Book Review: What They Don't Teach You in Library School

Photo by Barbara Slavin

Title: What They Don't Teach You in Library School
Author: Elisabeth Doucett

I read this book because I recommended it to a few soon-to-be librarians, and I thought I should see what it was all about before recommending it further.  I've been a librarian for 6 years, so I'm not necessarily the audience for this book. However, there were a few chapters that I really liked, and the rest were full of useful information for just about any librarian new to the profession.

My favorite chapters were:

Chapter 4: Making "Librarian" a Brand
For some reason, of all professions, people think it is just so funny to poke fun at librarianship. For example:

Ignorant person: "Do people still use libraries?"  OR "Oh, so you read books all day?"  OR "Isn't everything online?"
Kate (well, what I'd *like* to say): "I'm sorry, what do you do again?  I'd like to poke fun at whatever that is."  

However, that's clearly not a productive way to respond to that kind of question.  This chapter talks about creating an elevator pitch to use whenever someone asks you what you do for a living or makes a comment like one of the above.  With the elevator pitch, you can head off the ignorant comments because part of it is to throw in a brief description of how you spend your time.  For example, my elevator pitch (with the three parts recommended by the author in brackets):

[Job title] I'm a librarian, more specifically a reference librarian at a university, which means [brief overview of what I do] I spend a large part of my time helping students find the information they need, either one-on-one or in a classroom setting.  [What I love about my job] One of the things that's so great about my job is watching the transition from frustration to excitement when working with a student.  Students often try to muddle through on their own for a long time before seeking out a librarian, so they can be quite frustrated at first.  However, as I work with them and make suggestions, I see the connections happening, and they leave not only with the information they need but with the skills to find information in the future as well as a more positive outlook on research in general.

The idea is to fit it into 30 seconds, so the above may be a little long, but it gets the point across.

Chapter 11: Promotional Marketing
The importance of marketing to libraries simply cannot be overstated, but it barely comes up in library school.  The chapter is just a very short overview, but is enough to get you thinking about the topic.

Chapter 12: Thinking Like a Retailer
This was a chapter that I've kind of seen touched on in a few places but never quite so straightforward and succinct as this.  There are things about retail that are very intentional that we don't really think about - when you walk into a grocery store, you enter first into the fruit and veggies section.  This is a very visually appealing - neat and tidy stacks of shiny apples, sections of bright green lettuce, etc.  Also, in a grocery store, the end of the aisle displays are for things the store really wants people to buy - that's real estate that sees higher product turnover.  Bookstores are always so neat and orderly as well.  So now I'm rethinking the location of our current displays, the idea of adding a few more, and also trying to create a sense of ownership of the library among our student workers so that they'll straighten more often as they wander around the building. 

All in all, a good read. The short chapters give brief overviews of each topic with suggestions for further reading at the end so if you want to pursue them further, you can.

Improving Productivity, part 2

It's been almost 3 weeks since I turned off the pop-up email notifications in Outlook, and I haven't missed them at all! I highly recommend doing this. It makes me wonder how much work businesses lose due to these notifications alone. It's great to go through email in chunks instead of individually as each item arrives.

I did have to learn to remember to check my email more than once or twice a day, though. You get really used to those pop-ups, so when they don't arrive, you tend to forget you're still receiving email.

Another thing I started doing 3 weeks ago is scheduling out my entire workweek each Monday, in time blocks on my Outlook calendar. This takes some practice, and I usually fall off the schedule by sometime Tuesday. Thus far, I have learned:

• to allot more time to a task than I expect it to take - that allows for emails and interruptions without throwing me way off my schedule. Also, I often expect things to take less time than they really do.
  
• to take the schedule with a grain of salt. Things will come up, other duties will be assigned that have higher importance, and you just have to roll with it.
  
• the schedule is great for prioritizing the more important tasks. In the past I've kept a to do list, but didn't have a prioritization mechanism. I still keep the to do list (I love crossing things off a list), but now I use it to plan my weekly schedule.
  
