Tag Archives: librarianship

Critical reading and a new kind of library for me

I’ve mentioned the work of Project Information Literacy several times here, and last fall I had the pleasure of working with a friend and colleague to apply some of what we learned from their Provocation Series in her English Composition class. We engaged the students in critical reading about QAnon and the Satanic Panics of the past. It was a blast, and I wrote a guest post about it which you can find at the ACRL Community and Junior Colleges Section blog: “Critical Reading Partnership Inspired by Project Information Literacy.” Check out other “Practical PIL” examples on their website.

Those of you who have been with me here at Nocturnal Librarian for some time know I’ve worked in public and academic (private and community college) libraries over the time I’ve written this blog. When I was just twenty-one and a senior in college and then a new graduate, I also worked in records and archives management at a college alumni association. Each of these jobs was different but the common thread has been connecting people with information. I love doing that. I’m the person in the Zoom gathering who is always popping links into the chat when folks mention a book or a movie or a website or an article.

Last spring I began to notice how much of my work was not primarily about connecting people with information. And also that my greatest moments of satisfaction weren’t due to my job, but to other things I am involved in, some related to work (like open education stuff, or connecting with science librarians), some not (like volunteering, relationships, or prayer).

In November, after many months of reflection, I took a job in my community’s hospital. On paper it seems like an illogical step — I was a library director, had taken steps to “move up” and take on more responsibility with each new job, had successfully managed people, projects, budgets, and resources, made a good salary. Why take an hourly job in the hospital radiology department? Well for one thing, the core of the work is still connecting people with information. My area is “image services” also known as the image library (it was once literally a film library). I look up and send people’s radiology images (x rays, CT or PET scans, ultrasounds, etc.) where they need to go so they can get the care they need. I work with health care providers and with patients and I’m using a lot of my reference skills. I felt drawn to healthcare (in part because of my participation in the Covid Alliance Senior Support Team of NH), and I’m enjoying learning about a whole new-to-me field.

More importantly, at least to me, is that I am able to be more available for my family, for the movements I engage with to work for a more just, equitable, sustainable world, and even for myself. I work four days. That means I have a whole extra day each week to be present for the people I love, the things I believe in, the “work” I really care about. Which, it turns out, isn’t always the work I do for money. Also, I had reached a point where my sense of who I am and what I stand for had become wrapped up in my professional identity in ways that didn’t make sense. I attended a webinar led by Br. David Vryhof of SSJE early in the fall where he talked about “disordered attachments” and why they make us unhappy:

“. . . an unhealthy attachment is when we cling to some idea or some person or some thing and we come to believe that our lives will not be happy or meaningful without this thing. And so we must have it. And that’s a sign of a disordered attachment.”

He’s a monk in an Episcopalian order, but that idea may sound familiar to you Buddhists out there.

It rang true for me.

The work of Fobazi Ettarh and Kaetrena Davis Kendrick also influenced my decision. I heard both of them speak at ACRL 2019 and followed their work since. I understood work life balance and the need to be a supportive manager, but I had also bought into the idea that I needed to put others before myself to be a good boss and librarian. It turns out capitalism primes us for that, but that’s a story for another time (I’m reading up on this topic, so stay tuned for a blog post over at bookconscious). Ettarh and Kendrick helped me see that it’s not selfish to think of your own well being, and that you can’t be much help to others if you aren’t taking care of yourself. And that “vocational awe” intensifies the sense of having to “serve” as a librarian rather than seeing it simply as a job, and as just one piece of who we are as people. Because work isn’t who we are, even if we like our work, or find it rewarding. Nothing wrong with that, unless we stop critiquing it, or develop a disordered attachment to it. For me undoing that meant changing jobs. Maybe for someone else it is simply a matter of shifting priorities or being more intentional about time spent in different aspects of life.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to. I hope you’ll stay with me for new perspectives from a different kind of library.

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Neutrality is a privileged illusion

Recently I saw a blog post called Free Speech on the Clock: A Case Study From Chattanooga – Intellectual Freedom Blog shared on a librarians’ email list. It’s about this: “a public library worker was fired for posting a video on social media of himself pouring lighter fluid on two Chattanooga Public Library books” which he had weeded and which were books of political punditry (the sort where a prominent commentator or politician rehashes what they’ve said in every possible way on every possible communication channel already).

