I’m sure anyone working in an academic library has already heard that the JSTOR interface was changing this summer. Well, how nice that they wait to finally make the change live the week that students are coming back to most schools. One of our librarians attended a webinar on the new interface and reported about it to the rest of the staff so we were pretty prepared for what was coming in terms of the interface change. But the thing that’s a really big deal is that JSTOR is now going to display everything in their collection by default. That probably doesn’t matter to a large University that subscribes to every JSTOR collection known to man, but for libraries of small to medium size that only subscribe to maybe 4 or fewer collections, your students will suddenly be seeing a lot of results in JSTOR that they can’t access. I did a search on World War II and Poland and out of the first 10 results there were only 2 that were in the JSTOR collections we subscribe to. If a student clicked on one of the eight of ten results that did not have a green check mark to the right of it they would see this:

What’s interesting is that we actually have many of these articles available in full-text through other databases.

I know what you’re probably thinking — “every database displays things that aren’t available in full-text. You can just enable your link resolver and students will be able to link to the full-text.” That would be nice, but JSTOR has decided not to make that possible. The response we got from tech support was “OpenURL links are not currently available when your users arrive at articles in collections that you do not license.” So, we can link out from full-text articles in JSTOR to versions of the same full-text in other collections, but we can’t link out from articles we do not have the full-text of in JSTOR to full-text in other collections. Either a lot of smart people don’t understand the purpose of OpenURL or they really don’t want to make it easy for students to figure out that their library has access to these resources through another database.

The other response we got was this: “At this time it is also not possible to change the default search to just your licensed collections.” Students can check a box on the Advanced Search page only that will “Include only content I can access”, but how many students are going to 1) notice that check box and 2) know what it really means? Especially when the default option (the box already checked) says “Include links to external content” and the explanation next to it says “JSTOR displays citation information and an outside link to the full-text of some recently published articles on external sites.” It makes it sound like students can get more full-text content that way when the reality is that they’ll just get more results that ask them to pay $12 or $30 for the article.

The tech support person went on to state “I will make sure that your suggestion of setting default search limits, and expanding OpenURL links to cover all non-licensed content, is passed on to our development team for consideration.” I have to call BS here. I can’t believe that these were not conscious decisions on their part. Was this developed by one lone dude in a shack with no input from other designers and librarians? I have to believe that they can’t be surprised that libraries would want these features.

I refuse to believe that all of the smart people at JSTOR have no idea how OpenURL works and have no idea how pretty much every other database vendor in the known world operates these days. Even if they were clueless, JSTOR has advisory boards made up of librarians who could tell them how things work. So my first thought was clearly they want to confuse students into paying for access to articles they could get through another database or ILL. But then I remember that this is JSTOR. They’re a not-for-profit. Something is clearly going on behind the scenes that we’re missing the boat on. And the first thing that pops into my head is PUBLISHERS. Are the pressures of publishers pulling out of JSTOR to pursue lucrative deals with EBSCO become to much? Did you have to make concessions that benefit your publishing partners but hurt the end user? I do understand that this change will make it easier for people not affiliated with a library to search JSTOR (helping to increase their base of individuals purchasing articles), but there is no reason that they couldn’t at the same time give libraries the ability to customize the default at their institutions or to make OpenURL work across the board.

So which one is it, JSTOR? Are you really that clueless about how modern databases and OpenURL link resolvers work? Are you out to make a buck off confused Freshmen with credit cards? Or did your publishing partners force you into it? Either way, you’re putting the customer dead last in this equation and, IMHO, breaking a trust relationship you’ve had with librarians for many years. I know that my solution to this will be simple. I just won’t teach JSTOR to social science majors here and will encourage students to use WorldCat Local. JSTOR articles are indexed in WC Local, so students can find the articles there and use Serials Solutions 360 Linker to link out to whichever database holds the full-text. Problem solved. And I doubt I’ll be the only librarian looking for a way around teaching JSTOR in information literacy classes if JSTOR doesn’t make a change ASAP. Way to make yourself less visible to future scholars, JSTOR!

