Professional Development

I started my day in the exhibits where I popped by to see Lauren and then went more systematically through the exhibits, which seem smaller to me this year from years past. I found an amazing microfiche/film/card reader that has some potential, picked up some posters, looked at and gave some input on a new line of mobile classroom furniture Brodart is developing. It’s nice, substantial and mobile, which is rare in mobile classroom furniture in my book. Visited other vendors of Political Science and Communication titles and then headed out.

My next stop was the New Reference Research Forum sponsored by RUSA. Three sets of reserchers presented their research projects. The first was on an analysis of 24 years of data from libraries using the Wisconsin-Ohio Reference Evaluation Program. This is a program where both patron and librarian fill out questionnaires after reference transactions. The data showed that several factors influence the success of reference transactions: personal attention, professionalism, learning and active collaboration. It also found that time spent per transaction is trending upward. An interesting note was that 75% of the transactions were handled by librarians but 90% of the questions were rated as easy to medium in difficulty (by the librarian). This seems to me to go back to the ideas we were dealing with in my preconference - librarians sitting the reference desk is just not a sustainable model when the other areas of our jobs are becoming more demanding.

Other research studies were on the efficacy of online tutorials and using VR interactions as teachable moments. Both were interesting, but the one about VR interactions had a lot of good advice about how to use those interactions to promote information literacy. A lovely dinner with ZSR folks capped a busy day.

My day 2 at ALA began with my first ever committee meeting. I am on the Teaching, Learning and Technology committee of the Library Instruction Round Table. We had a good meeting and chose our next project. Plus it was really nice to put faces to names, as our committee gets most of its job done in virtual meetings.

Then it was on to an EBSCO Lunch at the Hilton. EBSCO reminded us all that when libraries are hurting, publishers for libraries hurt. They detailed their cost saving measures for the next year which DO NOT include decreasing coverage or tinkering with access. So they are cutting direct mail entirely, and have cut back on print advertising. They are also looking for overlaps among their products and trying to streamline that. They mentioned a couple of new products that may bear looking at as we look to cut, as we can get volume discounts with them. A new Art and Architecture Full-text database, a new full text Political Science one and full-text options on America History and Life and Historical Abstracts. I stopped by their booth later and chatted with our rep about getting more info.

Then I headed over to McCormick Place for the program put on by the Law and Political Science Section which I recently joined and have found a great group of people. Their program was on how libraries can get involved in fostering civic engagement. We need to move being a place where ideas live and are stored to a place where they can get discussed and get turned into action. Our POL faculty are very interested in this topic and the handout gave a great bibliography on the subject.The main point was that we are already seen as a ’safe’ place in so many other arenas, that we should become that safe place for opposing views to come to the table and really work to solve social problems.

I then did a cursory tour through the exhibits (those who know me know I LOVE exhibit floors). Got some good info, made a few contacts, entered some prizes, got a book, found out about some online sources and marveled at how long librarians will stand in line for 1oz of champagne

Sorry this post is running a day or two behind, but wifi is hard to come by during my days!

I have mixed feelings about preconferences in general. I’ve been to a few good ones, but most I’ve attended were not worth the money as I feel they tend to be lots of people with questions and not so many people with answers. So it was with a some hesitation that I approached the RUSAMARS preconference ‘Reinvented Reference: Using our Collective Wisdom.”

The preconference had four issues around which it was organized: Staffing, Collaboration, Working with IS/IT and Assessment. The first half of the day was presentations on each of these topics and the second half gave us time to get in groups to discuss two of the four more fully. The two that are of most interest to me were staffing and assessment as we are facing the need to make serious changes in our reference staffing models, but we need to be sure we assess throughout the process to be sure we are staying true to the library’s mission.

First up was Bill Pardue, a public librarian from Arlington Heights Memorial library in Illinois who spoke about Reference Staffing. He made the excellent point that it is very expensive to keep desks staffed ‘just in case’ with librarians. Having librarians on the desk all the time is not a sustainable model. He made the point that small libraries have never had this issue because paraprofessionals have always been on the desk. He discussed different models of staffing and some results of study he did of libraries that had switched. The discussion that ensued also indicated that success was dependent on lots of thought going into the project ahead of the switch, rather than the switch being imposed from above without proper planning.

