instruction

Learning from Lukewarm Library Instruction

I said in my November post that it wouldn’t be the only one I wrote about library instruction. As someone who is still new to teaching and class instruction, learning how to be an engaging, fun, and informative teacher is one of my biggest learning curves as a first-year academic librarian. So, a few months later, I’m returning to this topic – specifically to talk about a library instruction session that didn’t go as well as the one that I prepared in 24 hours.

Teaching graduate students

In my role as a liaison librarian, I work with a specific department at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College. Within that department, I manage everything library-related for nine programs – five master’s degree programs, three Ed.D. (doctorate of education) programs, and one Ph.D. program. One thing you might notice from that list is that I only work with graduate students, which is something that I was both nervous and excited about when I accepted this position.

I was excited because I knew I would be able to relate to the students, having just finished two years of being a grad student myself. A lot of the programs I support are aimed at students who are coming back to school for a career change, or who want to further their current career by completing a degree while they continue to work full-time. As someone who worked for seven years before going back to school for my MSLS, I felt when I accepted the job like I would understand these students’ experiences, and working with them has confirmed this.

However, I was also nervous because I hadn’t worked with graduate students much before. I was a Graduate Assistant at a library at the university where I did my MSLS, but worked almost entirely with undergrads in that role. The only experience I had with teaching graduate students was one co-teaching experience with my supervisor.

The good news is that a lot of my nerves about teaching and working with graduate students dissipated during the fall semester. Most of what I was teaching was similar to what I had taught undergrads – the basics of Boolean and how to look beyond Google Scholar – usually with just a few more details or advanced database skills included. Although I knew I still had a lot to learn, I felt more confident in the content of my instruction sessions for graduate classes after a semester.

Teaching Ph.D. students – how different could it be?

Late in the fall, a professor asked me to teach a Ph.D. class of hers. She requested that I come for 10-15 minutes for a brief library overview, and if it went well, I could come back in the spring and teach the class again for a full session. I agreed, the fall session went well, and in December we scheduled a day for me to teach for an hour in mid-January.

Unlike most other lessons I had taught, this was a lesson that I needed to create from scratch. I had also never taught Ph.D. students, and had only a few vague ideas of what the professor wanted me to teach. However, I had worked with a lot of Ed.D. students one-on-one in the fall, so I decided to base the lesson on what I taught those students – the basics of Boolean, how to navigate a database, and an overview of the research-specific AI tools that we have. Both groups were doctoral students, I reasoned, so their needs were probably fairly similar.

I knew I was in trouble within the first five minutes of arriving at the classroom. I had prepared slides at the beginning of my presentation to explain who I was and give an overview of Vanderbilt Libraries’ resources – essentially a condensed version of what I had done in the fall. To my surprise, as I set up my computer at the front of the room, I realized that the group of students I was about to teach were the exact same students I had taught in the fall. Since this was the same class, I had figured the students would be different, because groups of students don’t usually take the exact same class in back-to-back semesters (or ever). But this was definitely the same group.

This made my first few slides obsolete, so I breezed through them like this was the plan all along, saying things like “since we covered this last semester, we’ll go ahead and move on!” I quickly reached my slides on Boolean. I cheerfully explained how databases speak a specific language, and that to be able to use them effectively, we needed to speak that same language. Then I asked how many people had heard of Boolean before.

Every hand in the room went up, and my heart sank. If all the students already knew Boolean, most of the rest of my lesson was also obsolete.

I pivoted as best I could, asking the students to generate terms for the example topic on my slide instead of explaining the terms I had already thought about. Then I used their terms to run some searches in the databases and talked about filters and peer reviewed articles. I was hoping to be able to move on to AI research tools and spend more of the lesson time there.

However, before I could change gears, the professor asked me to talk about searching by subject headings within a database. I hadn’t prepared anything on this topic but gamely pulled up the ERIC thesaurus and showed students how to use it for a search. No surprise that since it wasn’t a search I had prepared in advance, it didn’t return any results. My attempts to change the search or look for different subject headings didn’t help.

