Carleton is an Excellent Library!

It's official. Carleton College is this year's recipient of ACRL's Excellence in Academic Libraries award in the college library division!!!!! (press release)

I've said it before, but I can't say it enough: I'm so lucky to work with such a dedicated and creative bunch of co-workers, and I'm so lucky to be able to work with them in a library and on a campus like this one. Reading over the essay that my colleague, Matt, wrote for the award application, I realized yet again how much I've learned by working with this group and how much I value their energy, their creativity, and their friendship. They are Teh Awesome!

Is "Traditional Reference" Dead?

I've been mulling over this question for the last couple of years, but I returned to it after reading these conference notes posted at A Wandering Eyre. (I know, I know, that was months ago. But I've been mulling, remember?) In particular, there were a couple of lines in those notes where "Jane" paraphrased Joe Janes and then added her own commentary in brackets.

Now there is a lot of stuff and people can find it or they can find something. There are lots of ways to get help. Traditional reference is not going to work. [Mr. Janes is exceptionally humorous, but he is right. Traditional reference is not going to serve the needs of our users.]

I wasn't at that conference, and I'm not even directly responding to this passage. But this is a refrain I hear over and over among librarians, and every time I hear it, I think I must have missed something. I assume that "face to face" is implied by this form of reference, as well as "reference interview" and some form of question-resolving activity. And some form of these ingredients continues to make up a major portion of my work. Maybe the problem is that I've only been a reference librarian for almost 3 years. Maybe I never experienced this "traditional" form of my job that everyone thinks is breathing its last gasps.

But if we envision our service as one which helps students understand how to tackle questions and why tackling them in particular ways is might be important, is this "traditional" reference or something different? And if we notice growing numbers of students coming to us for this kind of help at the desk and in our offices, and if we're hearing that students are coming to us because their professors or their roommates or their best friends suggested it, wouldn't that mean that these services are, in fact, serving their needs?

The kinds of questions we get, and the way that students approach us leads me to believe that reference is not dead or even dying.* I think reference is alive and well just like the English language is alive and well. It isn't bound by the same rules and expectations as it was once, and new rules have emerged over time, but that doesn't mean that the basics have fundamentally shifted or become irrelevant. Rather than being gatekeepers of information, we're now expert in weeding through too much information, but we're still helping people fill their information needs. We've added new methods of communication over time (I imagine telephone reference was at one time regarded as new), but we're still in the business of communicating with people to figure out what they need.

So if by "traditional reference" you mean "a service which requires people to approach a desk and ask a librarian a question, face to face, as their only method of posing a question, and a service which will respond to these questions by handing back factual answers," then yes, I think that kind of service is has evolved and been subsumed into a much broader service. But it does not necessarily follow that desks, physical spaces, or even librarians are obsolete. These are just the tools, and only a subset of the tools available to us now; any tool can be put to good or bad use. The service that makes use of these tools is the key. And that service reinvents itself every time a new person presents us with a question, every time we work together to figure out how best to resolve the question, and every time present strategies and tips and, yes, even answers in a way that makes sense to for that question at that time in that context.

-----

* Of course, it may just be that my particular circumstances and community keep reference a vital part of what I do. As students here have grown to rely on the other two prongs of our service (instruction and individual appointments), we've noticed that they bring more and more "long" questions to the reference desk. They're perfectly able to find many of the answers to fact-based questions on their own (which is why our "short" question total has diminished over time), but they come to the desk for in-depth help, research strategy development, or just plain old help getting started in an unfamiliar research territory. I've also already talked about why our particular library benefits from a centralized location where a librarian can be found at predictable hours and how we supplement that service with our appointment model and with a low-key IM reference service. But these are outgrowths of our particular institution and our students' culture, so I understand that generalization is difficult in practice, however wonderful in theory.