• I don't always want to do what I've scheduled myself to do. I think over time I will get better at intermixing the things I like doing with those that I don't.
  

I don't really want to get into scheduling daily because it does take more time than just following the existing schedule, but it might be worthwhile to do it Monday morning and Wednesday afternoon (I work 1-9 on Wednesdays). I'm always somewhat off the schedule by Wednesday. Not to mention, our staff meeting is on Wednesday, and I usually leave with new projects to do, so a reevaluation would be good.

Despite the few bumps and learning experiences with the schedule, it really is working for me. Less time spent trying to figure out what I need to work on next is helpful. Plus, I have everything prioritized. If I get behind, I refer back to earlier in the week to see what I was supposed to do first. Also, I love organizing things, so planning out my workweek is a favorite Monday morning task.

Get Rid of the Traditional Research Paper in the first years

Barbara Fister has a very interesting article on the Inside Higher Ed's Library Babel Fish blog called Why the "Research Paper" Isn't Working. She argues that the first year of college isn't the time to hammer in the nitty gritties of citation styles. Nor is it time to have students write the traditional research paper.

I heartily agree. Citation styles are ridiculously specific. I find myself telling students all the time that most professors aren't going to give them a hard time about how they cited a website (or other challenging source to site) - in most cases, the professor has no idea how to do it either (nor do I, for that matter - or at least, no idea on how to make it close to perfect).

The traditional research paper is also very hard for intro students. It's hard to go out and research the literature of an unfamiliar field, combine all that data, and produce a coherent paper. Especially when faculty are demanding peer-reviewed articles. I'm always surprised at the number of students in intro courses who come into the library saying they need peer-reviewed articles. I can't even read the peer-reviewed science stuff - why are they asking students to? I understand that becoming familiar with peer-reviewed research is key, but wait until students are beyond the intro courses and have a knowledge base on which to build.

A very interesting article - well-worth a read.

I Love My Job

Walking to work this morning (so awesome, right? I get to walk to work!), I see a car backing out of a driveway. I stop to wait but she waves me on instead. As I get past the car, I hear someone talking to me.

"You're my librarian. I won't hit my librarian."

I assume she must go to Chatham (and also that she won't hit anyone... not just her librarian), and we start chatting. Then she says she's in the Masters of Counseling Psychology program, and I realize she didn't just recognize me as a librarian at Chatham. She meant that I am her librarian. I make a point of telling all the students in my liaison areas that I am their librarian.

And it sticks.

This woman referred to herself as a "very part-time" student. Yet she remembered me.

Such an easy thing to do, but it makes quite an impact.

ACRL 2011: Mobile Websites

Another big topic at the ACRL Conference, and one in which I was particularly interested, was mobile websites. This is something we are working toward at my library.

I attended several presentations on this topic:

1. Mobilize Your Library: Creating a Mobile Website. Presenter: Micheal DeMars, California State University-Fullerton
2. The Library's Swiss-Army Knife: Using Smart Phones for Information Discovery, Content Delivery, and Inventory Management. Presenters: Stacy Brinkman, Jason Paul Michel, Jim Clarke, and Bo Brinkman; Miami University

From these presentations, I learned:

1. There are a few options for making library information available on mobile phones: create a mobile website, build an app, or a combination. Both of these institutions chose to create a mobile website - because it's easier, updating the code is simpler, and it's accessible on most devices.
2. If you use Google Analytics, it will show you how many mobile visits your website is getting, as well as which platforms (Android/iPhone/etc) people are using. One library focused on making a mobile website that worked well on Android and iPhone because that's how the vast majority of their users were accessing their site. For us, the iPad, iPhone, and Android appear to be the most important.
   
3. For a list of libraries with mobile websites, visit the Library Success wiki's M-Libraries list.
4. For best practices, see W3C: The Web and Mobile Devices, Apple iPhone Standards (presumably that's somewhere on this site, but I'm mostly seeing info specific to creating apps - maybe that's all they have?), Smashing Magazine, and Android Best Practices (see the list on the left for a section containing best practices).
5. Both libraries only included stuff that had been optimized for mobile devices.
   
