Public Services

Did You Hear The One About The Library Presentation

Editor’s Note: Here is a guest post from ACRLog reader Marilyn R. Pukkila, Head of Instructional Services for the Colby College Libraries, in which she shares an interesting but not entirely pleasant encounter and experience at a First Year Experience conference. The ACRLog blog team thanks Marilyn for her contribution.

I’m just back from the annual First Year Experience conference . It was a great event, but I was rather taken aback by an exchange in a session on encouraging undergraduate research. The speaker was discussing various methods of integrating research into the first year seminar. Up came “Presentations — Library” (along with Office of Undergraduate Research) on the PowerPoint slide, and the speaker asked, “And what do we think of the library presentation?” in a tone which obviously invited ridicule and criticism. One of the participants obligingly responded with a rude noise, and the presenter nodded and laughed along with others in the room.

While I didn’t hear anyone openly advocating the exclusion of libraries from the first year experience, the word “boring” definitely put in an appearance, and there was a strong suggestion (if not actually stated) that the library presentation was a waste of time. I was not the only librarian in the room to offer an alternative perspective, and the rude noise maker later had the grace to apologize to me. Evidently no one had expected librarians to be in the room!

Fortunately there were also a few faculty there who chimed in to support faculty/library collaboration in the realm of undergraduate research, but the whole experience has left me more than a bit perturbed. I never worried much about the “librarian image”, but now I’m wondering if it isn’t more important than I thought. Yes, my ego was a bit bruised, but I’m much more concerned with the messages that students are receiving from faculty about the useful/uselessness of librarians in the educational enterprise.

Certainly those of us on campuses with active FYE programs or components thereof (such as a First Year seminar) can work to get on those committees or talk with those administrators. We’re going to invite our Dean of Students to a future Librarians meeting to tell us about his new initiative to use administrators to engage students academically. Librarians also volunteer to be moderators for the various panels at our annual Undergraduate research symposium. But I have a deeper concern. Can we counter decades of faculty and administrators equating librarians and libraries with dull, boring, and useless presentations and program?

Ironically, in another presentation on social networking sites, participants were falling all over themselves to applaud librarians’ knowledge of and contributions to this cutting edge technology. Perhaps this is more of a generational disconnect? Or are we becoming more associated with information technology and less with information use (otherwise known as research)? Whatever the case, I strongly encourage academic librarians to attend non-librarian academic conferences as a means of letting our colleagues know that we ARE a part of this education enterprise!

What You Want To Say And What You Do Say

I think this post over at Not of General Interest will resonate with any academic librarian who has worked the reference desk, taught an instruction session or possibly even graded some research papers. “Bad Professor, Good Professor” reminds us that even though we may sometimes have bad thoughts or reactions to what our students write, say or do, as academic librarians and educators it’s important for us to remember we’re here to help our students learn and achieve academic success – even if it sometimes takes lots of willpower. My favorite is found in one of the several worthwhile comments:

Bad professor thinks: Dear lord, you sound like a gum-smacking 12-year-old talking on a cell phone on a city bus.
Good professor writes: Establishing a more serious academic tone in your writing would help support your argumentative authority.

I think you get the idea.

So let me add one of my own, from the librarian’s perspective:

Bad Librarian thinks: Good Lord. Where did you come up with that idea! You can’t seriously be thinking you can actually research that topic when your paper is due in a week.
Good Librarian says: That’s a good start. Let’s take a step back and see how we can refine that idea into something that you can start researching in some of our databases.

So, have you ever had – wait, that’s a silly way to put it – of course you’ve had them. What is your memorable “Bad Librarian, Good Librarian” moment?

Warming Up To The Idea Of User Education

Reading the latest (November 2007) issue of Against the Grain brought two surprises in one article. In his regular column (In My Humble But Correct Opinion) Rick Anderson takes up a public service issue, not his usual fare. So surprise number one is that he’s taking on the problem of the reference desk and the need to create some change. He’d like us to be “more motivated to try harder to put our desks out of business”. Perhaps he’s been reading ACRLog posts, the Chronicle or Library Issues more recently. But the big surprise is that Anderson may be warming up to the idea of the benefits of user education. In the past his writings and presentations have come down rather hard on library instruction. I believe he referred to it as “eat your peas” librarianship – forcing our students to become mini-librarians. So imagine my surprise when one of his suggested alternatives to sitting at the reference desk is “Couldn’t that hour be more fruitfully spent in front of a class somewhere else on campus…”.