Taking the Plunge

I was probably in my teens before I realized that didn't like the fact that I don't know Japanese. Until then, it'd just been another language that other people knew and I didn't. My dad knew ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew (and a whole host of other long-dead languages), and I didn't, and that wasn't a problem. My ballet teacher and his pianist spoke Russian, and I didn't, and that wasn't a problem (though I did learn a few words, and the alphabet). I was learning Latin and French, but I didn't know them as well as my dad and my mom, and that wasn't a problem. My parents both spoke Japanese, and I didn't, and all of a sudden, this was a source of frustration.

I realized that it wasn't okay with me that I needed parents to mediate if I wanted to talk to one whole branch of my family. At the same time, though, it seemed like such a monumental task to learn that particular language. I knew I'd drive myself nuts by not getting the accent right. (I can't understand many words, but because I grew up around the language, a bad accent is like nails on a chalkboard.) I was also intimidated by the challenge of learning two syllabaries and a character set. And I think there was an element of not wanting to struggle to learn something that my parents just knew. I'm also just not really great at learning languages, though I do love them.

Well... yesterday I took the plunge and ordered a course in Japanese from Rosetta Stone, and today I bought a Japanese-English/English-Japanese dictionary. I think it's finally time to admit that I'll never learn this language by wishing it. It'll take work. And it'll be worth it.

I'm so excited. Why am I also nervous?

Flying Books

A bunch of reference librarians from various liberal arts colleges in the state gathered today to discuss the future of the reference collection. These meetings are always fun because the reference librarians at these schools are such great people. We do a lot of joking and laughing at these meetings (in addition to discussing weighty topics and sharing our recent experiments and innovations).


Well, today, one group was describing its library's process of deselecting about 40% of their reference collection. The question came up, did you move books to other areas in the library or get rid of them? And if you get rid of them, where do they go? Well, we were laughing about the idea of Reference Work Purgatory and some books just "flying away" to a better place when the projection screen saver started up. It was about 20 or 30 books that were flapping and flying around the screen.

Gales of laughter ensued.

It's All in the Family

What's a boy to do when he has a paper due and his library's reference desk isn't open any more? Call his librarian big sister, of course! And this he did, several months ago. I was driving up to a swing dance and got a call that went something like this...

"Ok, so you're in PsychINFO now? What color is the screen, and are their 9 search boxes in a grid?... there are? Good, that means you have the same interface as I do. Ok, so scroll down about half way and select "Empirical Study" from the "Methodology" box, and select "animal" from the "population" box. Now try your search and be sure to switch the drop-down boxes next to the search boxes from "Anywhere" to "Keywords." Ok... now tell me about your search results..."

This went on for almost an hour and finished (luckily) just as I arrived at the dance. In the end I'd talked him through the thesaurus and combining searches in the search history (and thanked my lucky stars that his school gets PsychINFO through CSA just like we do). I'd also scolded him for putting this off beyond the point of being able to check with his own librarians. That's the part of the reference interview that really and truly diverted from the norm.

Earlier this month I spent part of my parents' visit finding some specialized sources for my Dad's research, and then figuring out how to get access to the stuff we found. (Luckily, I used to work at his school's library, so we could talk through who to ask about a special form that let's him go borrow from area research libraries.)

Last year at a family reunion, I spent an afternoon looking up and identifying ancient Japanese coins so that my uncles and aunt could figure out what it was that my grandpa had collected over the years.

I was reminded of these incidents by some fragment of a crazy dream I had last night. I've already forgotten the dream, but it got me to thinking about how often people turn to the people they know when asking for help. I help my campus community as much as I'm able, day in and day out, in a large part because I make it my business to remind them that they should ask me for help. But then there are my friends and family. These are people who have access to their own librarians, or Google, but I get "reference" questions from them all the time because they know me, Iris, and by extension know that I'm kinda inclined to find things for people. I'm also just there in their lives. They don't have to go out and ask a question because I'm already there.

But now it's time to get ready for work. I'll leave this to ponder another day.

As Federated Search Matures, What Is Possible and What Still Isn't?

