It Takes a Village: Happy Early Thanksgiving

It's Thanksgiving tomorrow here in the U.S., and in keeping with the season I've been thinking sappily thankful thoughts.

But of all the many things I'm thankful for, one keeps bubbling to the surface: my village. Little by little I've found myself surrounded, online and offline, by an array of friends and colleagues that I talk to even more than I talk to the people I'm actually related to (and I talk to my blood relatives almost every day). And I've come to realize that it takes a village to keep a village going. Some days it's my turn to give... offering hugs and jokes and whatever it takes to support and lift the spirits of those I care about. Other days, the community is strong for me, letting me mope or cry at them in person or online and generally letting me know that they care, that they're there for me, and that I'd get through everything I have to get through.

It's a good thing we aren't all down at the same time.

It's also a good thing I don't write sappy posts all the time. :)

End of Term

Today is the last day of exams for Fall term, and the students are feeling the burn. This morning I held one as she cried on my shoulder about everything from papers to lost socks. There we stood, in the middle of campus with the fog and drizzle closing in around us, and all I could do was hold her, remind her that she will survive, and encourage her to tackle just one task at a time.

Later, walking through the library, I passed a couch where two students were sitting and writing papers, and out of the blue one of them just suddenly crumpled into tears. It was as if, mid-sentence, her paper had rebelled and flung up on the screen an image of herself flipping burgers for the rest of her life. What's a librarian to do? ... So I went downstairs and got four pieces of candy from the staff room, two for each student.

We're all looking forward to tomorrow.

I Hate Plagiarism

I don't hate plagiarism because it's "stealing" or "cheating" or any of that. Sure it's ethically incorrect, but everybody knows that. I don't condone it, certainly, but that in itself isn't enough to make me ponder in the early morning.

Don't get me wrong. I've seen plagiarism in action at the lowest levels of education, and at the highest levels of scholarship. I've seen it's consequences, and I've the way it eats up the lives and risks the careers of those who think it's important to expose a high-profile plagiarist. I've seen this stuff up close and personal, and it's not pretty. Heartbreaking, terrifying, sad, disappointing... but not ponder-worthy, generally.

No, what makes me ponder is the way plagiarism has insinuated itself into undergraduate education in what I think are unhealthy (and sometimes flat out improper) ways. Sure, it's important that undergraduates learn the ethics of scholarly communication. But it is not necessary to have plagiarism be the bully whip behind other problems of scholarly communication.

Take, for instance, citation. Students are told to cite their sources so that they don't plagiarize. What does this do? Well, it doesn't deter the plagiarists. No, instead it sends a steady stream of freaked out kids to my office right about finals time, each of whom is trying to figure out when to cite and when not to as much as they're trying to figure out where the quotation marks and italics go in MLA style. It's often not very clear when a particular statement needs a citation, and the poor students are terrified that they'll miss-step and inadvertently plagiarize.

And really, however heretical it sounds, I don't think that citation and plagiarism are inherently linked in the one-to-one relationship that most first-year writing courses seem to teach. Failure to cite a direct quote or a paraphrase constitutes plagiarism. But the act of citation itself should be much more a context-building act than an act of punishment avoidance. So when these students land on my doorstep, the only thing that seems to make sense (barring having us both read through the paper and discuss every sentence) is to explain that citation allows your readers to situate themselves in your context. You cite to give credit, but you also cite to allow your readers to find further information. So if you state a "fact" (one of those nebulous things that don't need citing but that nobody can explain because lots of "facts" need citations, too) and you think your readers might benefit from more context, cite it. If it's a "fact" that your friend's roommate would already know and, more than that, already know or be able to accurately construct its historical, social, theoretical context... there's no need to cite it.

Oh, and one thing that citation is not in any way related to is copyright. It does not make it OK to copy an image if you include the image URL or other citation information. Copyright is a legal process; citation is an ethical and communication process. Neither is related to the the other even a little bit. Including citation information is a good thing to do, but it does not eliminate or even reduce the need to weigh Fair Use or get permission. I mention this because this was the single most pervasive urban myth that we encountered when we started doing copyright training on campus.