To make matters worse, by the time I moved on from subject headings, that conversation had taken up so much time that we only had 10 minutes left in the lesson to talk about AI tools – not nearly enough. Students had a lot of questions about the tools and there was no way I could answer them all. To finish off the fiasco, another event was taking place in the classroom right after the class ended, so as I wrapped up my presentation by telling everyone they could email me any time with questions, students were standing up and heading to the back of the room, where pizza was being set out in preparation for the event.

My hope from this lesson is that it will be one of the worst ones I’ll ever teach. If I only go up from here, I’ll be happy. I felt so awful about it all that when my friends and colleagues asked me how the class had gone, I mostly just said “It was okay” and left it at that. The only person I really talked to about it at the time was one of my former professors, S., who has become a mentor and friend over the last few years. I shared all the details with her and greatly appreciated how understanding she was. She didn’t try to sugarcoat it or to convince me that it probably hadn’t been so bad. Then, she gently moved the conversation to something even more helpful than empathizing with me – she started helping me think through what I could do differently to try to prevent a similar situation from happening in the future.

Lesson 1 – Ask the faculty member for details

S. asked how much I had known about the class and students before I walked into the classroom. When I said not much, she told me that it was okay to ask the professor for more details. I think one of the things I’ve struggled with this first year is not wanting to be a burden to professors. It’s often so hard to get them to invite us into their classrooms in the first place, that I haven’t wanted to ask them too many things or push too hard for information. S. helped me see that asking for clarification and details is actually a part of my job, and that I can’t worry (much) about frustrating professors with my questions.

Lesson 2 – Consider giving higher-level students a pre-test

One of S.’s suggestions that I liked the most was to give doctoral students a pre-test before I teach in their classes. While undergraduate or even master’s students might not be willing to take a pre-test, doctoral students might complete one. If the professor agreed to distribute it, the responses would help me understand what those students know and don’t know – and therefore would help me tailor my lesson to fit their needs.

Lesson 3 – It’s okay to be honest with professors

One of the things I said to S. was that I felt like I could do so much better with the lesson if I could do it a second time – but that I doubted the professor would ever invite me back. She encouraged me to be honest with the professor, reach out, and simply say that I know I could do much better and would appreciate another chance to come to the class next semester to prove it. I haven’t reached out yet, but plan to do so along with my other fall instruction outreach, and hope that being straightforward helps.

Lesson 4 – View professors as colleagues

Something that I thought about, and decided against, ahead of the lesson was sharing my slides with the professor and asking if what I was planning to teach was in line with expectations. Again, I chose not to do this because I didn’t want to burden the professor. I was also afraid that I would get edits at the last minute, and would have to scramble to make changes the morning of. However, viewing professors as colleagues instead of people that I’m working for changes the equation on this for me. The next time I create a lesson from scratch, I’ll definitely send it to the professor in advance and make sure it matches expectations.

Lesson 5 – Remember that I have colleagues and mentors who can (and want to) help me

I think this is actually the lesson that, in retrospect, makes me feel silliest. Librarians are some of the most helpful and giving people I’ve ever worked with, but I was so scared of looking dumb by admitting that I was unsure about how to approach a doctoral-level class that I forged ahead on my own and forgot how many times fellow librarians encouraged me to ask for help. During my entire conversation with S., I kept thinking how much better it would have been if I had reached out to her before I taught this class and asked for her advice – and if I had reached out to any of my other librarian friends, mentors, or colleagues as well. This is definitely one mistake that I’ll never make again.

Moving forward

As much as I wish I could, I can’t go back and change how the January class went. However, I can change what I do in the future, and hopefully I can even come back to this class in the fall and teach a successful lesson. After this experience, I also have a much better understanding of how much instruction is comprised of way more than just a lesson that’s taught in the classroom. It’s about working with the faculty and department, my colleagues, and the library system to make sure I’m setting students up for success. My hope is that a few years down the road, with a lot more instruction experience to rely on, I’ll be able to look back on this class not as a failure, but as a turning point in my library instruction journey.

Let’s Discuss: How Should We Handle AI in One-Shots?

Whenever I teach a one-shot, there’s an AI-shaped elephant in the room. The rapid advancement of AI technologies has changed so much about how students approach completing assignments, which shapes the dynamic in the one-shot classroom. I worry that students, never the most enthusiastic one-shot attendees, now feel that library research skills are less relevant than ever.

