green librarian

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!

Sharing by furiousgeorge81 (via flickr)

Last Friday, I went on a field trip to Waterloo.

I was invited along for a gathering of Marketing & Communications librarians (and a couple non-librarians)  — attendees included Guelph, McMaster, Ryerson, Laurier, Queens, and Brock of course! Our host was Nancy Collins, Communications & Liaison Librarian at UW.

It was such an energizing and interesting day! Around the table, we shared ideas, challenges, successes, and less-than-successes. I learned that the group started as a pretty informal network, created by a few librarians in order to connect with others working to define their roles with this Marketing/ Communications job title — one of growing prevalence.

While the libraries around the table are trying to reach their users in many different ways and with unique style, the projects all have the same basic values and priorities. The great thing is that the library ethos prevails: share and share alike. There’s no shame in adopting and adapting the strategies of fellow libraries.  I walked away from the meeting, my head brimming with ideas & possibilities.

Part of my responsibilities at Brock is in the area of Marketing & Communication, and I have been working closely with Justine Cotton, Brock’s Communications & Liaison Librarian. This week, we published the Fall 2009 issue of Library News.

I learned alot writing these little pieces — otherwise, it’s unlikely I would’ve had reason to play around in ODESI, the new interface for the Ontario data repository. The faculty blogging article was also a good project because it got me reading Brock faculty blogs, and thinking a little about the roles that this medium can play in academia.I find it really interesting that McMaster Library is now hosting faculty blogs — true recognition that this can be a form of scholarly communication!

The aspect of marketing/ communications work that I’ve most enjoyed thus far is the opportunity to be creative –  brainstorming all sorts of ways to reach our diverse user groups.  I like working collaboratively, bouncing ideas off of others. I find that crazy or mediocre ideas become great ideas as they ping-pong between group members.

As a true ‘people person,’ I have to keep an eye out for these sorts of projects. I must admit that it can sometimes get a little lonely in my office.

What else am I up to at work these days?

• Taking a close look at a list of periodical indexes in my subject areas & trying to sort out whether there is coverage of this material in our electronic databases … harder than you’d think!!
• Reading up on LibQUAL+. Brock will be issuing the survey for the first time & I’ll be helping to roll it out. (Funny, cuz I blogged about it back in my job-hunting days)
• Trying to figure out the best way to use GOBI to get feedback on titles from faculty members. Oiy.

drop the puck by duluoz cats (via flickr)

I’m still coming down from the I-pulled-off-that-info-lit-workshop high.

This week, I had the opportunity to design a hands-on session ‘from scratch.’ A history professor asked that the students get experience with the research process, and otherwise left it up to me. I really do love instruction, and learning that it was a part of librarianship largely contributed to my decision to pursue this field.

The challenge with this particular course is that it is non-credit, so the students don’t have any assignments to which I could connect the activity. In order to help motivate the students, I included some game-like elements: I called the session, “The best kind of essay … the kind you don’t have to write.”

A few weeks earlier, I had given a presentation to this group on the basics: when to use the catalogue versus databases, tricks to improve search results, tips for history students. This time, I kept the intro quick & dirty and showed students where they could access the overview PowerPoint. I put them in groups of 3-4 and distributed sample essay topics. The students were asked to find the best 2 books and 3 peer-reviewed articles (accessible at Brock) on their topic, create a bibliography, and e-mail it to me by 2:45. This gave them about 25 minutes to complete the task.

Surprise: they played along! Since I couldn’t tempt them with grades or speak directly to their looming assignments, I worried that they would scoff at my request for a deliverable with a deadline. But, they took up the challenge!

I would’ve loved to have just a little more time, say half an hour, to better review the students’ submissions & directly address any trouble they had in finding resources.  Although, maybe it’s better to be short & sweet: I never hit the point where I’d ‘lost’ them, they were working on the bibliography right up until the buzzer.

The other surprise: they were interested in RefWorks and wanted to jump right in & try it. I gave the briefest of RefWorks overviews as I was reviewing finding journal articles: just sped through exporting three citations, selecting citation style, and producing a bibliography. This seemed to impress! And it makes sense really: the point is that RefWorks makes things easier and faster. If I’m going to have to create an account for something, you should be able to tell me what it’s good for in about a minute.

I asked the professor to distribute a link to a Survey Monkey evaluation form, so we’ll see if I get any feedback.

