green librarian

US Navy Cryptanalytic Bombe by Brewbooks via flickr

Recently I’ve been struck by that familiar sense of “so much to read, so little time.” Part of the problem is that my ‘periodicals’ have been piling up: The Walrus, Wired, the Saturday Globe & Mail, plus publications from OLA and ACRL. Never mind how behind I feel on my beloved Google Reader account. Oh, and I’m in a book club these days (just started reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks).

All of this to say that I only recently got around to reading the article “Film School” written by  TED curator Chris Anderson in the January 2011 issue of Wired. Anderson suggests that the Internet — and specifically online video — provides the ideal environment for what he terms Crowd Accelerated Innovation.* He argues that online video allows for vastly larger communities of interest and dramatically increased visibility, stoked by the motivation factor of online recognition:

So crank up all three dials and, lo and behold, the wheel of Crowd Accelerated Innovation lurches into motion. Videos are posted. Comments fly. Views accumulate. Leaders emerge. And all this provokes a new round of innovation. In the process, everyone marvels. Everyone learns.

I agree that the role of online video is only just being realized — even when in relation to mundane, every-day tasks. When trying out a new cooking technique, I YouTube it (is that officially a verb yet?). I’m teaching myself ukulele — with the help of many fellow players who have posted videos sharing strum techniques. My partner has searched and found tips for his golf swing.

It seems everyone is a teacher. With the prevalence (some would say glut) of online video, it appears that the average person with a webcam shows little concern about ‘putting herself out there,’ especially when contributing to a community of interest. There’s more to be said here about a re-definition of expertise and a trend towards shared learning — this reminds me a little of the WILU 2010 keynote by Paul Gee — but I feel the need to read up on this topic first. Plan for a rainy day perhaps?

Ok, where am I going with this?

All these ideas surrounding collaborative communities and possibilities opened up by the Internet, and I couldn’t help thinking about the Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities has become an umbrella term, oft bandied about these days, and if you are feeling a little unsure of what this term describes, you are not alone. I came across an incredible resource: Stanford’s Tooling Up for Digital Humanities. This site is, according to its authors, a repository of essays designed to provide an introduction to key topics in the digital humanities.

I worked my way through all of it, and it’s a very impressive mini-course that I would recommend as reading for almost any academic librarian, especially those serving Humanities departments. The content is accompanied by a Workshop Series going on right now – I wish I could just drop in and attend!

Tooling Up highlights the intersections between Crowd Accelerated Innovation and academia. It was exciting to read about the projects developing in the Humanities field enabled by unexpected interdisciplinary collaborations and innovative applications of emerging technologies. The existence of this resource also speaks to a need for literacy surrounding this field, for both new and experienced humanists.

Finally, we as librarians can look to this site as info lit done right. The tone, the style, the medium: THIS is the way to engage academics & offer a learning experience.

A slightly scattered post today, but these ideas just have me thinking in all sorts of directions. Things are changing. How we learn, how we teach, how we explore new ideas. And one project just builds on top of another — the way it’s always been of course, but those dials have been cranked way up.

* I just have to mention oh-so-briefly that I attended the 2011 WNYO OCULA Spring Conference last week and participated in Innovation Boot Camp facilitated by folks from the University of Guelph. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s worth checking out.

Another article about Facebook?

I know, I know. It’s sort of a tired conversation these days, especially with the Social Network movie getting all that buzz (for the record: I didn’t think much of the film). But I was pleasantly surprised by the piece From friending to research: Using Facebook as a teaching tool written by Anne Pemberton in the January issue of College & Research Libraries News.

The author has thought of a few great ways of taking advantage of students’ Facebook use and proficiency.

As she puts it, “You know what a database is because you use Facebook.” Often when I am helping an undergraduate student with a research problem and suggest they look in a database, I get a blank stare in response. “Database” is understandably a foreign idea. But by explaining the *concept* of a database through comparisons to something most students use every day, the comprehension seems more likely to stick and be applied in later research.

Ms. Pemberton also suggests that “Facebook tagging is similar to controlled vocabulary.” I think she has hit on a great idea here. Many undergraduate students I work with are most comfortable performing keyword searches in the library catalogue; it is most Google-like. Getting students to notice (let alone use) those oh-so-handy hyperlinked subject headings can be a bit of work. The author tries to get students to see the connection between tagging Facebook friends in a photograph and the controlled vocabulary used in our records. Admittedly, this could be more tricky to explain but when effective, it could blow their minds!

