It's like a dead-end when a road map is useless

One thing I like to talk about over here at Unified Library Scene headquarters is the value of well-formed metadata. Because I'm a cataloger, I'm often looking at the idea of well-formed metadata as it relates to the library catalog. But I think that well-formed metadata has value outside of the cataloging department as well. I was interested to read this post on OCLC's Hanging Together blog about how the changing landscape of metadata creation and remediation requires an emphasis on new skill sets for both early career and incumbent metadata creators.

I was especially interested to think about the Hanging Together blog post in relationship to this post from Ithaka S+R which highlighted aspects of their 2016 US Library Survey. Figure 1 of this post addresses the functional areas of the library to which library directors at baccalaureate, masters, and doctoral academic libraries indicated they would add positions over the next five years. At doctoral institutions, nearly 70% of respondents indicated they would be adding positions related to "specialized faculty research support (digital humanities, GIS, data management, etc.)."  At masters institutions, this functional area was significantly smaller at about 25%. At those institutions, the area that stands to see the greatest amount of growth in the next five years is "instruction, instructional design, and information literacy services" at nearly 40%.

If you go back to the 2016 US Library Survey, you can see a table that corresponds with this one. In this table, library directors at masters and baccalaureate institutions indicated which functional areas they would be reducing employee positions. It will probably not surprise you to learn that technical services, metadata, and cataloging was the highest vote getting functional area at about 25%. In fairness, this was down from close to 30% in 2013.

While it's worth noting that the responses for added and reduced positions aren't exactly one-to-one since there isn't data on which functional areas library directors at doctoral institutions would target for position reduction. But I suspect, anecdotally anyway, that technical services would be what they chose were they to have been queried.

The Hanging Together blog posts indicates that managers are looking for people to work with metadata who understand how information is organized rather than being skilled at working with a specific schema. The post also suggests that those of us who are interested in helping to recruit and retain the next generation of metadata creators "should promote metadata as an exciting career option to new professionals in venues such as library schools and ALA's New Members Roundtable." The author goes on to state that "emphasizing that metadata encompasses much more than library cataloging can increase its appeal, for example: entity identification, descriptive standards used in various academic disciplines, and describing born-digital, archival, and research data that can interact with the semantic Web."

While some of the tasks the author outlines in their post can be directly mapped to the faculty research support described in the Ithaka S+R survey, much of it still maps directly into functional areas of the library that may be cut in the next five years. And while many of the respondents to the Ithaka S+R survey indicated that they have a commitment to reskilling staff and reallocating them to different areas of the library, it's no wonder that people who understand metadata concepts and have technological skills are choosing careers in industries outside of librarianship--a problem that the Hanging Together post points out.

The disconnect between the need to recruit and retain people who can create well-formed metadata and the fact that these positions are some of the first to be targeted for elimination in academic libraries is one that needs to be addressed. After all, some of the emerging faculty support services rely upon well-formed metadata to be successful. I hope that connecting the dots is the first step in facilitating this difficult but necessary conversation.

Stay positive,
Erin

All I do is keep the beat and bad company

So, last week I wrote about the Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2016 and the importance of charting a course for the future that is built upon listening to your library's various constituencies and understanding the needs and values. After reading that report and writing that post, it was interesting to read in Inside Higher Ed that Ithaka S+R is partnering with OCLC to work on a project that looks at the relationship between university success and library success.

As someone who is about to start graduate school to study higher education, I have developed a keen interest in the idea that the library plays an important role within the campus community. So I was interested to read this part of Ithaka S+R's release on the project:

"it [a discussion of the future of libraries] often proceeds without reference to the universities of which they are a part. We contend that the most important long term influence on the library is the requirement placed on it by changing patterns of research and learning. The changing patterns, in turn, are shaped by the focus of the university and the direction it is taking."

I am interested to see higher education and librarianship put into conversation in this way because I think it draws explicit lines where there may only be implicit ones.

What gave me pause is the research question at the center of the project: what happens when libraries differentiate themselves in terms of services, not collection size; are there multiple models of success?

I think this is a fair question to ask, and I am curious to see what Ithaka S+R and OCLC find. How would our libraries be different if we thought more about the services we offer our user communities instead of the number of volumes in our collection. I think that collection size does not necessarily directly correlate with value or relevance to the user community. And while our collections are important to the people who use our libraries, they are not necessarily the first or only concern. So if the decision-makers in libraries only think of their library in terms of the number of volumes it holds, they may be missing out on making important connections with user communities. And, as the release on the project points out, a change in the patterns of research and learning on a campus can significantly alter how a library presents itself in order to response to that change in patterns. That is, in some ways the library of today looks different than the library of tomorrow will.