On a parting note, I came across a quotation this week that really spoke to me. In a recent C&RL News article, Bryan Sinclair discusses the concept of the ‘blended librarian.’ He credits Steven Bell and John Shank (2004) with the following definition:

an academic librarian who combines the traditional skill set of librarianship with the information technologist’s hardware/software skills, and the instructional or educational designer’s ability to apply technology appropriately in the teaching-learning process.

I read this and thought, yes! That’s the kind of librarian I want to be.

It’s a real shift going from ‘the eternal student’ (eight years of post-secondary education) to ‘young professional.’ Not only am I adjusting to the 9-to-5 work week, my evenings and weekends are suddenly my own. No more endless reading lists or always-looming assignments tingeing my spare time with guilt.

What, then, to do with this time? I’m finding the evenings to be hardest: get home, make dinner, chat with spouse, clean up from dinner… then what? A few evenings I’ll go to the gym, and on Thursdays I volunteer for askON for 2 hours. I can think of all sorts of lovely hobbies that I could/ should take up, but I do feel a little low on energy at the end of most days & regretfully, I often end up watching an episode or two of The Wire … or The Office … or Mad Men (I could go on).

One welcome distraction was getting excited about comics again — this seems to go in waves for me. So, just thought I’d share my last three reads.

Epileptic by David B.

Epileptic by David B.

Wow, this was an incredible book! I picked it up from the Popular Reading shelves at Brock — I’d never heard of the title or the author before. It was rich, and disturbing, and fantastical, and peppered with wry humour. Epileptic was originally published in French and in a series of six volumes. It’s one of those achingly honest stories. You could try to sum it up by saying it’s an autobiography of the artist’s youth and early adulthood as he and his family come to terms with his older brother’s illness, but that wouldn’t do it justice. Just read it — it will consume you, in a good way.

Black Hole

Black Hole by Charles Burns

Ok, so I’m pretty late in getting to this one. It sits prominently in the graphic novel section of every bookstore & I kept meaning to pick it up, especially since the cover is so eye-catching and strange. I have to say, it didn’t do it for me. The story is very teen-angst-y but in a stereotypical way: I didn’t find the characters believable. The story is basically about a disfiguring STD, ‘the Bug,’ that is afflicting teenagers in a small town. Black Hole seems to be a bit of a big deal in the comics world, but I kept waiting for it to get to the good part. It sometimes made me feel sick to my stomach, which I will put up with (and even appreciate) for a great story, but that’s lacking here.

Burma Chronicles

Burma Chronicles by Guy Delisle

I’ve read Delisle’s other travelogues (and mentioned them here before). Burma Chronicles is in very much the same vein, except this time Guy is taking care of his young son while his wife works for Médecins Sans Frontières in — you guessed it — Burma. I love the way this guy writes & draws — I actually laugh out loud. He always provides a self-conscious outsider’s perspective, and I can say that I’ve learned about North Korea, China, & Burma while following this artist’s overseas adventures. Plus he’s Quebecois, so now you have to check him out.

Now that I’ve binged on comics, I’m taking a break to try reading 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. No pictures in this one, but I like it so far because it’s about Comparative Literature scholars — go Comp Lit!

The Cribbies by Ryan J Murphy (flickr)

I’m back from our ‘mini-moon’ in St. John’s Newfoundland & feeling re-energized. Since returning, I’ve felt a greater sense of how I fit in at Brock. It has been a real shift for me, moving from student jobs in which the expectations and deliverables were very clear-cut, to my first position as a professional. It is my responsibility to make the most of this position, and play a role in determining the needs of the users.

I consider myself a pretty organized person, but the ‘game’ has changed: these projects and ideas tend to have fuzzy boundaries, not imposed deadlines created by outside forces. I’m still sorting out how best to manage my time & develop a sense of my work as a whole.

The OCULA New Librarian Resident position has opened up a world of opportunity for me, and created a position for a fresh grad at an academic library where there otherwise would have been none — especially in these ‘unsure’ economic times. The one challenge that exists in such a position is that the resident enters a workplace with a limited-term placement and is not directly ‘replacing’ anyone. You can see how it could be a challenge to determine the resident’s responsibilities.

From listening to other librarians, I’ve noticed that previous limited-term appointments made their mark at the library by finding an existing gap, creating a niche,  and pursuing a specialty. For example, one predecessor appears to have become the in-house RefWorks guru, even if just for her 12 months at the library.