On the surface, it appears that consumer-focused AI tools like ChatGPT are useful for student research. They can help students quickly locate sources, learn about a topic, summarize difficult peer-reviewed articles, and cite their sources—all tasks that are relevant to the learning outcomes of my one-shots. However, as I’ve discussed previously on ACRLog, I believe that higher education should be a place of particular caution when it comes to AI. The hazards of AI, such as copyright infringement, hallucinations, bias, lack of privacy, and the potential erosion of critical thinking skills, are particularly dangerous in an educational context.

Moreover, as Allison and DeRewal (2024) have pointed out, the missions of AI companies are directly opposed to our missions as libraries and universities. The goal of products like ChatGPT and Comet—and even AI tools built into educational products, like Primo Research Assistant—is to make tasks as easy as possible for the consumer. Our goal is to educate students, which cannot happen by making things as easy as possible. We intentionally build friction into our assignments and activities in order to help students develop the skills necessary to overcome inevitable difficulties in the research process. ChatGPT’s goal is to eliminate challenge; our goal is to strategically introduce it, because students can’t learn without it.

Here are the research-related AI applications I’m most worried about in regards to undergraduates I teach:

Using AI tools to find sources (“Find 5 peer-reviewed articles about climate change.”)
Using AI tools to learn information (“What are the main causes of climate change?”)
Using AI tools to summarize articles (“What are the main ideas of this article?”)
Using AI tools to generate citations (“Please format this list of sources into an MLA Works Cited page.”)

(In general, I’m also worried about students using AI tools to generate the text of their papers. However, that falls outside the scope of one-shot instruction, so I will not address it here.)

With all of this swimming around in my head, it can be overwhelming to try to productively address AI issues in a 50-minute one-shot, especially when I have so much else to teach. Whenever I feel lost about how to tackle an AI-related issue, I return to three touchstones: clarity, transparency, and guidance. I believe that undergraduate students today deeply value these qualities in the classroom. So when I tell them a proactive, firm “no” (clarity), I immediately follow up with transparency (“here’s why the answer is no”) and guidance (“here’s what you can do instead”).

I want to use the remainder of this post to share three of the strategies I’ve been using to address AI in one-shots—but I am just one librarian, liaising with the social sciences at a regional comprehensive university in the midwestern United States. My context may be very different from yours. I would love for folks to jump into the conversation and share strategies, thoughts, and questions in the comments below.

Strategy #1: Address AI upfront

I always start my one-shots by talking about AI for a few minutes. I don’t want students zoning out the entire session, thinking “I’ll just use ChatGPT for this,” so I try to capture their attention by posing the question: Why don’t you just use ChatGPT to research this paper? Why are you here at the library today? Per my transparency touchstone, I’m explicit about my intentions with having this conversation. I know this is something some of you might be wondering, and I often get questions like these from students, so I wanted to take a couple of minutes to talk about this before we dive in.

I state that in general, when students ask me this question, I do not recommend the use of AI for completing research assignments. I share specific examples of times I’ve witnessed AI-assisted research going wrong: Cornerstone students combing the stacks for books that were never written, law students tearing their hair out as they search for Supreme Court cases that don’t exist. I try to get vivid and lean into the storytelling.

I don’t want that to be you, I say. So today, we’re going to walk through how you can research this paper without running into any of those issues. Sound good?

Strategy #2: Demonstrate better open web searching

Let’s be honest: Using Google is miserable. Half the websites are paywalled, and the other half are sponsored links that relentlessly spam you with pop-up ads. No wonder students are increasingly turning to Google’s AI overview and AI chatbots to find information. The interfaces are far cleaner and easier to navigate; this not only provides a better user experience, it also appears more professional and, therefore, reliable.

But as information professionals, we know these AI tools aren’t actually more reliable, considering the frequency and magnitude of hallucinations. To provide an alternative when students want to search the web for information on a topic, I show them how to limit their search results by site domain (or even a particular website, if relevant to the course). I generally recommend .edu, but I sometimes show .org and .gov as well. I may also show how to use phrase searching or the intitle command in a basic Google search. Students are often surprised and excited to see how simple tricks can make Google searching so much easier.

Strategy #3: Cultivate college-level research skills

In most cases, it is currently illegal for a student at the University of Northern Iowa to download an article from one of our subscription databases and then upload it into a generative AI tool, such as ChatGPT. In some cases, it is not the student who would be liable for this action, but the library.