This is my response to that:

I get the gist of this, but the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom case study blog post seems problematic — a public librarian can’t burn weeded books, sure, but this point I’m not so sure about: “You cannot remove books you disagree with or believe to be inaccurate from a public library’s collection.”

My sense is that it’s not a library’s role to spend money on and provide access to things that are inaccurate. Librarians refer to reviews and look into authors’ credibility so that we don’t spend money on books that are poorly written or inaccurate. I don’t see how we can claim to be experts on misinformation and champion providing credible resources and then turn around and say it’s just library neutrality if we “order that stupid book that all of the people are asking for” — I’ve told patrons, “I’m sorry, but I can’t spend our limited budget on items that aren’t well reviewed, and this isn’t. Can I help you find something else on this topic?”

In the same blog post, this statement: ” A good library has books to offend everyone . . . .” is also problematic. Sure, librarians can’t just disagree with a political view to weed something, but we also don’t have an obligation to collect or retain materials with views that are harmful to human rights, promote hate speech, or describe people in ways that are outdated — which is why we weed books that refer to cognitive disability as retardation, or that praise eugenics. Or, I’d argue, the book she uses as an example that whitewashes Nazi history.

Every collection development or programming decision is a choice – the idea of being “neutral” or not thinking about materials in terms of values is an illusion. Just the idea of saying we’re “neutral” is a decision (and a privileged one at that). In reality, libraries advocate for all kinds of things, like early childhood literacy and greater access to technology and even reading itself. Those are positions we take. And one we claim pretty often but have many times not lived up to is that libraries are for everyone. If we really mean it when we say that, or if we claim that we believe in diversity, equity and inclusion, we can’t collect books that are counter to those values.

“Neutrality” is often code for “balance bias” where views that don’t deserve to be held up as equal are — like ordering a climate denial book because you have climate change books, when one is an ideological (and at this point fringe) view and the other is settled science. They aren’t equal, and it confuses people to act like they are.

If we create antiracism displays but then in the name of upholding some kind of false notion of neutrality in our profession, retain books by Nazi apologists in our collections, that to me is a bigger problem than someone not ordering an Ann Coulter book, when she has advocated violence in the past (yes, I am well aware she also had to cancel a talk because she felt threatened) and also regularly shares misinformation — we ‘re not in the misinformation business. There are lines to be drawn. If you disagree with someone’s well written, well researched, evidence based book about tax policies and don’t order their book, that’s so very clearly different than refusing to buy books by people who put other people down because you believe in basic civil rights for all.

Are those decisions sometimes difficult? Sure. But a good collection development policy can help you explain why you made them, as can other legal or policy guidance that applies to your town or campus, like civil rights and anti-defamation laws or guidelines, sexual harassment policies, etc. We don’t have an obligation to collect materials that support every view, and most of us don’t have the budget to do so even if that made sense.

Libraries are not neutral. Plenty of people have written about this more eloquently than I just did.

But I chewed on this all day and decided that I value speaking up 🙂 Thanks for listening.

I am happy to report I received a number of highly supportive responses. Including an important one — a note from a librarian who is from an underrepresented group in our predominantly white profession who thanked me for speaking up and shared how hard it is to be a in a profession with privileged and false notions of neutrality, and in a world where the status quo is upheld or people are scapegoated in the name of neutrality and legality all too often.

I am deeply grateful that this is changing.

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How to read if you want to connect the dots

The second essay in Project Information Literacy‘s (PIL) Provocation Series came out last week: “Reading in the Age of Distrust,” by Alison J. Head. I’ve been hearing from professors for years that students “don’t read” — by which they usually mean, don’t read well enough to do the work in a class. Although they might also mean, don’t purchase the egregiously overpriced textbooks, but that’s another topic. I even thought about working on a project to help students become better academic readers a while back, but the leadership I would have had to work with on it felt it wasn’t really the library’s role and also that it would look bad to point out that students struggled with what is considered a fundamental skill.

But to be clear, the issue isn’t often the mechanics of reading (although that can certainly make things even harder for a student). Head starts out by noting that PIL asked students themselves about their reading and found, “In their own words, students struggled with ‘connecting the dots,’ ‘figuring out the hook,’ and ‘discerning what to use’ from course readings and their own selections for writing research papers.” Head notes that recent research shows this doesn’t improve in college, and that these days, reading is made even more complicated by the complex and overwhelming deluge of information and misinformation that people are faced with today. The kind of deeper reading needed to “connect the dots,” and even to discern whether information is worth reading further or is, for example, political or corporate propaganda, is really a form of studying or analyzing, not just reading.

