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

Friday jams (08/14/2015)

Hello, friends of the Unified Library Scene! Have some jams!

Erin:
I'm actually kind of surprised that I haven't put up a Run-D.M.C. jam before. But I haven't, so here we are. It is, in fact, tricky to rock a rhyme that's right on time.

Rachel:
Oh, jams?

In the spaces in between

I like to practice what I preach over here on the blog, so yesterday I attended a lunchtime program at my library about ACRL's Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. I have become increasingly fascinated with the Framework and with understanding what the learning process looks like for our users. I grow more and more convinced that the key to effectively describing our collections and building our systems is to understand how our users approach the research process and are transformed by what they learn from our instruction-oriented colleagues.

But I digress. This post is not about that.

In preparation for that program, I read about threshold concepts. This primer on threshold concepts by Glynis Cousin was especially helpful for both explaining the concept of threshold concepts and grounding my understanding of the Framework. In this piece, Cousin explains that there is a space, the liminal state, between when a learner is introduced to a concept and when they master it. Cousin describes the concept of a liminal state as it relates to the mastery of threshold concepts, writing:

But once a learner enters this liminal space, she is engaged with the project of mastery unlike the learner who remains in a state of pre-liminality in which understandings are at best vague.

Cousin goes on to challenge those tasks with teaching by stating:

Teachers must demonstrate that they can tolerate learner confusion and can 'hold' their students through liminal states.

This idea of a liminal space and our responsibility to those in it stuck with me and made me think about how I approach working with people who are mastering new skills.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that I did not study education at any point in my undergraduate or graduate studies. Any understanding I have of how people learn things comes from teaching people things--both informally and in a classroom setting. My limited experience with library-related instruction comes in the form of one hour one-shot sessions that are meant to serve as an orientation to library resources. When I started doing these sessions, I would cram in as much information as I could for 50 minutes. Students saw a variety of resources being demonstrated, but they didn't necessarily come away from the class understanding how to use them or understanding any of the underlying concepts of information literacy.

Over time, I have changed my teaching style, after seeing what was successful and what wasn't and modifying my lesson plans accordingly. I have landed on teaching classes where I identify 1-2 concepts I want them to come away knowing and then building my activities and discussion around those. But after reading Cousin's discussion about the liminal space, I believe it is not enough for me to pare down my lesson plans. I also need to make room in any class I teach for those I'm teaching to sit in the liminal space. I need to stop filling the space with own thoughts and, instead, leave that space for learners to consider and master a particular threshold concept.

Making room for students to be in that liminal space is, admittedly, really tough. Once you've mastered a threshold concept, you can't un-master it. And it can be hard to allow yourself to feel how you felt when you lived in the liminal space: the fear, the frustration, the feeling of isolation. It requires an extraordinary amount of empathy to put yourself back in that space. But I would argue that it is necessary if you want to be a good teacher.

When I was taking cataloging, I really struggled. For about 3/4 of the semester, I didn't not not understand it at all and I was sure that I was going to fail. At some point cataloging "clicked" for me and, as they say, the rest is history. But I remember keenly that feeling of frustration over not understanding cataloging. I carry that feeling with me and I let it guide me in how I help others master cataloging concepts.

The bottom line, I think, is this: when we teach, we are responsible for creating a safe space for people to wrestle with the mastery of a threshold concept. Whether it's teaching a class of students or training our colleagues, it is our job as teachers to make room for the the liminal space. And, while we're at it, to fill that space with empathy and support. It takes time and practice to develop the capacity to do these things. But we owe it to the people we teach and, in the end, it's so rewarding.

Stay positive,
Erin

There's a ton of the twist, but we're fresh out of shout

Last week, Rachel wrote about what we're trying to do with the catalog. If you haven't read it, you should. Go ahead, I'll wait. Just remember to come back here when you're done.

Okay, I want to spend a little bit of time unpacking this bit that Rachel wrote about shared cataloging and whether or not it is helpful for library patrons. Rachel writes:

An important wrinkle in the story of the library catalog is shared cataloging. I would argue that shared cataloging helps library staff and communicating with other libraries, but is of questionable value to the library patron. After all, I really am not sure that a librarian at Harvard or Duke or even the Library of Congress knows best the description of the item that is both accurate and facilitates my users at Rural State University or Large Public Library or Tinest Library Ever looking for a thing. (this same discussion could be happening about subject cataloging, for instance).