Whenever I tell students this, it makes an impression. They’re especially shocked to hear that in some cases, their actions could lead to the library getting in trouble. I clarify that this is a result of the agreements we make with scholarly publishers in order to make their books, articles, and other materials available to UNI students. I explain that students often ask whether or not they can use ChatGPT to summarize sources for their research papers, and this is part of why their librarians and professors are telling them no.

However, I emphasize that I understand why students ask me this question—because, truly, I do. It’s difficult enough to understand peer-reviewed research when you’re new to academia and/or to a particular discipline; on top of that, many students are never actually taught how to read research, how to read in college. It’s very different from how we read for leisure or how they read to perform well on standardized tests in high school. Students may feel lost, like asking ChatGPT to summarize a difficult passage or even an entire article is the only way they can succeed in class.

There’s only so much I can do in a one-shot; reading research is a skill, and real skill development takes guided practice over an extended period of time. Nonetheless, I try to plant a seed. I reassure students: It’s okay if reading peer-reviewed research is hard. I provide a few tips about strategic reading, such as starting with the abstract and conclusion, making multiple passes, and annotating key points. I love this guide from Brown University and often share it with students. I also take a few minutes to explain citation chasing. Citation chasing is another college-level research skill that seems second nature to us, but it won’t occur to most freshmen until somebody takes the time to teach them about it. You don’t need to ask a generative AI tool for “5 sources about climate change” because once you find one good article or book chapter, there are tons of additional sources right there at the end.

—

I am in no way an expert on AI or one-shot instruction; this is only my second semester of teaching. I don’t come to this with the intention of sharing expert knowledge, but with the hope of starting a conversation. I would love for the comments section to become a place for folks to share experiences and brainstorm strategies around addressing AI in one-shots. Here are some questions to get started:

How have you been thinking about AI in your one-shots?
What strategies have you used to address AI in your one-shots? What has worked well, and what has not worked as well?
What kinds of conversations have you had (or not had) with your faculty about classroom AI policies, AI usage in research assignments, and so on?
Any other thoughts or questions that this post prompted for you!

Teaching with Twenty-Four Hours’ Notice

The Setup

This likely won’t be my only FYAL blog post about library instruction. When I started my master’s degree, I initially looked for a path in an aspect of librarianship that didn’t include instruction. I’ve never enjoyed public speaking, and although I got better at it before I went back to grad school, standing in front of a group of people with everyone’s eyes on me has never been in my comfort zone.

However, it didn’t take me long to realize that what I loved most about librarianship – working with students in an academic setting – was going to come with teaching as a job component. With that in mind, I made a point of finding opportunities while completing my MSLS to get more experience with instruction, working with my supervisor at my Graduate Assistant position on campus to co-teach library instruction sessions and taking Library Instruction & Pedagogy, which turned out to be one of my favorite classes.

The Situation

Fast forward to October. That month, I had a lot of one-on-one reference consultations for a specific master’s program. The small program is fully remote, but in mid-October a few students mentioned that they would be at Vanderbilt for a full program convening that upcoming weekend. After the second student mentioned the convening, it clicked in my head that, since I had worked with about half the students in this program already, this would be a great opportunity to meet them in person, as well as a chance to introduce myself to the ones I hadn’t worked with yet (and encourage them to make appointments too).

Thankfully, I had already had some interactions with the professor who runs that program, so I felt like it would be okay to reach out at the last minute. The very last minute. The Friday morning before the Saturday & Sunday convening, I emailed and asked if there was a break in the programming on Saturday when I could pop in and see everyone. I would have preferred to ask about doing some actual instruction, but I was hesitant to offer that with so little time to prepare. Coming by for some informal conversation seemed like a good middle ground.

The professor got back to me at 4:03pm on Friday afternoon. What a great idea! They would love to have me come by the convening! If it was convenient for me, they could give me time for a 20-minute presentation at 4pm on Saturday. 24 hours minus three minutes of notice for an instructional session.