A good bit of the essay then turns to the arguments over who should teach students how to read in the ways necessary to succeed in this world. Professors, she notes, often feel they don’t have time in their syllabi to teach something as basic as reading, and if they talk about reading in their fields, they don’t usually go beyond the kind of reading that is “a performance of a role: How well can you take a seat at this or that disciplinary table and hold a conversation in its language?” Writing and tutoring centers don’t usually teach critical analysis. Librarians often get very little time beyond the information literacy “one shot” visit to a class over the course of a semester is standard on many campuses.

So what can be done? Head has four very concrete and practical suggestions, starting with,”First, educators and instruction librarians must make the invisible activity of reading more visible.” By this she means do what we want students to do, in front of our classes, so they see it in action. Read in class, and comment as you go. For me that would look like saying, “There is a word I want to look up to make sure I get what it means,” or “I wonder why the author isn’t clearer here?” Head also suggests engaging students in asking questions themselves, or even providing questions with assigned reading. Questions that help them examine how well they understand the reading as it fits into what they are reading and learning in class or with their other interests and areas of study. Questions that help them suss out what else they want to know, and what seems unclear or unanswered.

Second, Head suggests situating reading as part of research, a strategy I suggest when I work with students. Reading something a professor provides on your topic, or reading some news or background articles, helps clarify what terms are used to discuss a topic. I also talk with my classes about how background reading can help them relate a topic to the people involved — who is included or left out of what they are reading, and why? Head suggests talking about who are viewed as experts and who are impacted; I’d ask explicitly, are those the same people, and if not, why not? She also recommends research begin with “reading titles and abstracts,” another good way to get a quick overview of how the topic is covered and what is being discussed. I would also add, read works cited lists, not only to trace the claims an author is making, but also to look for authors who write frequently on a topic and read their work.

Head’s third and fourth suggestions are a balm. Third is the notion that less is more: assign less reading, spend more time on it, and create space to really dive into it. She suggests that this pandemic lesson — don’t overwhelm students — should become a new norm, because people in academia have seen that going deeper is just as good, and maybe more engaging, than trying to cover everything.

And fourth, teach empathy as part of reading. Head writes, “Empathy — seeing through the eyes of another — is an outcome of college-level reading, but it usually gets little attention in class discussions.” Wittily and resoundingly shredding an opposing view seems to be our cultural norm, or at least what we’re exposed to across media platforms. Learning to be genuinely curious and open to understanding how and why an opposing view was formed is less valued. But this curiosity, and the effort to look at an issue through someone else’s eyes, can be helpful in determining what’s important.

Head wraps up this thoughtful and provocative essay by concluding that “connecting the dots” requires understanding the information ecosystem as well as the material you are reading. She explains, “In our contentious times, students must learn to critically analyze what topics and voices are amplified and which ones are not. Literacy should not only include analyzing a single assigned reading but a deeper understanding of the technological and social forces shaping the circulation of information in society today.” 

Indeed.

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Zooma zooma zooma zoom

If you grew up in the 70s you might recognize that back then, Zoom was a PBS show for tweens/teens. Strange that today it is the way many of us work, learn, meet, and even socialize. It’s been a while since I’ve posted because it felt like I had nothing to say about COVID-19 librarianship that wasn’t being said elsewhere. And I was busy zooming, like many of you.

It was a strange summer, and much like other summers in an academic library, many of the projects I hoped to get to did not come to fruition. I wonder if we’ll ever finish weeding? But I did spend a lot of time thinking about how to approach information literacy instruction this fall.

For one thing, I want to be more collaborative, allowing students to co-create sessions with me by sharing their experiences and what they are interested in learning. I’ve worked on this to some extent in person, but man professors expect us to “teach the databases.” On Zoom, no one knows what to expect, so I feel this is chance to experiment more.

Which is great, but, I get “one shot” classes with students, where they may have met me in similar one shots but they know they’re not going to see me again this semester. It’s hard to feel invested quickly in collaborating with a near stranger. To build a little comradery in advance, I tried sending a link to a Padlet yesterday ahead of a class I had today, letting them know it was low stakes – no need to sign their post, no right or wrong answers, ok to say “I’m not sure.” One person responded to my prompt in advance.