6. Categories: Research/Search, Events, People, Help, social media icons (Facebook, Twitter, library blog), Hours, Ask Us (Texting), Computer Availability, Video Tutorials, etc. The two libraries varied on what they called things, but both included social media.
   
7. One library uses automatic detection to send phone users to the mobile site, the other has a mobile URL that they publicize. The one that uses automatic detection includes a link to the regular full site, but mentioned that it was hard to override the automatic detection mechanism.
8. Databases with mobile versions: EBSCOhost, JSTOR (beta), ARTSTOR, WorldCat.
   

Also, while Google-ing around for other stuff, I stumbled across iLibrarian: 7 Tools to Create a Mobile Library Website (without Technical Knowledge!).

Currently, we have enabled EBSCO's mobile site, we're about to start using Innovative Interfaces' AirPAC, and we are starting to plan out what all to include in a mobile site.

ACRL 2011: Distance Librarianship

I attended ACRL 2011 in Philly last week, and besides enjoying an authentic philly cheese steak (okay okay, I opted for provolone instead of Cheez Whiz - can you blame me?), I learned a lot. Reaching distance students was a pretty big conference focus, and I attended several presentations on the topic.

The best and most relevant to me was Fostering Library as Place for Distance Students: Best Practices from Two Universities (PowerPoint), presented by Heidi Steiner, Distance Learning Librarian at Norwich University and Beth Filar-Williams, Coordinator of Library Services for Distance Education at University of North Carolina-Greensboro. Some points from the presentation:

• Virtual reference is much harder than face-to-face. You end up making a lot of assumptions, and there are often miscommunications.
• ACRL provides Standards for Distance Learning Library Services
• Students need access to library resources and course management from a distance
• At Norwich, every distance program has its own specific library webpage - to create a place for those students
• Resources available from a distance are important. This includes e-journals, databases, e-books, Films on Demand, and ILLiad for for seamless ILL transactions. Both libraries will mail books to student; one pays return postage, one does not.
• For distance students, it is especially important to be available at their point of need - through IM, plenty of research/subject guides, tutorials on how to use the resources, and more.
• For instruction, both institutions use a lot of tutorials. They have experimented with synchronous options. One recommends Elluminate vOffice. You have to pay for it, but it's only one room, so it's a lesser license than regular Elluminate. EventBrite was recommended for setting up instruction - it allows people to register for an event and also automatically sends reminder emails. Being embedded in course management discussion boards is another option.
• The presenters also discussed the importance of "Being Real" - making distance students realize there are humans staffing IM reference, not robots. They also mentioned including video clips of librarians introducing themselves on their websites/subject guides.
• Join.me was recommended for sharing your computer screen with a student. They said it is incredibly easy to use - all you do is send the student a URL. And it's free!
  
• Two other technology tools they use are free scheduling software tools: tungle.me and Jiffle. I'm definitely going to have to look into some of these!

I also attended a shorter panel session called Going the Distance: A Closer Look at Uniting with Remote Users. From that, I took away the importance of informing distance students about the services the library offers, the need to offer training on the resources, and the importance of determining if the resources and services are perceived as adequate by the distance students.

Some other distance learning notes from poster sessions:

• Some libraries use Skype to talk to distance students
• Screenr - does screencasting, but it has to be done all in one go (no editing!) and there is a time limit (maybe 5 minutes?).
• Librarians at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse evaluated several free web-conferencing tools. Information is on a LibGuide they created specifically for this topic.

Overall, a lot of info, a lot of ideas, and A LOT of cool tools to explore!

Improving Productivity, part 1

I had a talk with my husband about how to increase productivity and maintain motivation at work. He said it is something he struggles with too, but he had quite a few good suggestions. I'm going to be changing my work habits to include them. Step 1 is actually pretty simple:

Turn off Outlook's email notifications.

