Wayne Bivens-Tatum recently wrote a very interesting post questioning who should be teaching library instruction — librarians or faculty. This is an issue that I’ve been thinking about a great deal and while I don’t think an answer exists for every discipline or every school, I thought I’d share my own thinking on it.

We have been working on our report to our accrediting body, NEASC, since the Spring and one of the library goals that was originally written into it was for library instruction to be taught in every English 101 (AKA Freshman comp) class. Last Fall, we taught library instruction to 90% of the EN 101 classes as a result of aggressive marketing to instructors. We thought it a reasonable goal to say that we’d like library instruction to be in 100% of EN 101 courses so that the University would know that every Freshman has certain standard basic information literacy skills. It would create a baseline so that we wouldn’t have to teach the most basic aspects of library research in upper-level classes for the small number of students who didn’t have a library session in EN 101.

While this seemed innocuous enough to me and my colleagues, the English faculty asked us to strike it from the report. They objected 1) to the idea that we are the only ones who can teach information literacy and 2) to any mandate that faculty would have to have a library session as part of their class (which would interfere with academic freedom). We at the library certainly weren’t trying to say that we are the only unit teaching information literacy. Even when librarians do teach a one-shot (or even a few sessions), what students are learning in there is only a very small piece of the information literacy puzzle. The academic freedom issue is trickier and isn’t one that I have a difficult time speaking to. I assume that there must be certain standards, guidelines and requirements that instructors teaching 101 must adhere to already so that students can achieve a basic level of knowledge/skill. We always tailor our instruction sessions to what the instructor has assigned his or her students, so it’s not like anyone would be telling faculty what to teach. It’s the students who suffer because of this lack of standardization since it means that we either have to teach the same things again in upper-level classes or we skip teaching the basics in those classes and students who’d never had library instruction end up lost.

Wayne talks about a new model at Princeton in which the librarians are training the writing instructors to teach library research themselves. I can’t see that flying at many institutions where librarians are seen more as support staff than as fellow instructors with their own area of expertise. I can’t imagine most faculty here being willing to accept training from us on how to teach library resources to their students. But if they were, I certainly would be happy to let go of our instructional role in EN 101 if it meant that all students would get the same preparation.

I don’t think librarians should see the teaching of information literacy as our domain. Some faculty members are teaching information literacy and library research brilliantly in their discipline themselves and that doesn’t threaten me in the least. My Director wants us to be teaching at three levels in every discipline (for example, I teach at the 100, 300, and 400 level in the history program), but I don’t know if that is always necessary. For example, there is a criminal justice research methods class for majors. I do not teach in that class, but they still receive significant information literacy instruction from their professor. On the other hand, I have worked with a class of Junior psychology majors who had never used PSYCInfo or PSYCAbstracts. I think we (librarians AND faculty) need to worry less about what is our domain and more about ensuring that students have the skills they need to be successful in their major. It doesn’t matter who teaches it as long as it’s being taught.

But it needs to be taught well. There are some faculty members who are more knowledgeable about the library resources in their area of study than any librarian here. There are other faculty who have never used a database and still tell their students to use the New York Times in microfilm (we’ve had it online for years). The most unfortunate thing is that, in most cases, it’s the people who are very aware of our resources who request library instruction for their classes. Those who are not continue to assign their students to use only print journals and to find things we don’t even have anymore.

I struggle with how to reach those faculty members. When we get a “rogue assignment” we usually email the faculty member to either get clarification, describe the difficulty that their students are having with the assignment, or let them know that something they want their students to do is literally not possible. Sometimes that helps; sometimes we never hear back. I’ve been wanting to offer brown-bag lunch sessions on new resources in specific disciplines in an effort to get faculty up-to-speed with what we have available, but I suspect that the people I most want to reach will not be the ones who show up. I really want to provide outreach to these faculty — either to get them up-to-speed on our resources or to provide instruction in some of their classes — but I’m not sure how to reach them.

While I don’t really feel territorial about information literacy instruction, I do struggle with the knowledge that the library resources are our area of subject expertise. No matter how library-savvy the faculty member, we are always going to be more “up to date” on what we have. A history faculty member who uses our library all the time was surprised to learn in an instruction session the other day that you could create an account in JSTOR and save articles to your account. Faculty I work with frequently comment that they learned something new when I teach to their classes. I don’t know that all of us can teach it better (some of us are piss-poor instructors), but more often than not, we are going to be more knowledgeable about the library resources and their capabilities. This, of course, begs the question of whether deep knowledge of resources or teaching skills are more important, but that’s a question for another day.

Ideally, I’d like to see one of two things happen: 1) a faculty member who is very up-to-date on what is available through the library teaches his or her students about library research and information literacy or 2) a librarian teaches library research and information literacy in close partnership with the faculty member. Because what’s most important is that partnership. When a faculty member gives over sole responsibility for teaching research to the librarian, the students rarely see value in what is being taught. I’ve had faculty leave the room while I’m teaching and the students in those classes always become less engaged as soon as it happens. When the faculty member makes comments throughout the session and stays engaged in what I’m teaching, the students stay engaged, because the faculty member is indicating with his/her behavior that this is valuable and important. Ideally, I’d love to see classes team-taught, but just having the faculty member engaged in the class makes a huge difference for the students.