But what gives me pause about this question is that it surfaces a thing that often happens in libraries. Decision-makers in library seem to frame a conversation that puts collections and services at odds. Because space in a library is finite, short of the funds to undergo a building project, a choice must be made about how space is allocated: collections or services? How many new services and spaces can we offer our user communities, one wonders, if we clear our libraries of the collections they don't seem to want to use? So we clear our our stacks, either moving things offsite or withdrawing them from our collection. And we tell a story to our users about the value of the collections we have to offer them.

The collections in our libraries are not the enemy. And creating a false choice between collections and services is not the best way for a library to become more valuable to its user communities. Decision-makers have to balance the need to have a thoughtfully curated collection and the need to offer services that are relevant to the user communities that their libraries serve. Choosing to focus their efforts mostly on building a large collection is as unhelpful as choosing to focus on building a suite of new, cool services. The strength of a library, it seems to me, is at the intersection of thoughtful services and an intentionally built collection.

So yes, let's stop thinking that our value is tied up in the size of our collections. Let's weed our collections thoughtfully and relocation our collection when we need to make space for something new. But let's also stop think of our collections as the enemy of progress within our libraries and of engagement with our users.

Stay positive,
Erin

How it feels when we fall, when we fold

The Ithaka S+R US Library Survey for 2016 was published yesterday and if you're a person who works in academic libraries, it is definitely worth a look. What caught my eye was a chart fairly early in the document--Figure 4. Figure 4 compares the responses of library directors and faculty members to the following question: How important to you is it that your college or university library provides each of the functions below or serves in the capacity listed below? 

What emerges when you look at that table is that what library directors see as valuable roles for the library to play don't necessarily converge with what faculty members see as valuable roles for the library to play. I suspect this isn't surprising if you work in an academic library.

I noticed that the categories that received a larger percentage of positive responses from library directors seemed to be centered around they ways in which the library helps develop information literacy skills in undergraduate students how the library supports faculty with teaching and research activities. And the single category that received a larger percentage of positive responses from faculty is centered around the library paying for resources in all formats.

While I am wary of asking charts to do things they are not intended to do, it is interesting to see these different visions of the library juxtaposed.

Academic libraries invest a lot of resources into marketing and outreach in an attempt to sell our campus communities on the library services that I mentioned in the earlier paragraphs. We set up departmental office hours. We print flyers and create digital signage to market the services no one seems to know about no matter how often we remind them. We hold open houses. We have orientation sessions for new students and faculty. We try, through marketing and outreach, to get other people as excited about this version of the academic library as we are.

And we wring out hands when our efforts don't cultivate new relationships or lead to the more widespread adoption of new services.

This is not to suggest that these outreach efforts are misplaced. Teaching faculty aren't a monolith and some of them are as excited about our vision of the academic library as instructor of students and supporter of faculty activities. Some of our teaching faculty colleagues are, indeed, our strongest supporters and our best allies. And it is absolutely true that the best way to establish new relationships with teaching faculty by way of a satisfied faculty customer.

But I do wonder how much of our marketing and outreach efforts could be better spent by listening to our teaching faculty colleagues on our own campus and developing a shared vision of what the library on our campus should be--even when that vision isn't exactly what we think it should be.

Creating conversations between the academic library and its user communities is really challenging because it asks us to stop putting our vision ahead of the needs of our user communities. And when the vision that is reflected back to us by our user communities is not where we think we should be heading, we have to decide whether to chart a new course or not. It's scary, we think, because our user communities don't understand the history of the academic library. It's scary, we imagine, because our user communities couldn't possibly know what they need better than we do.

But in the end, the way to build an academic library that is not only useful on a campus but creates experiences for our user communities that is transformative is to listen far more than we speak.

What is one way that you can listen to your user communities about the library they want and need? Tell me in the comments!

Stay positive,
Erin

With a loose grip on a very tight ship

Like many of you, I went to ACRL in Baltimore last week. I was on a panel about gendered expectations for library leaders and I presented a paper that used the Framework as a lens through which to view cataloging policy and practice. I tried to think of a thread that unifies my feelings about my ACRL experience, but I honestly don't have one. So I'm going to give you a few disjointed, half-formed thoughts.

1.) ACRL is not my home within ALA--that's ALCTS, the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services. I was really happy with the increased number of collections and technical services programs this year. While I haven't been a supporter of ACRL creating a section specifically to address collections and technical services issues, I think that having a venue within the ACRL conference to talk about these issues is really important. Also, I found that having more collections and technical services-related programming helped make me feel like I wasn't a weird outlier for attending ACRL. I hope that the 2019 installment of the conference will continue this trend. If you're a collections or technical services practitioner, I would encourage you to propose a session. If the content isn't there, there isn't much the program planners can do to raise the visibility of this part of academic librarianship.

