This past week was the first week of fall semester classes at my university. This is the first time in a while that I’ve taught only one regular section of our 2 credit hour information literacy course. Last semester I only taught one section, but it was an honors section, so I spent a lot … Continue reading Welcome to fall semester
Welcome to fall semester
↧
↧
Back to school
Tomorrow is the first day of fall semester at my university. I’m looking forward to the first day of class on Thursday! Yes, it will be the “syllabus day“, but it’s also a time to set the tone for the semester. With this in mind, I thought I’d share one of the ways I try […]
↧
Class, Interrupted
So, this semester life decided to throw me a curve ball. I started the semester optimistic. Classes started abnormally early (Aug 10), but that was because MPOW added both a fall break and an extra week of classes this year, bringing us back to the 16-week semester that seems more common. (Right before I started, […]
↧
On becoming politically active
Since the election, a lot of people have started to become politically active. I think this is great. However, there are better and worse ways of doing this. For those who have not been plugged in, there is a powerful impulse to get together with friends and create a new organization or organize a demonstration […]
↧
Seeking a diverse candidate pool
Professional librarianship is still overwhelmingly white, even when the communities we work with are not. We talk a good game about wanting to become more diverse, we post ads that say we value diversity, and then we lament that all of the really qualified applicants look just like us. What are you going to do? […]
↧
↧
#IACAL2017
Back in May, I went to the Identity, Agency, and Culture in Academic Libraries (IACAL) Conference in Los Angeles. There were some really great presentations, but it took a greater emotional toll than some conferences. I started writing this post shortly after I got home, but left it sitting as a draft for a while, […]
↧
Dream job
The other day, I tweeted a bit about dreaming of all the things I wish my job could be. There have been some problematic dynamics in my department for a while now (years), and I’ve gotten to a point where I’m just frustrated. I spend so much time dealing with drama from this situation (including […]
↧
Thoughts on travel funding
I’ve been in a few conversations on twitter recently about funding for conference travel. Last week, I came across this article: What I Learned From Posting a Survey of Conference Speakers. The author shared some of the findings from that survey, including: Paying Travel and Expenses is a Diversity and Safety Issue Of course, the […]
↧
(Dis)engagement
Back in 2013, my campus got a new University President. The previous president had been in his position for 19 years, and by the time he stepped down, there were significant problems with morale campus wide. So the new president started doing an annual climate survey, with questions about various levels of leadership – immediate […]
↧
↧
Chief of police interviews on campus
My campus is currently hiring for a new chief of the campus police. For each of the four candidates, there was an open presentation, followed by a Q&A session. I decided to attend, to make sure questions get asked about dealing with racist policing practices. While there is a lot of critique about policing in […]
↧
Hope in dark times
Today was the second class meeting of the course I regularly teach, Information Literacy & Research. It was also the first class meeting after the white supremacist march & terrorist attack in Charlottesville. My regular lesson plan for day 2 of class fills the whole period, so I was unsure whether or how to address […]
↧
Info Lit lesson ideas
I let this blog go dormant for a while – partly because I was busy, partly because I just didn’t have any good ideas to write about. But, Eamon Tewell recently tweeted a request for ideas for info lit lessons that don’t need students to have computers available:
I responded with a 2-tweet description of a lesson I do, but thought it would be nice to have a fuller description I could just link to for those who find such things useful. Maybe this will become a regular thing, describing individual lessons I find useful, maybe this will be a one-off. Time will tell!
Why do scholarly journal articles matter?
I developed the lesson I’m describing today for use in the first of two sessions that I do for a 3000-level course that is required of all sociology majors in the first semester after they declare that major. The class sessions are 75 min long. I’ve also adapted it to use in the credit-bearing info lit course that I teach, but those sessions are only 50 min, so I have to break it up a bit there.