I must apologize for the twisted path this post has taken — it matches well my own muddled thoughts on the issue. I think so much of what the ideal is for library instruction depends on the university, the discipline, and the individual faculty members a librarian is dealing with. We can’t say “___ is the best way to do library instruction.” Even in the social sciences (my liaison area), I work very closely with one department and in another I’ve only taught one class session in two years. I don’t think there’s a perfect model that will work for every institution/department/class, but I do know that the more that we or academic faculty are territorial about our roles, the more likely it is that students will get very poor library instruction or none at all.

Like Wayne, I’m curious what your thoughts are on who should be teaching library instruction? Do you have similar power struggles at your institution? Do you have great partnerships with faculty in teaching library instruction? I’d love to hear about it. We all learn so much from hearing about the experiences of others.

And just to be totally gratuitous, here’s a picture of my biggest (and most wonderful) distraction from blogging.

Within a month of starting work as the Distance Learning Librarian at Norwich University four years ago, I was painfully aware of that fact and felt woefully unprepared to play the role of salesman.

I laugh at how naive I was back then. I just assumed that faculty, who were complaining about the poor quality of sources students were using for graduate-level research, would welcome my offer to teach their students how to find and evaluate information resources. I assumed that if I put up information about all of the library resources and services available to them, students would look at it. I was wrong, wrong, wrong. True, some faculty/administrators were very interested in information literacy instruction, and some students were really up on what the library had to offer. But for the most part, I found I had to do a lot more “selling” than I’d ever anticipated.

Steven Bell talks about this a bit in his post Academic Librarians Are Not Salespeople – But They Should Be:

Somewhere during the discussions one of the participants said something along the lines of “Academic librarians are not good salespeople.” I can’t quite recall how that came up but it struck a chord with me because I’ve thought the same exact thing for quite a few years. Frontline librarians need to do more than just respond when the end users are looking for information. They’ve got to be out in the field spreading the word, and making the sales pitch for why the library’s resources are vitally important to the teaching and learning process.

Here’s an example. I was at a meeting last week of our Distance Learning Advisory Group. Our leader asked me to say a few words about how the Library supports online learners – and where we need to improve. As I finished one faculty member blurted out “I had no idea I could do at that with your resources.” How many times does that happen? Too many. We’re also doing LibQual+ and there are far too many comments with suggestions for what the library should be offering – that we’ve already been offering for two or more years.

I’ve seen that in our assessments too, and it frustrates me to no end when I see that we are offering something they want and they just don’t know it. And a lot of the time, I’m not quite sure how to tell them about it. It’s not as difficult with our undergraduate population, because we reach nearly all of them as Freshman with library instruction, and we deal with them in the physical world all the time. But there is no “captive audience” element with our distance learning population. They don’t even have any required synchronous components to their program where we could come in as guest speakers and make our “pitch.” All of the information is there for them, but they have to choose to look at it. The online graduate programs are in the process of redesigning their online orientation and we’ve been able to insert library learning activities for students to complete where they can’t get to the next section of their orientation until they do them. This will at least get them looking at our website and using some key resources in their discipline, but I still don’t feel like it will do enough to make them aware of what we have to offer.

I feel strongly that library schools need to teach marketing and salesmanship to future librarians. We don’t all come to the profession with those skills, and the idea of selling library services to faculty can be daunting for the new professional. We go into library school thinking that we’re going to help people who want our help, and then we find that we have to convince people to accept our help, which is a whole other kettle of fish.

When I was in Iceland, I talked about the importance of LIS schools teaching marketing, and Ken Haycock (Director of SJSU’s SLIS program) mentioned to me that they offer a marketing class and it receives very low enrollment. This tells me that there is a real disconnect between what skills libraries need and what library school students think librarians need. Maybe they don’t see marketing enough in job descriptions and job requirements. Or maybe marketing shouldn’t be its own class. Maybe it should be taught as part of classes on public librarianship, academic librarianship, school librarianship, law librarianship, etc., with information on how to “sell” to the stakeholders in each area. As you can see in Stepping on Toes: The Delicate Art of Talking to Faculty about Questionable Assignments (from one of my favorite blogs, In the Library with the Lead Pipe) many librarians feel uncomfortable putting themselves out there and making suggestions to faculty.

In terms of what Steven Bell wrote, I think it’s more about advocacy, persuasion, outreach and marketing than “sales” in the business sense (or is that just a semantic distinction because we don’t want to feel like used-car salesmen?), but I’m sure we could learn a lot from salespeople that would inform our ability to market library resources to our patrons. And whatever you call it, librarians and LIS educators need to make it clear to LIS students that marketing/outreach/advocacy is a critical skill for all professionals.

Just before the break, the Vice President of Academic Affairs came to visit the library to see what we do. I had about 20 minutes to talk to him about library instruction and the progress we’ve made in this area. He was seriously impressed (I loved when he asked us who created our tutorials — as if we’d used some outside company) and stated that he is committed to ensuring that library instruction is a required part of the curriculum for every Freshman (meaning that we don’t have to sell information lit to each faculty member one-by-one).

Meeting with the VPAA gave me the opportunity to reflect on what I’ve accomplished in this position over the past semester, something I haven’t had time to do during what was certainly my busiest semester. Here are some of the things I was able to get done regarding instruction:

Changing our Freshman Orientation: This was the first thing I worked on in with my instruction hat on over the summer. In our original tours, we dragged the (usually bored) students up and down the library talking at then. In our new tour, we showed them a funny movie and made them go on a crazy scavenger hunt that actually taught them how to use the library. It was a lot more work for us, but a big success and I wrote a post about it here.