If you’re curious, the prompt was, roughly, “Think of a time when you needed information outside of classes. How did you decide where to look for the info? How did you know whether it was accurate? How is your experience different when you have to find info for class?” I answered, so they’d have an example. I looked up when to get a flu shot. I was starting from a New York Times article, I took a link to the CDC, which is our national public health agency and is tasked with overseeing flu shots, so I knew the information between these two sources was a) as official as it comes in our “every man for himself” country and b) edited and fact checked by professional journalists. When I do an assignment, I check first to see what kind of sources are required.

In class I gave them five minutes to answer the prompt, since most people hadn’t yet, and realized many of them didn’t know how to add to a Padlet. I let there be an uncomfortable silence with very little typing. Finally I asked if anyone was wondering how to add to the Padlet. No one spoke. I said into the silence: “In case you ARE wondering, click the plus sign.” And repeated the low stakes spiel I’d put in my announcement ahead of class.

Some responses! Not much discussion. A little, and then I caught myself filling the silence, so I moved on to asking what they’d done so far with the assignment. The professor, likely sensing that Zoom seems to be an unlikely place for people who don’t know a guest speaker to open up, called on a student who she knew had found something interesting. She shared her screen. We talked about why it was interesting — a lobbyist wrote an article for a peer reviewed journal. It passed through peer review, with a conflict of interest statement. Cool — something to talk about!

This gave me an opening to work in another thing I vowed I will bring up in every instruction session this fall: equity. Who controls academic research and publishing? Whose voices are included? Whose are left out? Where is the power (which translates to authority in information literacy terms)? What groups are not studied? I was happy to see many heads nodding when I pointed out the equity issues in research.

So, that’s one class down. Not counting four nursing orientations I did with my coworker the last week. Which were little more than “we’re here for you, get in touch, here’s our website.” Where, by the way, we post photos of our pets.

Which got some smiles, and a tiny glimpse of human connection – the nursing students were on campus and we were off, so we couldn’t see them very well, since they were in a classroom and we were on . . . Zoom. They could see us, projected onto a big screen. I will hang onto those glimpses of eye contact and enthusiasm and try not to sweat the silence and the fear of admitting uncertainty and the worry about whether people are getting what I’m saying or wondering when I’m going to shut up.

Because really, Zoom is not that different than in person “one shot” sessions. It’s not a great way to teach, nor a great way to learn, having an hour or 90 minutes with a group, one time during the semester. I’d like to build relationships, get to know my students, even over technology. Over the summer, one student responded to a post I put in her course, inviting students to ask me for help with their research assignment. We “met” several times over the next two months, and I helped with each paper. I learned, over chat, and one attempt at Zoom, that she is a mom of three young kids, trying to get her associate’s degree while caring for them. By the end of the term, it felt like in some small way, we’d made a connection. I had glimpses of what she was juggling, how hard she was working to keep it all going. And what kind of help was most helpful.

So, can I keep co-creating learning with my students over Zoom, or in person, if I only get one shot at working with them? I can try. Being in their courses as Librarian helps, because I can post announcements with tips and a little bit of humor if possible, a little personality. So they know there is a person beyond the screen, someone who cares about their research success. Who really wants to hear about their experiences finding information — which I hope helps them see they are already competent researchers outside of class, and can easily be in class as well. And who is aware of racism and gender bias in research.

This year will be memorable, I am sure. I’m not going to predict which changes will last and which will be forgotten post COVID. But I’m trying to make the best of things, as we all are, and I think there is always room to learn from my students, even in Zoom, even “one shot” at a time.

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Another reason libraries are vital

I finished reading one of my Christmas gifts, Educated, on Friday evening. You can read my thoughts on this memoir by Tara Westover over at bookconscious. This morning I read Michiko Kakutani’s essay “The 2010s Were the End of Normal” and it got me thinking about why Educated has resonated so strongly with readers of all kinds (I’ve had more people recommend this book to me than any other I can think of). And why Educated illustrates the importance of libraries, even though Westover doesn’t necessarily say so (although she mentions several libraries in the book).