I’ll be really curious to see how this shakes out, because I can’t imagine we’re the only library that’s going to be very negatively impacted by JSTOR’s bad decisions. I hope they make a change, and soon, because my History and Political Science info lit classes are coming in just a couple of weeks.

Update: For those who think that this is already resolved or have mentioned that you’re seeing a link resolver link to some articles, let me explain what you’re looking at as I’ve done a bit more digging. There are three types of results you can get right now in JSTOR, and you’ll see each in this screenshot (sorry for the size, my computer is being wonky — just click on it to expand it):

JSTOR results

The first (with the gray asterisk) is from a journal that is not in a JSTOR collection we subscribe to. There will be no link resolver link that lets patrons easily get to the article in another database to to our library’s ILL form. Frequently, there will be something that tells the user they need to pay to access the article. Otherwise, it’ll just be a dead end.

The second (with the green check mark) is an article that is in our JSTOR collection. Students can click on the title and get to the full-text.

The third (with the yellow arrow) is from a journal this is in our JSTOR collection, but it is not from the date range of full-text that is available through JSTOR (in this case, the article is from 2006 and JSTOR’s coverage goes to 2005). Clicking on the title of this type of result will provide a link resolver link so that the patron can check to see if the library has this in full-text elsewhere.

For those who are seeing link resolver links right now, what you are seeing is the third type of link. You may just have too many JSTOR collections to easily get a result in the second category which is very lucky for you.

Immersion was exhausting. You barely had time to stop and think since you were constantly engaged in activities or doing “homework.” But it was also exhilarating, because you were constantly hearing things that made fireworks go off in your brain. “Oh my gosh, we could totally do that at my library!” After being back at work for 3 hours, I’d already used an idea from Immersion for changing our student orientation program. This year we’re getting 26 groups of about 30 students each coming to the library for around 40 minutes each. My cohort leader (the fabulous Tiffini Travis) gave me the idea to break the students into groups and have each group find out about certain parts of the library and then share that information with the entire class. Brilliant! Not only does it prevent us from having to give a dry, boring lecture/tour, but it gets the students engaged in learning and acting as teachers rather than passive participants. While I loved the scavenger hunts we did for the past two years, they were a ton of work and stress for me and I always felt burnt out just as the fall semester was starting. This idea was embraced by all of my colleagues. Hot damn!

Immersion was also about breaking down one of our biggest barriers: ourselves. Never underestimate the power of denial and procrastination! I think my biggest epiphany came when we were discussing a case study we’d been assigned to read. It was about Dorothy, the first instruction coordinator at her institution, and the missteps she made in her first few years on the job. I realized when I was talking about the mistakes she’d made, I was getting really annoyed. And then I realized why. I’d made many of those same mistakes. I was Dorothy! It made me see my own role in a new light and helped me realize that I’d been avoiding some of the same things (being more involved in the University outside of the library, focusing on staff development). Those realizations really informed my action plan and will inform all of my work this year as instruction coordinator. After talking to many of my fellow program-track colleagues, I realized that I was not the only one who’d had that epiphany, so it was definitely a good experience to break down our own denial.

Another epiphany came when we took a survey to determine where we fell in our leadership orientation (structural, political, human resources or symbolic). I found that I scored very high on symbolic, which didn’t surprise me at all, because I tend to be a big picture/vision person. What it made me realize was that I wasn’t focused enough on the other areas. I wasn’t focused enough on building consensus and a sense of shared purpose amongst the members of the instruction team (while my colleagues have always gone along with my ideas, I don’t feel like I ever had the sort of buy-in that makes people feel truly committed to a project). I wasn’t focused enough on the world outside of the library and getting involved in committees and activities that could provide opportunities for promoting IL. And I wasn’t focused enough on gathering and using data to make the case for information literacy instruction. So these were the areas that I ended up focusing on in my action plan, which was the final project we did in the program track of Immersion.