Or, you know, lead them to a few key sources for their research topic. I’d settle for that

I’d love to try this out in the classroom, or even at the help desk. I’m not sure I’d run my entire instruction session around Facebook, but I think it could be a useful method to explain the concept of a database before getting students to try out some searches. I continue to believe that we do them a better service by working on concepts rather than the idiosyncratic details of a subject-specific search interface.

It will have to wait though, since instead of sitting at my desk in the Schmon Tower at Brock, I am on maternity leave and quickly typing while my little boy Elliott naps. Insert gratuitous baby photo here:

gift wrap by 'smil, via flickr

So, it appears I took a summer/early fall hiatus from blogging. I won’t apologize for not writing, since that’s one of the biggest blogging faux-pas — although it is likely now a blogging cliché to *not* apologize for not writing… Alright, I’ll stop being all “meta” and get to the point.

Today is my last day at Brock! On Monday, I begin a new chapter in my life: maternity leave. As you might guess, my partner and I are pretty excited to meet this new little person about to change our lives. Oh, and it has launched us into a totally foreign information universe of Parenting. Full of reference books, manuals, how-to guides, online forums, and a brand new vocabulary.

Life has been pretty busy with preparing for that little side project, but things at Brock have been quite active as well.

I completed my stint as the OCULA New Librarian Resident and took on a new title at Brock as the E-Learning/ Liaison Librarian (I wrote a little piece summarizing my residency experience in the latest InsideOCULA Newsletter, pg. 4). There’s a real push for E-Learning at Brock right now and it’s an exciting time full of strategizing, planning, and taking on new projects. I’ve spent a fair bit of time experimenting with software such as Camtasia to see how the Library might use it to offer a suite on online learning tutorials (eg/ Our new-ish Tutorials page).

A big question I’ve been sorting through these days is, how to offer the student active learning and self-assessment opportunities following their use of such a video? I’ve been testing out various avenues and probing the limits of the technologies we have access to here at Brock. I think it’s an important consideration, especially with the reduction of in-person workshops at many institutions.

Sure, I love screencasts and think they offer a great fix for demonstrating discrete online research techniques, but they have their limits and only offer a pretty passive learning experience.You’d be hard-pressed to find an academic library not offering a wealth of screencast tutorials, but I haven’t found examples of post-tutorial student engagement. Are we missing something here? Or are screencasts just ‘quick and dirty’ and it’s not necessary to build in an assessment piece? Should we just assume the viewer goes out and effectively puts those skills into practice after watching?

I somewhat reluctantly have to put this experimenting on hold and pass it on to the very competent new E-Learning Librarian, Silvia Vong.

Speaking of which, for the first time, I was on the other side of the table: I was a member of the search committee hiring for this position. And wow, what a process. One of the major take-aways for me was not to feel awful about all the jobs I’d applied to in the past and was not selected for an interview. So many qualified candidates applied and it really was a matter of trying to match our posting with an individual we thought best demonstrated those skills. I’ll be on the job hunt again at some point in the next year, and will have to remember what I learned.

But for now, I’ll be saying farewell to my colleagues at Brock. It has been a great ‘first year on the job’ filled with learning experiences in many different areas of librarianship.

The Juggling Act - 90/365 by foshydog, via flickr

You know that feeling you have after you’ve attended a good conference? All full of interesting ideas but you’re just not sure where to put them? That’s how I am feeling after attending WILU 2010 hosted by McMaster University.

And just to compound the problem, upon returning to Brock I attended a day on Best Practices in Service-Learning, hosted by our Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies. The plenary speaker was the impressive Edward Zlotkowski.

I definitely noted some synergies between some of the WILU speakers and the concept of service-learning — something I was admittedly skeptical about (though I now see that my doubts came from pure ignorance).

The opening keynote at WILU was James Paul Gee, someone who is thinking about learning and video games. He opened his talk with the suggestion that schools have a “content problem” — too focused on students absorbing and regurgitating content, rather than actual problem-solving.

Gee finds a way out of this mess in the workings of online communities. Using wide-ranging examples including Yu Gi Oh,  fan fiction, Sims, and World of Warcraft, he sees communities of learners, working together to optimize their problem-solving skills. I’ve been pretty fascinated about the power of online communities for a little while (I wrote about one called Kvetch last year). Gee underlines something that I too was so impressed by: the expertise is in the community.

The challenge for us is: how do we (the library/ the institution) engage *this* sort of learning? How do we create environments conducive to these sorts of communities?

Zlotkowski also emphasized the potential for service-learning to offer students valuable problem-solving experience, while embedded in community engagement and further upon extensive reflection and consideration of the broader forces at play.