Outlook defaults to popup notifications and a sound when you receive new mail. Not only do you see and hear new email arriving, but you get a tiny tantalizing snippet of the email to whet your curiosity. This is endlessly distracting, but for some reason, it never occurred to me to turn it off.

It took a little hunting to locate it, so here are some quick instructions for how to disable this feature in Outlook:

1. Go to Tools
2. Then click on Options
3. In the Preferences tab, click on Email Options
4. Click on Advanced Email Options
5. Uncheck all the boxes in the section entitled "When new items arrive in my inbox"

There is no email that I receive that is important enough that I need to respond immediately. I would argue that almost no one gets email they need to respond to immediately. I'll still check it quite frequently; I just won't be interrupted when I'm working on something else.

Floundering

I feel as though I am floundering a bit in my job. Sure, I'm getting stuff done - lately a lot of number and data crunching. But just that vague feeling that there has to be something more, some truly intriguing project that will make a difference. And it's only going to get worse as summer approaches.

Summer is downtime for librarians in academia. The spring semester is often quiet but summer is even quieter. Not nearly as many classes, very little instruction to be done, mostly self-guided projects. I find the transition to summer so difficult.

Any suggestions for how to self-motivate? Any ideas for cool library projects?

Get a Free Education!

Or free teaching materials! EDUCAUSE put out a 7 Things You Should Know About... Open Educational Resources article that was quite interesting. I knew about MIT making some of its lectures available for free, but I didn't know about all of the various options.

Some of the interesting ones include:

• University of the People - get a free online education
• MIT CourseWare - includes the course material for over 2,000 MIT courses that faculty at other institutions can use
• Connexions from Rice University - shared course materials
• Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative - free online courses for students as well as materials for instructors
• iTunes U - From the site: "There are over 600 universities with active iTunes U sites. About half of these institutions — including Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, and UC Berkeley — distribute their content publicly on the iTunes Store."

What a great trend - the opportunity to use other people's course materials, as well as educate yourself for free! As the EDUCAUSE article noted, there is a variance in the quality of material, so be aware that not everything you find on these sites will be great. However, definitely worth a look.

Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age

The article, Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age (EDUCAUSE Review), is not exactly what you would expect from the co-founder of Wikipedia. He expresses concern that we are underemphasizing the importance of individual knowledge. Instead, we have turned to the internet as such a readily available source of knowledge that students no longer need to memorize facts. In addition, the increasing number of assignments that revolve around students working together to create knowledge is not necessarily a good trend.

He also argues that the internet is not a good replacement for a complex, dense book.

An interesting read. Makes me want to go read War and Peace. Or maybe not... :)

Two Types of Librarians

There seem to be two types of librarians: (a) those who think the library is a privilege and users must respect that; and (b) those who recognize that libraries wouldn't be around without the users.

In the book Bite-Sized Marketing by Nancy Dowd, Mary Evangeliste, and Jonathan Siberman, the authors lay out "The New-Media Marketing Manifesto." One statement of this manifesto illustrates which type of librarian we should all strive to be:

I will remember that my job is not to convince people that they need libraries but to convince libraries that they need people (p. 17).

Let's all repeat that a few times.

User Friendly Library Stats

I love this quick 2-page document of public library statistics that OCLC put out: How Libraries Stack Up 2010. My library could definitely benefit from putting out a short, colorful document like this - for administrators, for the Board of Trustees, etc. Even if we only used it to compare ourselves to past statistics or made general comments in relation to number of students on campus.

For example, last year our stats showed that there were nearly 160,000 visitors to the library. If I estimate the campus population at 2000 (it's somewhere around there), that's basically like saying everyone visited the library 80 times.

A Reference Librarian is a "Secret Weapon"

What a great article from the Washington Post's "Campus Overload" blog about reference librarians being a student's "secret weapon" when working on a research paper.

I would also add that we are great at lowering stress levels. By the time students come to us, they are often so stressed out about the information they need to find. Many have already tried, and some have even become convinced there's nothing on their topic. However, we're willing and able to help, and we won't stop until we find them something.

