather, I was going to manually input my order of operations and delineate my fields all at once!

Some inner part of me was screaming inside my head—what are you doing!? But it was too late. The Rubicon had been crossed. As I typed in my keywords and pressed “search,” an error message popped up. My nested parentheses were off, and I awkwardly tried to troubleshoot in front of the class as the error message persisted like a wasp at a cookout. I flushed. Students looked pained. I avoided the instructor’s stare, who was no doubt regretting extending the invitation to me at this point.

“Well, sometimes this kind of thing happens,” I said as my inner voice shouted at me: Run! Run!

“Let’s pivot to another database and see if that works better.”

Act 3:

The rest of the class did indeed go better. We moved to Medline, and I successfully helped the students find articles on their topics through live demonstration, abandoning my niche improvised example. We talked about truncation and subject terms and ways to expand and limit searches if you weren’t finding the results you were looking for.

At the end of the class session, the instructor very kindly asked the students to share three things that they learned from me that day. This is what we do as a community, she explained, we support one another.

Although I still left feeling embarrassed and confused by what had happened, I tried to focus on the positive. I hadn’t completely melted down and ran out of the room. I somewhat recovered the session after my bizarre improv moment, and the students, hopefully, came away with skills that they didn’t have before.

That afternoon, thankfully, I had another instruction session with a small group of PhD students that went wonderfully. I got to show them super advanced search techniques, and they were engaged and asked fantastic questions throughout the two-hour session. When I got back to my office, I sent a follow-up email to the public health instructor thanking her for her time and apologizing for my mishap.

Debriefing with a colleague afterwards, she shared some words of wisdom that I’ve tried to keep in mind as this day’s events have vaguely haunted me. Not every search goes perfectly, she said, and when we practice ahead of time, we give students a false impression. You were just being real, she said.

Although my ego was bruised, my colleague’s kind words did wonders to ease my anxiety. In live instruction sessions, sometimes we go off script. Mistakes happen. We can’t be perfect, and we shouldn’t expect ourselves to be. But we are a community, and when things go wrong—as they inevitably will—we support one another.