By the end of Day 1 back at work, I’d implemented one of the items from my action plan. I wanted to develop a library staff development program centered around instruction. In addition to scheduling monthly instruction meetings (meetings had previously not been very regular and were combined reference/instruction meetings), I also scheduled monthly brown bag lunches to share ideas surrounding pedagogy, assessment and content related to IL. We’re going to have our first brown bag this Friday where I’ll be talking about developing learning outcomes (thanks Anne Zald for the great lessons on developing appropriate outcomes!). Given that my colleagues have varying levels of training and experience in teaching (from zero to a bit, pretty much), this should be really beneficial for all of us. I also hope it will create more of a sense of cohesiveness among members of the instruction team, since in the past we’d been very focused on our own liaison areas. We’re one of the few libraries out there that’s been suffering from too few meetings rather than too many, so I think this will be a positive change.

One of the most rewarding activities we did at Immersion was a brand new one that the Immersion faculty were trying out for the first time. They had each program track cohort plan and execute an instruction session for a teacher track cohort about planning and persuasion (basically what we’d been learning all week). It was great for us, because there’s nothing that makes learning stickier than when you have to teach what you’d just learned. It also brought our cohort together more. And it was great for the teacher track because they’d been planning out how they were going to change their teaching without considering how they were going to convince stakeholders that this was a change worth making. Also, it was just nice to come together with members of the teacher track like that and hear about what they were learning.

One of the things I loved best were the variety of group and individual experiences. Sometimes we were listening to a lecture in a big room. Sometimes we were participating in small group discussions/activities. Sometimes we were doing individual work. Sometimes we were molding stuff with clay and doing skits wearing snorkeling gear. Sometimes it was just the 30 program track participants sharing their experiences. I feel like I’ve built such a wonderful network of instructors and instruction coordinators whom I know I will learn much more from in the future. I absolutely loved working with my cohort; we are all dealing with diverse and complex situations and it was really nice to discuss this stuff with people who are equally passionate about user-centered info lit instruction. I really hope to keep in touch with these inspiring professionals.

If you do instruction at your library and have the opportunity to attend Immersion, I’d highly recommend doing it. I’ve been to plenty of conferences and have come out with great ideas, but I’ve never felt so changed by anything else. It was wonderful. Thanks to Randy, Anne, Beth, Craig, Tiffini and ACRL for creating such a memorable experience for us!

Librarians keep a lot of statistics and measure a lot of things. Gate count, reference transactions, instruction sessions, website hits, visits to a specific tutorial or research guide, e-resource usage, etc. We are big on numbers. I have no problem whatsoever with measuring things like this and in many cases I think it’s essential. The thing I do have a problem with are the unsupported interpretations we often make based on these numbers and the direction they’re going in.

Reference desk transactions went down. This is a bad thing! We need to try and get them back up! Really? Why? Do you know why they went down? You probably have some theories, but do you know for sure? Is it because you’re less approachable or is it because there has been an increase in instruction sessions which helped students become more independent researchers? You need to look at the larger ecosystem beyond the reference desk to figure out why this happened and whether it’s a good or bad thing.

The tutorial I created has received more hits than any other one. It must be really useful! Oh yeah? Or is the tutorial for a class that has a lot of sections? Did an instructor require that students visit it? Are the people visiting it staying for a long time or just for a few seconds? Are they getting anything out of it? You can’t say that a web hit = someone getting something out of that page.

We’re teaching more library sessions than ever before. Students will be more information literate when they graduate! Maybe. But how do you know that? Teaching more doesn’t necessarily = learning more. If the instruction you’re providing is not course-integrated and emphasized at various subsequent points in their college career, it might be going in one ear and out the other. How can we determine that what we’re teaching is actually making our students information literate?

Sidenote: Years ago, a professional colleague complained that students in her information literacy sessions were not as engaged as they were years ago and reasoned that the caliber of students at her school had declined. The question I wanted to ask at the time, but didn’t, was have you considered that maybe the way you teach doesn’t work for the current crop of students? We come to unsupported conclusions all the time — not just when trying to analyze statistics. Don’t just assume it’s “them.” Maybe it’s you.

Statistics can tell us a lot of things, but they can also be manipulated to support just about any position. Without actually knowing why something increased or decreased, we should be hesitant about making any judgments.

