Readings: Week 11

.... or Twitter: Week 11.

So, per our instructions, I took the plunge into Twitter. And? I just don't know. Like a lot of people, I've long thought Twitter is just kind of silly for most people. (I always say, "It's like Facebook with just status updates. Who needs that?") I can see how it'd be useful for certain types of people-- politicians, celebrities, and the media. And they're the type that are largely known (in the public consciousness) for using it. But the more time I spent around SI, the more I came to think there might be something to Twitter having professional uses too.

And, after spending some time there, I think it probably can. But like every other professional tool, it takes some time to get used to and some figuring out to use well. Personally, just jumping in and following some people, I'm just overwhelmed. Figuring out who to follow and then finding the things they say that are actually useful is just too much; I'm not able to find information I actually want or like.

I'll admit I haven't spent that much time on Twitter, and I know there are tools that can help make the abundance of info less overwhelming. But I still feel like it may not be the most efficient tool for staying professionally connected. Hard to tell, though.

One thing I think is key is having a good strategy for who you follow, and not just following random people who look interesting. For one thing, if I'm going to use Twitter for professional purposes, I really don't want to follow people who fill it up with non-professional updates. I'm  really not that interested in the personal lives of random people I don't know. But some people only feel comfortable if they're able to really merge their personal and professional identities, so that's the only way they'll feel comfortable tweeting. That's just not me, though. What this means is that it's not a good idea to just click "follow" on someone whose tweets you aren't familiar with just because you think their description looks interesting. Finding people to follow is thus more complicated than I anticipated.

Overall, I'm still on the fence about Twitter, but it'll be interesting to hear other people's observations in class tomorrow. There's a lot to be said and a lot of different perspectives out there, I'm sure.

Class in Review: Week 10

1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader his [or her] book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.


So this week in class we covered the apparent library-school necessity of talking about Ranganathan's five laws of library science, as seen above. Though I'd heard of the five laws in passing, I'd never really reflected on them much before. Overall, I agree with people who think the laws have aged pretty well. I think all of them save perhaps #3, if you substitute some broader term for book, still hold up pretty well today. I was surprised it took us so long to talk about #4, because I think it's the most compelling and challenging still today. If we aren't saving users' time in finding resources, what are we really doing in libraries?

As usual, I'm going to ponder a little how these "laws" do or don't apply or can be transferred to an an archival setting. As far as I know from my ARM coursework, there isn't a similar succinct formulation of what archives are or should be. So let's try to substitute "archival materials" (an unwieldy term, but the best we can do) for "books" and think about how the laws hold up circa 2012. Part of the complicated history of archives is the tension between archivists thinking of themselves as historians versus thinking of themselves as librarians. My contention is that we have a lot to learn from doing the latter, so this ought to be a helpful exercise.

I think laws #2 and #4 transfer pretty easily. With the complexity and overwhelming-ness of archival materials, everything we do in archives should definitely be geared toward saving users' time. Since archives (almost always) have closed stacks, this becomes especially important when archivists still have to for the most part mediate access. With digital materials there's pretty much a direct analog to libraries, though archives sometimes have to deal with more complicated digital content. Likewise, "every user his or her archival materials" (as awkward as that sounds) should be broadly accurate, though I think what this actually means is a little complicated, just as it is for libraries. Basically that's my way of saying this is the "law" I think is the vaguest and least helpful.

Beyond this, things get complicated. We noted in class that for non-academic libraries, law #3 really doesn't make sense as a guiding principle. For archives this is true to the extreme. Deciding what archival materials to preserve and keep, and why, and even constitutes "archival materials" is one of the most complicated areas of the field. We have a whole class on Archival Appraisal (SI 632), and I think those of who've taken it would still say we've only touched the basics of this issue.

.... which brings us to law #1. Are archival materials "for use"? What does that mean in the context of archives? You could touch off a lot of controversy among archivists from the questions that leap of off this law. Obviously, we want people to use materials in archives, but what does that mean for our collecting/appraisal decisions? Do we only collect things people want to use or we judge likely to be used? Or is our job as archivists to preserve those documents/artifacts/whatever that best represent whatever we're documenting the history of? What does "best represent" mean? As you can tell, the role of "use" in archival collecting is controversial to say the least. So I'm not so sure this law should be one we try to "transfer" to archives.