Improving our Instruction Statistics: No matter what else I did this past semester, I wanted to make absolutely sure that our instruction statistics went up. While numbers aren’t everything, they do make it easy to show progress. And in the areas I had any control over, the stats did go up. Other than in English (which many of us teach in), subject liaisons teach the classes in their subject area and work with faculty to schedule classes. I would be overstepping my bounds if I contacted Architecture or Engineering faculty to market library instruction. While some subject areas were down in terms of classes taught, on the whole, we taught more in Fall ‘08 than we did in Fall ‘07. Working with folks in History and Criminal Justice, I more than doubled the number of classes we taught in the social sciences. We also took the percentage of students reached with library instruction in English 101 classes from 50-60% to 89%. How did we do it? I just kept contacting people. Some faculty are very proactive about scheduling instruction, while others need a nudge. After I sent out a reminder email around mid-semester, all but one of the faculty members contacted me to schedule library instruction. We only ended up missing out on three EN 101 classes and we plan to hold voluntary refreshers on research basics this semester in the hopes of catching some of that 11%.

I also marketed some less-structured forms of instruction to faculty. Not every class necessarily needs to spend a full 50-75 minute period with me learning about research. For this coming semester, I’ve developed course guides for several upper-level classes for which the students should already have the research basics but just need some info on where to start researching their specific topic areas. Some faculty members who I’ve never worked with before really liked the idea of this, which is awesome!

Making Learning Active: I get bored easily, so I empathize with Freshman who have to sit for 50 minutes while a librarian lectures at them about how to do research. One of my big goals was to get students more actively involved in the learning process during class so that what we taught wouldn’t go in one ear and out the other. The downside of this approach: we can’t teach as much. The upside: students might actually remember something, making the sessions more useful. I started with English 101, developing a worksheet that students would complete during the library session. We’d teach a skill (like finding books or brainstorming search terms) and then they’d practice that skill with their research topic on the worksheet. Then we’d go onto the next skill and so on. The worksheet not only got them actively involved in class, but it gave them a record of what they’d tried so far in their research. Faculty really liked this idea and many collected the worksheets for a grade. The Head of the English Department stated that the quality of his students’ papers this semester was better than ever before.

I ended up replicating this method in the classes I taught in the social sciences, modifying the worksheet based on what I’d be teaching in each class. In all of these classes, the faculty members collected the worksheets for a grade, which was fantastic. And even better, the faculty members gave me feedback on what students seemed to understand and what they had trouble with. I felt like students were getting a lot more out of the session because they actually had something to do and, in the end, they had a product of their work and learning.

Changing the Way We Do Assessment: In early September, I wrote a post about the way we’d done assessment for English 101 classes thus far, which was basically to measure satisfaction with the session at the end of class. While I like to be liked, I really don’t care if students like me so long as they learn something. Our assessment method told us very little about whether the student absorbed what we taught them and whether or not they could apply it. So, for this semester, we collected those worksheets that students completed in EN 101, quickly graded them, and handed them back. We graded each question on a scale of 0-3, zero being they didn’t fill it out at all and three meaning that they demonstrated comprehension of the concept taught. Each student in the class would end up with a total, but his/her scores for each question would be recorded on an Excel spreadsheet. That way, we could see where students were having trouble and it could inform our teaching. If most of the students were getting 1’s on the question about subject headings, clearly we didn’t teach subject headings well enough. At the end of the semester, I averaged up the scores students got in each class on each question and had some very useful data regarding what we are teaching effectively and what we need to improve on. Knowing what students can and can’t do after an instruction session is a lot more useful than a student answering “Agree” to “The information presented was clear and well organized.”

So what’s on tap for this semester? Well, I only have a few months to go until I start my maternity leave at the beginning of April, but it will definitely be a packed few months. I’m doing a lot of work with the History Department and am now getting into teaching 8 sections of History 108, in which Freshmen have to research a specific country’s involvement in WWI and the Paris Peace Talks (easy if you get, say, England, not so easy if you get Australia). They’ve had this assignment for years and for years I’ve observed confused students wandering through the library not having a clue about where to start. I’m very grateful that they asked for my involvement this time around. I’m doing my second year of teaching students in the Historical methods classes, for which I get three sessions with each class. I’m lucky to have some really amazing faculty to work with in the History Department who are really interested in students gaining the information literacy skills they need to be successful in their discipline. Would that every department were like that! I should have sessions with other departments and will probably teach some of the English 102’s, but I’m guessing that history will make up the bulk of my teaching load.

My big push for this semester is going to be marketing library instruction to faculty. We plan to hold brown bag sessions for faculty in specific disciplines where we talk about new(ish) online resources we have access to in their area, including EndNote Web. EndNote is going to be the hook that draws them in, but our real goal is to get some long-time faculty to become aware of some of the great databases we have and the necessity of teaching students how to use them. It’s all about just being on their radar so they think of us when they’re planning for a big research assignment. Some of the best marketing has actually come from faculty who’ve been impressed with our work. I got a call from a psychology professor who wanted me to teach her Experimental Psych students how to find peer-reviewed journal articles based on the recommendation of one of the history profs. I feel like we’re getting close to the point where marketing will get much easier because we won’t be the ones doing it.