So these ideas are just bouncing away in my brain. Not sure where they will land just yet…

Several of the sessions I attended at WILU brought similar ideas to the surface.  I’ll share a few ‘takeaways’ :

• Peggy Pritchard’s Embedding an eJournal Project: An amazing use of OJS that got 1st year (!) students deep in a hands-on writing for publication experience, complete with peer-review. A fantastic template that can definitely be picked up by other librarians…
• Birds of a Feather Motivating Students conversation: This informal discussion resulted in some great points. ie/ Artificial = bad. The closer your IL activity to the research process, the better. Recognize motivation as a factor: ask students why they are interested in a particular topic. Treat them as scholars!
• Mita William’s Libraries in games: Mita raised so many questions in my mind about the role of games in scholarship/ libraries and made me want to read up on theories of fun and game design. Just one point she shared (which should be obvious, but wasn’t to me) was that play must be free — it cannot be obligatory (or it will no longer have the qualities of play). Hmmm…

At Brock, the university is gradually moving all web content over to a new Content Management System (CMS) using Drupal architecture. At the same time, everyone has been adapting to the new branding standards and restrictions — you may have seen our new look in full-page Globe and Mail ads or on bus shelters in TO, especially right around when university applications were due.

Anyway, the library just launched our new homepage on April 29th. It’s still a work-in-progress and it will look pretty different by the time September rolls around, but it is a HUGE improvement on our previous web presence.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

My role in this project has been mainly to work on designing the Research Guides within this new system, and develop training for the rest of the librarians to enable them to create their own content and guides. Drupal allows the librarians to get in there and directly edit, create, and publish web content — this removes previous hurdles and delays. But, this also means that every librarian is now a web designer… with all the freedom and responsibility that this entails.

So, I set about creating a training plan and instructional materials — this time for my colleagues.

For materials, the format I used was simple guides with screenshots and call-outs highlighting action and ‘where to click.’ This appears to have been a good choice since some librarians printed out the guides while others just had them open in another window. I covered topics ranging from getting started with content creation and organization, to diving into the HTML code to embed YouTube videos and Meebo widgets.

And turns out, I really enjoy making these how-to guides. I love thinking about a process and boiling it down to the essential steps, and using strong visuals to make it as clear as possible. In appearance, they’re nothing special really — not terribly flashy or exciting — but I think they work… which is the point, right?

This was also a good exercise in forcing me to notice some of my assumptions: I overlooked a few key ‘tips and techniques’ in the early days, not knowing what is or isn’t common knowledge.

In addition, I held drop-in sessions in one of our eClassrooms where anyone interested could work on their content, with someone available to assist and answer questions. It worked really well to have those folks who were more tech-adept sitting side-by-side with others, working through it all.

It’s been an interesting experience — especially since it’s not just providing technology training, but also raising many questions around issues including best practices in writing for the web, student use (or lack of use?) of research guides, terminology choices within research guides, and so on.

For now, it’s an ongoing project. But it’s pretty exciting to see it all coming together!

• I should share a great read on writing for the web: Redish, Janice. Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works. Elsevier: New York, 2007.

'teacher, high school yearbook c.1960's' by bunky's pickle, via flickr

I’ve been thinking a lot about teaching & assessment these days.

In the past month I ran two new history seminars — one focused on scholarly versus non-scholarly resources for a Native Studies course, and one on research & primary sources for a History of Technology course. By far the most valuable aspect of these seminars was an assessment form that a colleague, Pam Jacobs, shared with me.

In the fall I tried getting feedback from students using SurveyMonkey to save some trees, but had no luck. It seems to take so little effort for them to scratch down a few comments on a sheet of paper that I hand out in the last 10 minutes of the session. So, tree-killing it is for now — sorry, I need the feedback!

The most interesting responses came from the questions, “Please comment on what you found most helpful / least helpful about the session.”

Six of one. A half dozen of the other.

For the first group, I had a fascinating problem. A considerable number of students listed the least helpful aspect as “what is scholarly vs. popular” … yet also listed the most helpful aspect using phrases such as “the practical analysis of sources,” or “showing the different types of sources,” or “clarifying what qualifies as a scholarly source.” Urk. To me, these students were listing the same thing as the most & least useful element in the instruction. I can only conclude that it’s a language issue. Perhaps I used a slide title like “Distinguish between scholarly and non-scholarly” when I should’ve written “How to filter your search results.”

The last question on the form was “Was there something you wanted to learn that was not covered?” A handful of the Native Studies students expressed concern about navigating the primary source collections necessary for their assignment. Since the prof had asked me to focus on analyzing sources, we couldn’t cram all that in 50 minutes. BUT I was able to respond to the students’ concerns by creating a brief screencast focused on this part of their assignment & post it in their Sakai page.