I can’t say yet which directions I will pursue this year — I believe it will also be determined by a combination of local need and climate. I’ve been encouraged from the very beginning to reflect on my areas of interest & consider opportunities for implementing them at Brock. I’ve got a few germs of ideas that I hope will grow into productive and interesting projects.

I’ve had some small successes over the past few weeks in the form of positive response from faculty and students following info.lit. workshops, faculty interest in a small article I’m drafting, and a few promising email conversations that I hope will develop into good liaison work. It’s early days yet.

Well, that was a pretty introspective post! Next, I’ll report on one of those budding projects.

The above photo, though not taken by me, is from a spot called the Cribbies near Tors Cove, Nfld that I visited last month. My grandfather’s family is from this small town about an hour south of St.John’s.

the schmon by wootam! (flickr)

It’s been just about a week since I started my position at Brock and I thought I’d take a moment to share some of my thoughts and early observations. Some of these might be academic library-specific, or Brock-specific, or just plain obvious, but here they are anyway!

(Apologies for a ‘lighter’ post this week — I’m getting married this month & that is taking up most of my spare time and energy these days.)

• The informational interviews that I had been on during my months of unemployment turned out to be extremely valuable — and not how I would’ve expected. These conversations that I’d had made me more confident, more aware of challenges facing other institutions, and provided me with strong contacts to consult when I’d heard I had an interview. I sent quick e-mails to a few of these contacts, and they responded with valuable interview tips & encouragement. Also, the fact that I’d done these interviews came up in the Brock interview, and the panel seemed impressed that I’d been proactive in this way.
• This blog paid off!! Of course, it’s been rewarding in terms of personal satisfaction, but I also had a number of librarians who I met during the interview process make specific reference to certain blog posts leaving me with the “oh my god, someone is actually reading this stuff!??” feeling.
• Salary negotiation was a pretty intimidating part of the process, and something that I felt unprepared for. It was a real challenge to find out what other new-ish academic librarians are making in order to better consider my job offer. I wonder if I was missing some kind of key study or publicly available resource? I tried asking around for insight and direction, but mostly came up empty.
• It’s great to be at an institution where librarians and faculty (professors) share the same union. While some of the items in the collective agreement don’t pertain to me as a limited-term appointment, there are some great benefits and just the sense that the profession is better appreciated on campus.
• The sense that I had about librarians being generally swamped & pulled in all directions appears to be true. There is so much information flow directed at our inboxes (ack, e-mail management is such an issue!), and trying to deal with all issues appropriately, while attempting to maintain a proactive ‘outreach’ perspective… wow. I’m feeling the need for time and head space to strategize in these early days, about where I can take initiative and what I think might make for an interesting project. I can see how it’s easy to get caught up in just responding to the most urgent needs at hand, and attempting to reply to e-mails. To do: Must think of the best time/ space to do that sort of thinking.

That’s probably enough for tonight. I start my first volunteer askON shift tomorrow & I’m looking forward to it! I’ll report on how that develops.

By the way, the photograph above shows the Schmon Tower on Brock campus which houses, among other things, the James A. Gibson Library. My office (I have my own office — That’s a first for me!) is on the 11th floor. Sans window, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.

Hm, I need to re-name this blog now that it’s not just shameless self-promotion. My original title was “the view from here,” but since my office is window-less, it may not be the best choice — harhar. Just add it to the ‘to do’ list, I guess.

Jumping in the Beach by TuTuWoN (flickr)

Great news! September 1st, I will start a 12 month contract as a Liaison Librarian at Brock University in St. Catharines. This position is a little unique: Brock won OCULA’s New Librarian Residency Award, which means that I will become an ex-oficio member of OCULA & provide them with two reports and attend four meetings. (There was an article about the award in the most recent InsideOCULA e-newsletter.)

I’m pretty excited about getting started at Brock — I’ve got lots to learn & I’m looking forward to working with the many great librarians I met during the interview process.

Life has been pretty crazy ever since I accepted the job: my partner & I are re-locating, we bought a car, I’m learning to drive standard (ugh), and… we’re getting married next month. So, I haven’t made the time to blog lately, but I hope to record my experiences as the New Librarian Resident in this space.

Back to the packing for now, but I should also mention: YAHOO!