Another big project for this semester is LibQUAL. I’ve been tasked with running our library’s LibQUAL survey (our second time doing this) and have formed a great committee of colleagues to help me out with the marketing, administration and data-crunching (especially since I’ll be away by the time we get our data). To be perfectly honest, I’m not a true believer when it comes to LibQUAL — I didn’t feel like we got that much out of it the first time we did it — but I’ll certainly do my best to make sure we get a really good response rate. The final big project will be an upcoming search committee that I’ll be on to hire for a pretty awesome position. I’ll be sure to post the info here about the position as soon as we get cabinet-level approval and the ad gets posted.

While I did like being a distance learning librarian, I’m loving the challenges that this job brings. I love teaching (far more than I ever thought I would), I love working with faculty, and I love change. This is a job I can’t get bored of since there’s always something new to do and no project is ever really finished. Integrating information literacy instruction into the curriculum of every academic program is a huge goal, and one I could chip away at for quite some time. In spite of the fact that nothing is ever really done, I feel a sense of accomplishment already. I can see positive progress and I know I helped to make it happen. I still feel like I’m flying blind most of the time, throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, but I don’t feel insecure about that anymore. While I’m still not as up on the literature of instruction as I’d like to be, I’ve learned a lot about what works at our library, and that’s a whole lot more important.

Does someone really need to understand the back-end of a system to capitalize on it? I don’t believe that’s true. Most people don’t know how to build a car; they don’t understand all of its internal mechanisms. Yet we still drive cars. We just know where to go when we need help. I have no clue how to debug things in Drupal. I’ve never made any attempt to understand the internal mechanisms of it. Does that mean I shouldn’t have used it the three times I have for classes? No way! I can install it and I can use it for the purposes I’ve had for it. I can’t do a lot of the fancy things a lot of people do with Drupal, but it worked fine for what I needed it to do. All my limited knowledge means is that when I have a problem, I need to look up the answer or rely on the community of Drupal users and developers for help. I did just that and thanks to the community, I was able to fix any problems I’ve had.

Yeah, I’d like to know how to fix every little thing in Drupal and create my own modules, but I’d also like to know how to fix my car. Priorities. In my position, it’s much more important that I know a lot about instruction and a decent amount about instructional technologies. Programming is not a necessary skill-set (not that I wouldn’t like to have mad coding skillz). If I’m going to engage in professional development, it will be to learn more about information literacy instruction and assessment, not to take a class on PHP or JavaScript. I’ve even done stuff with PHP and JavaScript, but it just involved messing around with stuff that already existed. I’d break it, figure out what I did and how it impacted things, and then fix it. Eventually I’d usually get it to do what I needed it to do. Yes, I’d love to have a better understanding, but it’s not a priority with my job and there just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to learn everything I’d like.

Should library schools require technology classes? Without a doubt! I don’t think anyone should come out of library school without basic web design skills, a basic understanding of library technologies and Internet technologies, the ability to assess technologies, the ability to be fearless with trying out new technologies, and probably a whole host of other things I’m not thinking of right now with pregnancy brain. But does everyone need to come out knowing how to code? No! While technology is a part of every job, not every librarian needs to know how the back-end of the catalog works or needs to know how to debug a Drupal module. Instruction is a critical part of most of our jobs as librarians too (be it formal instruction, reference assistance, or staff training), but not everyone is required to take classes on instruction. And probably most people don’t need to know as much about instruction as I (and other people in similar positions) do.

People can do so many different things with a degree in Library and Information Science. I think it’s important for everyone to have a certain baseline of technology skills, but beyond that, it’s really dependent on what sort of job you want. The technology skill-sets you need to be a head of instruction vs. a systems librarian vs. a web developer vs. a reference librarian vs. an archivist are very different. I think for any library school student, it’s a good idea to hedge your bets and not just train yourself for a single job. It’s important to take tech classes, but if you know you don’t want to have a job where you’ll need to program, you shouldn’t have to. Focusing only on technology and not at all on public service-type classes is an even bigger mistake, since anyone developing tech for libraries needs to understand user behavior and how to train librarians on how to use the technologies.

Dorothea already wrote a lot of really brilliant things about teaching tech in library school, so there’s really no point in my going into more depth when she already said it all. Like most things she writes, I agree with 99% of it.

But my mind is on all of those people who are already out of library school and didn’t have the opportunity to take tech classes (or perhaps just chose not to because they didn’t think it would be important). Those are the people I write my column for. And the reality is that there are many libraries where no one has good programming skills (mine included) or the money to hire/rent talent. There are also many libraries where no one has an MLS at all, so the issue of tech in LIS education is irrelevant to them. I started writing my column because I saw too many articles that only highlighted things that could be done for a lot of $$$ or with serious programming talent on staff. I wanted to highlight the things that people could accomplish at almost any library so long as they are willing to experiment, maybe break things once, twice (or twenty times), and rely on documentation and the robust user communities that are a part of most of the tools I highlight. I like to show the range of what can be done with any technology, from things that require significant programming to the very simple nearly-out-of-the-box job. That way, they know what’s possible with the software at both ends of the spectrum.