As I read the professor’s email (twice, to make sure I had gotten it right), I could literally feel my heartbeat speed up. My palms started sweating. I hope to get more comfortable in the future with instructional sessions, but right now I prefer to have my slides done at least a week in advance and to be able to practice a couple of times to make sure I’m saying the right things and showing the best searching examples in each class. I didn’t think there was any way I could pull off an instructional session with one day’s notice. One of my work friends happened to be in my office when I received this email. “I just got asked to do an instructional session tomorrow afternoon. What do I do?!” I asked her.

The Decision

In my Library Instruction & Pedagogy class in graduate school, one set of readings that our professor assigned was about saying no to instruction requests. Those articles have stuck with me, because saying no to instruction – or really any faculty request – wasn’t something I had thought of as an option before I read them. The authors and librarians in the articles made good points about why they had said no to instruction, including a lack of preparation time. Now, just three months into my first job, the thought flashed through my mind: was I in a situation where I could – or should – say no to this instruction request?^{1, 2}

There weren’t many other options to think through – with so little time, and the students only here for one weekend, I felt like I could either politely decline the request or try to throw together a lesson in a day. I realized quickly that with only 20 minutes, I wasn’t going to be able to do much actual searching demonstration, which right now takes up most of my preparation time. That would make it more doable. Additionally, my predecessor in this role was incredibly organized and generous when she left, and gave the library team access to a lot of her materials – including slides and lessons. Was there a lesson for this group of students?

I checked the folder, and sure enough, a “library 101” lesson was there, tailored for this master’s program. I quickly clicked through the slides and felt myself calming down. Talk about the library; I can do that. Explain the basic resources and databases that are recommended for education students; check. Emphasize that I’m here and available for research help and any questions big or small; no problem. Maybe I could do this.

Despite all of those thoughts, though, my decision to say yes to this instructional request came down to feeling like I couldn’t say no – for two reasons. First, I’m a new librarian trying to find my footing and build relationships, and declining this opportunity felt like it would be a step in the wrong direction. Right now, every opportunity to teach a group of students about the library feels like a chance I can’t miss. Second, because I was the one who had volunteered to come to the convening in the first place. Even though instruction wasn’t originally what I had volunteered for… I did volunteer.

Either way, it would be a leap of faith – and a learning experience. Around 4:45 on Friday, I emailed the professor back and told her that I would love to come teach for 20 minutes the following afternoon. Then, I started updating and personalizing the slides for the next day.

The Outcome

We actually had a separate library event that Saturday, so after volunteering at that event, I spent a few more hours in my office working on my slides. Then I walked across the quad to go teach – a little less than 24 hours after setting up the session.

In this case, everything worked out really well. The students who already knew me were excited to see me, and their excitement was contagious. Maybe partially because the turnaround was so fast, I wasn’t very nervous and so I was able to be more myself while I was presenting, which helped me land the material better. I had more fun, and I think the students did too. My 24-hour teaching turnaround was a success. (I’m still a little in disbelief that I pulled it off.)

I also learned some important lessons from this experience that I can take with me moving forward:

Being more “me” while teaching made it more fun, and I think made me a better teacher, too. Hopefully, as I keep gaining experience, my nerves surrounding public speaking will continue to decrease and more of my personality can come through.
Building relationships with students and professors really matters. A big part of why I was able to do this was because I already knew the professor and about half the students in the class, so I knew I would be walking into a friendly environment.
Practice is key. I was supposed to teach for 20 minutes, but ran over, largely because I hadn’t been able to do a full run-through of my presentation with so little preparation time. I also got lost at one point and started mentioning Boolean searching, only to remember mid-sentence that I didn’t have time to fully explain and show what that meant. I ended up saying something like, “I can explain more about Boolean in research consultations” – not ideal, but not the end of the world either.
Only volunteer to “come by” a class if I’m prepared to get up and teach too!

References:

Meulemans, Y. N & and Carr, A. (2012). Not at your service: Building genuine faculty-librarian partnerships. In Reference Services Review, 41(1), 80-90. doi: 10.1108/00907321311300893
White, A. (2023, October 11). Let ‘no’ be ‘no’: When librarians say ‘no’ to instruction opportunities. In the library with the lead pipe. Retrieved November 10, 2025, from https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2023/let-no-be-no/

Learning to Teach Credit-Bearing Courses

One element that excited me about my current job was the opportunity to teach credit-bearing courses in our Library Informatics bachelor’s degree program. In my role as department head, I not only get the chance to teach and but also lead the program. For my first year, I mostly did the administrative work of leading a program. I worked with our advisor (one of our librarians in our department) to resolve student issues, coordinated our program assessment, set up our course rotation each semester, and assigned classes to the folks that report to me. My first year was really a chance to dive into the program, learn about its creation and context, and lead conversations with the department about the program’s future. It seems that my second year here has focused more on actually teaching the classes, something that excites me and also gives me a lot to think about.