2.) I was troubled by the number of programs that were social justice-themed or Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)-themed that were proposed and lead by white men. I feel like it requires a significant lack of self-awareness to be a white man and think that you're the person uniquely qualified to speak on issues related to social justice and/or EDI. It's especially shameful when you consider that nearly 90% of librarianship is made up of white people. And it does a lot to perpetuate the gross white savior narrative upon which librarianship seems to be built. I know that social justice and EDI are hot topics right now in librarianship, so everyone wants to be on record as saying something. But if we really want to advance these issues in our profession, those of us in positions of privilege would do well to sit down and make space to amplify the voices from marginalized communities. See also: the Roxanne Gay Q&A debacle of Aught Seventeen.

3.) I grow more and more annoyed at the Q&A periods during conference sessions. By the end of the conference, I was getting up and walking out when people finished their presentations. I feel like these Q&A periods do little to advance the work of the presenters and that questioners rarely ask good questions that are generally applicable to all in attendance. Instead, these questions usually fall along one of two lines:

1. The questioner has no question.
2. The questioner has a question that is so specific to their particular situation that the answer to the question is of little value to anyone other than the questioner.

I started to think that the Q&A period should be done away with and the time given back to the presenters. But the more I think about it, I think maybe that the Q&A period, with  some tweaks, could be useful. So don't approach the microphone unless you have a question that is general enough as to be valuable to all who are in attendance. And also, yes, do use the microphone--even if you think you can project.

4.) I had a real love/hate relationship with the social media back channel at this event. I found myself using the back channel to say some things that weren't very kind about situations and programs in which I found myself. I feel like everybody has to decide for themselves how they use social media, so this is more a self-critique than a hot take on the social media back channel writ large. At some point, in wanting to build a brand and cultivate a following, I lost track of my authentic voice in favor of something snarkier. And I don't like how I feel when I do that. I think I need to spend time thinking critically about how I use my voice in online spaces. As someone who wants to be taken seriously and who wants to have their voice heard, I recognize that my words have power and that I bring energy into a space with what I say. Maybe it's all the weird things happening in my life and in the world but at some point, I started putting snark in front of thoughtfulness in the words I express on social media. As someone who wants to build a Unified Library Scene, I can be truthful and say hard things without being...unkind, and I really need to think about how to strike that balance. That being said, I really appreciated the tweets that a lot of you made during the course of ACRL. I appreciate how thoughtfully and thoroughly you documented sessions and how smartly you held us all accountable for the ways in which we forgot to be our better selves during the course of the conference.

Stay positive,
Erin

Let's put our heads together

I am really fascinated by the work done by Ithaka S+R. Even when I don't entirely agree with what's written in their publications, I find myself using their writing as a entry point for engaging with academia and the academic library. The most recent Ithaka S+R issue brief, Talent Management for Academic Libraries, was published on September 1st and I thought it had a lot of interesting things to say about recruitment and retention of academic librarians.

Talent management is a field of human resources management made famous by the 2001 book The War for Talent. In it, the authors discuss the ways in which companies could (and should) be deliberate in how they recruit, retain, and develop employees. Talent management (and The War for Talent) has become the go-to strategy for recruitment and retention in technology start-up culture and Deanna Marcum, the author of the issue brief, takes the tenants of talent management and applies them to the field of academic librarianship.

When considering the recruitment of new talent to an organization, talent management suggests that an organization should do as much work recruiting talent to the library as it does posting a job vacancy and passively accepting applications. In the brief, Marcum writes:

In an organization possessed of a talent mindset, managers and colleagues are creative in building candidate pools. They network through the community to identify the best possible candidates, reaching out to them and selling them on the awaiting opportunity. When they see that a vacancy may arise, they may bring potential candidates to campus for a visit or a talk. They participate in the selection process muscularly, rather than passively. They actively engage throughout the hiring process, recognizing that it is among the most important tasks the organization takes on.

I think this is an interesting idea for academic librarianship, and I suspect a lot of this kind of recruitment already happens off-the-record. If you are an administrator, you probably know someone that you would love to have working in your library. And if a job comes open that fits with that person's skill set, you're probably going to send them an email or call them or seek them out at a conference. I think this kind of recruitment is especially important if your library is in a perceived undesirable location or if you worry that the salary and benefits package may not be enough of a draw to someone in the field.