Brian Matthews from UC Santa Barbara (formerly of GA Tech) was the speaker on Assessment. He had a few timely reminders including the oft-stated, rarely practiced advice that assessment should be an ongoing, iterative process that should take place both during planning and implementation phases. He also feels that assessment should not be used to justify what you want to do - in other words don’t say “Let’s do X” and then create a survey to ‘prove’ that X is what your patrons want. He mentioned that we should start by asking the right questions - what do we really want to know. He gave some great ideas of ways to assess in non-traditional ways. These include Bulls eye questions - targeted - visual way to answer questions, asking ‘The Ultimate Question’ (which is the name of a book). You ask ‘on a scale from 0 to 4, how likely are you to recommend your library to others.’ Another great idea is the projection exercise where you ask patrons to personify your library — ‘imagine the library is a person, What would they look like, what’s their personality, how would the act and interact with others, who would they be friends with, who do they resemble’ — The answers can be VERY telling.

The afternoon sessions where we broke into groups around these topics were a good deal of probelm sharing and not a lot of solution finding, but there was some good food for thought in both of my discussion groups. All in all I would give it 4 out of 5 stars and I came away with a couple really great ideas that I’ll bring back to RITS and the marketing committee. Sometimes the benefits of these sorts of things are not in the content, but in the sharing and in the realization that as rough as we may have it - others are in much worse position either because of massive budget cuts and/or clueless and unsupportive administrations - two things we are VERY lucky not to be dealing with at ZSR.

I started my Saturday at a small Focus Group breakfast put on by ProQuest. I had asked a few questions at the ProQuest booth on Friday and was invited to this breakfast which was to talk to librarians about upcoming interface changes in ProQuest. A lot of what I saw I can’t talk about (nondisclosure and all that) but a few things stuck with me from the experience. First, ProQuest is talking to librarians at the VERY early stages of the process and plans to continue to talk to us throughout the process of designing the new interface. Second, they REALLY seemed to want honest feedback and weren’t in the least bit defensive or protective of their product. They came off seeming as if they really want to create the most usable and useful interface they can. Finally, it got me really excited about the direction they are going with their products. I’m hoping to have ZSR among the test groups they will have going this summer and will pass along more information about that if it arises. I had never been part of this kind of focus group and it was a really great experience for me to see databases from the design and usability angle.

Next it was on to the discussion of two paper presentations. The first was of a paper written by San Diego State University about a survey they did of their student assistants trying to gage how important both the academic and non-academic purposes of the library were in how integrated the students felt to the school. It was an interesting study that came of the intersection of the retention, success and persistence literature in higher education. It was rewarding to see what an important role the library does seem to play in the success of our students not just because we provide them with academic tools to conduct their research but also because we provide them with jobs, understanding and a place to come and feel safe. The second of the two paper presentations was done by UNC and USC (South Carolina) and looked at the academic library workforce. It was a workforce study (one of the only ones that have been done on librarians, apparently) and surveyed thousands of librarians that had graduated from the library programs in North Carolina (I vaguely remember filling out the survey - I’m sure some of you did, too). It confirmed some of what we know (lots of librarians will reach retirement age in the next 10 years) and also some things that were new, about how people find librarianship and why they leave.

Then after a lovely lunch, Susan, Mary Beth and I walked up to the Seattle Public Library. As a huge lover of architecture, I found the building fascinating. As a lover of libraries, I found it less than appealing as a place I personally would want to hang out in for very long. As a lover of logical design, I found it a nightmare. Truly a place where you need a map and an outstanding visual and perceptual sense to find your way around in. But it was full of people in the coffee shop, checking out things, waiting for tax help, working on computers and more.

Then it was back to the Convention Center to sit in on the beginning of Lauren’s panel presentation and then to hop over to see Lynn present her paper. I had missed her dry run at ZSR so it was great to see. I have a sneaking suspicion that if this study was done now with our renovations and our Starbucks that our students would be even more on the side of library as place.

Next was my own Cyber Zed Shed presentation on Google Docs. Most in the audience had used them, some had not. I hope my presentation gave them some new ideas for their use and the confidence to try it if they hadn’t. The response seemed positive, despite a bit of technical difficulties. I’ve done many presentations where the loss of an Internet connection would have been non-consequential but when your presentation topic is Google Docs, I would have had to do some interpretive dance to make it a success. As it turns out, I didn’t have to dance at all (to everyone’s great relief).