Over the course of the past few months (well, years actually, but more recently it's become a higher priority project and less of a "watch and see" project), Carleton and St. Olaf have been exploring federated search as a joint option for our two libraries. It's entailed many meetings and informal discussions, quite a bit of research, and significant time imagining scenarios and functions and services.

The good news is that federated search products have improved, even compared to last winter. Metalib, for example, has what looks like a slick set-up which would allow me to quickly and easily select databases that might be useful at the course- or assignment-level and to create a search box that will let my students explore just those resources. In fact, this more focused use of the system strikes me as incredibly appealing. I can imagine using this for almost every class I serve, but especially for the interdisciplinary classes. I would also look forward to using a federated search tool to look up a known item. You know the kind of search... you know the author or the title but not where it was published, and you have to go searching through 25 or 30 databases just to get a complete citation. These frustrating sessions could be a thing of the past just like the similarly frustrating hunts for full text access were squashed by our link resolver.

Encouraging this kind of use of the tool while discouraging its use as a kind of Library Google wouldn't be so hard, I think. It would mean limiting exposure to the "search every database under the sun" search box, and placing all kinds of subject-specific search boxes in the places where students will be likely to find and use them. I can imaging search boxes on every research guide, and I bet professors would be happy to put course-specific search boxes into their pages in our Course Management System. We'd have to be careful how we labeled and described these pages or we'd end up with the "every search box searches everything" problem all over again. But I think this could accomplished, and what's more, I think it could serve our students well.

At the same time that these exciting possibilities exist, though, federated search is still not up to par as a Library Google, or even a tool for pointing students toward subject-specific databases. Not by a long shot. Do a keyword search for "psychology" and you still won't get many results from PsychINFO, simply because the word "psychology" has very little descriptive value in a database wholly devoted to that subject, so it isn't used very often in that database. Because of this, the tool can't even serve as a pointing device to get students into a subject-appropriate database. All it'd point toward would be Academic Search Premier, and ProQuest.

But will the students be satisfied anyway? We hear all the time that they don't want the "best" sources as long as they find stuff that's "good enough," so we should provide access to some system that would supply "good enough" easily. Well, I didn't necessarily agree with that line of reasoning to begin with, but in the last couple of years my co-workers and I have repeatedly experienced proof that general results from ASP and ProQuest do NOT satisfy our students. We have students who refuse to search ProQuest because of the sheer number of hits, many of which are irrelevant to their needs. If I do an example search in class and come up with 500 hits, a common response is, "But how do you ask it for more specific things? Isn't that a lot to look through?" Seeing students flock away from ASP and ProQuest makes me think that an even more general search tool would not go over well in the long run.

And, of course, there's the problem of the frustration and instruction time involved in helping students navigate collections of collections, but I've already written about that at length here. All I'll add is that the one class of freshmen described there ended up requiring multiple sessions of clarification in class, time spend writing up detailed instructions that could be linked from the Course Management System, 7-8 hours of one-on-one time in my office, and about 4 hours of reference desk time, all told. And all that to accomplish a simple exploratory assignment that lead them through a collection of collections. And while I don't grudge that time at all (I learned a lot by helping them through it, and it gave me excuses to teach them so much more than navigating American Memory), I can only imagine the amount of instruction and desk time we'd sink into a poorly implemented federated search product. Far from being a time-saver, I think it'd be a time-sink.

So at this point in the federated search life-cycle, I think it's finally become useful if implemented smartly, but it hasn't yet become useful as a monolithic library search tool. If we end up getting one of these things, I actually look forward to coming up with a careful and creative implementation that will maximize its benefits and minimize its faults. I think we could end up having a positive influence on our students' search experience and outcomes if we do this well, just as I think both the experience and the outcomes will be disappointing if we do this poorly.

I have only one goal, and that is to serve my students well. I just wish I knew exactly what that would look like at this point. Even though I'm on the committee that's supposed to recommend a tool to our libraries and should therefore be in a position to know which way we'll go, I'm waiting with bated breath to see what we decide. The suspense is killing me!