I want small libraries to realize that they can have a decent website without necessarily knowing HTML or having a web designer on staff. I’ve learned over time that most librarians have no idea what they’re capable of doing with tech. I certainly didn’t think I was capable of doing anything with Drupal until I tried it out and realized that it wasn’t as beastly as I’d imagined (though the whole taxonomy/node stuff really took me a while to understand properly). I want to encourage people to try things out and to realize that they’re capable of so much more than they think they are. So, while I’d love for every library to have someone on staff with mad tech skillz, it’s important for people to realize that they still can do a lot of great stuff with tech even if they don’t have tons of money or programming talent.

I deeply love teaching; I love everything about it (with the possible exception of giving people bad grades, which I fortunately don’t have to do too often). Probably the thing I find most exciting is to watch students go from a point where they are not particularly confident in their technology skills to realizing that they are capable of more than they’d ever imagined. One student in my class had emailed me before the start of class wondering if she should be in the class at all because she’s not “techie.” She now can syndicate RSS feeds using JavaScript, create personalized home pages for a library, create podcasts and screencasts, edit a wiki, and so much more. She did incredibly well in the class! All of the students in the class were surprised by how much they were able to do with social technologies by the end, and that’s really what I wanted to hear. This social software stuff ain’t rocket science, but it does take patience, persistence and the willingness to sometimes ask for help. I’m blown away by their accomplishments.

On Tuesday, I received an email informing me that I’ve been chosen to receive a Faculty of the Year Award for Excellence in Online Education from WISE (a group of 15 LIS schools — including UIUC, UNC, Syracuse, and San Jose State — which allow students to take online classes at other schools in the group). I don’t think anything could have surprised me more. What means the most to me is that people must be nominated by their students for this award. That my students think my teaching is worthy of recognition means more to me than anything.

What this award really validates, in my view, is the method of online teaching that I’ve adopted. I’ve been using Drupal for my classes as its flexibility supports my more constructivist approach to teaching. As one of my students wrote:

Comparing Blackboard and Drupal, I thought that the opinions and thoughts of the students are treated with respect by using the Drupal system. In other words, by using this system, students are like the main actors and actresses in movies. I thought that the features of Drupal were built around blogs and focused on connections and communication among teachers and students. On the other hand, Blackboard focuses on announcements and instructions from teachers to students.

Well put, Toshu! The focus isn’t on me imparting my wisdom to my students (thought hopefully my lectures were worth something!); it’s on their impressions and reflections about what they’re learning and the conversations that come from sharing those reflections. I believe strongly that the more students control the conversation and guide the class, the better their learning experience will be. I see my role as a facilitator — not an authority. I need to know a lot about the topic to provide guidance when needed, but I don’t want my thoughts on an issue to ever be seen as gospel. I hope my students realize that we’re all learners and teachers and that they’ve learned as much from each other as they have from me. I’ve learned from them too. Social learning is awesome, and I think social technologies enable that sort of learning better than traditional course management systems.

I’ll be taking a break from teaching for at least the next 2-3 semesters to focus on my baby. While I’ll miss teaching, I don’t want to put students in a situation where I’m not totally committed to them and I can’t imagine how I could be with a new adorable little boy to love up. But I hope to come back to teaching for Spring 2010 (if they’ll have me), as it’s become one of the more fulfilling activities in my life.

Basic Survey Responses (PDF)
Open-Ended Responses for #1 (PDF)
Open-Ended Responses for #2 (PDF)
Open-Ended Responses for #3 (PDF)
Open-Ended Responses for #4 (PDF)

Some interesting things from the survey:

Of the people who responded, less than 50% thought that library school didn’t prepare for them for their work in libraries. Some who said yes mentioned that they only answered yes because of their internship/practicum.

The biggest things that people thought should be taught as part of the LIS curriculum that weren’t taught when they were in library school were management (#1 by quite a lot), Web 2.0/emerging technology, instruction, web design/programming, and conflict management/customer service/dealing with difficult people. A lot of schools are teaching the first four topics these days, but not all are doing it in much depth or in a practical way. I was surprised to find that still, Florida State is only offering one instruction course and it’s designed for people in a K-12 setting. Considering that instruction is a part of the work of librarians in just about every setting, it’s surprising to me that it isn’t being emphasized more in library schools (though I’m sure others are doing a much better job). Management also really isn’t taught in enough depth in library schools. I frequently think about getting an MBA, because I want to know more about managing people and resources, budgeting, strategic planning, marketing, etc. The one class we had that was about management was really interesting, but it was very focused on theory and I really wished there was a “Management II” and “Management III” that would have gone into more depth and would have been more focused on the practical. With some librarians going straight into management positions (or even directorships) after library school, it’s critical that students are prepared to be great managers by library schools.

The survey definitely gave me a lot of interesting food for thought for my presentation in Iceland. Thanks so much to those of you who responded to my call for help!

I think my Director would like to see assessment that is consistent across instruction sessions. There are good reasons for this. For accreditation, it’s good to show that you are using consistent measures of instruction. Also, how will you really be able to compare the effectiveness of an English session with a Business session if the measures are different? However, I worry that creating any assessment that is going to work for everyone will end up not giving us as meaningful results. Last year, we used an assessment tool for English 101/102, and in the social sciences, architecture and engineering. It asked students to rate us on the following statements:

1. The purpose of this instructional session was explained to me.
2. The information presented was clear and well organized.
3. There were opportunities to ask questions during the session.
4. I will be able to use these research tools by myself.

with a strongly agree to strongly disagree scale. Looking at the assessment stats for last year, only a very small percentage actually chose “disagree” or “strongly disagree” on any of the questions, leaving us with very little useful feedback. There was a final question that asked for open-ended feedback, but we almost never got any. It is nice that we can look at most of the classes taught last year on a single spreadsheet and see what students thought of them, but looking at those stats tells me absolutely nothing about what I (or any of my colleagues) should be doing better or covering in more depth. It also doesn’t give me any sense of whether they absorbed what I taught them.