This leaves us with law #5. This seems like an easy proposition to agree with, and certainly it should apply to archives in terms of technology and access in many of the same ways it does for libraries. I guess I'm a little wary about the word "grow" because it implies getting bigger. Change, if done well, can be good. Growth for the sake of growth (because we're supposed to be "growing") usually is not. I think pondering whether this applies to archives can lead us into complicated philosophical territory about what our mission is and what we should or shouldn't be doing. Then again, the same thing can probably be said for libraries. And a lot of this is contextual; there are so many different types of archives that do different types of things that it gets very complicated. (Not that this isn't true for libraries as well.)

The other big thing I recall from class is hearing about the webinars people watched. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who had a disappointing experience with my webinar, but it was really fun to hear about the cool things some people's webinars did. I hope ours in this class can meet the high expectations!


(Edited to make this look... like it should. I blame Google.)

Readings: Week 10

Our first reading this week was another chapter of How People Learn, this time offering specific examples of effective teaching in the areas of history, math, and science. I found a lot of the conversation fascinating, especially the history part, since I have a history degree and went to school with a lot of people who were planning to be (and today are) history teachers. History is maybe the core subject area in American K-12 education where "theory" and critical thinking are most de-emphasized in favor of memorization of facts, which might have something to do with why it's so unpopular. It was really great to see examples of history teachers who are really engaging their students and teaching historical thinking. I was also really pleased by the emphasis on content knowledge and knowledge of how a discipline works as a vital component of teaching in a discipline. This is something I've believed for a long time is a really big deficit with our educational system. Like with a lot of the book, though, I left this chapter really unsure about how teachers begin to put these techniques into action. The examples presented are really amazing, but they're not always things that teachers, especially beginning ones, can just pick up and go with these strategies. How does a teacher try to get to that point? What are the first things you can do? This is what I'd want to know.

Reading about our webinars made me excited but also nervous. I think it'll be a fun activity but will take a lot of prep time. I think the comments from last year's students will be really helpful.

The Montgomery article was simplistic in some ways, but I think it made a really good case for areas in which webinars can be a really effective tool. Communicating with students who are off-campus is a really big advantage, and I think webinars really could potentially provide some exciting results there. I think one thing that's key is promoting this service. For example, Montgomery mentions an institution where librarians will actually do on-demand webinars with off-campus students. That's really awesome, but I wonder how many students don't take advantage of this and would but don't really know it's an option? And there are going to be students who are just put off by the idea of watching a video to start with, but could really benefit from the help.

The article on traditional v. hybrid embedded librarians was probably the most informative for me. This is because (confessions of a non-LIS student here), I didn't actually know what an embedded librarian was! It's a term I've heard before but not one I was really familiar with as someone who's only taken ARM classes. And it's not something we had at my undergraduate institution, so I don't have experience with it personally. So I learned a lot, needless to say. As to the specific content, I found it really interesting that the hybrid embedded librarian saw distinct advantages and opportunities in his position that wouldn't have likely been there if he were a traditional embedded librarian (like conducting classes using online meeting systems). On the other hand, the traditional embedded librarian saw huge advantages in being actually "on-site" with her department. A lot of this, of course, comes down to the culture of a business school versus a music school, and I think that's key. One of the most important things in librarianship is really having a sense of who your patrons are and being able to serve them in the ways that are most relevant technologically, culturally, whatever-ly. This article made me think of that in ways I never had before.

Also, since I'm always trying to what we talk about to archives, I pondered a bit how the concepts that make embedded librarianship work well could be extended to archives as well. The tricky part, I think, is that for academic libraries and public libraries, your core user base is generally speaking geographically situated in one place. For most archives, the thing that unifies a core user base is intellectual interest in certain topics, which isn't going to line up with geography. Of course there are exceptions both ways; many archives are located within academic libraries or other institutions that have a geographically defined user base (though they also have other outside users), and lots of academic libraries are coming up with new ways to work with distance learners. There's definitely territory to learn from both ways. I think the key takeaway for archivists, though, is that even if you can't be physically close to your users, it's important to as much as possible try to become a part of their professional worlds and communities and share in their culture. This is possible in a lot of ways.