The potentially problematic side effect of this kind of talent recruitment is a fixation on fit. While it isn't necessarily problematic for administrators to identify potential employees who are forward thinking and are well regarded professionally, it veers into problematic territory when those recruited are chosen because they look and act like the existing members of the organization. Smarter people than me have written about fit and I encourage you to read them. Angela Galvan wrote a piece for In the Library with the Lead Pipe about the how whiteness and middle class-ness are inextricably linked to librarianship. Jacob Berg blogged about how fit is an unconscious bias that causes us to favor applicants who are like us. And in most cases, "Like Us" means white, middle-class, heterosexual, cisgendered people.

So here's my take: we shouldn't dismiss recruiting talent out of hand just because it has the potential to be problematic. Instead, let's revisit Marcum's piece. In it, she asserts than in an organization that recruits and retains using a talent management mindset, all of the staff have a role to play in identifying potential new colleagues. She writes:

All staff are on the constant lookout for excellent additions to their teams, even when there are no specific vacancies to be filled.

So, if it's up to us to identify our potential colleagues, let's use our positions of privilege to identify the people from underrepresented groups who would make great colleagues. Let's worry less about fit and more about giving a platform to the smartest voices in our field that have, to this point, been marginalized. And let's not do it because we expect a plate of cookies for being good allies. Let'd do it because it will be beneficial for librarianship, for our libraries and for those we serve.

Stay positive,
Erin

 

Everything is fine, fine, fine

Library Journal and Gale/Cengage produced a report called "Bridging the Librarian-Faculty Gap in the Academic Library" which documents the results of a survey sent to a pool of academic faculty and academic librarians. The purpose of the survey was to identify where faculty and librarians are in agreement with regard to what constitutes an essential library service and what can be done to increase communication and understanding. An executive summary can be found here.

The most interesting part of the summary is the set of bar graphs in the middle of the document. The first bar graph notes the percentage of faculty respondents and librarian respondents who considered a particular service essential in academic libraries. The second bar graph indicates the percentage of faculty respondents and librarian respondents who rated their library "excellent" when it came to providing the services referenced in the first bar graph.

There are a handful of services on the first graph that a higher percentage of faculty consider essential than librarians: supporting faculty research, coordinating research data services, adding faculty articles to the digital repository,  text and data mining, parceling course materials from separate texts, and managing research grants. Interestingly, faculty also gave librarians higher marks on providing those services than the librarians gave themselves.

It is worth noting that the faculty respondents came from private, college or universities and that many of the respondents came from the sciences and the humanities. It is also worth noting that every individual library operates in a different context. So what this report says on a macro-level might not scale down to your individual library.

On Thursday, Rachel wrote about how the best way to understand our undergraduate users is to engage with them and then provide them with the services they want. She wrote:

There is a simple solution, you know. We can get comfortably uncomfortable and ask students what they want out of interactions with librarians and libraries. We can ask students what their ideal relationship with a librarian looks like throughout their college career. We can listen seriously to what they say, and try to be exactly who and what they need and want.

The report from Library Journal and Gale/Cengage gives us a place from which to start the conversation. Asking what we can do to support faculty research is a good place to start the conversation about what their ideal relationship with a librarian looks like. But let's not stop there, assuming that's all they want. And when we ask faculty what their ideal relationship with a librarian looks like, let's ask because we really want to know and not because we want faculty to take us seriously or see as as equals.

Ultimately, I think that coming into agreement about which services are essential for each of our user groups is the most important thing we can do to succeed. There are some library services we will never be able to jettison, and that's not a bad thing. But there are some services we offer our users that made sense at the time, but which have been rendered obsolete by the passage of time. It isn't that those services never had value--they did. But now they don't, and those services (and the people who provide them) can be transformed into something new and even more useful for users. We just have to be open to having the conversation and open to accepting the feedback even when it makes us uncomfortable.

Stay positive,
Erin

Singing Sight Unseen

The Beloit Mindset List is perhaps the very best example of lazy and dangerous thinking that exists. I'm definitely not the first or the smartest person to comment on the issues with the list and I will leave all of that to those with more time and energy.  I will note, however, that The List has excellent SEO and news penetration, so you would be hard pressed to find the discussions about its issues. I direct you to this fine analysis of this year's list, the list in general, and compendium of other comments.  If you prefer your comments with a big yellow box at the top, here's a story about this year's list worth reading.


But I'm not here to talk about this year's list, I'm here to talk about people. The List manages to casually and jovially re-inforce the idea that each incoming group of first-year students is a uniform and distant unknowable group, and that on the other side we are a uniform group of professor tropes. I, personally, don't find stereotype confirmation a kind of humor that makes me laugh. Instead, it is a kind of humor that makes me angry. In Higher Ed, we want to encourage wider deeper thinking not actively work against it.