So why do I hate plagiarism? Because I think those of us who work with undergraduates have adopted it as the boogie man of scholarly communication and then generalized it to domains where it doesn't belong. In the process, it's become unhelpful to students. Using punishment-avoidance rather than scholarly communication as the sole impetus for citation has actually made the process of deciding when to cite harder rather than easier. Even more importantly, it has shut them off from some of the joys and richness of using citations in their own research. As one of my colleagues likes to tell her students, "The literature in each field indexes itself" via it's citations. But if students skip over reading these citations, perceiving them simply as legalistic mechanisms that the authors are using to cover their behinds, they miss out on uncovering new pieces of context surrounding their topics.

Brain Vacation Days

Every once in a while, to renew my grasp on sanity, I give myself a "brain vacation day." I'm still at work, and I still do work, but I give myself permission not to tackle the really hard projects. I only work on the fun projects, or the little clearing-up projects that always get put off during the headlong rush through the term.

Today is one of those days. I couldn't tackle a hard project if I tried, so I won't try. I'll recharge, reacquaint myself with my surroundings and my thoughts, get a bunch of little things done, and generally assess my progress on the things that need to get done soon. When this day is over, I'll have a better sense of what needs to happen for the next few days, and in what order it needs to happen.

Such Annoying Confessions!

I mean, seriously. I thought it was funny at first, but now I'm totally ticked off! All these people talking about being the Annoyed Librarian!!! I can't take it any more. I give up. I'm confessing now so that everyone else will stop trying to steal my thunder.

Oh, and yeah. I won't use their annoying graphic, either.

p.s. to the people I work with: Ask me about this.

MLA

I hereby declare a moratorium on thinking up names for library/librarian associations that begin with an M-word. I mean, seriously... how many MLAs does one profession need?!? I realize that this will be difficult for states and areas of study beginning with M, but consider the benefits of having an acronym that actually conveys meaning, that actually names your association.

For those of you who's heads spin whenever somebody mentions "MLA," consider adopting my fool-proof solution: choose one meaning and cram all mentions of that acronym into that particular meaning. For example, since I'm the librarian for languages and literature, the Modern Language Association dominates my life. So from now on, to make things easier, I'll just assume that all mentions of "MLA" refer to that organization. I can't see that this would cause any problems...

Working with our Writing Center

I've written before about working with writing centers. About a year and a half ago the director of our writing center invited me to a joint meeting of writing center professionals and librarians. As is usual with such things, the meeting was great, but the conversations that our campus' writing center professionals and I had on the way to and from the meeting was even better. In fact, it resulted in my being invited to make a 10 minute appearance in the writing consultant orientation the next fall, and for our two services to exchange publicity materials and generally start talking to each other in a new way.

Well, this fall things progressed much further. Rather than repeat my 10-minute appearance at the tutor orientation, the WC director generously handed over a full week of their fall mentor group sessions. (Writing consultants here don't take a course prior to working in our writing center. Instead, they gather for one Saturday early in the term, and then for the rest of the term they meet in small "mentor groups" each week for an hour, during which time they discuss a reading with their writing center mentor. One week may be "Working with ESL students," and another may take on plagiarism. This year, one of the weeks was library week.)

Preparing for these sessions proved to be challenging for several reasons. First, there were logistics. 5 sections of a class in the space of a week puts quite a dent in my calendar, and this year there were some scheduling snafus which will hopefully be ironed out next time we do this. Then there was the challenge of finding a reading that would be appropriate for students, that would give them some touchstone issues to discuss that would be relevant to their work, and that would encapsulated the practical and epistemological worth of the library on an academic campus. Turns out, our profession doesn't really write such thought-pieces in a way that is appropriate for students. Either that or I just couldn't find what was out there. So I assigned a piece James Elmborg had written about writing centers and libraries and how we're a good match.* And finally, I realized that I've become completely dependent on preparing library sessions with an assignment in mind. Not having an assignment stymied my efforts to put this thing together for quite some time. I hadn't realized how dependent I am on using the assignment as a way to prioritize what gets included in a session.

