Posts Tagged 'lunch with lauren'

Conversations on librarianship to kick off a new academic year!

Published August 9, 2012 the profession Leave a Comment
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Lauren Pressley and I always have great conversations about libraries, teaching and librarianship. Back in April we each wrote a series of posts based on a wide-ranging lunch convo. Below are those posts in the correct order. Steve Thomas of Circulating Ideas recently asked us to record a podcast talking about the origin of the posts and a whole host of other things. While you are scheduling classes or answering email, give it a listen. Steve puts a lot of time and effort into his podcasts so we should give him the library love! (You should also check out the podcast with Jessamyn West! Awesome!)

And have a great start to your semesters! Things are kicking in gear here at the “G”. Looking forward to seeing the students again.

Conversation 1: New Wild World of Reference

Conversation 2: New Wild Reference Librarians

Conversation 3: New Wild World of Libraries

Are we ready for Library 2525?: Lunch with Lauren

Published May 3, 2012 the profession 2 Comments
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This is the final post from my lunchtime conversation with Lauren. She writes about the library of the future much more effectively than I can. Might have something to do with our core competencies and personas! But I want to add a small dilemma. It is something I’ve been thinking about a lot.

I agree firmly with Lauren about the evolving role of librarians from servants to service-providers to collaborators. I see it in the disconnect when I talk with librarians who haven’t moved into a collaborative role. When I talk about my activities, the ones I see as collaborative, I often get a quizzical look and questions about whether that is what librarians are supposed to be doing. For example a few of us have been teaching the introduction to the university courses over the past year. We see this activity as firmly embedded into library practice, especially as these courses are inherently about information literacy. Because of our teaching the library has had been able to give more input into the development of these courses. We are at the decision-making table helping to shape the future instead of reacting to whatever the “real” decision-makers decide.

But here’s my dilemma. We are doing more and more true collaborative work (embedded librarianship, assignment development, curriculum development, developing online journals with faculty) and spending more and more hours on these activities. Collaborative work is taking us away from our traditional service duties especially reference desk work. In the past the value of the reference department has been based on the number of questions we get each hour, each day, and declines in those numbers has led to proclamations that “Reference is Dead“!

What numbers will we use to prove collaboration to skeptics in the future?

This has become a bigger issue at my library because more of our classes are going online and asynchronous only. Two of my core classes that I used to teach each semester are now asynchronous online. Why does this matter? Because I am no longer teaching library instruction sessions for them, and my instruction numbers went down. Does this mean I was any less busy? Heck no. In one class I spent a few hours creating a video tutorial on the OECD.stat geared to their assignment and several more in consultations with the individual students. In the other I had to make my very first “Hi, I’m Lynda” video. (That video may seem old hat to you, but dude it took me forever). These videos were then embedded into the instructional materials in Blackboard and not just sitting on a library website hoping for hits. I felt like I was collaborating with the professor on how we could best integrate the library into the virtual world of these students.

Now, I track numbers of consultations, but in reporting this I only report interactions. I don’t report time spent. We track contact time with students in library instruction sessions, but not how much contact time we spend with the category of “reference desk interactions.” Because I am obsessive I track  the time I spend on each question (both prep and interaction time) and counted all of that up for my tenure presentation this year. I spent over 80 hours in consultations alone. That number is twice what I spent in the library instruction classroom. This does not include any of the work I did on tutorials or otherwise. Tutorials and otherwise don’t exist in the library reporting mechanism.

So, back to my question. As we become collaborators, as we enter more complex relationships, how are we tracking it? What numbers matter most and can best explain how much time we spend collaborating with faculty? If a librarian embeds into a course like Steve Cramer, how does he account for the many hours he spends with those students? What about my political science class? Even if it may seem tangential to my work, it has had a tangible impact on my interactions with political science students (my consultations numbers doubled since I started teaching the class).

Our assessment efforts are a good starting point, but they tend to be based on small samples and are about (as they should be) student learning. They can’t and aren’t meant to demonstrate the breadth of work we are doing throughout the campus. They make the case that students are learning things, but they don’t make the case that a new reference and instruction librarian should replace the one who retired.

Because numbers have been used to prove our lack of worth in the past, what numbers will prove our worth in the future? More importantly if we aren’t tracking those numbers now, what is going to be our library future? Are we even ready for 2525?

Confessions and competencies: Lunch with Lauren

Published May 2, 2012 the profession 5 Comments
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Confession 1: I like trivial pursuit, but I didn’t become a librarian to be a fount of trivia. That’s what Google is for. Or Duck Duck Go.

Confession 2: Beyond my own personal reading, I don’t really care about the future of the book. I mean, I care, but it is not what gets me out of bed and into the office in the morning.

Confession 3: I am REALLY REALLY bad with details. I may be obsessively neat and good at collecting statistics (at work), but I was horrendous at cataloging. Horrendous. Me talking with a cataloger is like a Croatian trying to understand a Macedonian. They can pick up a few words here and there but most of it just sounds like Greek.

Confession 4: I became a librarian because I like talking with people. I found the research life demoralizing and isolating. I tried talking to my cubicle, but you can imagine how that ended up. When I found out that some librarians spent much of their time yacking I knew it was the life for me. And they teach?! And maybe even teach kids like this?! Oh glory be I’ve come home!