For my webinar, I watched one of the Wyoming State Library ones on social networking. I was pretty disappointed in a lot of ways; it wasn't very interactive and I didn't feel it used the time very well. Some of the information was also a little sketchy, and it couldn't seem to decide if the target audience was people who were familiar with the sites it was discussing or brand new to them. Still, it did give a lot of good information on a lot of things, like ways libraries can use Flickr and the advantages of putting photos there rather than just in local storage online.

Whew, I'd better stop now before this post gets any longer! Lots to think about this week.

Class in Review: Week 9

This week we presented our one-shot workshops in class. I was pretty excited about the other workshops my group was presenting, and there were others in other groups that looked really interesting that I wish I could've gone to as well. Since (as with the book club) there's inconsistent overlap between my group of workshops and my blogging cohort, I'm going to make some more general observations about the workshop experience, both as a presenter and as a participant, instead of focusing on individual content of workshops.

As a presenter, the biggest thing that surprised me was how well we managed the time we had. Because there's no way to really practice group activities, we were pretty worried about things taking longer than we had planned and eating up our 20 minutes. As it happened, the time flowed pretty well and some things didn't take as long as we anticipated, while others took a little longer and used up that time. Generally, I think this aspect of our workshop went well. Another thing I realized was that you can't do group discussion very well when you've given a group hardly any time to learn about and process the new concept you went to discuss. We had two discussion periods in our workshop, and the one that followed a portion where the participants were more engaged in and had more time to learn about the content we were discussing went much better. This should be obvious, but I'm not sure it was something we really anticipated per se while we were planning.

I had a lot of thoughts about the other workshops, and obviously I thought some went better than others. One thing about workshops that run well is that they 1) have an intense focus on each individual topic (or sub-topic) discussed, and 2) keep things moving. A lot of short, different activities that each have a clear goal is going to be more successful than a couple big, broad, fuzzy things, it seems.

Another thing that I noticed is how much the content of your workshop influences the way you conduct it. There were a couple of presentations where I initially thought, "This is really uninteresting." Then I reflected on how I would teach the same content in a more interesting way, and I wasn't really sure. So I decided that was content I probably wouldn't have tried to present at all. But it was useful and interesting information. Finding a way to really engage people in something that's important but not necessarily the easiest to teach or demonstrate takes a lot of work, and obviously some people did a better job of this than others.

Class in Review: Week 8

This week's class was focused on ethics in librarianship and the ALA Code of Ethics. In reflecting on class, I'm not really sure there's much specific I can say beyond what I said in last week's post, but I think the situation we drove home solidified the views about ethics I expressed there.

When we did the "case studies" of ethical issues (about Random House and the ads in Toronto), we were asked to derive guidance from the code of ethics for what we would do in the situation. My group found that pretty difficult to do in any sort of specific way. We talked about different approaches to the situation, how we should respond as librarians, and agreed that the situations raised a lot of interesting issues and things worth talking about. But it was hard to find provisions in the code of ethics that we could really use as justification for whatever decisions we'd make. Obviously, the code notes that this isn't really its purpose; it's supposed to provide a general set of viewpoints and values, not anything that tells you to do a certain thing at a certain time. And it's important as a profession, I think, to have some broad view of what your values and ethics are. So the code serves something of a purpose. In many ways, though, that set of shared values is sort of inherent and intangible-- it's something people share before they go into the profession, and it certainly serves as a reference point for their decision making, but it's hard to articulate in a list of values like the code of ethics gives.

I wish we would've talked a little more about the implications of some of the provisions in the code, and maybe about how "virtue ethics" does or doesn't fit in with the code, because I found that approach really helpful for the reasons I laid out in my previous post. Overall, I think the "case studies" drove home the value of circumstances-based decision-making and an approach to professional ethics overall in line with the virtue ethics approach, though.