RSS Spam

Warning! Everything I said here is apparently out of date. Two weeks ago this was all true, but kindly friends just pointed out to me that you can now go into "settings" and then "friends" and click "hide" next to each of your friends' names. Yay!!!! Now please excuse me while I go slap my own hand for not double checking... Perpetual beta bites again. :-)

I've been happily reading my feeds in Google Reader all month, and this time, I think it's matured enough that I'll forget about my Bloglines account for good. I'm still experiencing oddness with the "all items" having phantom new items, but like I said, I've decided to find this amusing. But there's one thing that I really really don't appreciate. It's the spam.

That's right. Google Reader has seen fit to force us to receive feeds we didn't subscribe to by pushing feeds from people in our Gmail address books into our readers. The only way to "opt out" of this gift that keeps on giving is to delete friends from our address books. Here's what the Google Reader help screen says about managing your Google Reader Friends list:

Reader's friend list comes from the list of people you can chat with on Google Talk or Gmail chat. To invite friends to see your Reader shared items, simply invite them to chat. To remove them, delete them from your Gmail contacts, or from your Talk list.

So there you have it. You can either have gmail/gtalk contacts or you can have a feed reader that only shows you the feeds to which you've subscribed. Odd.

Even though I like the people in my contact list, I did not subscribe to those feeds. In fact, I'm now getting some feeds that I've deliberately unsubbed in the past. I'm also getting duplicates of some feeds that I already have in my reader. In my book, these unsolicited messages count as spam. It's information coming at me that I didn't ask for, don't want, and can't turn off.

The first thing I did when I set up my account was to check to see what items I might be shoving in other people's faces without meaning to, and then to turn that feature off where ever possible. I never ever click "share," and I've made sure that my starred items aren't shared (since that's how I save items for later). I sincerely hope I'm not spamming my friends, and I'm so disappointed in Google for forcing friends to bend over backwards so as not to spam each other. Seems like it'd be such an easy thing to add a "do not show me friend's shared items" option, or even a "show me only those shared items from the following friends" option.

Subversive Handouts: One Librarian's Secret Weapon

I've recently (within the last year and a half) taken to the idea of handouts. Real, printed, paper handouts. I almost never list specific resources on those handouts, though, since I save that kind of thing for the online guide that goes with each class (unless I have a good reason to think the class will want a paper cheat-sheet). That kind of handout works well with some teachers and some students, but I've never been able to pull it off to my satisfaction. Instead I create what I've affectionately termed "subversive handouts."

Before you get too worried, I should say that the name came from my very first incarnation of this thing and is no longer an accurate description of the genre. I'd been asked one too many times to do an "everything the class will need to know about research in 10-15 minutes, please" session. All efforts to get more time failed, so instead I paired the class down to the two small tasks that I thought the students would need most... and I created my very first subversive handout. This listed the two things they'd learn that day at the top, continued with a lengthy list of catchy and interesting/important sounding skills they could ask me about later, and concluded with my contact information and the URL for my calendar at the bottom.

The idea was threefold:
1) Students would still get a little concrete information and a chance to see my face (invaluable if they're supposed to come make individual appointments with me later).
2) They'd have their imaginations jogged about the kinds of things they didn't know were possible, or the skills they didn't know they needed to learn.
3) The professor would see that "everything they need to know" encompassed a whole lot more than the library catalog and finding journal articles. And I won't lie; in this original case, this third point was the most important to me.

And you know what? It worked. I ended up staying 15 minutes past time as the professor and students asked me questions off of that handout during class time. That meant I had effectively doubled my face-to-face time for with that class, and everyone was engaged and asking questions.

Since then I've used the "Here's what we learned today... Here's what you can ask me about any time... Here's how you can get help..." handout in many, many classes. And while they're useful for lots of kinds of classes, they're particularly good for two kinds of sessions: those like the one I described above, and those where the professors know full well that the primary goal of a short session is to introduce their students to me so that the students will be more likely to come see me with their research conundrums later. And my original experience of having professors and students alike ask questions from the handout while still in class has held true of almost every session for which I've created one of these. (Here's an example of one I created for a class I taught earlier this week.)

