In a 2008 article in Library Journal, Casey and Stephens argue that egos are bad for libraries:

The ego, we concluded, can be a very damaging thing. Inflated. Overbearing. Egos create rules for rules’ sake. Egos complicate procedures and keep good people down. Egos squash good ideas and can take the best of an organization and turn it on itself.

But they really refer to over-inflated egos.  I argue that a healthy, reasonable ego is a good thing. For all of us. Perhaps this is semantics: since the word ego has some pretty negative connotations, maybe I really mean to suggest that librarians need more professional self-confidence or self-esteem.

Because librarians are smart. Damned smart. They are talented, knowledgable, hardworking and willing to go out their way to help others out. If you want to find something out or get something done you should definitely ask a librarian.

But I’ve seen colleagues acquiesce without any discussion to poorly thought out faculty demands regarding library instruction. I’ve seen librarians sit quietly through meetings with bosses or administrators and then provide intelligent, thoughtful criticism after the meeting when the boss isn’t listening.  I’ve heard colleagues at conferences complain about faculty not including them in learning management systems and I find out that they never asked.

What contributes to this quietness, this passivity, this inability to assert ourselves even in the areas of our expertise?

Is it gender? Over 80% of librarians are female, and workplace gender dynamics might come into play.  I’m certainly no expert on this topic, but books like Nice Girls Never Get the Corner Office and Lean In seem to suggest that women need to be more assertive at work and stop confusing “being nice” with asking questions and stating opinions. NPR has an interesting new series called the Changing Lives of Women. As a part of that series, they have created a tumblr project called She Works: Notes to Self encouraging women to share their slogans, affirmations and advice. Many of submitted slogans encourage women to speak up, “Sit at the table and speak up,” and “Don’t be shy. Promote your accomplishments.”  But there are also of slogans encouraging women to be nice or be quiet, “Smile on the outside, tell them off on the inside” or “Work hard and be nice to people,” advice that I’d bet wouldn’t be posted a similar site geared to men.

Is it education?  Although librarians often have faculty status, we most often do not have PhDs like most of the rest of the faculty. I routinely call professors by their first name since we are colleagues and that’s what colleagues do these days.  But other librarians routinely call professors “Professor Smith” even when the professor uses the librarian’s first name.  Are librarians intimidated by the title or the degree? Are some folks less likely to state opposing opinions or ask challenging questions?

Is it the library’s place within the institution?  Although we are often faculty, we are different than classroom faculty. No matter how robust our library instruction programs, we sit outside of the classroom and teacher model that serves as the core of most high education institutions. And in a digital world, some faculty start to question the ongoing relevance of the brick-and-mortar library.  Are we stymied by our kind-of-outsider status?

I don’t know what the answer is.  But I’ve met and spoken with lots of librarians, and I know what they are capable of.  They are amazing, articulate professionals with a deep understanding of how folks search for information and the knowledge of what kinds of information is out there. We know about scholarly publishing, instructional design, data resources, pedagogy and a gazillion other things.

Let’s dust off those egos. Let’s make sure other folks know our strengths. Let’s stand up for our accomplishments.

It started a couple of summers ago, when the newly formed Instructional Design team at my library organized a series of technology workshops.  We each took turns sharing new websites, apps and other tech tools that we liked and used in our work.  I thought this was great, and I loved hearing about all the things my colleagues knew about.

CC-BY image courtesy of Flickr user James Sarmiento

Last summer, I wondered if they were going to do the same thing.  At the same time, the Scholarly Communication team in my library was hoping to do some workshops for library staff about things like open access and the Elsevier boycott.

At this point I took over getting things organized, and twisted the arms of my colleagues to put together workshops about things they were knowledgable about.

It was a rather selfish move on my part – I wanted to learn about the things my colleagues knew.

With help from colleagues, we brainstormed things that we wanted to learn about and recruited folks to present on those topics. I wanted the workshops to have an informal feel: I sought out hands-on workshops and discussions more than formal presentations.  I also asked the simple question: why don’t we invite folks across campus to these workshops?  There was no good reason not to, so we sent campus wide emails advertising the workshops that would be over interest to folks beyond the library.

The first summer I organized the workshops, all of the speakers were library staff members.  This year, I asked for workshop topics from our CIT office on campus and a couple of faculty who are doing some interesting things. I’m excited about the workshops they will be presenting.

