Fitting the Patron into the Organization

Bradford pears next to the science building (library obscured)

Listening to the radio on the way to work on a recent morning, I heard an advertisement for a bank (Ally Bank, if anyone is curious) promising service from "a real human." This implies a person answering the phone instead of an automated phone system. As a customer, this sounded attractive to me -- the very thought of an automated phone system makes me groan. It's an annoying process, but doubtless it saves the company money...

...And there are parallels with the reference desk. What I would love to do is automate the process of answering some of our most common questions. Mostly this is for selfish reasons related to the sense that I answer the same question 20 times per day. But by doing this we may not be best serving the students. They may instead groan because they have to read a sign explaining how to print instead of asking someone to show them quickly, for example.

Then again, what service are we at the college providing? While public libraries have public service as part of their core missions, at the college we are focused on education. We are trying to promote independent adult behavior and a desire to learn.

Our students come from a variety of backgrounds with a variety of expectations, and becoming an independent learner is not always at the top of their lists. Perhaps in the past the librarian looked up books for them, they were never expected to know how to handle malfunctioning computers, or they were never even allowed to work on a computer unsupervised. Now they are in college. Should we encourage students to work without mediation, or should we behave like a business and cater to their every whim?

E-Textbooks for Libraries, Anyone?

Seed pods on leafless black locust tree

So last week in a meeting I proposed the idea of spending some of our reference budget on student textbooks available electronically. The library's policy of not purchasing textbooks was partly because they went missing all the time. E-books would not be at the same risk. Simple, right? I thought this would be an instance of the library being really helpful to students. Of course, when I suggested the idea I did not know what it would mean to accomplish it.

To figure out how to make this a reality, I went to the college book store and asked if they knew which of the current textbooks are available online. The book store representative gave me the web site they use and said the books were listed there (whywaitforbooks.com). So I called the customer support number on that page, and the support specialist directed me to the two vendors they use, CourseSmart and VitalSource. I called both of them, and at both the customer service representatives seemed surprised by the idea, took my information, and promised to get back to me.

Within 24 hours, I received a polite email from CourseSmart expressing pretty much what I expected: "Currently, our business rules only allow for individual accounts that assign responsibility to one individual rather than multiple users for the same account. The publishing companies that partner with CourseSmart determine these guidelines." The email did mention that they would keep me posted if a library use model is developed in the future, however.

Also within 24 hours, I got a voicemail from VitalSource saying they were confused about my message and would try and contact me later in the day. I have not heard from them again, and the representative, who described himself in the message as technical support, did not leave a number for me to call back.

So, fellow librarians, this is so far a bust. Has anyone else had any luck? I thought I had reason to hope due to things like the downloadable audio book program now in effect at the public libraries in New Jersey, and the Nook's ability to share e-books. But maybe the situation is exactly what D.J. Hoek describes when he discussed music collections in a lucid article recently in American Libraries: Libraries are not necessarily considered part of the market when it comes to digital content, because companies are typically licensing directly with individuals and are not encouraging sharing.

We can change this, right?

E-Books: Are People are Finally Ready?

November sky, near the athletic fields on Wednesday

This is purely anecdotal, but -

I notice that e-books are suddenly being greeted with previously-unseen enthusiasm this semester. Is it due to kindles and nooks creeping into the popular mindset?

The change in attitude has been subtle and difficult to pinpoint, but it seems that instead of reacting with surprise/fear/ennui, the majority of students are now expecting e-books and sometimes even look forward to using them. Particularly in instruction sessions, I'm noticing a downright electricity in the room when I bring up e-books. The first time a student asked in class how to use the e-books I nearly fell off my computer stool in surprise, but now I anticipate the interest as a matter of course.

It's true that in other semesters I heard a few students singing the praises of e-books (as well as students looking for 'regular' books, and why are you showing me all this confusing computer stuff?), but it's as if all of a sudden the idea of an e-book is understood and is being taken more seriously. Perhaps the word has sunk in?

I'm waiting until the end of the semester to review usage statistics, but even faculty (sometimes the slowest adopters, alas) seem to be catching on. I've helped a number of professors on the phone recently as they navigate our e-books. I wonder what the tipping point was -- Barnes & Noble, the economy, some textbooks being offered electronically, a critical mass of preference for electronic resources? Perhaps in a small way, our library's outreach efforts? In any case, the future seems to be arriving here.

Library Photos

Life at the community college library continues as normal, replete with all the usual challenges. I had planned on writing about The Student Research Process (or lack thereof) this week, but as I've been taking a lot of amateurish photographs of the library building recently, I thought I'd share some of those instead, alla flickr:

GUI Design Thoughts

Blackwood woods, on Wednesday

It's a short post this week: I'm feeling swamped.

When I do a lot of library instruction, I repeatedly return to this thought: Many computing activities try to mimic a physical environment.