Even though I almost never create these handouts with the primary goal of educating the professor any more, the name has stuck. It's just so fun to knuckle down to the task of creating a handout and be able to rub my fingers together and imagine myself scheming minor subversion. (Imagine shifty eyes and a monologue populated with mutterings such as "They didn't know they'd want to know about THIS.... Mwa-ha-ha-ha.") This little bit of fiction is all it takes to make a mundane task feel interesting every single time. Which I suppose means that I'm easily amused.

The Joys of Journal Searching in the MLA International Bibliography.

This morning's class was one of those typical classes: Teach these students how to find journal articles in the MLA International Bibliography, please. Nothing very remarkable in that. But for some reason, today's class went remarkably well. It was one of those classes where you leave feeling all glowy and like you'd actually made a real difference. And you know what I discovered? Of all things, I love teaching the MLA International Bibliography and citation best.

The MLA-IB is such a difficult-to-use database, and yet it's the bedrock of almost all of the research done in language and literature (the disciplines that I serve). So to have finally figured out how to unlock it for my students has been such a huge relief! It took me more than two years of working with it and with my students to figure out how to tease information out of it and how to explain that process to students, but I think I've finally gotten to the point where I can say with confidence that I'm covering the important concepts and significantly changing my students' searching capabilities in the process. I'll even go so far as to say that I can usually pull this off in an interesting way... which is probably the glowy feeling talking, but I'll go with it.

I can't even describe how happy this makes me. I've struggled for a while to figure out what unique skills I bring to the amazing group I work with, and I think at long last I can say with confidence that there ARE search skills and strategies that are unique to my disciplines and that I now have some expertise in deploying.

I've also discovered another secret weapon, The Subversive Handout, which I'll write about later. (How's that for a librarian cliff-hanger?) ;-)

Come Work With Me?

We've re-opened the search for a new (as in "additional" rather than "replacement) Social Sciences librarian.

From the job ad:

Carleton College seeks an innovative and energetic librarian to join us in our lively and imaginative program of information resources and services in a liberal arts setting. Within this dynamic library, the Reference and Instruction programs emerge out of and are informed by the skills, interest, and passions of the members of the Reference team. This is an ideal position for an individual who is 1) looking for an opportunity to work in a liberal arts institution focused on teaching, in collaboration with an unusually fine group of students, faculty, and colleagues; 2) committed to excellence in teaching and student learning; and 3) deeply rooted in and excited about a social sciences discipline.

When the Social Gets Personal

We in library land spend a lot of time talking about the "social" web. We create Facebook profiles, MySpace pages, sign up for Twitter, and let people know what we're thinking by writing blog entries, commenting on blog entries, and IMing each other... and that's just scratching the surface. There are more social spaces online than any one person could possibly keep up with in a lifetime. And they serve several distinct (and sometimes conflicting) roles. We talk about wanting to seem more relevant and approachable, inserting ourselves were our patrons are, "personalizing" the library. We also use these tools to build our own professional networks, exchange professional wisdom, troubleshoot problems, give encouragement, and just plain hang out with each other. Beyond that, I'm sure lots of librarians have a personal space or two online where they can connect with friends and family on a less-library-related footing.

I don't know why it continues to surprise me, given the shear volume of interaction, that the social web is more than just social. It's personal. I don't mean "bare the hidden secrets of your family" or "gossip about people" personal. That's almost never advisable. No, I mean "act kind of like an extended family" personal. For someone who's never had boatloads of friends (being content with a few really good ones), I hadn't expected to develop such close ties with people I'd never seen in real life. I still marvel that several of my very best friends don't know what my voice sounds like when I'm excited, or have never decoded the set of my jaw and realized that I'm concentrating.

Even so, some of these people know me better than my extended family does (and mine is a fairly close-knit extended family). They know when I'm bursting with good news, when I've had a rough day, and when Pippin has snuggled in for a good cuddle-n-purr session. And what really gets me is this: they actually care to hear these things, just like I care to hear about similar things from them. Personally, I can't imagine most of my cousins being interested in that kind of information.