Anyway, at the advice of a co-worker, I finally decided to build the session around a theme of "how we are similar." I hoped that this would give them something to latch onto (since they lacked the grounding force of an assignment, too), and that it would give me a way to work out my own uncertainties about turf.

Yes, I said "turf." Here I am, going around believing that if we librarians feel the need to "own" Information Literacy, we lock ourselves into an unsustainable, less-than-perfectly effective, and ultimately untenable position. Not only are we insufficiently staffed to be the sole purveyors of Information Literacy to our population of undergraduates, but our students need to learn these skills in the context of their other learning if they're to develop any kind of facility or nuanced understanding of the research process. What's more, how can we make the claim that IL is an essential part of a liberal arts education, that it is inherently intertwined with learning on many levels, and then sequester it in the safe confines of the library? And yet, here was I, worried about turning these writing consultants into mini-librarians.

Luckily, my co-workers have wise heads on their shoulders and pointed out that I was worrying for very little reason. The best outcome possible would be to equip these consultants to help their peers think through research problems at point of need, and that they would know enough about what we do to feel comfortable making the decision to refer writers to us when needed.

So these sessions stressed our similarities. Just as consultants "work with to develop writers, not writings," so librarians work to develop good researchers rather than hand over the perfect research. We both deal with citation, so we talked about resources for that and when consultants could, perhaps, want to steer students our way. We both deal with "it's due tomorrow" issues, so we talked through strategies for dealing with these students. Of course, we also covered a few library basics, the "how do I know if this counts as a print source" conundrum (they loved the idea of Ulrich's as a giant cheat sheet of "print" resources), and where to find the research guides that we create for most classes we support.

All of this seemed to go over well, so next term we're stepping it up a notch. The writing center director and I are coordinating support for the "writing rich" courses on campus so that each librarian can know if classes they've been asked to support also have a dedicated writing assistant. If there is a WA, we'll invite them to the course's instruction session so that the WA will have the same understanding of the research involved as do the students we'll all be serving.

Meanwhile, I'm going to try my own little pilot project. I'm going to arm one of my WAs with a reverse sign-up sheet. This way, the WA can identify students would could benefit from an individual session with me, provide me with the students' names, and I can follow up and schedule one-on-one appointments. We'll see how that goes.

*Elmborg, James K. "Locating the Center: Libraries, Writing Centers, and Information Literacy." Writing Lab Newsletter. March, 2006. (Available Online)

Updated Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States chart

Peter Hirtle has updated his Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States chart, the chart for anyone who needs to begin evaluating the copyright status of a work produced in the United States. This version has a new URL, so update any links you had before. The chart also includes new sections on sound recordings and architectural works.

Mental Energy

It takes a certain amount of mental energy to read a book, even a fun book, and recently that mental energy has been prioritized away from such things as reading for pleasure. When I had a minute to myself, I could muster just about enough energy to stare at a wall or watch silly TV shows. But this morning I woke up, rolled over, picked up my book, and read for 2 hours straight. Pippin came and slept like a baby in my arms for a full hour of that time, sighing and pressing his paw gently against my chin whenever I turned a page, before moving down to his tent at the other end of the couch.

It's too bad this feels a little like the calm before the storm. This next week is the dreaded 10th week of our term. Half the week is filled with classes, followed by two reading days, followed by exams. During this time panicky students scramble for last minute research appointments, the tension on campus is suffocating, and we have several days full of candidate interviews. Consequently, while much of the U.S. takes time to honor veterans for their service to our country, my schedule is back-to-back jam packed from 8:15 to 5 on Monday.