Redoing a library website

For many years, my library has been maintaining a number of websites with various degrees of success. IT recently redid the public university website, but before they did so there was an extensive library website available on it. We hardly ever touched it. It was viewed as mostly information for potential students, and there were no live links to databases and other resources. Thus, some of the information available on this site was rather out of date and perhaps even inaccurate.

As a second website, I maintain our subject guides via an external wiki. I update these quite frequently. This is the only site that we have the ability to update at present.

Finally, the main library website is located behind an intranet. This has been a source of frustration for a number of reasons. We are constrained within the restrictive parameters of a content management system. I recognize that most universities use content management systems for their websites, but the one used for our intranet has been particularly difficult in the past. To be fair to IT, I think it isn't quite as restrictive as it seems. However, we currently do not have the ability to make modifications on our own. This then means we have to bug IT every time we add a new database, remove one, need to update a description, etc. This would certainly become a lot of work for IT if we wanted to get much fancier with our design. A final source of frustration with the intranet is that we cannot link anyone directly to a page within it. They will just be bumped out to the main login screen. Once they login, they are taken to the first page as usual, instead of the one you hoped to link them to. This results in a lot of "click on blank, then blank, then blank" ad nauseum.

Thus, we decided it was high time to redo the website in such a way that we will have control over updating the content. We also want to have only one main library website to update instead of two. And, of course, we want a website on the public side of things so that we can link users directly to the information they need. After going through the proper channels and obtaining permission, we were able to start working towards a website that meets all these requirements. The subject guides will continue in their present form.

In order to make a website that will be helpful to everyone, we are doing a variety of testing. Thus far, we have conducted several focus groups (to be discussed further in a future post). We hope to do individual usability testing soon on the prototype of the new site. If usability testing reveals a variety of problems, we'll resort to other techniques, such as card sort.

I hope to continue posting as we move through this process. I am also very hopeful that all this testing will result in a highly user-friendly website for our patrons.

A Very Belated Thanks

Way back in December, Sidthegnomenator of Confessions of a Middle-aged Coffee Addict gave me a Kreativ Blogger Award. In typical fashion, I started a response post, and then time got away from me. I would just like to take the time now to thank her for the award. :)

It was really a rather surprising award. First of all, after over 4 and 1/2 years of blogging (wow, has it really been that long?) this is the first award I've been given. Secondly, given my lack of posts, I was extremely surprised to find that someone I don't personally know actually reads my blog (I'm sure I still have a number of friends out there who feel obligated).

I hope to someday soon get back to blogging on a more regular basis, but right now, life is crazy. I'm taking a graduate class, planning a wedding (my own - and I have quickly determined that I will never again plan another event this size), and house hunting, all while working full-time. Work is often fairly busy so I don't get around to blogging there either. But someday I will start blogging again!

But, really, thank you, Sidthegnomenator! And everyone else, check out her blog. :)

Cheating with Technology is Not Cheating?!

Plagiarism is a rampant problem on campuses and has been discussed in depth at mine. I was on a committee that discussed it, and I have taught quite a few instruction sessions on plagiarism.

So I found this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education particularly interesting. Apparently, students don't consider it cheating if they use technological methods, such as a graphing calculator with equations stored on it.

It's also interesting that professors often overlook it. It does make sense that people who cheat will ultimately do poorly on tests, but still. Really? What has happened to higher education?

And lastly, I think a call to standardize punishment for cheating is in order. My campus has an honor code and a system of enforcement. However, it doesn't get at the different types of plagiarism - unintentional, lesser plagiarism, full-blown plagiarism, etc - so professors often handle it in class and don't report it. This also results in inconsistencies across courses and frequent cheaters not getting reprimanded (well, I'd assume that latter happens, but I haven't heard of any situations).

Interesting stuff.

On Weeding

It seems to me that few people really like to weed. I'm not sure I particularly love it, but there is something very satisfactory about clearing the collection of unwanted and unused items. I don't think academic librarians will ever hear the end of comments about how all the books in the stacks are old, but at least we can do our part to weed out some of them.