This kind of personal affection and interest was highlighted this week when somebody in one of these social circles was killed in a car accident. I didn't know this person at all. Our two circles overlapped, but we'd never "met." And yet, the ripples of the tragedy spread quickly as the woman's friends expressed shock and disbelief and spread this to their friends, who spread it to their friends, and so on. Very quickly, an entire social network seemed to have slowed to a crawl as everyone lost the will to share trivial thoughts in the face of such events. (The woman was young... my age, in fact, with very young children.)

And that's when I realized that the social web is more than social. It's personal. It's intimate. And it is immensely powerful, though not necessarily in the way I'd thought before. It's not enough just to "be where the patrons are." I've never thought that sounded right, somehow. I'd hear that phrase and imagine it being like standing in the lobby of a dorm feeling foolish and not doing anyone any good. No, being involved with an online social network more than that. And if we don't admit that to ourselves, I think we set ourselves up for stress, anxiety, and disappointment.

New Blog About Federated Search

Thanks to Digitization 101 for pointing out that there is now a blog devoted to the world of federated search called, you guessed it, Federated Search Bog. It's put out there by Deep Web Technologies but apparently will not be promoting that company's product.

Class: Citation as a Lens for Interdesciplinarity

By popular request from my twitterish friends, here is the basic gist of the class I taught today.

Context:
One of the amazing professors here (I have to say that, she's reading this :P ) teaches a class which, being interdisciplinary and being a lower level course, often ends up introducing students to the world of interdisciplinarity. So this professor and I have decided to prime the students' brains early in the term for two concepts: there are different disciplines out there and they each have their own conventions for good reason, and you'll have to follow one of these conventions soon, so here are the basics.

Class (PPT):

• Citation has many goals, and avoiding plagiarism is only one of these goals (and frankly, the least interesting of the bunch, in my opinion... see my opinion). These goals have to do with the fact that writing is enherently communicative, and communication happens primarily within a community of inquiry. As you read throughout this term, see if you can determine a little bit about each authors' relationship to research and to his/her community of inquiry simply based on the citations included in each piece of writing. Citation...
  
• Shows respect for your community
  
• Communicates clearly within a community (like jargon)
• Reveals what kinds of evidence are most important to a community
• Builds context for your argument
• Gives credit where credit is due
• There are three interlinked rules that all citation styles strive for:
• Rule of Least Confusion (get your readers to exactly what you want them to see)
• Rule of Brevity (Accomplish the first rule as succinctly as possible)
• Rule of Readability (I know... doesn't seem like any style accomplishes this one)
  
• EXERCISE: Working in groups, look at these three journal articles and build your own citation style that fulfills the three rules of citation and that reflects the values of the "community of inquiry" that is your class. Report back what you decided to include, exclude, and why.
• Comparing MLA, APA, and Chicago (show citation to the same work, three different ways)
• MLA is designed specifically for the “softer” humanities, such as languages, literature, and the like. This style foregrounds authors and their works and chooses to mention but not highlight dates, since most of these disciplines don’t do as much time-sensitive research (works of literature rarely become “obsolete”). The important evidence in this field is often the words that particular authors wrote, so the author and title are the two most salient pieces of information.
• APA highlights authors and dates. It serves many of the harder sciences, and information in these disciplines can quickly become obsolete. What would you think if a person gave you computer instructions based on a manual from 1992? Most of the information in that book would be out of date and therefore not useable.
  
• Chicago Manual of Style is somewhere in between MLA and APA. It is especially useful for interdisciplinary work, which is as likely to use time-sensitive material as it is to use material that is not time-sensitive. It foregrounds the author and the work, but it acknowledges that the date and the publication itself may also be important to the author’s argument. Footnotes bring this information to the reader’s attention at the point when the author quotes or makes reference to another author. The bibliography provides a summary of all the works cited in the document, allowing the reader to go out and easily find all the author’s sources.
  