Let us turn then to what we can learn from the failings of The List.  Erin talked about the library's position between academics and student life, our institutional relationship with students. I want to talk about our individual relationship with students.  The List, at least to me, has a tone of "how can we even know these people?" based on life experiences. That's ridiculous on the face of it because you need know nothing about another person nor have any common experiences in order to have a valuable and productive interaction with that person. I cannot stress this enough.

What you do need to have in order to have a valuable and productive interaction with another person is respect. The List, through it's reinforcement of tropes of students and faculty is working against that respect by telling us that we know already these people by some set of facts. You can know one thing about by knowing that I am thirty-four years old, or by knowing that I am Jewish, or by knowing that I am queer. You can know either that you share this common trait with me (but not know that we are alike or different in any other way) or you can know that we do not share that common trait. No fact about me tells you about my lived experience. You don't know me. You don't know anyone, really. And that's fine.


But wait, let's think further. Not only do we not know students, we seem confused about how we do or do not know students. Our interactions with students are not making new friends at synagogue or inviting some folks over for a cook-out. We're not here to make friends with the students. Not that we don't want to have valuable and productive interactions that might lead to life-long relationships (professional relationships or friendships or both), but that's not what we're here for. Like Erin noted, when we engage with artifice, it comes off poorly.




There is a simple solution, you know. We can get comfortably uncomfortable and ask students what they want out of interactions with librarians and libraries. We can ask students what their ideal relationship with a librarian looks like throughout their college career. We can listen seriously to what they say, and try to be exactly who and what they need and want.

I'm guessing it's not a cool older friend who remembers when the Oilers were in Houston, though.

Keep Rockin'

Rachel




P.S.
I have to also note that my feelings about The List may be shaded by the fact that Beloit is a conference rival of my beloved alma mater, and man do I hate those guys I can't even explain it. Ugh and Lake Forest College. How can I even have opinions about those schools it doesn't make any sense.

Teach me how to unlearn a lesson

Rachel asked a question yesterday in reference to the Beloit College mindset list that got me thinking.

okay, library twitter, how SHOULD we go about connecting with our incoming first-year students, if not through random historical facts?

— M is for Rachel (@RachelMFleming) August 24, 2015

Academic libraries want very much to be seen as an integral part of the learning process and of the student experience. We take pride in our collections and in our services and we try very hard to. We devote resources to outreach and marking and administer surveys like LibQUAL+ to assess the areas in which we can improve service to attract more users. We send collections off site to make more room for collaborate work spaces. We use patron-drive acquisitions as a method for collection building in order to provide our users with exactly the material they need at exactly the time that they need it.

User engagement is important. And when those efforts succeed, we engage students in a meaningful way. But those efforts aren't authentic, we just end up talking past our users.




I think that part of being seen as an integral part of the learning process and of the student experience is to see our student users as an important constituency and to convey that to them by developing and implementing services and programs to help them succeed in the university environment. To that end, what would happen if we ran our libraries more like a student affairs division and less like an academic college?

Let's start by considering what we we mean when we talk about student affairs. Wikipedia's entry on student affairs breaks down student affairs into a few functional areas: academic services; admissions, financial aid, orientation; alumni and advancement/development; campus life; counseling, health, and wellness; diversity and inclusion; residence life; and sports and recreation. It then digs down into each of these functional areas like academic success skills and orientation.

When it comes to engaging students, academic libraries live at the intersection of academic services and campus life. We provide instruction and support to students that not only helps them navigate our collections, but also helps to make them information literate people in much the same way that an academic success skills program teaches students how to acquire study skills that help them succeed in college. I think that ACRL's movement from information standards and outcomes in the Information Literacy Competency Standards to frames and threshold concepts in the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education shows a movement toward developing information literacy skills that transfer far beyond finding articles in a database or a book in the catalog.

I think now is a good place to acknowledge that academic libraries are engaged in other activities than helping students develop information literacy. Traditionally, academic libraries have seen their purpose in the academic community as acquiring, describing, and making available to researchers items in our collection. This material covers a variety of subject matter in a variety of formats and lives on a continuum between unique and commonly held. And let's be clear, providing access unique collections is arguably the most important service an academic library provides to its users. But as more resources become available to a wider range of people, as as we reconsider what authority means when it comes to information, library staff grow less and less to be be the gatekeepers of information.

And I would be remiss if I didn't also acknowledge that undergraduate and graduate students are not the only user group an academic library serves. Academic libraries also work closely with faculty members, developing collections in their research areas and providing assistance with the management of research data. And those services definitely meet a need that can't be met anywhere on campus. But I sometimes worry that our need to be taken seriously by faculty and treated by equals means that we meet their needs in a way that doesn't reflect, percentage-wise, their impact as a user group.