So, in some ways shared cataloging is in our DNA as catalogers. If you pull records into your local catalog from a bibliographic utility you are taking advantage of shared cataloging. This type of shared work allows us to reuse records created by other libraries and saves us from having to create records from scratch for every item in our collection. There is a long tail in library collections, though, and your bibliographic utility of choice will probably not have records for everything in your collection. But by contributing and pulling down records for more commonly held items, your library's catalogers can focus on those unique items for which there is no copy.

Shared cataloging happens on the micro level as well. Consortium and university systems have long banded together to share cataloging resources among their membership. In 2014, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation conducted a cooperative cataloging pilot. The program was opt-in and participants assessed where their cataloging needs were and what they could offer in exchange. The pilot focused on both language and format expertise and helped reduce backlogs at participating institutions. The California Digital Library also has a shared cataloging program whose goal is to provide records for material licensed by the California Digital Library and to eliminate cataloging redundancy among libraries in the University of California campuses.

Shared cataloging is useful in my estimation because it allows libraries to work together to share expertise for certain formats and languages. It is a local solution for outsourcing a problematic backlog of specialized materials because it allows libraries to leverage their strengths to cover their weaknesses. Oh, you have a reading knowledge of Arabic? Great--I know a lot about serials cataloging! Let's work together to clear our respective backlogs! On the macro level, shared cataloging allows us to move widely held material through cataloging and processing to get them on the shelves and into the hands of our users. It also allows libraries to focus on their hidden collections of unique materials.

So, clearly shared cataloging provides value to libraries. But back to Rachel's point about the value of shared cataloging for patrons. Is the value of eliminating backlogs and uncovering hidden collections enough of a boon to users to justify our libraries' involvement in shared cataloging initiatives?

I do think Rachel is right about the fact that different user groups have different needs when it comes to description and access. I wrote earlier about the micromanagement of metadata and how we, as catalogers, need to learn to accept more metadata as-is. I should note that I don't think all local editing of records is bad. Sometimes we do need to augment records with data that will be useful to our users in the form of local notes or copy-specific information. Adding this information falls into the category of adding value to existing metadata. And shared cataloging doesn't mean that we have to leave our users high-and-dry when it comes to meeting their discovery and access needs. It just means that we have a place to start from.

So, no. I don't think that shared cataloging is a panacea for all of our metadata creation woes. We will probably always need to add value to records that reflect the needs of our users. But I do think that shared cataloging allows us to make material available more quickly to our users (always a good thing), and gives us the freedom to address the collections that are unique to our libraries.

Stay positive,
Erin

Friday Jams! (7/31/2015)

Rachel:

As I was writing my post yesterday and thinking about the catalog one of the questions that crossed my mind was "can we rebuild it?" Which of course, led to this,

Which, of course, leads to Kanye.

Erin:
I know that I normally post new music and tell you a story. But it's been a really long week, you guys.

All My Daydreams are Disasters

Erin talked recently (and all the time) about how catalogers and technologists need to include public services professionals and patrons in their discussions of the library future. It got me thinking, again, about The Problem With The Catalog. This isn't a "the OPAC is dead" post, and I have to admit that I don't even know what "the OPAC is dead" discussion is about because I've avoided it because it seems entirely off-base to me. However, I think that a return to basic principles is in order when we think about the post-MARC world and how library catalogs have worked (or not worked) for us in the past.

The basic question I like to start with is "what are we trying to do here?" It is a question that gets overlooked far more than we're aware and way more than we should be comfortable with. I have some theories as to why that is, but we'll leave that for another day. What are we trying to do with a library catalog? What are our purposes?

Let's take a look at the many and varied things that we try to do with the library catalog, based on the audience.

Library Staff
Library staff use the catalog as inventory control, a complete and comprehensive list of items in the building at any time, a complete and comprehensive list of items that the library owns. Most systems also use the integrated library system (I'll note that it isn't necessarily the catalog, but the linkages are essential to how we function these days) as a customer management system, tracking interactions with users including lending, money owed, renewal dates for borrowing privileges, and a host of other things. Many libraries also use the integrated library system as an accounting system which encumbrances, expenditures, budgets, renewal dates for continuing commitments, and an archive of fiscal functions.

Other Libraries
We use library catalogs as a means of communicating with other libraries, an extension of the inventory control function of the catalog. In communicating with other libraries, the need for complete and comprehensive coverage of the exact physical item is reiterated. We communicate with other libraries through both our catalogs (through Z39.50 as well as union lists) and through union listing of serials holdings in places like the OCLC database. All of this facilitates interlibrary lending to the end of providing more and better materials to our users and to the users of other libraries.