It was very satisfying to be able to follow up with them & feel more like I’d fulfilled their needs. If I hadn’t been able to share that video, I’d have felt that awful feeling like when you sort out the answer to a reference question moments after the asker has walked away. This does not make for a happy librarian.

'345/365 touch-up' by kharied, via flickr

How do I know that you know what you think you know?

With the second group of students, I ran the session five times (ppt is on Slideshare). What a bonus ! I was really able to make small modifications based on the feedback I received each day — not enough to change the real content, but to better customize the instruction for this specific group.

I see countless students at the Help Desk without a clue of how to search for a book in the catalogue or subsequently, find it on the shelf. So, since the students needed a ‘monograph’ for their assignment, I made a point of covering the basics of books.

The response was loud and clear: we know how to find books, lady. A good majority of students listed “basic book search” as the least helpful aspect of the session. It was hard for me not to think, “But do you really know how to find books…? Like, have you heard of subject headings?” Still, I took the note & abbreviated this part of the seminar. Even when I cut the book stuff down to a minute or two, these 2nd year students were not interested in hearing it.

This got me thinking about the challenge of aiming for the middle when it comes to our assumptions about students’ research skills & library know-how before we (individually) get to them. I wished I had some sort of pre-test in the weeks before I ran the session so I could better customize the session. My colleague Pam  has started experimenting with clickers to engage the students and get this sort of info … and I could see this working with larger groups, but when you’ve got 15 students in a small room I feel like clickers would be weird.

And of course, even if I could have a pre-test with a question like “Have you searched for journals in a library database?” the responses wouldn’t actual tell me if a student knew what a database was. I wonder if anyone else has tried anything along these lines …?

The most frustrating thing about library instruction for the average student (I’m speaking from experience here) is REPETITION. We already know this! they scream. So, how to avoid repetition … while at the same time making sure to cover the important stuff (especially for those students who’ve slipped through the cracks)??

I attended a great talk at OLA SuperConference last month (among many others of course). It was session #1206 “Teaming up: benefits of collaborating with library colleagues” presented by Kim Cornell, Lise Doucette, and Dan Sich  of University of Western Ontario Libraries. They talked about how the physical sciences librarians at the Taylor Library moved to a team approach. There were many points in this presentation that really spoke to me: co-teaching, the sharing of instructional resources, and cross-training.

But, they also spoke about mapping out the students’ interaction with the library. So ideally, the librarian could have a sense of what sort of library instruction the average 3rd year chemistry student has already encountered. I know this isn’t a brand new idea, but it really spoke to my recent challenges with the history students.Of course, this may be a little more challenging in the Humanities where students are not on as direct of a path towards graduation. Also, this is not really something that a newbie ‘limited term appointment’ such as myself could implement… but I like the concept.

If we want students to value library instruction, we have to find a way to acknowledge their existing research skills and incorporate that into our lesson planning. How? Well… I’m working on that.

I’m excited to finally share the project that I was developing in December!

this year is going to be different officially launched today, the first day of winter term for Brock students. It is both a library promotions page with a  contest, and a mini-suite of information literacy essentials mainly directed at undergraduate students.

The project originated as a marketing & communications initiative for the new year. Based on an idea from Jonathan Younker, Head of Library Systems and Technologies, Justine decided we should set this up on a completely different website. She has been working with a new Student Advisory Group for the library, and found that when they received information “from the library,” it tended not to catch their attention. Inspired by other brands who have created stand-alone websites that are not overtly pushing the product (a sub-brand? I’m not sure what this is called in advertising lingo), we started looking for hosting sites that might allow us to reach students before they hear “brought to you by the library” and tune out. I took to calling this our not-a-library-website.

Which brings us to Wix. Justine found this incredible site — I’m not sure how. In their own words, “Wix offers you a simple powerful platform to make flash website templates and more” — oh, and it’s free with very minimal ad content on your webspace.  It was great to use their simple drag-and-drop functionality to create a funky site with surprising flexibility. Although I’ve learned now that Flash sites are not friendly with some mobile devices, such as iPhones — darn.

Anyway, I used Camtasia to create three screencasts with content determined by a number of factors: issues raised by the Student Advisory Group, frequently asked questions from the reference desk, and tips we felt could make a difference in an undergraduate student’s research process. I did a bit of research into screencast best practices, which I’ll likely write more about in the coming months. The videos were fun to develop, though creating a tidy Camtasia video can be quite the process. In order to set them up on Wix, the videos had to hosted elsewhere so I created a Brock Library YouTube account and did the necessary file conversion.