My big push for this year is to incorporate active learning into every session we teach. To that end, I created a worksheet that students are meant to complete during the class session(s) we’re teaching. The worksheet contains things like an area for students to brainstorm keywords for their topic, a place to record their search strategies and what the results were, and a place to record useful books and articles they found. In class, we’re supposed to go over a topic, like finding books, and then give the students time to complete that part of the worksheet with our help. Then we go onto the next topic and give them time to practice those skills. I think it’s helpful for them to practice the skills we’re teaching during the session, because I know how easy it can be to zone out when someone spends an hour lecturing. But when you’re forced to actually do something, the chances of remembering what you learned later on are much greater. Also, the worksheet can act as a “roadmap to research” later on, reminding them of what they’ve already tried when they’re in the thick of their research.

The worksheet template is being used in all EN 101 sessions and all of the social science sessions this semester. It’s just a template and it can be tweaked to fit the topics being taught. For example, I recently taught a session that covered creating search queries, finding tertiary sources, and finding peer-reviewed articles in History. For that, I got rid of the section on finding books and added a section on reference sources that was appropriate to what I would be teaching. As a result, each class will probably have a slightly different worksheet, because we’re preparing them for different assignments and, thus, should be teaching different skills.

Even within English 101, it’s difficult to create any sort of consistent worksheet for students to use. My predecessor’s goal had been to create a consistent list of things that we would teach in every EN 101 session. It was a good goal, but difficult to do when each instructor assigns a very different research assignment. I’ve seen English 101 classes where students had to find peer-reviewed articles on environmental topics, where students had to find articles related to topics discussed in Flowers for Algernon, where students had to research and write about a controversial issue, and more. And the resources they were required to use also varied widely. With so many different topics, it’s almost impossible to cover the same set of resources in every EN 101 session. I know there’s a push here to standardize the EN 101 curriculum, but until then, I think we have to teach to the assignments students have.

A colleague of mine gave me the idea of using the worksheet as an internal assessment tool as well. We could grade the assessment using a rubric I created and then record each student’s score on each of the individual questions on a spreadsheet. That way, we could see not only how well the students in the class absorbed what we were teaching, but what specific topics they had the most difficulty with. If there is a certain question that the average student score was very low on (for example, justifying why an article is of sufficient quality to use in their paper), we would know that we need to cover that topic better next time. It should really give us a sense of our effectiveness as instructors and what specifically we need to do to improve.

Obviously, if we all have somewhat different worksheets, we won’t be able to compare the scores exactly from one class to the next. Hopefully, each worksheet will contain some common elements (like, hopefully each person is teaching the students how to use library databases), and we can compare those scores. But, what I think will be nice, is that we’ll be able to see where, in a given session, we didn’t get through to the students.

I know consistency is important, but what I really hope to accomplish this year is to get some measure of our effectiveness as instructors. And I just don’t know if any single tool will help us to learn that. I want to know that we’re really giving the students the skills that they need to do research for their assignments. Then, once we know we’re ok on that, I’d like to focus on creating more consistent assessment. But I really think that making our instruction work effective is far more important than measuring everything in the same way.

I’m curious how other libraries assess individual information literacy sessions. Does every instructor use the same assessment tool in every class? Are there specific assessment tools for specific disciplines? Do you assess students satisfaction or student learning? Do you feel that the assessments you get back are instructive to you?

When I was named the Head of Instructional Initiatives, the Rook Tours were the first thing that I wanted to tackle. I wanted to make them engaging, experiential, and maybe even a little fun. I immediately thought of doing a scavenger hunt, and after reading about some other schools who’d done similar orientations, I settled upon that as a good way of getting students familiar with the library. To make up for not taking them up and down the library, I figured we could make a movie that would introduce them to what’s on each floor.

Our movie is a testament to the fact that you don’t always need a lot of time, talent or technology to make a half-way decent orientation movie. When it was less than three weeks before rook tours and my colleague, Josh, hadn’t started on the movie (not his fault, he had a million other things on his plate), I suggested that we should just take pictures of the library and sew them together into a movie instead of trying to film and edit something full-motion, which would have taken much longer. So I went around the library taking photos of everything. Josh put those together into an order that made sense and then managed to create a pretty darn entertaining movie with his folksy narration. I don’t think it even suffers much from the lack of technical sophistication or full-motion. We got lots of laughs from students, some applause, and a number of students asked if the movie was going to be available on YouTube. Freshman are a tough audience, and I’m really impressed that Josh was able to put something so entertaining together in a matter of days. I also created a very brief screencast that introduced students to the library website and the features that they’d need to use during the scavenger hunt. We showed both together before the students were sent off on the scavenger hunt.

We plan to make a better movie during this year with work study students, but I was pretty pleased with how things turned out this time around.