Now, we are a small institution with a small number of faculty.  I needed to be realistic in terms of my expectations of attendance: we weren’t going to be filling lecture halls.  Attendance at the 2012 workshops varied widely, from a low of 4 to a high of 16 folks from the library and across campus. For our small campus, I was quite happy with these numbers.

At the end of the summer, I sent an evaluation survey to campus faculty and staff and got some great feedback regarding workshops to hold again, ways to improve communication about the workshops and suggestions for future workshops.  One of the less tangible benefits of the summer workshops was the way in which the existence of the workshops (and the emails announcing them) added to the library’s reputation as a group of folks to talk to about scholarly communication issues or some instructional technology issues.

Here are some of the workshops we have lined up for this summer, relevant to staff across campus:

• What’s In a Name? The Many Facets of the Word ‘Editor’
• Mendeley
• Zotero
• Time Management for Busy Geeks
• Gmail community roundtable: labels, searches, filters, labs and more
• Copyright and Creative Commons
• Trends in peer review: third party peer review services
• In praise of paper: an open discussion about our favorite paper based tools
• Introduction to R: Free and open source program for statistics and data analysis
• Reading your Copyright Transfer Agreement
• Video hosting and sharing with Ensemble
• Managing your online professional identity
• Open Educational Resources
• Instant Response System

I’ll be leading a couple (Mendeley, Trends in Peer Review) and attending almost all of them.  I’m excited to learn about some interesting things from my smart and talented colleagues.

Does your library have a professional development program?  How do you facilitate the exchange of knowledge between library staff?

You see, I don’t have office hours. Sure, there are lots of hours when I am in my office, but unlike teaching faculty, they are never the same from week to week.  This week I am available on Friday at 2pm, next week I’m not. This can make it complicated to set up meetings.  I can rely on viewing my colleagues calendars in Google Calendar, but making appointments with students can be more complicated.

Most of them don’t use Google Calendar, and it can take a lot of emailing back and forth to find a mutually agreeable meeting time.  I make my schedule available online, but most of them don’t think to look it up.

My profile from our Subject Guides pages

A couple of months ago, I put a link to the MeetMe service on the profile of me that exists on all of my subject guides – “Make an appointment.”  Students click on the link and see times when I am available (because MeetMe connects with my Google Calendar) and can request a time that works for us both.  I get an email from Doodle, click on a link to confirm (or reject) the appointment, and the meeting is automatically added to my calendar.

I liked how this worked.  It was easy and convenient. But it isn’t perfect.

For years, students at my institution have been able to fill out an online form to request an appointment with a librarian. Students give us a bit of information about the project, their topic and their availability. The form is sent to all of the librarians, and the most appropriate (or most available) librarian “claims” the request and responds to the student. This is great for record keeping purposes (info is automatically entered into a database) and wonderful for students who don’t know who they want to meet with, but it can waste time if the student already knows who they need to talk to.

So I’ll keep the “Make an appointment” link on my profile and see if there are other ways to use this service.

A working printing press in one of the labs at the FHTW in Oberschöneweide. CC image courtesy of flickr user tölvakonu

Proposals are due tomorrow (February 15, 2013), but all we are asking for right now is a 300-500 word abstract about the services and strategies that your library. 24 hours is plenty of time to write 300 words!

If you are doing some interesting or innovative things related to publishing, think about sending in a proposal. Some questions we are hoping to answer include:

• What programs and services are offered by libraries to writers?
• Does your library help users develop curated content to publish either in print or digital form?
• What strategies are being used to select items for digitization?
• Has your library identified unique print materials to be digitized and potentially sold?
• Has your library developed partnerships with other agencies to support digital publishing?

If your abstract is selected (and you’ll know pretty quick), the final brief papers (just 2-5 pages) will be due on April 22nd.

See the complete call for papers on the Library Publishing Toolkit website. Submissions are accepted via email to browna@geneseo.edu.

This latest meme was inspired by an xkcd comic that attempted to explain the Saturn V rocket using only the 1000 most common English words.  Saturn V becomes Up Goer Five.