But you know? The crazy part of me kind of looks forward to the week ahead. I couldn't tell you why. I just wish I had a week off between now and Monday to sit here with my snoring cat and my book.

Making Connections on Our Campuses: MnObe Ref Fall Round Robin

Yesterday 20 or so reference librarians from the 5 Minnesota Oberlin libraries got together for one of our 3-ish annual meetings. This one was our informal "round robin" gathering where each school reports on what they've been doing recently, generally revolving around a theme. This time's theme was that of connecting with people, organizations, and services on campus. These discussions are always fascinating. In fact, I tend to prefer them to the more formal presentations we do at the other meetings. Throughout this meeting I sat there taking notes on all the cool things the other libraries are doing to connect with their campuses while thinking to myself how lucky I am to have such fascinating, engaged, and imaginative colleagues.

One school has a set of faculty representatives whose job it is to act as a conduit between their fellow faculty members and the librarians. This school is also getting involved in the orientation for study abroad students, setting up library orientation for parents during new student week, and has created an online game (much like Clue) for new students to do before classes start. And that's just one school! Another one gets 25% of their reference questions via a brand new chat reference service.  Here at Carleton we've been involved with campus curricular initiatives, the Writing Center, an ethnographic study on student and faculty use of visual materials, and our re-accreditation process. Several of us talked about ways in which we're integrating library services into course management systems.

I could probably write a book on the cool things these MnObe schools are trying.  We're all building or borrowing online tools, and we're all thinking of ways to simultaneously get our content (and ourselves) out of the library and get our communities to come to the library (physically or otherwise).

But at least as interesting as the topics we covered was the feeling of the conversation. When I first started attending these meetings 3 years ago, even the round robin meeting was pretty formal. Each school had an alloted time period and most people brought handouts or powerpoint slides. Now we've gotten to know each other so much better that we happily sit around a table and spend a couple of hours in informal but productive discussion.

p.s. I'm publishing this from Flock, so we'll see what how it looks.

Blogged with Flock

Getting Back into Meebo Rooms

For those of you who haven't yet gotten back into Meebo rooms after they went kerplunk last week, here's what you've gotta do.

If the room is still in your buddy list, you get to do the short version.

• Open the room. It will probably look like the screenshot to the right.
  
• Click the little bar which, among all the nothingness, looks like it would open the media player (kinda up, kinda right). The room should now look like it's taking on more structure, with spaces for typing and viewing. The problem is, it will still be completely blank. Fear not!
• Close the room with the media area open.
• Open the room. You should be well and truly in the room, and it should even function! You can now keep the media area closed while you're in the room, but be absolutely sure you open it before you leave or you'll have to repeat this whole process. (This is a bug Meebo is working to fix.)

If the room is not on your buddy list any more, you have to do the long version (by which I mean "may take longer and be more annoying" rather than "has more steps").

• Send your Meebo login name to a helpful friend who has access to the room. (If you send the name to an unhelpful friend, I cannot guarantee results.)
• That friend must now add you as a buddy under the Meebo network (not AIM or Google Talk, or any of those other networks).
• Then the friend can enter the room, click "invite," and invite you're Meebo name to the room. The friend may have to "re-invite" you a couple of times (by right-clicking on your grayed out name in the room and selecting "re-invite.")
• When you receive the invitation, be sure to "Join and Add." Soon, the room should appear in your "recent rooms" area on the buddy list. Remember to make sure the media area is open before you close the room, though, or you'll have to do the steps above.

And there you have it! Meebo says they're working on the two bugs that require the media area to be open and that have disabled the "Become a Member" button in the rooms.

Oh, and may I just say that Meebo people are awesome! I sent them an email explaining the problems we were seeing. They wrote back and forth with me for a couple of days getting all sorts of additional information. Then they even sent MeeboTester3 into our room to hang out for part of an afternoon and do some mysterious tests. A few of us spent time explaining to the tester what we were seeing and the work-arounds we'd figured out. In the end, Dorothea was the one who figured out the media area trick and told the Meebo Tester. Woohoo for beating things with rocks!