The day ended with a wonderful dinner at Wild Ginger and then the all-conference reception at the Expeience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum. Another architectural treasure, desined by Frank O. Gehry - it marked my first visit to one of his buildings. It totally worked for the purposes of these two collections and it was a nice evening all around.

So today was a day where I spent a good deal of time with vendors and since Mary Beth and Susan will most likely cover the sessions I went to, I’ll focus my post on what I learned about new products and offerings on the horizon.

The day started with a breakfast sponsored by Serial Solutions where Alison Head of Project Information Literacy presented (I’ll post on that in more detail elsewhere). After she spoke, however, Jane Burke announced a new product from SS called Summon Unified Discovery Service. The idea is to take the simplicity of a single search box a-la-Google and put behind it the metadata from your catalog, IR, journal subscriptions, web information etc. so that it is as easy to use as Google but substantially more effective in getting to research. It’s a fascinating prospect - some big name journal publishers are on board already - and is absolutely worth watching in the future. I stopped by the booth later in the day and got an up close look at it and I have to admit I was impressed.

Next I made the rounds in the Exhibit Hall. Some highlights for me were:

• Alexander Street Press’ brand new American History in Video collection that combines video and transcripts of newsreels, History Channel shows and more. Currently at 300 hours of video and expanding up to 2000 hours eventually, the collection is a really remarkable one. ASP has such quality databases and a wonderful interface that you wish you had a rich uncle who would pay for us to get them all!!
• Next I went to a booth presentation at Oxford University Press on their database Oxford Islamic Studies Online. A great assimilation of scholarship, Quranic studies including two translations of the Qu’ran and a concordance, encyclopedias, and other materials. No other source on Islam that i have seen has been quite as complete and integrated as this one. At the end, our gift for watching the demo was a Dictionary. Seriously - an Oxford American Dictionary. Looks like I’ll be shipping a box back home!
• I stopped by the Greenwood booth to talk to them about their digital reference options and caught a presentation of some of their features (which netted me a coffee mug). What I found out, however, is that by September, Greenwood, ABC-Clio, Libraries Unlimited and Praeger would have their eReference titles on the same platform. So many quality reference books come out of these imprints that I can say with certainty that I will be investigating what we need to do to set up an account so that we can purchase eReference from them as we do from Oxford and GVRL.
• Lunch was a What’s New with Gale session in a beautiful room on the 35th floor of the Sheraton. Several interesting things came to light here
  • A group has been working to assign LC Subject Headings to all the ECCO records. Libraries with ECCO will be able to purchase the new MARC records with the LCSH content.
  • They are creating an ECCO II with content from the 18th Century found and digitized since 2003.
  • They have a new wonderful looking database coming out called Slavery and Antislavery in America. This will contain an enormous amount of data, but most interesting is that it will have our slave narratives and abolitionist papers that we currently have on Microcard (SLA and SLB) included. This has long been an irreplacable resource in a hard-to-use format and its inclusion in this database will bring it to the top of our desiderata list. But the other content included also makes it extremely desirable for us.

There were other vendors and other news to share, but I think that is the highlights of what I found out today! More tomorrow!

Had a fabulous tour with Mary Beth and Susan today called “Chocolate, Waterfalls and Wine” - hard to think of any other combination more appealing to me unless it had been called “Shakespeare, Frank Lloyd Wright and ACC Basketball”! We started at Boehm’s Chocolate’s just outside of Seattle. Handmade chocolates, free of preservatives, housed in a lovely Swiss chalet and absolutely delicious. Then on to lunch and Snoqualmie Falls for a quick view of the falls. We finished the day at Chateau St. Michele for a great and informative tour of their winery. Mary beth and Susan will give their takes, but I’ll pass on this fact: Sweeter wines are sweeter because they bring the temperature way down thus making the yeast inactive and stopping it from using up all the sugar in the wine. We tasted, we purchased and we headed back to the Convention Center. Susan will put pictures up soon!!

Lynn gave a great summary of the really good keynote speaker Rushworth kidder, but I’ll share a great story he told. While researching for a book on e.e. cummings, he came across cummings’ handwritten copy of his poem “Buffalo Bill’s” with a reference to an obituary for Buffalo Bill. He hunted down the obit and found in it several of the phrases cummings uses in the poem. No one knew of the obit or had ever connected it to that poem. Those who know me know I love stories of discoveries made while researching in libraries, so you can see why I love this.