We often take these assumptions right up to Administration, using these numbers as evidence that we are doing a great job, deserve more funding, etc. This reveals another flawed assumption; the idea that these numbers matter to administrators outside of the library. What do university administrators care about? Retention. Student success. Accreditation. Student satisfaction with the University. Etc. They don’t care about the number of information literacy sessions the library taught unless you can somehow show how those contributed to student success (i.e. student use of quality resources in their papers increased leading to better grades). They don’t care about the number of reference transactions unless you can show that reference support helped to improve retention. Sure, they may nod their head and say “great job!” but you’re not going to really get them excited and “on board” until you tie what the library does to the University’s goals and provide data that demonstrates how what you do contributes to those goals.

I don’t have all the answers on exactly how to measure how the library contributes to the larger goals of the University, but I do know that we’re doing our students a disservice when we make assumptions about how what we do is impacting them based solely on a bunch of numbers. And if we want to promote libraries to the people who hold the purse strings, we need to focus more on demonstrating how we contribute to their “bottom line” than to our own.

I try to never miss a talk that Rebecca Jones gives, and, as usual, I was not disappointed by the talk that she and Deb Wallace of Harvard Business School’s Baker Library gave on Critical Thinking: Getting to the Right Decision. Rebecca started with the seemingly obvious point that if you’re not willing or ready to change, don’t bother doing strategic planning. While I’d like to believe this is obvious, I know of libraries that have done strategic planning with no intention of changing in any meaningful way. Rebecca stated that critical thinking is not about being critical; it’s about decision-making. You have to challenge base assumptions. When people have to make decisions, they tend to do one of two things – they oversimplify the issue or they get overwhelmed by the decision and are like a deer in the headlights. To employ critical thinking, people must demonstrate clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, use sound evidence, have good reasons behind our decisions, be fair, and open-minded.

We need to be clear on the fact that when we are challenging assumptions we are challenging a situation, not people, but people may feel challenged by it. When making decisions, we need to look at our assumptions and how our views of things are colored by time/perspective/others. We need to look at statistics and trends with clarity and try to think about what they’re really telling us, rather than looking at them through the colored lens we usually employ to examine such things. I really like what Rebecca said about sunk costs and how people often stick with something that’s not working because they already invested so much in it. “When you find yourself in a hole, the worst thing you could do is keep digging.”

Deb works at the Baker Library of Harvard Business School, which is an iconic structure, but they’re trying hard not to be identified only as a building. They have an important role in educating leaders who make a difference in the world. Over the past few years, they have worked hard to connect all staff to the bigger picture of the library and how it can move forward, which was difficult with some staff who had rote tasks and were not really in the habit of thinking that way. They wanted people to look at the library with new eyes and ask themselves if they’re anchored in stuff that was done a specific way 35 years ago. When you erase the status quo, people actually have to exercise judgment, which can be scary for some.

Deb said a lot of profound things, but there was one thing that really stuck with me as the Head of Instruction. She talked about making clear the distinct capabilities we bring to the table that the faculty don’t have. The different roles should be clear to avoid butting heads when we collaborate. This has been a big issue at our library as we try to ensure that every freshman gets basic information literacy instruction. While we’d like to standardize this and do it through the library, some English faculty are really against this, arguing that it’s their role to teach information literacy (though some don’t do it or at least don’t do it well). So I’m really struggling to define what we offer that’s unique in this realm, when faculty can (and in some cases do) teach information literacy as well.

In the afternoon, I gave a talk with Joan Petit on Virtual Learning & Training: From Classrooms to Communities. I talked about how I use Drupal for my online class in SJSU’s SLIS program to make class more engaging, encourage reflective learning, and create a more constructivist learning environment. Joan talked about how she used blogs in a face-to-face information literacy class to extend learning and make the class more engaging. Joan was a last minute addition to the lineup as my original co-presenter realized on Friday that she couldn’t make it to the conference. In light of that, it was even more amazing what a great job she did. It was such an interesting session and we got a lot of good questions from the attendees. My slides are below and links to my classes also can be found on my presentation wiki.