So Theo Sanderson created a text editor that only allows you to use the 100 most common English words and challenged scientists to explain what they do using simple language. It isn’t easy.  Anne Jefferson and Chris Rowan (of the excellent blog Highly Allochthonous) then created a tumblr blog collecting examples, like this description from volcanologist Lockwood Dewitt:

I like rocks. Also high places that sometimes act like they’re on fire. But what I really like is sharing what I know about rocks and high places, and how those things came to be. What made them? What moved them? Why are they the way they are? I think the answers to these questions are important, and I think people should know more about them. So I use words and pictures to show everyone how beautiful and amazing rocks and high places are, why they’re important to us, and why it’s important to know about them. Sometimes I even get to take people to see rocks in real life, which is the best part of what I do.

I tried my hand at explaining my job in simple language:

I help people learn about the different types of stuff they can find on the computer. I help them find books and computer stuff they need to learn about the world around them.  And I help them learn about how people tell other people about what they learned.

One of the first things I thought of was how this forces you to really think about the topic you are writing about, because you can’t rely on the jargon you normally use.

My next thought was that this could be a useful exercise for students, and could help them understand the concept of “putting something into their own words,” a concept that I talk about often in plagiarism workshops.

The first part of putting something into your own words is to really understand what you are trying to say, a step that students sometimes skip when putting together their term paper at 1am the morning before it is due.

So this might be an interesting challenge for students: ask them to use the Up Goer Five text editor to explain their research or term paper topic.

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Q: Who was the 32nd president of the united states?

A: Franklin D. Roosevelt

But in many cases, the reference transaction is about much more than simply providing answers, it’s about teaching the patron how to find the answer themselves.

Q: Who was the 32nd president of the united states?

A: Well, a quick google search leads us to the Wikipedia list of presidents.  Here it lists Franklin D. Roosevelt as the 32nd president, and provides some citations for that information.  If you are just curious, the Wikipedia list will be perfect, but if you need to cite this in a paper, you might want to refer to the White House website, which would be more authoritative and provides some good biographical information.  Do you need to find more information about Roosevelt?  if so, we may have some biographies of him in our collection….

Just like any other learning opportunity, a big part of the whole experience is retention – do the students/patrons remember what you taught them an hour from now, a week from now or a month from now.

Taking notes is a useful tool in the learning process. CC image courtesy of Flickr user geekcalendar.

With that in mind, librarians at my library will be working on some new practices for the Spring semester.  Building on the tendency of librarians to jot down search terms or possible databases while working with a patron, we will be making a more concerted effort to write down notes as we answer a question and give those notes to the student when we are done.  The idea here is that students will better be able to retain the knowledge they gained if they can refer back to the notes that were taken.

We’d like to try and capture information on this student learning, so we are going to try two things.  First, we will be using standardized carbonless duplicate note-taking forms.  This way the student gets a copy of the notes, and we can retain a copy for future study.  Second, we hope to combine this with an assessment of student learning at the reference desk (or at least an assessment of what students think they learned at the reference desk) by asking students to fill out a brief survey asking them what they learned.

Hopefully we can be more deliberate in making sure students walk away with a record of the transaction and this will increase the learning that goes on during a reference transaction.

I’ll let you know how it works out.

So far, I’ve either hid my real identity well or these chemists are as welcoming as everyone said.

On Sunday afternoon I was able to attend a few talks about the use of electronic lab notebooks, and a few talks about undergraduate research. Many of the faculty at my institution face challenges dealing with student research data.  With more frequent turnover than their colleagues at graduate schools, keeping track of data from so many sources can be challenging.

On Sunday night I attended the plenary talk from the president of the ACS himself, Bassam Z. Shakhashiri (see this website, too).  Apparently dubbed the “Dean of lecture demonstrations” by Encyclopedia Britannica, Shakhashiri was engaging, humorous and inspirational.

His talk was also frustrating.

At several times he talked about how the mission of the ACS was to “Advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and its people” and he expanding on this saying “especially in the face of denial of basic human rights especially the right to benefit from scientific and technical progress through access to the advances of science” (emphasis was his). He talked about the social contract of science, that taxpayers who pay for the research should be able to learn about the results. I agree!  But I think we disagree on how taxpayers should learn about those results.

I believe Shakhashiri was talking primarily about science education and science writing. He discussed an interesting initiative to get PhD candidates to include a chapter in their dissertation explaining their research to a lay audience.  But I couldn’t help but feel something was missing, given the ACS position on things such as access to taxpayer funded research, open access, and their incredibly aggressive institutional subscription price increases.