PSC 240 Spring 2012

So, why the confessions? Because a few of us (me, Lauren, and Jenny Dale) have recently become obsessed (a bit) with this idea of core competencies. Jenny and I read about it in the book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam, and she borrowed it from the business literature. Coming from the idea of comparative advantage, you have opportunity costs for every task to which you decide to devote your time. Opportunity costs are the things you give up to do something else. The tasks with the lowest opportunity costs are your core competencies. Vanderkam argues that we should spend our time on our core competencies and avoid or delegate whatever is not core to someone with those core competencies. To give an example: in my house I am much better at cleaning things while DM is much better at fixing things (detail oriented to a fault). If we are following our core competencies, we would split our tasks appropriately. It would take me much more time to fix a cabinet than to wait for DM to do it.  From a time management perspective it is more efficient and increases motivation because you enjoy doing things you do well.

The question we’ve had is how to apply this to the library setting. Jenny and I will flesh this out on a micro-level in an upcoming project, but what if we applied this to the macro-level? What if this is how the library organized itself? How would a library that is divided into the core competencies look? What core competencies would it need for it to function?

This then led into a discussion of the major personas in a library: the grand strategy thinker, the patron-centered talker, the instruction-based performer, and the detailed-oriented producer. If we approach library functions from the angle of core competencies and fit, can we manufacture a library where people are more motivated because they are doing the functions they find most fulfilling? Lauren for example is the grand strategy thinker extraordinaire. She is not only able to see the big picture for the library future, she cares about it more. It is what motivators her to  get up and go, to present, to talk with others, to put in those 8 hours every day. How much more effective would the library (or any organization) be if it approached motivation based on core competencies?

Granted we are mirroring the current roles, but if we try to think bigger than what exists, what roles do we see?  What core competencies would be represented in your library of the future?

Lunch with Lauren: Reference and the Research Process

Published April 27, 2012 the profession 6 Comments
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Whenever Lauren and I have lunch we end up with wonderful and grand schemes for rethinking the library. I always leave with 100 ideas and many things to do. Our first task was to blog about the discussion and see where we overlap in thinking. And the first grand idea up is reference and the research process.

We’ve been talking about this idea since ALA NOLA and it stems from both concerns Lauren has about reference and from my experience with embedded librarianship. I’ve been obsessed with the idea of embedded librarianship for a year or so now because I see it as the future of reference.

Now to clarify, embedded librarianship does not mean just becoming a member of online courses. I see embedded librarianship as deep integration into a class or a discipline or any institution separate from the library. It could be online, but being in a class online doesn’t equal embedded librarianship. It is the activity that you do and the role that you develop that constitutes embeddedness.

Embeddedness implies a deeper level of understanding of the content of the institution in which we are embedded. Yes, we will be the librarian, but the librarian also needs to have a deeper knowledge of what actually goes on within that institution and potentially some subject expertise.

Now there is a huge debate about whether you need training in an area to support a department, and if we are supporting groups in the traditional liaison model, then I don’t think you need subject expertise. As Lauren says you can learn to be good at answering any question. My friend and colleague Jenny Dale is the perfect example. She support English (her background) and Kinesiology (decidedly not her background) and she is fab at both. Steve Cramer is also an amazing business librarian with a Medievalist’s background. But, he has become masterful in his area by teaching himself the content to some degree.

Subject expertise (or willingness to study the area) helps quite a bit, especially if we are trying to integrate our work more into the actual research process of our students and faculty. Here’s why I think this. I support Political Science, which is my background. Many of the questions I get are simple database searches, but a growing number of those database questions have been interspersed with questions like this:

  • “What does decentralization mean?”
  • “What is the Responsibility to Protect?”
  • “Do my variables sound remotely on target?”
  • “What are operational definitions?” (which spawned a post on the death of reference)

Now, anyone at the reference desk could eventually answer those questions using subject dictionaries, but honestly most of the time those reference resources give incredibly vague definitions or definitions that refer to components of an idea and not the idea as it is used in their specific class. You could refer them back to their professors, but typically students ask these questions in the moment of actual need (or avoid their professors for various reasons).

For deep embedded librarianship subject expertise, and some kind of passion for the field, is critical. How does this relate to rethinking reference? Well, while I think embedded librarianship is the future, it would be unrealistic to expect everyone to have this level of expertise in our cash-strapped libraries. And of course working the desk is entirely different. But what if our training for the desk revolved more around thinking in terms of disciplinary areas and less in terms of tools?

At UNCG we have classes in Social Science or Humanities information sources, but those tend to be focused on the tools and databases of those disciplines. They are less focused on the commonalities of research within those larger areas. What I want to know is how research is actually done within the field? What are the key things that matter? What is the research lifecycle? And most importantly, when does the library figure in?

For our reference intern training starting last fall the intern coordinators (myself, Amy Harris, and Jenny Dale) instituted this approach in our first training sessions. We taught three sessions that were non-department or tools specific: science research, humanities research, and social science research. I only have the slides for social science, but you can get a picture of what we were trying to do. I should mention this is a work in progress, so suggestions are welcome!

Some of the session considers tools, but the tools are contextualized within the research process. Our goal is to give these students the basic vocabulary of these larger areas so that they can better see how a field works. For example, what is secondary data analysis and why does that matter to the social sciences? This would then encourage a student to think beyond the typical article databases when some numeric information might be more appropriate for a question. I think approaching training this way would help with Lauren’s issue of supporting interdisciplinary departments where you have researchers working in both the social sciences and the humanities.

To wrap this up, I see two big areas for future investment in reference. One is using those people who are subject experts and who feel comfortable in a field more strategically in embedded relationships. Two is revamping our training at the reference desk to encompass more thinking about the discipline’s approach and less about the tools. Both ideas are more about the process of research than the specific question being asked, but in our environment of declining reference questions shouldn’t we be more concerned about getting into that process?

Up next, what is the library of the future?

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