Yes Rick, librarians can achieve positive outcomes when they educate users. I know our research systems should be so easy to use that no one ever again needs to think about what words they should use in a search, or whether it makes a difference if you use a business or humanities database or whether an article comes from a popular magazine or scholarly journal. But until that time it may be that getting out into the classrooms – or having the students come to the library’s instruction center – is a constructive strategy for equipping students with the knowledge and skills they need to conduct effective research. Not only might it eliminate the need for a stop at the reference desk, but it’s a good thing when students get to know librarians through user education experiences. They actually learn who their friendly, departmental librarian is, and in many cases the next time that student needs help he or she will go right past the reference desk and down the hall to that librarian’s office for a consultation. Think of it as “pre-emptive reference“. Great suggestion as well about integrating library services into the curriculum (and courseware and social networks). Some of us call that the information literacy initiative.

As always Rick’s writing is first class and thought provoking – and when it comes to how one views the future of the reference desk – he and I might finally be in agreement about something. If you aren’t reading his IMHBCO column regularly you need to get a copy of Against the Grain – which is always chock full of great stuff. Now I will REALLY be surprised if Rick joins the Blended Librarians Online Learning Community and shows up for our next webcast about information literacy.

Welcome To The Contact Zone

You know how when you read something that is really new and provocative, you just want to immediately share it with colleagues. That’s the way I felt when I first read a draft of an editorial written by Bill Miller for The Reference Librarian. The editorial is titled “Reference, Cultural Values, and the Contact Zone,” and it appears in Vol. 47, No. 2 for 2007. If your library has access to the online version of Haworth Journals you can find it there. At that time I did ask Miller, a co-editor of the journal, if I could write about it in ACRLog. Unfortunately, I learned that I would need to wait until the issue was published. Now I finally can tell you about this editorial.

Like me, you may have never heard of a seminal conference address by Mary Louise Pratt on the topic of “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Miller points out that this essay has “received next to no attention within librarianship”. The Contact Zone is where people from different cultures come together, and is what happens when they interact in the Zone. Miller indicates that this has profound implications for reference librarians, for the desk is a contact zone. But the cultural clash with which reference librarians contend is not one with students from a foreign country, but many of our native students who represent a very different culture, especially when it comes to academic expectations. Miller writes:

Reference librarians dealing with a diverse student body need to be very aware that they are operating in a contact zone in which many library users have fundamentally different assumptions from our own about what is valuable and important…our imagined community in which every student is assumed to be a fledgling scholar who would naturally want to practice research…is truly more imagined than real. If one views young people as coming from an entirely different culture, things start to make more sense.

So the next time you are at the reference desk or in an instruction session it may be helpful to develop a mental image of yourself talking with or assisting a stranger in a strange land. Given how radically different the culture of today’s students is, they may as well be from a very different place. As Miller advises the reader, new strategies are needed for the nature of work in which we now engage in the contact zone.

Another Reason I’m Glad To Be An Academic Librarian

Compared to public librarians, I think that academic librarians have it easy in some ways. We tend to complain about students and faculty not using the library, but let’s face it, to a large extent we have a fairly captive audience. Many students need to use their academic library at some point, be it for a reserve item, to use a computer or to find a study room. The academic library is also conveniently located somewhere on campus that makes it easy for students to drop in during the course of the day. Few have to get in their car or take public transportation for a library visit.

Having attended a few public library-oriented sessions at ALA, I see that those folks have no audience except for the one they create. No one has to go to the public library; they have to want to go. So public libraries are getting savvy about marketing and designing programs to attract their community members of all ages. Compared to some of the outreach efforts I heard about it seems that academic librarians are not doing nearly as much to engage their patrons outside the library. And that may be because our survival is not entirely dependent upon it.

Oh, and academic librarians rarely have to deal with this sort of thing, but for our public library colleagues it must be the bane of their existence.