• Basic Elements of Chicago, and examples of citations for the primary kinds of works (this is the nitty-gritty details bit)

So there you have it. That's what I was up to today. Since I wasn't actually teaching the mechanics of Chicago style and was concentrating on how to read its citations and what the citations could tell you about how useful the works themselves would be, I didn't spend long on the nitty gritty bits. In all, this was a 40-minute session.

Since we're talking citation, I should mention that I out-n-out stole my views on citation as a function of disciplinary priorities from one of my esteemed co-workers. But I was really excited to see how that kind of thinking could help me move this class toward a richer understanding of interdisciplinarity.

Strategically Planning for Library Technology

Here's a not-so-hypothetical question for you: What key technologies or kinds of technological trends should go into a three-year strategic plan for library technology?

Just brainstorming here, some of these are in the works and some of them may not be appropriate... but hey, I'm brainstorming.

• Get a new catalog (boy, do I ever wish!)
  
• Better platform for research guides (more interactive, less massive-block-of-text-ish, etc)
• Clickers for classrooms?
  
• Better space for assistive technology in the library
• Evaluate space in terms of increased laptop usage and make printing from laptops possible
• What about making the library mobile-computing friendlier?
• Do we know what technology will be needed as we plan and implement a data service?
• Implement federated search
• Continue with the on-going project of evaluating/tweaking the library site
• Continue to explore ways of integrating library services into Moodle
• Continue to collaborate with the IT department as much as possible
• Create better space for the manipulation/creation of multi-media projects
  
• Here's a vague one: keep thinking about how to make stuff easier to get to online.
• I don't remember where we are on our digitization initiatives, but I'm sure that'll be part of this.
• Continue to look for ways to put help at point of need.... that's another vague one.

I don't know what other departments will want or need, but luckily, I'm not the only one thinking of stuff to add to this plan.

I enjoy taking time to think about this kind of thing, but at the same time it feels weird. I already feel like if I want to try something, I can, and if our department needs to use or implement new technology, we get the support we need. So I guess I need to stop thinking of it as a "here's what we wish we could do" document and more of a "here's what we're likely to want to try" document.

But I know I haven't thought of everything. In fact, I feel a little less kept-up on emerging trends right now than I have before because I had to put other priorities ahead of that one last term. So what am I missing?

Wishing to Track Students Better

I really wish there were an easy way to keep track of which students I'd taught in classroom situations, and what I'd taught them. With a population of just under 2000, it's entirely possible that I'll start seeing some of them over and over now that I'm getting invited to meet with more classes.

Now, I very rarely teach the same library session twice simply because each session is (hopefully) tailored to the needs of a specific assignment or set of assignments, and even if the same assignment comes up in future years there's usually a new resource or something that keeps me on my toes. But there are a couple of components of these sessions that I find myself teaching over and over again in different contexts: the MLA International Bibliography, for example, or getting your hands on the actual text of an article, or the disciplinary importance and conventions of citation. Wouldn't it be nice if I had some way of knowing if most of the students in an upcoming class had already practiced with one or more of these components and would want me to approach them in new and interesting ways? Even if I still had to cover the MLA IB because they needed something new or because a few of the students hadn't worked with it before, wouldn't it be nice if I knew to change things up enough that it would keep the interest of the veterans while still feeding the newbies what they needed?

I keep notes about this kind of thing for my individual appointments, and it really helps when this year's seniors come to me for help with their senior theses and I can look back over the sessions I've had with them in past years to figure out what they might be expected to know already, and where I can push them to grow a little more in their research prowess.

Alas, I just can't think of a good way to keep on top of this for the classroom situations, though. I mean, I could create a database that allowed me to describe the components of a class and link that class to all it's enrolled students. Filtering by class could help me see what I'd included for that course number over the years. Filtering by student would show me if I'd seen individuals more than once, and what they'd supposedly learned from me. But honestly, I don't think I'd be able to keep up with it.