I watched a brief interview Westover did with Bill Gates, where she talks a little bit about divisions in our world and describes the potential of education as “this great mechanism of connecting and equalizing.” She also describes the way some schools become “an instrument of that division” because of the way “we self-segregate, and schools become reflections of people’s homogeneity.” In other words, depending on where a child grows up, they may or may not learn the same history as a child who grows up somewhere else, even in the same city or town.

Now, I’m not saying everyone should learn one official version of history. We need what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “narrative plenitude” — where the many threads of being human in America and the world are included in the overall fabric of the history we learn, instead of the majority controlling the narrative. And education, ideally, should present that plenitude, instead of whatever the dominant narrative is. And what Westover was discussing with Gates is that if we really meant what we say about providing a good education for all, we might actually have less division. Because if you know someone’s stories, they become familiar, and you begin to see how they are also like your stories, and how they are different, and since we are born curious, you also start to wonder why.

This morning, I read Michiko Kakutani’s essay “The 2010s Were the End Of Normal” and I think one reason Educated is so powerful is that Westover’s experience, while extreme, explains the divisions we currently face. Knowing only one version of the story of humanity, particularly one that justifies fears in the face of a changing world, leads to what Kakutani quotes Richard Hofstadter as calling “the paranoid style” that Westover’s father embodies. If people then reinforce their views by limiting the scope of information they take in to what they agree with, as Kakutani notes that many people whose world views rely on “alternative facts” do, you can end up with extremes.

Westover provides some hope that anyone who can read and think (potentially, most people) can discover for themselves what has happened in human history and is happening in the world now. So people who are insulated from reality can potentially learn that their “truth” has been mediated and their accepted narrative controlled – but the scary flip side is that if enough people don’t ever learn that we end up where we are now with nationalism on the rise all over.  You probably know where I’m going with this if you’ve read Nocturnal Librarian before: libraries and librarians can help counter division because we help make it possible for people to expand their views and embrace narrative plenitude.

Information literacy, the skills and habits that allow people to find, evaluate, and use information to answer a question or solve a problem, is at the core of what academic libraries do. We teach students to consider the ways information is mediated, what mechanisms are in place to safeguard facts while still presenting persuasive arguments in journalism and academic writing, and how to recognize and critically assess those. Public libraries also foster information literacy, and they act (when they are at their best) as some of the last egalitarian public spaces, where all citizens regardless of where they live or go to school have access to the same resources. Libraries of all kinds support lifelong learning, and collect and preserve all kinds of narratives that are part of our shared human story. They can also promote civil discourse either explicitly through programming or implicitly through their collections.

So, if you want to live in a less divided, more civil world where people know how to recognize and counter “alternative facts,” support your library!

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Opening education and ourselves

One of the things I’ve gotten very involved with in my time at a community college is helping to encourage and support the adoption, adaptation, or creation of open educational resources. I’ve written about this here at Nocturnal Librarian a couple of times, including sharing with readers what students say they would buy if they didn’t have to spend money on textbooks.

But I gained another valuable perspective at the recent OpenEd19 conference. Some of the best sessions I attended were by students, and at one of those I realized there is another benefit to OERs that I hadn’t fully understood until I heard students talk about it: if you can’t buy course materials, you feel like you are faking it in class. This is not just a problem of learning (because many persistent students get around not having a book in all sorts of creative ways, by sharing, taking photos of pages they need to read, or finding alternatives to the textbook), but of attainment — there have been many studies linking student success and a sense of belonging. You can’t feel like you belong in college if you are mired in imposter syndrome because you are just trying to get by without an expensive textbook you can’t afford.

At OpenEd I also heard some presentations on including students in solving the problem, either by including them in the co-creation of materials in the classes they’re enrolled in (known as open pedagogy) or hiring them to help faculty build OER courses. Both of these endeavors are additional ways to counter imposter syndrome with participation. If you feel like you don’t fit in the status quo, what’s more powerful than being part of changing it? Plus, students gain useful experience and a sense that they are capable autodidacts who can learn what they need when the work they do and the world around them changes and they need to adapt.

Because it changes, doesn’t it? Another powerful session I attended was presented by a panel of librarians talking about the need for community, because for many of us working on opening up our campuses to these practices, our job descriptions or responsibilities don’t actually include this work. The panel also noted that we librarians also sometimes face imposter syndrome when we’re at the table with faculty, instructional designers, and learning technology staff. I went into the session thinking I just wanted to hear about the need for community but I didn’t actually need that “other stuff” and came out realizing, yes, I do. So, I’m going to work on owning that “other stuff” and getting comfortable with the messiness of choosing to do something that I’ve mostly learned on my own and added to my role not only because it’s a priority on my campus, and a priority for making higher ed more accessible for students, but because I am perfectly capable of pursuing professional interests without having been granted expertise by anyone else.