I think that this circles back around to asking and answering the question that Rachel poses to us quite often: What are we trying to do here?

Acknowledging that it isn't practical to model all of our programs and services after those in student affairs, I do think we can learn a lot from our colleagues there when it comes to engaging and supporting undergraduate and graduate students by treating them as a valuable user group. It requires a shift in thinking, but I believe that the outcome is an authentic, meaningful relationship with our users that puts us squarely in the center of the student experience.

Stay positive,
Erin

Just because you can doesn't mean you should

Remember a couple of weeks ago when Rachel wrote about the value of preaching to the choir? I wholeheartedly agree. We haven't been up and running all that long, but I think that Constructive Summer is a safe space for us to tell our stories and challenge our beliefs. Hopefully in doing our own work, we challenge you to do yours as well.

ACRL's Dr. E.J. Josey Spectrum Scholar Mentor Program is looking for technical services librarians from academic libraries to volunteer to serve as mentors for Spectrum Scholar recipients. As a technical services librarian, I immediately went to the volunteer form. I want to do my part to help recruit and retain new technical services librarians--especially people from underrepresented groups.

The goal of the Mentor Program, as stated on its ALA webpage is:

to link participating library school students and newly graduated librarians, who are of American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino or Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander descent, with established academic librarians, who will provide mentoring and coaching support; serve as a role model in academic librarianship; and provide guidance in seeking a career path and opportunities for leadership in the profession.

I want to serve as a role model and help new technical services-minded librarians find their way in the profession, so I started to fill out the application. The questions asked about my ethnicity, my gender identity, and my physical disabilities. And these questions served as my light bulb moment that maybe I'm not the right person to do this job.

I'm a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered female. I basically check all of the white privilege boxes.

As much as I want to help mentor a new technical services librarian, my privilege definitely creates a lens through which I see librarianship. And I am pretty sure that the last thing a person who already feels like an outsider in librarianship wants to hear is another white lady telling them how to "do librarianship." Librarianship is overwhelmingly white. According to the 2012 edition of ALA's Diversity Counts, 104,392 of the 118,666 credentialed librarians were white. In academic libraries, 23,207 of the 26,954 credentialed librarians were white. That's 86%!

By using our privilege to put ourselves in positions of power--especially in positions where we give advice to new librarians--we shape a future of libraries that looks a lot like us. In a recent blog post about the amorphous idea of "fit" in libraries, Jacob Berg breaks down the idea of homogeneity in librarianship. Berg points to a Smithsonian article that states that diverse groups get better results when it comes to decision-making, problem solving, creativity and innovation, and scientific research.

All of this leads me to this place: just because I can be a Spectrum Scholar mentor doesn't mean I should. I do have advice and experience to share with a newly minted technical services librarian, but I also have biases that come from privilege.

So instead of serving as a mentor, I want to signal boost the opportunity. I am not sure I have an abundance of street cred or clout, but I want to use whatever I have to share this opportunity with you. If you are a technical services librarian from an underrepresented group, I urge you to apply to be a mentor for a Spectrum Scholar.

I'm trying to do the work to build a future of libraries. And sometimes that work requires me to challenge my beliefs and, as a result, go a different way. Building the Unified Library Scene isn't easy, but doing awesome things never is.

Stay positive,
Erin

So many wonderful treasures

The first time I read the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy was when I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago. I'd heard and read a lot about the document, but I hadn't bothered to invest the time in reading it. The Framework languished on my to-read list because I felt like it has little relevance to what I do as a cataloger. I'm committed to staying current on trends in academic librarianship, but I was prepared to see the Framework solely as a blueprint from instruction librarians.

When I read the Framework for that blog post, I was surprised to see myself in the last frame of the document: Searching as strategic exploration.

The description of this particular frame talks about the search process from beginning to end and describes the experiences of people on all parts of the learning spectrum:

The act of searching often begins with a question that directs the act of finding needed information. Encompassing inquiry, discovery, and serendipity, searching identifies possible relevant sources and the means to access those sources. Experts realize that information searching is a contextualized, complex experience that affects, and is affected by, the searcher’s cognitive, affective, and social dimensions. Novice learners may search a limited set of resources, and experts may search more broadly and deeply to determine the most appropriate information within the project scope. Likewise, novice learners tend to use few search strategies; experts select from various search strategies, depending on the sources, scope, and context of the information need.

I appreciate the fact that this concept distinguishes between the novice learning and expert learner, and acknowledges that their needs and experiences are different. As with all of the other frames, there are "knowledge practices" and "dispositions" that describe what people who are becoming (and have become) information literate should be able to do.