My first chance to teach happened this past summer, where I co-taught LIN 175: Information Literacy, our general education course that covers the research process and gives students a look at research through an IL lens. We taught in a five-week, five days a week, two hours a day, synchronous format. I was able to learn the content, teach about ? of the class sessions, and work closely with the students enrolled. Their final project was a group poster (inspired by the better poster template introduced by Mike Morrison) on an IL related topic of their choice. This version of the class was also a heavy revision from ways the class had been taught previously; our team got together in May and reimagined how the content was introduced and created the final poster project. In many ways, our revisions worked well and the new structure kickstarted a lot of good discussion within the department about how we want this class to work.

This fall, I had to pinch hit and teach a seven week, asynchronous version of LIN 175. I had never taught a credit course asynchronously before and relied on my department colleagues who let me look at their past syllabi and lurk in their Canvas shells. Teaching a seven week course was definitely eye opening. It was fast paced and pushed me to juggle my day-to-day job, creating content, and evaluating student work. Particularly, I ran into the following challenges and opportunities:

Out of sight, out of mind. At first, I sort of forgot I was teaching an online class. I was involved in so many other projects and in-person activities that I had to actively remind myself there were students, online, waiting for my instruction and feedback. Like any other project, I had to find ways to build it into my to-do lists and my calendar.
Developing weekly content aka building the airplane while I was flying it. In general, I roll my eyes at the “building the airplane while we’re flying it” phrase, but it definitely was my experience this fall. Especially at the beginning of the course, I felt that the day before I “dropped” a new module, I was frantically recording lectures, organizing learning materials, and double checking the assignments were set up correctly. While I had a lot of the content from the summer class, there are vast differences between working with students daily, in-person, and having a student work online asynchronously. It’s not an easy transfer! It did get a little easier in terms of setting up modules as time went on, but it was anxiety inducing to start.
How much content is too much content? With the in-person, five-week class, we had two hours each day to go through context, do activities, and learn the materials. I feel comfortable with lesson planning for two hours. I did not feel as confident designing asynchronous content. I still am learning what is reasonable/doable for a week’s worth of learning materials. I want to pick things that are relevant, engaging, and applicable to the students. I also want content that connects to each other and sets the stage for application assignments. Those assignments are really my only way to know if students have absorbed and learned the material, I don’t have the same in-person cues. I ended up with some good modules and I also made plenty of notes of how to improve content for future iterations of this class.
Building connections with students. Something I’ve heard from both faculty who teach online courses and students who have taken online courses is that connecting with each other is tough. Just because I have students complete a reflection over VoiceThread doesn’t mean they connect with their peers or feel connected to me as their professor. I know there’s learning I need to do to better understand how to cultivate community in this time frame and virtual environment. In many ways, I feel like I’m VERY behind on this conversation after the pandemic (but look forward to reviewing all the content created in this time).

When I submitted my grades on Monday afternoon, I felt a sense of relief. I did it! I don’t think I’ll teach this class, in this format, until the fall, so I have time to make some tweaks and build off what I learned the past seven weeks. For now, I’ll make a transition to preparing for a different seven-week class that starts in January. Wish me luck!

Featured image by Kelli Tungay on Unsplash

Prepared? Reflecting on grad school after 3.5 months on the job

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how well my MS/LIS degree and its related experiences prepared me for my job now as a Research and Instructional Services Librarian. It’s important to note that I worked in my undergraduate library for three years while receiving my bachelors. I also worked in my hometown public library for a year before heading off to graduate school. I’d worked at a physical reference desk before, had worked with LibChat, and had a base knowledge of databases. I had more library experience than some, and therefore had a better idea of what classes I needed to be taking to become an academic librarian.