Towards the end of the lecture, Shakhashiri impressed everyone by a few simple chemical demonstrations.  The 1000mL graduated cylinders of purple, pink and blue liquids peaked my interest from the time I sat down, and the addition of dry ice just made things more interesting.  Importantly, he forced the audience to be explicit about our observations of his demonstration – it wasn’t just about the wow factor, but walking the audience through observations about what was happening.

So far, my sojourn into unknown territory has been highly educational.  I anticipate that the sessions of the next couple of days will help me learn a bit about chemistry education, a bit about chemists, and perhaps even a bit about chemistry.

With my exceptional colleague Kim Hoffman, we discussed a small project we did in the Fall 2011 semester to try to assess what students learned at the reference desk.

Our abstract for the presentation and our actual slides are below.  You can also view the slides on Slideshare.net to see the speakers notes.

Going Beyond Anecdotes: Assessing Student Learning During Reference Transactions

Reference services comprise one of the most important teaching opportunities within academic libraries.  While we typically assume that students learn from these interactions, we rarely have evidence to demonstrate what students actually learn.  Librarians at many institutions track the skills taught via reference statistics gathering programs, but we rarely ask students what they find most meaningful.

At SUNY Geneseo, we wanted to know what students were learning via reference transactions, beyond typical counts of reference questions or user satisfaction surveys.   These reference transactions occur in several settings, including at the reference desk, during scheduled reference consultations, and through impromptu questions at various locations.  Building on assessment techniques such as the One Minute Paper traditionally used in library instruction settings, students were given a survey after each reference transaction that simply asked “What did you learn today from your meeting with the librarian?”

In order to categorize responses, librarians developed a list of commonly taught concepts, skills, and tasks seen via reference services and library instruction.  Student responses were assigned one or more items from this list of concepts, allowing us to easily evaluate which skills were most frequently reported.

While this survey explores which concepts students report learning, it does not measure their actual mastery of the skills reported and is therefore an incomplete examination of student learning at the reference desk. Despite these limitations, this study offers a useful improvement to standard reference assessment efforts, typically based on assumptions and anecdotes.

I will be co-blogging with Hadas Shema, an information science PhD student who has previously blogged on some fascinating stuff on her blog, Science Blogging in Theory and in Practice.

As a result, my posting frequency here will probably drop, but hopefully won’t disappear altogether.  There are some things I want to talk about that just might not be of interest to the Scientific American crowd. But we’ll see.

We will be talking about many of the same things that I talk about here: open access, scholarly publishing, sources of frustration in finding information, etc.

Please have a look!

To those in the know, this isn’t big news. Publishers have been hinting about it for some time.

For-profit (and some non-profit) publishers want more money, while keeping their content locked down and controlled. CC image courtesy of Flickr user Images_of_Money.

But a recent analysis report (PDF) has been making the rounds of the twitter-verse today, making a few things more explicit. Reed Elsevier: Is Elsevier Heading for a Political Train-Wreck? is an investment analysis from Claudio Aspesi and others at Bernstein Research:

Most important, at a time when budgets of academic libraries look likely to be constrained for years to come in many countries, Elsevier’s growth will increasingly depend on its ability to secure funding earmarked for general science research, instead of library funding.

This fascinating report, lays out the challenges facing Elsevier in an age of boycotts, open access, and increasing researcher awareness of the costs of scholarly publishing.

The report also focuses on Elsevier’s culture of control of their content. From limits on open access, licensing restrictions and text mining restrictions Elsevier wants to control who does what with their content. They want to take an ever increasing share of library budgets, then the research grant money, and they want to control what you do with the information you license from them. The investment analysts state:

We continue to be baffled by Elsevier’s perception that controlling everything (for example by severely restricting text- and data mining applications) is essential to protect its economics.

Recently, it seems like every year I talk to faculty in my departments and say “We have to make some tough choices due to flat budgets and increasing journal costs. What would you like to cancel?” Every time librarians do this, faculty become a bit more aware of the economics of scholarly publishing.

Elsevier isn’t the only publisher facing these challenges, and they might not even be the baddest apple in the group, but they are very big (my library pays more for their content than anyone else’s), and their actions are drawing the attention of the scholarly community.

It will be interesting to see how this develops. Stay tuned!