Has anyone else done anything like this? How?

It Happened... At Long Last

I've tried Google Reader several times in the last year. I kept hearing other librarians falling head over heals in love with it and wondering what I'd missed. But each time there was something that fundamentally disrupted my feed reading flow. I couldn't have labels I wanted (it didn't like having multiple labels having the same beginning word for a while there), I couldn't rearrange the order of the feeds and simply could not function with that draconian an adherence to alphabetical order... lots of little things.

But over the past few days, Bloglines hung up on me one too many times and I thought I'd test out Google Reader again. After all, with the world of perpetual beta you never know if the problems that irked you 2 months ago will have been solved. And lo and behold! They had been. I imported my feed collection with no problems, rearranged my feeds to my heart's content, and began reading away.

The only thing I don't like is that it forces me to see what other friends in my gmail address book are reading. It's not that I don't like these people or their feeds. It's that I don't have the time, and I don't have the will power NOT to click on a link that's bold with new items. That new-item bold is hardwired into me as something that needs to be cleaned up NOW.

But I think I'll stick it out this time. Hopefully in the next few months they'll add a preference that kills this particular version of water torture.

Update: I cannot for the life of me figure out the "All Items" link in Google Reader. It routinely has more items listed than the sum of all my new items below it. In fact, I just clicked on that link and read all the items in it... the screen is now blank of new items, and it STILL says I have 13 new items. I don't! If I do, I can't see them. Grumble.

Update 2: After a few days of watching the phantom "new items" number climb and climb for no known reason, they suddenly disappeared this morning in the middle of my blog reading. Yay! Now it works as I want it to work (except for the annoying Friends Shared Items thing... but I'll deal).

Last Update, I promise: So it appears that I get to cycle through weirdness and normalcy. The phantom "new items" number grows and grows each day until one day it realizes that it's lying and clears itself. It stays clear for a day or two, and then grows again. I've decided to find this amusing.

Let the Pilot Begin!

I spent a good portion of today working out the logistics of a new pilot program we're trying. I'm so excited to see if it works, it's not even funny!

But first, the background. Our writing center contacts professors who will be teaching WR ("writing rich") courses across the curriculum to see if these professors would like a writing assistant assigned specifically to their classes. So, for example, a bunch of English courses and a handful of sociology/anthropology, PoliSci, and History classes promise to provide their students with a portion of the intensive writing experience that's required for graduation. And professors teaching these courses have the option of working closely with a single writing assistant who will shepherd enrolled students through all the writing assignments.

Well, last year the director of the our writing center and I began scheming ways to make our two operations work together more closely. I attended a writing professionals' mini-conference with her. She invited me to start training new writing assistants. And this winter we're taking it a step further.

She provided me with a list of courses that have a writing assistant assigned to them. Each week at our departmental meeting, I'll check with the other librarians to see if they've been asked to work with any of these WR courses. If they have, they will contact the writing assistant for those courses in invite the assistants to the library session. That way the writing assistant will understand the research process and options when working with each of the enrolled students. They'll also be encouraged to send students our way when they read drafts.

I'm going to choose one course to take this set-up one step further, just to see how it goes. I'm going to have one writing assistant take down the names of student that could use a librarian's help and (with the students' permission, of course) hand that list over to me. I'll then initiate the contact with the students. I'm curious to see if overcoming that initial shyness of approaching a librarian for help makes a significant difference. On the other hand, I'm a little worried that this might be more of a workload than we can handle. Hence the pilot within a pilot... and zero publicity. It'll just be between me and my writing assistant (and a few thousand of my closest internet buddies).

So today I got the list of courses and their corresponding assistants and spent some time creating a new section of the Moodle space we use to collaborate within my department. Hopefully with courses listed, contact information easily at hand, and spaces for noting our impressions of the process we can keep this thing moving forward smoothly and effectively. Goodness knows that if the process isn't as easy as falling off a log by the time classes start (tomorrow, by the way), the scheme will never fly.

Wish us luck!