I thought another interesting point he made was to say that ethical delimmas can essentially be boiled down to one of four things: Truth vs. Loyalty, Individual vs. Community, Short-term vs. Long-term or Justice vs. Mercy. He also gave a definition of ethics that I liked “obedience to the unenforceable” and made the point that as a society, if we let our ethics erode, law will inevitably try to fill in the void. His speech was really inspirational and once again made me proud to be a librarian! We Rock!

This afternoon 18+ folks gathered in LIB204 for a webcast from ACRL on Information Commons. The sections was led by Joan Lippencott. Here are the notes from the session - it will be available online from ACRL and I will post the link here when available.

She began by discussing the concepts of Information Commons and Learning Common.

• Not just computer labs - need to incorporate the role of content and levels of service that computer labs don’t.
• Many also make room for other campus services (writing center and Teaching and Learning Center)
• Info Commons emphasize areas for groups, collaborations, food, art, etc. as opposed to quiet individual study
• Need to provide an environment that engage learners
• Most are in libraries, but some are in academic buildings or student centers

Vision and Goals

• Who will conceptualize the vision and goals for your commons? Who other than library staff need to be involved? Encourages direct representation on committees by students.
• How does your library serve the community?
• Link your goals to the goals of the University as a whole.

For What Purpose

• Convenience
• Increase ability of students to work in groups
• Make more technology available
• Provide services efficiently and effectively
• Provide new services
• Promote a sense of community
• Enhance learning — should be your primary focus

Linking the Info Commons to Learning

• Deeper Learning
  • Social
  • Active
  • Contextual
  • Engaging
  • Student-Owned

Physical Space Slides showing examples of spaces from Info Commons

Collaborations and Partnership

Issue is do they become partners or just tenants? Not much leveraging of the physical proximity.

• Co-location - adjacenct service points and opportunities for informal crossover staff contact
• Cooperation
• Collaboration - developing shared mission and goals, joint planning, pool expertise to develop new services, each contributes resources.
• Dartmouth Center for Research, Writing and IT. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~rwit/
• GA Tech Information Commons

Staffing Issues:

• What will be the key uses of your commons?
• What types of services do you anticipate?
• Who will be your partner organizations?
• Will services with other units be co-located?
• What mix of professional, support, student staffing will be needed?
• What kind of training is needed and who will provide it?

Assessment

• Gate counts
• counts of use of workstations
• use surveys
• question counts
• satisfaction surveys
• quality perception surveys

• Frame assessments in the context of your institutiton’s learning priorities
• Partner with assessment experts on your campus
• Communicate to staff what type of information would be valuable to administrators and funders
• Assemble stakeholders to shape the assesment effort
• consider both quantitative and qualitative measures

5 Ideas You Can Do Now

• Form group spaces in open areas
• Add inexpensive equipment to promote student collaborative learning
• Improve promotion of content and services through signage and displays
• Begin pertnerships and joint training with other units
• Do needs assessments

Planning Issues

• Develop a vision related to learning
• Develop goals
• Determine partners
• define and gain resources
• determine location
• define what you want users to be able to do
• define services
• determine staff needs
• Later you can work on the specifics

I didn’t post about my last day an a half at the ACRL Intentional Teacher Immersion program primarily because it was pretty intense and I needed time to process it. Again, I won’t bore you with the details, but it involved pretty intense discussions of what we percieve to be weaknesses in our teaching that were carried out in what we called a Palmer Circle format. This comes from Parker Palmer, the author of one of the books we read. The idea is that a concern is stated by the focus person and the other members of the group can only ask questions of the person to try and help them think through the issue. The process of asking questions was almost as difficult as the process of being the focus person. Teachers and librarians tend to be problem solvers and the impulse to say “well…what I would do in your situation is…..” was difficult to overcome. But the experience was a great one and I hope to take away a new respect for questioning as a way to work through issues rather than just giving advice.

To prepare for the questioning aspect of the Palmer Circle we used a set of cards called the ‘whack pack’ which was designed to inspire creative problem solving. The questions were great and I am ordering a pack of the cards off eBay for us to use.

The final half day was devoted to creativity in instruction and in reflecting on the experience of the Immersion program. As I have reflected over the last week here are the big take-away’s for me:

1. Getting time away from my other duties to focus more on my instruction will become a higher priority for me.

2. Keeping up with the literature of instruction across the disciplines is a commitment I really want to make. This will include exploring presentation and publication possibilities in discipline specific arenas outside of librarianship.