Think the floppy disc icon = Save:

Think file folders for organization:




Think journal articles: our online bibliographic databases often display journal articles by (unintentionally?) making reference to the paper version of the journal. Paper is still the standard. But why do we need page numbers when Ctrl+F exists, for example?

Also, is continuously referring to a different format effective? At times it is sort of nice to have a physical representation to refer to. When I am in front of a class explaining what a journal is, I sometimes show students a printed journal. But does this get to the heart of scholarly communication? Is pointing to a physical object that an increasing number of students have never seen the best way to teach them about the relevance of scholarly publishing?

We are now working with students who have perhaps always done research at least partially online. I wonder how many of them have ever interacted with printed magazines and newspapers. While it's true that not everything is available full-text online, increasing numbers of items are born digital. It seems unfortunate to have to tether the digital objects to a frame of reference that in the future may no longer exist. But maybe this is a natural consequence of living in a transitional time.

How Much Should I Worry about the Student Sleeping in the Back?

yellow flower whose name I don't know, in bloom right now

Well, the semester (and thus library instruction) is again in full swing. This means I am as likely to be found in front of a class as at the reference desk right now.

I notice a few things have changed since I last thought about how to teach effectively:

(1) I no longer assume students know what I'm talking about. I don't assume they know what a catalog is & what it's doing when they click 'search', I don't assume they know what books (particularly academic titles) are all about, I don't assume they know what a journal is, or know the meaning of the word 'periodical'. (In fact, strong majorities in BIO1 classes told me with a show of hands that they did not know what a journal was.) I try to define my terms as much as possible while still getting to the point of the lesson, but this leads to (2) me talking for a lot longer -- it's suddenly easy to go for 45 minutes without interruption. I wonder if this is good for the students, and in fact I have noticed a few of them falling asleep. And so I go back to being conflicted over (3) how I can make the material interesting to them. Moreover, how much energy should I spend worrying about this?

Begin rant / These are adult college students, and they have the responsibility to sit up and pay attention, and if they choose not to do this, how is it my fault if they decide to go to sleep? School -- even college -- is by its very nature boring for some students, and for every one student who is snoozing, there are 15 who are wide awake and attentive. Why should I grease the squeaky wheels by dumbing down my lesson with fireworks displays? I have no idea why they are sleeping -- maybe they are working three jobs, maybe the room is too hot, maybe they were kept up all night by screaming children, or maybe they really do not want to be in college. I usually only see them once, in a single class, which is not enough time to try and understand what is going on with them & what learning style will best work for them. / End rant

In an ideal world, of course, we would all be able to create learning experiences like this one:

I assume this video was meant to show a novel approach to changing people's behavior (while promoting fitness or decreasing energy consumption?). But really, how I can I make using library databases -- even taking into consideration all my enthusiasm and confidence that they are magical -- into an experience similar to this? Modify them into a first-person shooter game? I'm going to need some serious programming skills for that one.

Then again, if you asked the people who participated in the video above, I wonder what they would say they learned? Did they learn that using the stairs makes them fit and healthy? Did they begin to understand how much more energy the escalator uses than the stairs? No, they learned that they could play music on this set of stairs. Although perhaps the use of that staircase increased, those same people might well have kept using the escalator everywhere else -- i.e. where the steps had not been turned into musical keys.

The problem is, work is not always fun. Work is sometimes work. And isn't being able to successfully do something that is not particularly fun a valuable skill? Or, should we be encouraging the ability to constantly turn work into something fun?

Creating, Maintaining, and Sharing Personal Libraries

purple sweetgum leaf

I've been pondering how personal collections (libraries) are changing, and I think it comes down to sharing: It used to be more difficult to share items from a personal collection because of concerns about loss or damage. Now, however, with digital copies and high-speed networks, sharing your collection can be much easier.

So, what does this mean for public & institutional libraries? If folks are now able to share easily amongst themselves, what purpose do we have? Are we providing resources for those who do not participate in those sharing networks for one reason or other? Are we exposing people to new resources that they might not have encountered in their networks? More importantly, are librarians part of these networks? I believe librarians now have the responsibility not just to keep up with, collect, and maintain materials, but also to disseminate them by engaging in networks.

Unfortunately, many (I hesitate to say most) people do not consider the organization of their collections terribly important. For a lot of people it slides to the bottom of their priorities list. In librarian terms, this means the metadata is often a mess.

To put this in more concrete terms, I can think of a number of tools I use to organize my own personal libraries: delicious to organize my collection of web sites, Visual Bookshelf to organize my leisure reading, zotero to organize my scholarly projects and citations, iTunes to organize my music, etc. But I don't know of one tool that brings my collections together, lets me connect to people I know, and allows me to share all that information. Is it Ning? FriendFeed? Where is the one tool or set of standards to support this? Maybe an important component of information literacy (which is now getting attention from the president) is exactly how we should all be creating, maintaining, and sharing our personal collections.