Right now, we are rather short on shelf space on the third floor of our library. While another row of shelving might be nice, I suspect we can clear a decent amount of space just by doing a bit of weeding. We are focusing first on duplicates (ever-so-affectionately called "dupes"). For the most part, academic libraries do not need duplicate copies of items, especially if they are rarely, or never, used. We are starting with the particularly tight areas, and will then move on to the rest of the third floor.

Then, we'll weed, starting with the tight areas, and finally we'll shift the whole floor.

The project will take a while, but I think we'll see a nice benefit of all the work. I am nearly finished shifting all of the books on our second floor. I've been at it for maybe 2 years, because I can only shift during breaks - the second floor is our only quiet study floor. It's really nice to see all the shelf-space now available in previously constricted areas. I'm sure our student workers appreciate the ease of shelving. Whether anyone else notices, who knows.

And, of course, all our weeded books go to Better World Books. I love their library discards program and highly recommend it.

Best "Your Book Has Shipped" Email Ever!

This cinches it. I LOVE Better World Books. First they take our library discards at absolutely no cost to us and pay us a percentage of the money they make off of selling the books. And they recycle anything they can't sell.

Then, I order a textbook for class from them, using a 15% discount card and saving lots of money over what the book was selling for at Amazon or half.com.

And now, they send me this absolutely awesome, unbeatable "Your Book Has Shipped" email:

(Your book(s) asked to write you a personal note - it seemed unusual, but who are we to say no?)

Holy canasta! It's me... it's me! I can't believe it is actually me! You could have picked any of over 2 million books but you picked me! I've got to get packed! How is the weather where you live? Will I need a dust jacket? I can't believe I'm leaving Mishawaka, Indiana already - the friendly people, the Hummer plant, the Linebacker Lounge - so many memories. I don't have much time to say goodbye to everyone, but it's time to see the world!

I can't wait to meet you! You sound like such a well read person. Although, I have to say, it sure has taken you a while! I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but how would you like to spend five months sandwiched between Jane Eyre (drama queen) and Fundamentals of Thermodynamics (pyromaniac)? At least Jane was an upgrade from that stupid book on brewing beer. How many times did the ol' brewmaster have one too many and topple off our shelf at 2am?

I know the trip to meet you will be long and fraught with peril, but after the close calls I've had, I'm ready for anything (besides, some of my best friends are suspense novels). Just five months ago, I thought I was a goner. My owner was moving and couldn't take me with her. I was sure I was landfill bait until I ended up in a Better World Books book drive bin. Thanks to your socially conscious book shopping, I've found a new home. Even better, your book buying dollars are helping kids read from Brazil to Botswana.

But hey, enough about me, I've been asked to brief you on a few things:

[insert shipping information, order number, and other details here]

Eagerly awaiting our meeting,

Case Studies in Abnormal Psychology

Better World Books, you made my day. :)

Please Interrupt Me

A while back, I wrote about creating a Please Interrupt Me sign for the reference desk. We've had great feedback. Many people have commented on it, and we've heard "I like your sign" quite a few times, including from the President of the University!

It hasn't been without its drawbacks, however. Occasional abuse of the sign does happen, particularly during summer day camp. Young boys between the ages of 8 and 12 seem to think the sign is an open invitation to annoy the crap out of the librarian. Oh well, you'll have that. We can also choose to take down the sign temporarily if the kids become too obnoxious.

Overall, however, the benefits far outweigh the few drawbacks.

Library as "Laboratory of Collaboration"

There was a great article in the Chronicle of Higher Education the other day called A Laboratory of Collaboration (subscription probably required). Thomas H. Benton (aka William Pannapacker) is a professor with a deep love of libraries. In his article he discusses the changing role of libraries as well as the increasing gap between librarians and faculty, the reasons for the gap, and some ideas for collaboration.

Well worth a read. I also hope many professors stumble upon it. It was actually sent to us librarians by a professor, which is always nice.