When I looked at the bullet points in these sections, I saw the way in which the work that I do as a cataloger has a direct impact on whether or not a library user becomes information literate. Three bullet points in particular have me thinking.

1. Match information needs and search strategies to search tools

As laid out in the description of the frame, novice and expert researchers have different information needs. And libraries have responded to the one size doesn't fit all argument by offering both "next-gen" catalogs and legacy catalogs. Novice researchers may prefer to use the library catalog that has been augmented with a discovery layer, while expert researchers may prefer our legacy catalog. The "next-gen" catalog gives novice researchers the opportunity to search using keywords born from natural language and then refine based on a set of facets. The legacy catalog, on the other hand, allows expert researchers to refine at the outset based on advanced search options.

I wonder whether we put equal resources into maintaining both our "next-gen" and legacy catalogs. I have had to train myself to check my cataloging work in both catalogs to ensure that the information displayed in records is usable to both novice and expert researchers. It is so easy, as a cataloger, to prefer the legacy catalog because "next-gen" catalogs are notoriously bad for known item searching. But the point of these discovery systems is to give novice researchers a way into a research process that can be tricky. And given that, according to the 2015 State of America's Libraries report, 51% of college freshpeople have a hard time learning to navigate new tools, we owe it to our novice researchers to help them find a way into the process.

2. Use different searching language types (e.g., controlled vocabulary, keywords, natural language)
It seems obvious to say that searching with controlled vocabulary yields different results than keyword searching. It seems less obvious to suggest that well-formed metadata is an important part of developing library users into information literate people.

There are a lot of reasons why it isn't really an option anymore for catalogers to touch every piece that comes through the door. Shelf-ready books with accompanying records are a way for us to get material on the shelves faster and MARC record services for journals provide title-level access in a way that individual catalogers just can't. The move from cataloging every title to focusing on hidden collections is a smart one.

I would argue, though, that we should push back when we're given records with poor quality metadata. Sure, some access is better than none, but our users need to expect that different searching language types will surface the material they are looking for. If we teach them to use a variety of searching methods and none of those methods return the resources they're looking for because the metadata is of poor quality then we've failed them. I believe that we could get more buy-in from our library's leaders if we positioned metadata as an information literacy issue.

3. Recognize the value of browsing and other serendipitous methods of information gathering.
Serendipitous discovery is such an important part of the search process. Have you ever gone to the shelf to find the book you're looking for and recognized that the books around it are also valuable to your research? It's an amazing feeling to go to the stacks looking for one book and leave with a stack of them.

But when your collection moves off-site or you purchase electronic resources, you lose the capacity to find that material when browsing the shelves. It is important, then, that you ensure that these materials can be found by way of virtual browse. By putting call numbers in records for your electronic material, for example, you make them discoverable in a call number browse. And by ensuring that records are up to a specific standard before their corresponding physical items are moved off-site means that off-site items are found in a subject browse. By placing as much value on virtual browse as physical browse, you make the various piece of your collection easier for your users to find, identify, select, and obtain.

The bottom line for me is that the Framework isn't just a resource for instruction librarians to consider, puzzle over, interact with, and react to. Whether you accept the Framework without reservation or push back against some of its claims, I believe technical services librarians should be in conversation with it and use it as a lens through which to see our work. If you work in technical services in an academic library, I invite you to read ACRL's Framework for Information Literacy and to find yourself there. How does the work you do directly impact the ability for library users to become information literate people? And if what you're doing actually hinders their development, what can you do differently?

Stay positive,
Erin

A thousand compromises (don't add up to a win)

I often find that when I am uncomfortable with something, I need to pause and think about what it is about that thing that makes me uncomfortable beyond my initial knee-jerk reaction.

So it was when I read this this essay from Inside Higher Ed. (hat tip to Jacob Berg, noted BeerBrarian).

I agreed with much of what Ward had to say about how envisioning the future a campus library has to be a collaborative effort between the library’s leadership and campus-wide stakeholders.

Ward writes: 

It will take a university community to shape a future library that meets the specific needs of learning and research at that institution. This transition is not just about libraries. It is about how colleges and universities come together to solve a collective challenge. Libraries cannot puzzle out their future alone.

And as much I as I agreed with Ward on this, something didn’t sit right with me. After writing and deleting several blog posts worth of material, suddenly I was confronted with what made me uncomfortable about Ward’s essay.

Ward is right in that academic library leadership must understand the decision-making process of key university stakeholders and he is correct that that process is both “complex and ambiguous.”  Understanding what faculty and administrators value is important when considering what areas of collections or services you need to develop. Are members of your science faculty working more on securing grants? Great—work on developing a plan to build up your data management services, including better understanding grant requirements. Are members of your humanities faculty working more on incorporating geospatial components to their research? Great—maybe it’s time to consider investing in a GIS Librarian!