I feel like a broken record saying this, but my graduate experience was quite different and chaotic at best; my first year, I was entirely online (unplanned), assistantship and all. Online classes weren’t necessarily a surprise, given my alma mater’s strong online MS/LIS program, but setting foot in the library I worked for exactly once during the 2020-2021 school year wasn’t something I was expecting. I did chat and email reference, team meetings, and taught workshops all from my tiny bedroom in Urbana, IL. I’d moved to Illinois specifically to have an in-person program, but alas – Covid ruined those plans. My supervisor and the other librarians I worked with did their best to train my cohort remotely, but as you can imagine, the physical reference desk is a whole other beast compared to a virtual one. Even when we went back in person in summer 2021, things felt constantly up in the air. Policies were changing left and right as folks tried to reconcile COVID-19 restrictions with being back in person. If anything, my “chaos cohort” of other graduate assistants were prepared to be adaptable!

collection development

With that being said, one aspect of my degree that might seem controversial to some is that I actively chose not to take collection development, despite never having done that in any of the previously mentioned library jobs. This was based on some of my friends’ experiences in the class; it was useful, for sure, but there were other classes they’d wanted to take that they couldn’t as a result. I had the thought too that wherever I ended up, they would “do” collections differently. I’d have to learn new processes no matter what classes I took. Now that I’m here at Salisbury, I am responsible for collections in areas like Environmental Studies, Public Health, and Exercise Science, to name a few. I lean on my faculty for book recommendations, as well as Choice Reviews from ACRL and book reviews in journals. I am also part of our Leisure Reading committee, where our main responsibility is to develop our leisure collections for students, faculty and staff. Here, the collection development is a group effort. Personally, I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on too much; I’ve learned how to use GOBI on the job, and my university has a great faculty request system in place.

instruction

A theme I have noticed in literature regarding the master’s degree is that many academic librarians feel they weren’t adequately prepared to take on instruction. It’s also been written about on ACRLog before. This is something I felt fairly confident about, as I took the class “Instructional Strategies and Techniques for Information Professionals” with Merinda Hensley. We created a lesson plan, struggled through writing learning outcomes (emphasis on the struggle), and wrote teaching philosophies. I also took “E-Learning” with Melissa Wong, which gave me language and strategies for teaching virtually. On top of all of this, I was teaching for the UIUC library via my graduate assistantship. So when setting up instruction sessions with my faculty at Salisbury, I felt confident. I’m always going to be nervous before teaching, but it’s never been because I have no idea what I’m doing.

faculty communication

Where I feel shaky in regards to my job duties is in communication with faculty. Some of this is to be expected with a new librarian, but where I find myself unsure is how many emails to send, how to reach faculty that don’t already request library instruction… essentially, I am struggling in this aspect of “proving” myself and my job to other faculty at the university. I attended the CLAPS (Critical Librarianship & Pedagogy Symposium) two weeks ago, and Baharak Yousefi’s closing keynote has really stuck with me. Some of these tweets capture the essence of this powerful keynote, which had some focus on one-shot instruction:

“No physicist, historian, or geographer on our campus teaches this way – going around begging for the right to teach in a one-off manner.” (tweeted by @lydia_zv)

“We are deprofessionalized by being given work we can’t do well, and the very fact that we can’t do it well makes us reluctant to resist the condition of our de-professionalization” (tweeted by @RoxanneShirazi)

I didn’t have the words for what I was feeling, but Yousefi has captured it perfectly. I was hired at Salisbury to perform a job, I have faculty status, and yet, it sometimes feels like I need to prove the merit of library instruction. I’ve got some great faculty who know the value of a librarian for their students, but even then, I’m in front of them maybe once a semester. If the timing of our session isn’t quite right, students won’t see the value of what I teach yet or won’t want to re-do their research based on what I’ve shown them. I imagine that confidence in faculty communication will come with time and effort; is this even something an MS/LIS could prepare a new librarian for? I’m inclined to say no. We can perhaps be warned about the phenomenon by professors and mentors, but it strikes me as something a librarian has to experience and address themselves at their institutions.

These are just a few things I’ve been pondering since graduating. How did your MS/LIS prepare you for your library position? How did it not? Feel free to sound off below. This post by Sarah Crissinger on tips for graduate school might be of interest too.