Library Users

I put this last because it often seems to come last in how we think about our catalog. We, naturally, think of our professional needs before our service needs. Our thinking seems to be along these lines:

Well we obviously need to have a catalog that has a well designed inventory control and a good accounting system and that will work to talk to other libraries. Doing that obviously gives the users the information they need -- a comprehensive and complete listing of library items here and at other libraries and a way to get access to them. We've been taking care of users all along!

But library users aren't using the catalog in the same way we are, they're generally looking for things. Looking for things takes on a number of guises, but I don't know that any of those guises is exactly inventory control.

An important wrinkle in the story of the library catalog is shared cataloging. I would argue that shared cataloging helps library staff and communicating with other libraries, but is of questionable value to the library patron. After all, I really am not sure that a librarian at Harvard or Duke or even the Library of Congress knows best the description of the item that is both accurate and facilitates my users at Rural State University or Large Public Library or Tinest Library Ever looking for a thing. (this same discussion could be happening about subject cataloging, for instance).


I'm not sure that's a complete list of the things that we're doing or at least trying to do, but those are the main things I see. Let me know in the comments if I've left anything out.  This look at what we're doing start the conversation.


My original question is what are we trying to do here?
Let's break that down into an examination of what's already going on:

• does it make sense for us do each of these things?
• does it make sense to us to try to do all of these things together?

 From there, we can expand the scope:

• are we trying to do the same thing that we were trying to do when we set all this up?
• are there things that we're trying to do that are wholly unaddressed?

To me, this seems like the basis to start a discussion that involves everyone and aims at building a common understanding based on our collective goals instead of what is going wrong with what's happening right now. What do you think? What questions would you add to the discussion? Let me know in the comments.

& Keep Rockin'
Rachel

Stuck between stations

As we move toward a post-MARC future, there is an increasing interest in bringing into alignment the metadata creation community and the library technologist community. This interest seems to be based on the understanding that the way in which we describe our resources needs to be in alignment with the way in which we build our systems to manipulate that metadata.

I have written before about metadata and user experience and the relationship between metadata creators and library technologists. I'm definitely in favor of finding areas of mutual concern between these two communities and leveraging that to build a more collaborative future. In fact, I think if you demanded that I tell you what I think the Unified Library Scene is about, I would probably say it's about building a collaborative future built on areas of mutual concern. I write and talk about that past the point of ad nauseam.

So, yes. Let's do that. Let's build a collaborative future based on areas of mutual concern between metadata creators and library technologists.

But do you notice who is absent in this discussion?

We cannot take users out of the equation when we're creating metadata and designing systems to manipulate that metadata. We are not building library systems or creating metadata for ourselves. But if we want to build user-centered libraries, it should matter at least as much to us (and probably more) what our users require from our metadata and our systems than we want them to be able to do.

The best way to understand user needs is to talk to users. But in situations where that doesn't work, our public services colleagues can certainly act as a conduit of information. They can teach us about the points of pain that users face when they try to access library resources using our metadata and our software. And from there, we can understand what can be easily be fixed in-house and what needs to be addressed at the developer level.

This isn't a new idea. Agile software development uses this method in developing user stories. User stories are useful because they give voice to user needs. In a post-MARC development world, a public services colleague can be a valuable resource in developing user stories about metadata and systems use.

This is a good time for us to pause and acknowledge that certain aspects of our metadata and our systems are, in fact, built for us. We need systems that do inventory control and request fulfillment. And some of the metadata we create is administrative. And those needs come with a certain set of specifications that are separate from what users require from our systems. But let's not confuse creating standards and software that support librarian needs from creating standards and software that support user needs.

Turning our attention toward actual user needs instead of perceived user needs has the potential to be uncomfortable. It may require a redesign of our standards and systems which may, in turn, require a reallocation of our staff efforts locally. But I think this is where we can learn something from software designers and the agile software development movement. If something isn't working, agile software developers move with changing requirements until is does work. Because creating software that doesn't meet user needs is essentially a waste of time and money. And so it is with libraries. Throwing staff time and resources at metadata creation and systems development that aren't working is essentially a waste of time and money.

I think that a good starting place is to involve our public services colleagues in conversations about our post-MARC future. By allowing them to help us understand user needs, we can begin to create metadata and systems that support them. Even if that metadata and those systems aren't what we expect them to be.

Stay positive,
Erin