On Appearances and Legitimacy

For quite a while, now, I've been simultaneously intrigued and disheartened by how much we have to wade through assumptions in order to be taken seriously.

That's a very vague sentence, partially because it has to be. Here's an example of what I mean. Another librarian was telling me about her feeling that people who approach her for help must assume she won't be expert in database searching because that involves interacting with computers, and surely she can't be comfortable working with computers at her age, right? She commented that it's probably a lot easier for me to gain trust simply because someone my age is assumed to be highly computer proficient. I, on the other hand, had just been feeling like being 20 or so years older would help people trust me because, after all, how could anyone my age have the experience necessary to be an expert at anything?

In my experience and that of other librarians I've talked to, administrators, consultants, the occasional professor, and even other librarians can take a rather indulgent attitude toward young-uns like me. "You're so young" becomes a complicated statement. Is this a problem? Are you surprised that I'm young because I did a good job? Are you surprised that I did a good job because I'm young? Or is it an explanation for a less-than-perfect interaction?

Because of this, on the days when I'm in important meetings, interacting with new professors, or doing anything else where I need to be taken seriously, I feel like I have to work harder to make the pace and pitch of my speech function on a professional level, and my clothes have to be just so (not too business-ish, because that's just not me, but no too casual either). This is especially important during the beginning of Fall Term when there are lots of new staff and faculty on campus whom I need to condition into interacting with me as a professional. Basically, I engage in an elaborate process of appearing legitimate.

This plays out in ways I hadn't anticipated. I had never considered, for example, that there would be people who might use relative amounts of busy-ness as a measure of legitimacy (this was especially true at one job I had in grad school). Once, a long time ago, a researcher "thanked" me for spending so much time on his research question while pointedly implying that having this kind of time to help him must mean that I was probably being paid too much for the amount of work I contributed to the library. At various other times, people have "complemented" me on things like this blog or an updated research guide or a report delivered on time and backed up with evidence, but they've left me feeling terrible rather than bolstered. I'm sure you've heard it: the "you're so lucky you have time to do this kind of thing." Complements like this can sap the energy right out of me because the implication is that I'm not busy "enough" to be a legitimate member of my department. (Note that simply complementing me on something that takes time is not a bad thing. Anything but. It's the "you must not be as busy as everyone else if you have time to do that" kind of thing that I'm talking about here.)

Whether people actually perceive me as too young or not busy enough I don't know. Just as I had never thought to question my friend's computer competence, maybe people don't actually question my experience or time management skills. But I've heard many librarians express the need to fight these real or imagined assumptions, so in the end it doesn't matter so much if they're true or not. What matters is that we're think they're true, and so we work against them. In fact, whether consciously or unconsciously, we work against them so continuously that when we hear comments about age or expertise or... whatever it is each of us worries about, we are left to wonder if we're hearing complements, insults, or simple statements of fact.

I wish I could say with confidence that I'll just decide not to think about this anymore, but I don't think it's that simple. And I don't think it's just me. I think this plagues a lot of people. It's not like we go around second guessing everything anybody says to us. Context and tone are really important, as always. But I've been wondering for the past year or so if this is connected with something inherent to our profession (and other similar professions) or if it's just part of human nature and our constant quest to be useful and respected. What I do know is that there are better things by which to measure legitimacy than relative appearance of busy-ness, age, or any other appearance. I just don't know how to completely divorce appearance from reality.

Too Soon

It snowed today. Just a little. Not enough to leave any evidence. ... It's too soon for such things.

Reflections

It's been kind of a rough Fall Term for me. Beginning a month before classes started, I've been swamped. Then classes actually started.... Not pretty. For a few weeks there I came as close to being truly overwhelmed as I ever have. And according to the normal order of things, that's precisely when more deadlines appeared and my support systems crumbled. But I survived. I'm out of shape, I've had a lingering cold for a month now, and I feel like I could sleep for a week, but I survived.