I was so energized by the ladies from UNC Greensboro (Beth Filar Williams, Lynda Kellam, Amy Harris, Hannah Winkler) who presented on Instructional Technology: It’s a Team Thing (a much more detailed blog post on this session can be found on Heather Braum’s blog). Before the four women came together, instructional technologies at the library were not used systematically, and it was dependent on the individual instructor. One of them was tasked by her supervisor with trying to standardize the use of instructional tech to a greater extent. To that end, she asked interested members of the library staff to meet with her about instructional tech, and from that group, she assembled a team of four librarians to be the instructional technology team. They each have different skills/strengths and really complement each other. They brainstormed ideas for tech to implement, and broke them down into high impact/low effort, high effort/high impact, etc. to figure out what would net the most impact with the least effort. Those were the things they decided to try first. I was really impressed by how organized their meetings were, with very detailed agendas (with what/who, details, and time allotted for each topic). It’s something we really don’t do at my library and as a result, we often end up with overlong rambly meetings that veer off on various tangents. At the meetings I run, I think I’m going to start organizing meetings the way they do.

In April 2009, UNCG had a big budget freeze and had no money for anything, so they had to reprioritize what they wanted to do. They created tutorials, an assignment calculator, and several other things that they could do for free. Later on, when they had money, they could get things like clickers and a video camera and boom mic. These are all things I’d really like for my library too. The women also started a team blog to communicate amongst themselves and with the other staff members about what they’re working on.

In addition to their internal group, they also started an instructional technology group with librarians from other local academic institutions. This is something I’d really like to do in Vermont (or at least central VT). It’s so easy to develop tunnel vision or groupthink when you’re talking to the same people everyday. It’s really nice to get out of your little box and talk to other librarians on a semi-regular basis.

Stay tuned for Day 3!

On the other hand, I really don’t want to see information literacy be thought of as “our job.” “Information literacy” is not something that is simply taught to a student in a 50-minute library one-shot; it should be woven throughout a student’s learning experience. They should get basic instruction in their first-year classes (like English 101 or whatever equivalent you have at your school). They should then learn about doing research in their discipline as they ease into their major. Finally, they should learn how to do advanced research when they’re at the Junior or Senior level. And all of it should be tied to the work they’ll be doing in their classes; their skills should grow to match what they’re being asked to do. And yet, based on a survey I did two years ago, plenty of faculty figure what the students get in a library session in English 101 is enough (which is all the more sad since EN 101 faculty are not required to even have a library session).

On Friday, I spoke to my Director about the idea of the University putting together an information literacy committee that is made up of faculty members from each School and representatives from the library and academic computing. There’s a similarly-composed committee to discuss academic technologies, so it makes sense to me for one to exist to plan out the University’s strategy for building student information literacy skills. My Director originally suggested that maybe this is something that could be taken up by the faculty senate library committee, but my response was that this isn’t a library issue, it’s a University-wide issue (and if her first response is to see it as a “library thing” I can only imagine what other faculty members think). We’re going through NEASC Accreditation right now, and it’s not as if information literacy is something that is only asked about in the library section of the report. It’s also a part of Standard 4 (see standard 4.6), which asks about how the University teaches students to find and use resources. It makes sense for this to be thought of as an issue we all need to be focused on.

I know this is stuff that every academic librarian who teaches struggles with. It’s so frustrating sometimes to feel like you’re the only unit on campus who really cares about information literacy beyond accreditation time. And while I know that’s not entirely true, it feels that way sometimes. Every semester, I have discouraging setbacks and promising accomplishments. I’ll get asked to do instruction for a new professor (yay!) only to find that it’s a “babysitting” session with no clear assignment. But then I’ll have one of those zen-like information literacy instruction sessions where the students are involved and engaged and the result ends up exceeding my expectations. Or I’ll go to a faculty meeting in my liaison area and will get a round of applause from faculty members who tell me they really appreciate all I’ve done for them and their students. I’m sure we all have our ups and downs in teaching and promoting information literacy, but it’s important to focus on what we can control than instead of we can’t.

In spite of my moments of frustration and impatience, when I look at what we’ve accomplished in the two years since I took over as Head of Instructional Initiatives, I do feel a strong sense of accomplishment. I and my colleagues have made some real changes in what, how and how much we teach, and we’re always thinking up and trying new things. I feel like as long as we keep making slow progress towards improving the research experience for students, we’re making a difference. I wish we could move faster on this stuff, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, and if Rome was built by a university committee, it probably still wouldn’t be done.

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.