The contest asks students to watch a video and tell us “how does this help you?” Justine managed to get a winter term gym membership as a prize, which fit perfectly with our ‘new year’s resolutions’ theme. And now it’s live! We’ve already had 10 unique contest entries so far today with over 100 YouTube views since Thursday, which I’d say bodes well. While Wix can’t give us a count on number of hits, we do have the YouTube views counter & I’ve also been promoting the site using bit.ly which counts clicks.

I’m hoping there will be something to learn about screencast content in the student comments ( very interesting so far! I posted excerpts on the ‘your feedback’ part of the Wix site– these aren’t fake!) and I’ve already learned a great deal in the process of rolling out this project. Definitely a great way to start the school year.

As a final note, in my thinking about video tutorials and info lit, I came across a few fascinating projects. I haven’t had a chance to fully digest these, but I know they will influence my work in these areas.

• Tutorials and Online Learning Guides by NCSU. These folks wrote about the development process here & I really think they’ve got something with this focus on CONCEPTS.
• http://projectinfolit.org/ Based at the University of Washington’s iSchool, these researchers are producing some very insightful documents, including the 42 page report, How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age. I’m still making my way through this puppy.
• Kim Leeder’s post ‘Learning to teach through video’ also offers some interesting thoughts.

A paper that I wrote earlier this year was just published in the most recent issue of Faculty of Information Quarterly. F/IQ is an e-journal started last year by fellow iSchool students — most notably Meghan Ecclestone — and continues to be run entirely by current students.

It’s titled Kvetch: Information Sharing in an Online Wedding Forum. This was my first dive into true social sciences research & information studies ‘in the field.’ I really immersed myself in the project and find myself feeling there’s much more to be said about the topic of virtual communities and information sharing.

For now though, it’s Christmas break! I’ve spent the past week or so working away on a little project that I’m pretty excited about involving Camtasia screencasts. But we’ll just have to wait until the new year to see the final product!

iWhale by Stephen Hackett via flickr

While there are many venues for librarians to discuss the processes of their success in a professional forum, there are few opportunities to collaboratively display and examine the processes behind our most productive failures. All success is built from failure, and the lessons learned from failure are arguably as valuable as what we learn from success.

I’m pretty fascinated by this proposal and I think there’s real potential to learn a lot from each other’s so-called failures. It’s also clearly a delicate thing, talking about failure, potentially fraught with personal risk and sensitivity issues. I look forward to following this event’s development to see what direction they decide to take it.

In the library world, it’s hard to call something an out-and-out failure. In the context of my eBooks presentation, I know that I learned something I wouldn’t have otherwise, and I also know that I can’t take personal responsibility for the ‘no shows.’ It does make me think about assessment of what we do, and how our services evolve based on past experience.

Finally, to finish off on a ‘fail’ note, I wanted to share my eBooks presentation here, so I uploaded it to SlideShare. But SlideShare didn’t like my Notes slides, so I was only able to upload it sans notes.

And this also made me think about my presentation style: I’ve been moving away from text-heavy slides that cover everything-that-you-say to more use of images that help convey a message. In this presentation, I did a mix of “going live,” and slides with images and/ or text. In terms of a lasting record of the content, the PowerPoint document doesn’t really offer too much in a meaningful way. So, by attempting to make a more engaging in-person presentation, I seem to have created a less engaging ‘lecture capture’ product. Below, find my hopefully-somewhat-meaningful presentation.

Note: The presentation was also videotaped which could potentially offer a better online record. I’ll let you know if it turns out…

There’s an interview with me in the latest issue of InsideOCULA!

I attended my first OCULA council meeting yesterday & they are such an interesting and collegial group. It was great to be a part of the behind-the-scenes conversations & get a sense of the amount of planning involved in these projects.

Also in the good news department: This morning I attended a History department meeting to plug embedded instruction services, explaining how library support could take various forms: web guide, screencast, presence in Sakai,  in-class session, etc.

The History prof I worked with earlier this term chimed in with a great testimonial, saying that the session I’d offered his students was very successful. The course mentors had met to discuss the fall term, and agreed that the library session was the most effective piece. Woohoo!

So, I’m hoping this will lead to a few phone calls or e-mails from other History instructors. I would really love some more experience developing tailored library support.

I heard a great idea for engaging/ communicating with faculty  from the YBP rep this week. She mentioned that when she was a liaison for History, she would keep track of History questions that she got at the desk & share a sample with the library rep at the end of term. She found faculty were always surprised at the sorts of questions their students were bringing to us. I bet this contributed to the sense of a need for collaboration between the library and the department. Hm, food for thought!