The term (which ends in two weeks) wasn't all bad, though. There were exhilarating moments, happy moments, and moments of clarity where isolated incidents gelled into identifiable trends. I also started to feel, for the first time, that I might be on the verge of understanding where I fit into the constellation of people and functions and services on my campus. By necessity, my skin is thicker than it was 8 weeks ago; I've learned to bury certain fears deep inside of me in order to get things done, only freeing them once I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, replaying my day for analysis, critique, and release. All in all, the prospect of upcoming classes on unfamiliar research topics, or that late-night email from a student in desperate need of help with some impossible research question, or even the task of telling a professor to trust me that students can't possibly learn everything there is to know about library research in 20 minutes... these things used to paralyze me. Now they cause some anxiety, but nothing to bowl me over.

At this point, I think I'm finally almost qualified to hold the job that I have. And I mean that in all seriousness. My first year here, my amazing co-workers held my hand through everything from class-planning to composing emails. My second year I was able to teach and meet with students and sit at the reference desk with more ease, but I still felt a little like I was pretending to be a librarian and that at any point a student might stand up in the middle of the room and accuse me of being the impostor that I was. And how would I deny it? By showing my diploma? This year, I've finally begun to feel that I contribute to the team I work with. I no longer feel like it's evidence against me if I can't answer a question; it's just part of life and reason to thank my lucky stars that I have amazing co-workers to whom I can refer the question.

I can't wait until qualification blooms into expertise. It'll happen, but it'll take time. I'm schooling myself to patience.

A Wise Woman Once Said...

... The more you grow as a professional, the more often you'll end up referring questions to others.

"Teaching the Computer" and Other Fun Substitutes for Boolean Searching

I've been doing a lot more teaching and research consulting this term than ever before, and lately I've kind of fallen into a different way of teaching complex searches. I used to be more explicit about using boolean to build those wonderful long strings, complete with parentheses and all that jazz. Unsurprisingly, this method left students impressed, but slightly baffled.

Lately, I've started "teaching the computer" each of my concepts in turn, and then using the search history to combine the concepts. This started with my senior thesis writers who needed ways to manage immense strings of MLA International Bibliography controlled vocabulary terms. I'd teach them to mine the thesaurus for broad and narrow terms for each of the concepts, explaining why the rules of indexing require that they include even the narrowest terms they could find (which I talked about here). And then, after we'd gathered as many broad and narrow terms as we could for each major concept, we'd hop over to the search history and combine the concepts. Et voila! Beautiful search results (most of the time).

Now I'm trying this out on less advanced students who are having trouble with the concept of combining terms. I help them "teach the computer" each of their concepts and then combine concepts. So, in ProQuest (for example) I might have the student brainstorm all the possible words associated with the concept "poverty" and string them across the top search box using OR "to let the computer know that any one of these could fit my concept." Then move the cursor to the next search box and start stringing together words associated with illness and health care, again putting an OR between each term. Suddenly, our result set has tons of good articles about the relationship between poverty and disease.

Something about the process of describing a concept to a computer and then having the computer find the overlap between concepts seems to be easier to grasp than the more technical process of combining terms and groups of terms. Maybe it means that we have to juggle fewer terms and concepts in our short-term memories. Maybe it means that we can chunk up the process into easier steps rather than thinking of the search as one massive and frustrating step. Who knows... I'm not a cognitive psychologist. But my advanced students especially seem to reach that "ah-ha" moment pretty quickly and move on to adapt it to their own needs. It's early days yet with my less advanced students, but so far I've seen a few of them repeating the process without a hitch. And several times, I've gotten the feeling that my consultations were shorter because the students reached that point of feeling able to go and try this on their own more quickly.

Unfortunately for my ego, this leaves students less impressed with my librarian-ish super powers... after all, anybody can think up words that describe a concept. Ah well. I suppose there's some value in having people think they could do this without my help. :)