Ward writes:

At the same time, librarians will be unsuccessful in planning for the future on their own. They possess much expertise about libraries, but less about trends in research and curriculum. Moving forward, the process of recreating the library must be one that involves many people in many roles on campus.

But I feel like it goes both ways. The academic library plays a unique role on a college campus, but I feel like its leadership is not always invited to participate in conversations in which it possesses expertise. Does someone from your library serve on your college’s curriculum committee? Is your library represented on your college’s committee on rank and tenure?

Academic library leaders should absolutely involve campus stakeholders in the planning process. Have summits, run focus groups, host strategic planning days to better understand the needs of constituencies.  Develop relationships with your stakeholders based on areas of mutual concern. I have written before about how important it is to develop relationships with stakeholders by crafting compelling stories about our services and collections.

But academic library leadership shouldn’t stop there. They should be active in their college’s community, offering their expertise on issues where their library is uniquely qualified to comment and offer solutions.

So, I guess the question is—what is it that the academic library is uniquely qualified to do that no other department on campus can? And how do we include stakeholders in developing our future without giving that away?

Stay positive,

Erin

I grew up in denial

The 2015 edition of the American Library Association's State of American Libraries document was released on Sunday and is worth your time if you're interested in learning about the issues facing academic, school, and public libraries.

I was struck by the infographic in the school libraries section entitled "The good, the bad, and the ugly." The two figures in the "ugly" section that gave me pause:

51% of college freshman have a hard time learning to navigate new tools and 43% have trouble making sense of information once sources are found. 

College freshman have the most difficulty conducting research:
coming up with keywords (75%)
sorting through irrelevant search results (57%)
identifying and selecting sources (51%)
integrating writing styles from different sources (43%)

Take these facts and juxtapose them with this information in the "Experiences with information literacy" section of the 2014 National Survey of Student Engagement entitled Bringing the Student into Focus.

...about nine in ten first-year students said their instructors discouraged plagiarism and stressed appropriately citing sources. Additionally, large majorities of first-year students reported that their instructors emphasized using peer-reviewed sources (81%) and questioning the quality of information sources (74%). Two out of three first-year students frequently received feedback from instructors on how to improve their use of information resources. 

It seems like both the students and the librarians who serve them at both the school library and academic library levels must be frustrated.

What students learn before the reach college with regards to information literacy seems largely dependent on the state of the school libraries that support them. Budgetary constraints mean that libraries close and positions are slashed. Every time that you think you have to do less with more, think about a school librarian. Currently friends of school libraries are lobby to get school library funding included in the Elementary and Secondary School Act, but it doesn't seem a sure thing.

On the other side of the equation, ACRL just released the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. This framework is anchored by six frames, or core concepts. These frames cover the entire process from information consumption to information creation.

I was struck by how closely these two situations sat in the State of American Libraries document, but how far apart they seem in real life. It is important for college students to be good consumers (and creators) of information, and the Framework seems to give them the tools to do that. But when I look at what the Framework expects information literate people to be able to do, I end up back at the figures about how college freshpeople have a hard time conducting research. And I wonder how we, as academic librarians, can expect college students to become information literate if they come to college without the skills to participate in the larger conversation because of the preparation they received before coming to college.

I don't know the answer to how you take college students who (at least according to ALA's figures) are ill prepared to be good consumers and producers of information and turn them into information literate people. But I think the first step is to acknowledge that strong school library programs create a good foundation for information literacy. And that cutting those programs puts college students in a compromised position when it comes to being college students navigating the world of finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining information. Which, by the way, are the FRBR user tasks.

Look, I get that shaping students into information literate people while in college is a process that happens both inside the library and inside the classroom. And that information literate students aren't created in a day, or a semester, or even in four years. And I get that you have to have the Framework because it gives you signposts for where you are in the journey.

But I can't help but feel like, from my perspective anyway, these two worlds exist independent of one another. And I also can't help but feel that maybe they shouldn't.

I will admit to feeling ill-prepared to write about this topic, since I'm not in a public services position. I teach a few one-shot classes every semester, but that's the extent of my interaction with information literacy and with students. But I feel like it's important for me to think about (and talk about) this issue. I feel like thoughtful engagement with the ACRL Framework will make me better able to support my public services colleagues in shaping college students into information literate people. Admittedly, there are nuances in this argument that I'm certain I'm not aware of. So I'm sure I got it wrong. And if I got it wrong, tell me in the comments!

Stay positive,
Erin