For the scavenger hunt, I made a list of the things that it would be important for Freshmen to know about the library before they (hopefully) come in with their English 101 class. There were certain rooms I wanted them to be able to find (the Learning Support Center, group study rooms, etc.) as well as certain items (the new periodicals, etc.). I also wanted them to be able to look up a book in the catalog and find it on the shelf. Finally, I wanted them to be able to find the research guides on our website and to know how to IM a librarian from our MeeboMe widget. So I built all of those goals into the 6 separate sets of clues/tasks I created for five teams. We’d break each group of students up into five teams and each would have a separate bunch of clues to look for. But no matter what group they were in, they’d be developing the same basic skills.

Doing a scavenger hunt is exceedingly difficult when your orientation is scheduled the way our rook tours are. We had to pull off the same scavenger hunt 12 times, which meant hoping that the five sets of clues were still where they were supposed to be each and every time. For each thing students had to find, I put 15 clues (on color-coded slips of paper) in an envelope and put that envelope at the location they were supposed to visit. The students were supposed to just take one clue out and leave the envelope for the next group. Unlikely with the average Freshman population, but I knew that our Rooks tend to be exceedingly polite due to the fact that it’s drilled into them in the military part of their training. For each clue, I also kept a backup envelope in my office with about 25 more copies of the clues.

While we did have a couple of mishaps with books being put back in the wrong place, envelopes disappearing, etc., it went a lot better than I thought. My colleague, Josh, and I tried to check on the clues after every session or two and I was pleased by how few disasters we had. No group ended up not having a clue at their location. But still, it caused me a lot of anxiety throughout those three days. Next time, I plan to have people take shifts for checking on the clues before the next group comes. It’s too much for two people.

My other huge worry was timing. I had my husband (who isn’t a fan of libraries and doesn’t really know the dewey decimal system or the layout of our library) try doing one set of the clues and it took him about 15 minutes to get through it. I thought for the average Freshman, it would probably take 20-25, though really I had no idea. Would they pay attention to the movie and remember which floor things were on? Would they be able to figure out how to use the library catalog and then find a book on the shelf? I sweat bullets over the first group on Monday morning, but was relieved when one team got back in 15 minutes and the others made it back within 10 minutes of that. A couple of groups didn’t quite finish, but they were usually only one clue short of being done, so not bad.

I think they definitely learned a lot during the activity, which is fantastic. So many students give up on the library because they don’t know how to find a book or they don’t know how to get help. By having them learn these things in a game situation, I think it made it more tempting to try to figure things out on their own (well, in groups) instead of giving up. The best part was seeing how much fun they were having. The students got really competitive about the scavenger hunt and would rush around at light speed trying to get through it before any of the other teams did. It was also a great team-building activity. Students were really proud of themselves when they finished. We got comments from their Cadre (the upperclassmen in charge of the Rooks) that they’d wished their orientation had been like that. Awesome!

It’s always hard to try something new after doing it a certain way for years and years, so probably the biggest difficulty was with some staff members who were very accustomed to a certain kind of rook tour and weren’t quite clear on the details of how these needed to be done. But once each librarian had worked with one group, they had a much easier time facilitating it the second time. I’m sure it’ll be even easier next year.

I spent the few weeks before orientation really nervous about this new model. It’s easy to say that something is boring and suggest a change, but when the responsibility for its success or failure is 100% on you, you start to worry about whether or not your idea was really a good one. I had lots of doubts. It certainly would have been safer to do things the way we’d done them forever (and less stressful for me!), but I couldn’t be happier that things turned out as they did. Risk-taking can be super-scary, but it’s better to try something new than to stick with something that just isn’t working (especially if the students aren’t learning anyway). The worst thing that can happen is that it won’t work well and you’ll learn from it to make it even better next year.

Next stop, improving how we teach and assess English 101 library sessions. No pressure!

I’ve been the Head of Instructional Initiatives for four months now and I’ve really been enjoying the new position. I’m also the liaison to the social sciences, which is the largest division at the University by far. It’s brought a bit more stress and a lot more work than I had before, but I’m loving the new challenges. I get bored pretty easily, and this is definitely a huge job with lots of different elements that will keep me on my toes for a long time.

Here’s what I was able to get done this summer:

• Evaluating 100+ year old books – this project has never been done before, so it involved going through all of the circulating books from the early 1800s to 1908 (yes, we had circulating books from the early 1800s) and determining whether to keep them in the circulating collection, deselect them, or send them to special collections. Not surprisingly, my liaison areas (criminal justice, history, psychology, political science and education) contained far more books than anyone else’s so it was a massive project for me. Fortunately, next year it’ll just be the 1909 books. What was really amazing about this project was how many of the 100+ year old history books I found in Google Books. It’s a real treasure-trove for people doing historical research, . Favorite book title found: Bibliomania or Book Madness: A Bibliographical Romance.
• Revamping the “Rook Tours” – when the new cadets (half of our student population is military) start their orientation a week before classes, they all get a tour of the library. For time immemorial, the tour has been pretty boring — we’d tell them a bunch of stuff about the library they didn’t care about and then dragged them around the library. When I became the Head of Instruction, I was really enthusiastic about changing this. My colleague Josh is making a brief movie intro to the library for the students to watch. They’ll then have a scavenger hunt to go on that requires them to find and do a lot of the basic things they’ll need to use during their first year — like finding a book on the shelf, finding the subject guides, finding the Learning Support Center, etc. I’ve spent a long time planning it and have no idea how it will go, but I’m glad to be trying something new that might provide more value to students.
• Integrating information literacy into the history curriculum – this one has been a lot of fun for me. I received an email in June from a History faculty member asking if she (and a few other faculty members I’ve worked with) could meet with me about integrating library instruction into 100 and 200-level courses. That’s the kind of email most instruction librarians dream of getting! We had a good talk about how to do this and what to teach at different points. I developed an assignment to support/assess student information literacy and am looking forward to teaching in a lot more history classes this year than last.
• Developing an instruction menu and learning activities for English 101 – I’ve worked this summer with our liaison to the Humanities to really integrate active learning more into our teaching of EN101 classes. I developed a worksheet that students will work on during the library session that will both assess their learning in the class and to give them a record of what they’ve tried so far in their research (thanks for the inspiration UT Austin!). I’ve shown it to a number of faculty members this summer, and they’ve all really liked the idea. I’m still not sure how we’ll use this as an assessment tool internally (if the faculty member collects it) and I need to figure that out ASAP. The other thing I’ve been working on is a menu of instruction to give to faculty. Often, we’ll have faculty ask us to teach the research process from soup to nuts in 50 minutes. And then we end up trying to pack far too much into a session and leave no time for students to practice what they’re learning. The menu shows faculty a large number of modules (such as developing a search strategy, determining whether something is peer-reviewed, etc.) with an amount of time attached to each. Faculty can then combine these modules into an instruction session (or more than one), keeping in mind how long the class is. Faculty have really liked the menu, because they didn’t know how long things took or what topics we could be covering. Some have even realized that we need more than a single session to cover what they want students to learn and have given us two class sessions! It’s definitely been a win-win.
• Orienting the new Distance Learning Librarian – I has me an employee! Her name is Toni and she is bright, energetic and has a ton of great new ideas. I was really looking for someone who wouldn’t just keep doing the same stuff I’ve done over the years. I’ll admit that it’s a bit hard to watch someone changing tutorials and other materials that always felt like “mine”, but I also can’t wait to see what new services and ideas she brings to the table. I really look forward to working with her to better promote information literacy instruction in the online graduate programs. It’s also great to have another tech-savvy librarian — we’re pretty close to having a critical mass now!

Here are a few of the things that… well… didn’t happen:

• Weeding storage – I get the sense that there were a whole lot of pack-rats working in this library back in the day, because our storage area is full of things that really should have been weeded straight away instead of thrown into a basement purgatory. For those of you who take an overly conservative approach to weeding, just remember that you may be dooming your successor to a Herculean weeding task.
• Weeding the 900s – we’re soon going to have a big influx of Chinese history books to support the increased number of courses in Chinese history, language, literature and culture. With the 900s packed to the rafters as it is, I was hoping to make some room for the new books. It’s something I probably won’t be able to ignore for much longer.
• Writing a report on Faculty Perceptions of Student Research Skills – towards the end of the Spring semester, my colleague and I administered a survey we’d developed to get an idea about what faculty think about their student research skills and their attitudes towards information literacy instruction. So far, I have gone through the data (which makes a strong case for library research instruction), but haven’t really had time to write anything up. And my report has to be good since it’s going to go to faculty and administrators and will likely be an important document for the University retention committee.
• Doing lots of research on instruction and assessment – while I’m so excited about this job, I do feel woefully out of my depth. I never had a course in grad school on library instruction and have never had any training since then. All of my knowledge comes from experience. I’ve read some literature, but not enough to feel like I’m not fumbling and stumbling. What I do have is a real passion for instruction and the will to do what it takes to improve our instruction program. I’d also rather have a job that forces me to learn new skills and stretch myself than one that I can do with one hand tied behind my back. How boring is that?!? I wish I’d had more time to read up on pedagogy and assessment, but it’s rare that I have time to read when there are so many more immediate needs at work. How do you make time for professional development reading at work? What are your favorite books or articles on library/information literacy instruction?
• Working on marketing – I’d wanted to create a marketing committee and really get a group together whose sole focus was how to market library resources and services to faculty and students. I think this is of critical importance, but no time or funding has been devoted to marketing the library. I figure we can’t really complain about how little faculty know about what we offer when we’re not doing a great job of telling them.

It’s hard to believe that the students will be back in a week and a half and the onslaught of instruction will begin soon after. I had wanted to be a lot more prepared for it, but there are only so many hours in the day, and the best laid plans often go awry thanks to hard drives failures, proxy server meltdowns, student access issues, Voyager upgrades, and really tough research questions. C’est la vie.

The annual LOEX conference is trying something new as an experiment this year: three of their breakout sessions will be presented as live, interactive webcasts a few weeks after the conference: http://www.loexconference.org/2008/virtualsessions.htm
I think this is a terrific idea, and addresses two distinct issues with LOEX: first, the number of people who want to go but can’t because registration is capped at a certain number of attendees; and second, the inevitable problem of too many good sessions scheduled against one another at the conference itself. It’s also great for anyone who can’t go to the conference due to funding or travel restrictions, library school students, etc.

The virtual sessions will take place between May 20 – 22nd, and registration for it will open up tomorrow (April 29th) at 1pm ET. Registration is reserved for LOEX members or those who are attending or were wait listed for the LOEX conference this year.

It’s really nice to see conferences experimenting with the development online components for those who are unable to attend, and it’s especially nice to see opportunities like this offered at such reasonable prices. LOEX is definitely a conference I hope to get to next year in my new role as Head of Instructional Initiatives.