Like our students, I can create my own agency and efficacy. And if I do that with them, all the better, because we’ll learn from each other as we go and strengthen each other’s sense of belonging. I hear a lot of people talk about how hard it is to actually have community at a community college because people (faculty as well as students) are not there very much — they come to class and then head off campus to other responsibilities at work and home. But open educational practices, it seems to me, can counter that by drawing people together around a shared purpose in a way that packaged curriculum can’t match. Opening education can and does change our work, our learning, and our world. And if that work doesn’t belong to all of us, what does?

**update — here’s what happens when a student feels people in higher ed (librarians in this case, I am happy to report) are actually listening: https://openstax.org/blog/true-champions-oer-movement

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We’re fine without fines

I had an interesting conversation today with a student worker who wanted to know if we charge for replacement ID cards. I said no, and that even if there was a policy in the past, I was not in favor of charging students extra for things, especially since most students have little money. I pointed out that it’s possible a lost ID is at campus safety, so it might be good to ask the student to check there before having a new one made, but otherwise, just make the replacement. The student worker said they hadn’t heard a librarian say anything like that before.

We also don’t charge fines at my library, although if a book is never returned we do bill for replacement. one of our staff has been calling patrons with bills, and she said today that they don’t always believe there will be no charge if they return a long overdue item and some have even said they don’t return it out of fear of a big fine.

When I worked at a public library, “fine free” was becoming popular. In 2017, NY Public Library System president Anthony Marx wrote about some forays into fine amnesty and fine free borrowing for kids and noted that in response to those who worried about what fine free tells people about responsibility, “what is truly the greater moral hazard? Having fines or not having fines? In my view, teaching kids that the library is not an option for the poorest among them is absolutely unacceptable.” Indeed. It has always really frosted me when kids can’t use the library because of fines.

Because it turns out, library fees and fines are regressive. And now the Chicago Public Library has become the largest American library system to go fine free. Library Commissioner Andrea Telli had a similar response to the question of whether eliminating fines erodes accountability: “Libraries don’t necessarily want to be in the morality business, and we don’t want to make the assumption that if a book is late or someone can’t pay for a fine, that they’re delinquent or bad in some way; they may just be in a place in their life where they can’t pay the fine.”

Exactly. It turns out the value of returned items is often higher than that of fines collected, and that fines don’t deter people from returning items late — they just prevent people from feeling the library is for them. Which is not in line with the values of librarianship, or of human decency generally.

If the administrations that provide our funding want fines to be part of our budgets (which is not even necessarily the case — in Chicago, fines never went to the library), we need to help them learn about equity and inclusion, and stand with our colleagues who point out that we’re fine without fines, but excluding our patrons because they can’t pay is not fine.

 

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New semester, same challenges

We’re about to enter week two of the fall semester, and even though a new term always provides some of that fresh start feeling, some things never change. For example, printers are always surprised that students are back and generally respond by jamming, making print jobs disappear, or otherwise malfunctioning. Students are sometimes surprised to realize they have no idea what their login information is to get into the various systems that can tell them what time their classes are and in which rooms, who their professors are, and what they need to know about their classes, either because they forgot their logins over the summer or they are new and aren’t even sure they know what it is or where to login yet. Ditto on how to get into or find their college email.

Students don’t always arrive on campus digitally literate, or in other words, able to use the technology we expect them to in college (which is often some of the same technology we all had to learn at work, never by osmosis). Just because they can text and use apps doesn’t mean they can navigate various portals and systems that contain the vital information every department on campus thinks they should immediately take in. They may have limited experience with email and word processing and other productivity tools, and they’ve mostly, at least at my community college, never seen a learning management system before (like Canvas, Blackboard, or Moodle).

But the default in higher education is to assume they can master all this at the same time they are adjusting generally to the freedom and responsibility of college. Some of our students are fresh from twelve years of public school where they had very little freedom and nearly no personal responsibility other than to show up and follow directions. Others may have worked and have some experience making sure they get where they need to be on time and manage their tasks independently, but even these more worldly new students are often in the same boat as recent high school graduates when it comes to digital literacy — they may know a few more tools, but not those specific to higher education, and possibly they worked at places where they had limited access to technology outside their very specific responsibilities.