I have nothing more to say, except that I'm looking forward to the opportunity to learn something in an interesting way from my peers in our workshops tomorrow.

Readings: Week 8

While reading this week's readings about ethics in librarianship, I thought back a lot to the class we had on ethics in SI 580, the introductory archives class, with David Wallace. I remember that as one of the most interesting lecture and discussion sessions that we had in that class, because it raised some big issues but made them very real. The biggest thing I remember Dr. Wallace emphasizing was that ethical decision-making is very much dependent on context-- on the situation, the people involved, your work setting, and above all your own personal values. And he said that everyone has to make their own decisions-- that what one person decides is ethically proper in a situation or is comfortable doing will not be the same for everyone else, and that should be respected.

This approach seemed a really sensible way to talk about professional ethics to me, and one that was much more sophisticated and realistic than a lot of what you see out there. Essentially, I think this approach is pretty much what the "virtue ethics" Lenker is advocating is. I definitely agree with Lenker that ethical decision-making can never just be a set of rules to follow or something hopelessly reductive-- it takes a lot of thought and a lot of consideration of various factors, and isn't going to be easy. I was especially glad that Lenker emphasized that your own personal values are as much of part of this decision-making as consideration of other people involved or the values of your institution, because often when we talk about "ethics" in professional contexts I think people forget that we're talking about people with their own moral principles, not automatons who can just blindly follow outside "rules." I thought it was good that in presenting his hypothetical scenario, Lenker gave a very human identity to his hypothetical librarian Clark, and gave information about "Clark" that has nothing to do with librarianship but would certainly be relevant to his own ethical decision-making process.

As for the ALA code of ethics, I was also reminded of what Dr. Wallace said when we talked about the SAA code of ethics (which is much longer and more complicated than its ALA equivalent), which at that time included at least one provision he strongly disagreed with. (I believe he mentioned the next semester that one particular provision he strongly objected to had since been removed.) Basically, he said that this may say a lot of nice things, but it's not as though it's some sort of binding rule. Yes, when you join the organization you may agree to uphold it, but you're not going to get kicked out or even penalized in any way for not doing so-- and how do you even measure "not upholding the code of ethics" in a situation like this? With this in mind, I pondered the fact that the ALA code was probably the product of great thought and deliberation by some committee, that it's undoubtedly gone through lots and lots of revisions over the years, and that most librarians still probably don't think about it that much. It's simply a tool in the process of ethical decision-making process Lenker described, but far from the only one or even the most important one.

Class in Review: Week 7

The book clubs were, as promised, definitely a nice break from our regular class session. It was very interesting to see the variety of different ways that different groups implemented the book club, especially given the variety of readings we had.

One thing I realized, both from leading my own book club and participating in the others, is that leading discussion really is tough. Some groups took a lot more proactive approach to really trying to get people to share ideas and helping the conversation along. Some groups really just let things go where they would and didn’t seem to mind. I’m not sure that either format is really “better.” It just depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you really want people to have some intellectual discussion about a particular reading, you’re going to guide the conversation more along those lines. On the other hand, if the goal is just to make sure everyone has a good time while talking about what they read, the conversation is going to be more free-wheeling.

A couple of other observations: one is that one of the toughest things in group discussion is getting everyone to really participate. There are always going to be some people who are more comfortable talking in this type of format (I’m usually one of them), and some people who aren’t. Even when the people who enjoy talking have good ideas, and in our group they usually did, it’s hard to say, “No, we don’t want to hear from you. We want somebody else to talk now.” Especially when no one else wants to talk. This didn’t happen per se in our group’s discussions, but some people definitely were more active participants than others. That’s all right, but you still want to have a balance, and getting there can be tough.

Last thought: I kept feeling at first during our book club group like things were getting derailed, or the discussion was going off on wild tangents, and we were “losing control.” At some point, though, I realized that people really were discussing interesting questions related to our reading, and things that we wanted to talk about, even if it wasn’t going the way I’d envisioned. One of the toughest things, I realized, about leading this type of discussion is you have to be willing to “lose control” to some degree and just let things go as they may!