3. I will endeavor to trust my students more with thier own learning and strive to be a guide to them whenever the opportunity arises.

4. The two leaders of the program, Lisa Hinchcliffe and Beth Woodard both from Univ. of Illinois are MASTER teachers and were such amazing role models of what exceptional teachers do that I will carry their examples with me for a long, long time.

5. Campus food is lousy everywhere, but UCSD has truly integrated environmentalism and sustainability into their campus culture which was a truly refreshing site. Even down to putting recycle cans outside next to all of their trash cans and using compostable plastic cups for conference set-ups.

Yes. We had an earthquake. We felt it — a bit scary but when the locals didn’t run for the hills we figured we were ok. We are meeting in a brand new building so it has all the requisite earthquake resistance built in, but still a bit unnerving.

Day two was a good one. Just a few impressions. We started by discussing in small groups some research studies we found and brought with us that focused on pedagogy, library instruction, classroom experience, any thing in that area. What I came out of it with is a realization that we often need to go outside the library literature to find really good research on teaching and learning, but that if we do - it can be very informative. We all expressed a desire to have more time for keeping up with the literature that is out there on good teaching and are crafting some ways to help us do that.

We spent another part of the day discussing our students. Who they are, what they need, what they would ask us if they could. Very enlightening exercises but the most interesting one was one we did about assumptions. We all had to list three assumptions we make about the students when we enter the classroom - we then listed them all (75) and found some real insights. We discussed how our assumptions affect how and what we teach in good and bad ways. We also talked about how reluctant we often are to give up our assumptions even when faced with ample evidence that they are no longer valid. Food for thought.

We finished up the day developing the perfect job description for the perfect librarian as seen from the student’s perspective. Not as easy a task as it sounds — hard to keep putting yourself in the shoes of the student. But as I have been thinking a lot about job descriptions lately - it was a good exercise.

Now to dinner and then some lighter viewing fare tonight — Parker Posey in “Party Girl!”

This week I am in San Diego in one of the ACRL Immersion programs. For those unfamiliar with them, these programs are week-long immersion programs focused on various aspects of information literacy. There are four tracks. Assessment (not running this time, but focuses on how to assess student learning and program success), Program (focusing on how to get an IL program going at your institution), Teacher (focused on instruction strategy for new teachers) and Intentional Teacher (the one I’m in) which focuses on people who have been teaching for a while in an effort to make them more aware of their teaching.There are 25 of us in the Inentional Teacher group from all over the country (and Canada) and from all sorts of libraries, backgrounds and stages in their careers.

As the ‘Immersion’ moniker suggests, it’s an intense program with long days, many activities, much discussion and even more reflection. I’m not going give a play-by-play of each day but will instead highlight as best I can those things that stuck out to me. Once I’m done I hope to also have some bigger picture thoughts to share.

Today we first focused on the two books we read before arriving. Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach and Steven Brookfield’s Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher.  Both books had their moments for me (usually surrounding concrete examples rather than lofty theory) although both tended to obscure points with too much jargon for my taste. What was interesting in our discussion is how what one person found depressing in one book, another found exhilarating; what I may have dismissed as unimportant, another person really connected with. So I came to see both books in a new light.

Later in the day we discussed our results of the Teaching Perspectives Inventory.  This measure was developed to show teachers where they stand within the five teaching perspectives identified: Transmission, Apprenticeship, Developmental, Nurturing and Social Reform. I won’t bore you with the specifics, but I’d love to get a group of our ZSR instructors together to take the test and discuss the results when I return. Taking the inventory is free and it can offer real insights into how we approach teaching and where the disconnects are between what we believe about teaching and what we actually do in the classroom. It was a fascinating discussion and one I’ll be mulling over for some time to come.

One of the goals of the week is to begin to develop our own teaching philosophy statement so I will close here and begin my work on that. Tonight we have a movie and tomorrow it’s another all day set of discussions and activities beginning at 7:30am and ending at 9:30pm. What I find really nice is to have the time to really reflect about the part of my job that brings me the most joy and satisfaction, but the part that I find I don’t spend enough time really thinking about. It’s also very invigorating to be around colleagues that do what you do on a daily basis. I’ve already shared stories and gotten inspiration from the folks I’ve met.

The fact that it is 70 degrees, sunny with a nice breeze doesn’t hurt, either. San Diego has it made in terms of weather!!