The library and learning commons staff find ourselves helping students who’ve been told on the first day of class to print a module or syllabus without really knowing what that means — not where to find those, not what they are, not how to print the on the mysterious campus printing system. I’ve been thinking about this digital literacy gap ever since hearing Ben Remillard, a doctoral candidate at UNH who also teaches at a community college and has experience working in student success programs in learning commons settings, speak about it at LAANE last fall. His point was that simply expecting students to grasp what we’re talking about when we tell them to start using their “EasyLogin” to get into multiple systems and tools doesn’t work. We wouldn’t onboard someone into a workplace that way, so why do we expect students to just start using everything at once without any training?

This is closely related to another perennial back-to-school struggle for librarians: convincing faculty to wait to schedule information literacy instruction until a few weeks into the semester, once students have had a chance to get familiar with all the digital tools and systems we throw at them, and they have a research assignment to work on. I always get requests to come on the first day of class or sometime in the first 2-3 weeks to “teach databases.” My gentle response is always that it might work better for students — resulting in better work for their faculty to assess — if we schedule information literacy instruction for later.

And that we don’t really “teach databases,” but instead teach students to seek, find, assess, and use information to answer a question or solve a problem. Because if we start by talking about databases when they don’t even know what that means yet, we’ve lost them. They’ll think using the library is too hard. I hear it often: a student will say that all this info lit stuff is fine for other people, but they can never find what they need that way so they “just Google.” I suspect no one has ever taken the time to help them see that the same skills they use to “just Google” can be honed until they are able to use them to successfully tap into the many collections of information — which is all Google is, really — they now have access to in college. And it’s hard to teach people to identify their information need before they have one, so tying this kind of work to an actual assignment is much more meaningful.

I am not one to let the perfect get in the way of the good; if it’s not possible can’t get on the schedule to work with a class unless it happens in week one, I’m there. At least letting students know who I am, how to find me and my library and learning commons colleagues and how to get in touch with us, and a teeny bit about our resources is better than never getting a chance to meet students and reveal the wonders of the library website to them! But I do think that until students have a chance to get comfortable with all the digital tools afforded to them as college students, they won’t be able to fully absorb everything we librarians have to say about information literacy. And until we help them see what they can already do with technology and how it relates to the new tools they’re expected to use, we can’t close the digital literacy gap and help them succeed.

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Research methods and networks

I was delighted to be selected as a 2019 Institute for Research Design in Librarianship scholar. IRDL “is designed to bring together a diverse group of academic and research librarians who are motivated and enthusiastic about conducting research but need additional training and/or other support to perform the steps successfully.” At the week long institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, I met the other 22 scholars and spent each day learning research methods, having consultations with qualitative and quantitative research experts and the two project directors, and basically geeking out over libraries and library research. I learned so much about research methods; I feel confident in my research design and methodology and equipped to carry out my work, which is to create and study a program in which peer Learning Success Mentors share information literacy and learning science tips with new students at my community college.

But the most important thing I gained is a research network. I would have taken a research methods class (although not in a week and not in such a beautiful place). But getting to know other people who are interested in which design will best answer a research question, how to write an in-depth interview guide and develop a codebook to analyze the transcripts, when to use regression theory, and why this matters to librarianship is not an experience I could every have had without IRDL. Knowing I can call on my fellow IRDLers and starting in July, my mentor, an experienced research librarian who will support me through the year’s work, is also pretty awesome.

The coming year will be difficult — I’ll be working harder than I ever have, trying things I’ve never done, working to deadlines, all on a project with a lot of moving parts that may not turn out as I hope. It’s pretty daunting. But so was getting on a plane to LA, being away for nine days, worrying about whether I’d be able to hold my own at the Institute. And in the coming year, the best part is that each of my fellow IRDL scholars will be doing what I am doing — holding ourselves to getting the work done, and standing with each other as we prioritize our research among all the other demands on our time. They are an amazingly talented group. I feel like I upped my game just being with them all for a week. Plus, I earned some pretty cool badges (yes, literal ones, not virtual).

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It’s great to be home, and I am excited to be on this research journey in such good company.

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