One of the big concerns faculty have at this point is related to getting students to use “appropriate” sources for their papers. But how often do faculty spend time explaining why they prefer scholarly journal articles over other types of sources? After all, identifying “appropriate” sources is not always intuitive for those new to academic discourse.
So, for the first of the two sessions I do with this class, we spend the time focusing on that – what scholarly journal articles even are, and what details you can get from a scholarly journal article that are generally left out of other types of sources. Of course, using a critical perspective, the focus is on the information related to a specific purpose, not on scholarly sources being inherently better than other types.
I start the session by showing the “Scientific Studies” episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight. I try to remember to offer a disclaimer that it does include some off-color jokes, but the critiques he includes make it worth it. I definitely cut it off before the little skit at the very end, but am not always consistent about exactly where I cut it off, and sometimes adjust for the sake of time.
After showing this, I lead a discussion of the issues he raises – the ways researchers can manipulate statistics, spurious correlations, the effect of sample size, the ways “publish or perish” can bias the scientific record, as well as how popular media often simplifies and sensationalizes research results. Throughout this discussion, I refer back to the scholarly v popular distinction regularly, highlighting the value in searching less-than-intuitive systems to find scholarly journal articles, then slog through the long boring text, to get the details you need to evaluate the sample size, the research methodology, etc.
I don’t have a strict timeline, adjusting for how the discussion goes, but no later than around 35-40 min into the class, I shift to a new activity: I ask students to work in pairs, and hand out a worksheet to each person and a set of articles to each pair. Here is a link to view the worksheet as a google document (view only, but if you find it useful you should be able to make a copy). For the articles, I give each pair one scholarly journal article (of course, for a sociology class, I use an article from a sociology journal!) and a popular write-up of that article. For the set I have now, I found 3 separate popular articles, so different groups get different commentary on the shared scholarly article, to kind of highlight that not all summaries are equal. This can be an interesting way to bring trade journals into the discussion, if appropriate to your topic.
And then, I give students time to work through these. Sometimes, there’s a natural cut-off, where most students are close enough to done that it makes sense to shift to discussion time again. Sometimes, I start going over it earlier, because I like to make sure we have about 15 min for the wrap-up discussion… At which point we go through the worksheet questions to highlight the characteristics of a scholarly journal article.
This lesson obviously requires a projector and speakers, but is best done in a classroom that does not include big computers at the students’ desks. These sessions usually go really well, and are not as dependent as some lessons on where exactly students are in the research process. For this class, since they usually have a research project they have to find sources for, they come to a library classroom for the second session, during which I introduce them to the subject-specific databases. But, that may be a week or a month after the first session! This lesson could also be adapted to be a stand-alone lesson to get students thinking about how to understand when they need to slog through a scholarly journal article instead of just an easier summary of it.
↧
Ch-ch-ch-changes…
This past year has brought a lot of changes for me professionally, without even getting into the influence of the coronavirus! For a long time, I really enjoyed being just a run of the mill faculty librarian – there’s a certain amount of freedom to subvert power structures when you’re not in the room where anyone is telling you directly that you can’t do certain things!
My library went through an extended transitional phase. The person who was Dean when I started retired in March 2017. The Associate Dean became Interim Dean, and selected an Interim Assoc Dean. A new person was hired as Dean, starting July 1, 2018. The former Interim Dean opted to go back to being regular faculty, leaving the person he appointed as Interim Assoc Dean in that role. That started an experience best described offline and with liquor, and ended with the newly hired Dean stepping down at the end of February 2019 and the Interim Assoc Dean being named Interim Dean. They just finally named that person as permanent Dean in early June 2020, bringing a little bit of stability for us to build on.
We had some significant morale issues when this all started. Part of that can be attributed to long term neglect from the previous library administration, and part of that goes back to a previous University President who crushed morale across campus. That previous University President stepped down in 2013, but some wounds take a really long time to heal.
All of that is background that led to a reorganization that went into effect Sept 1, 2019. Our Instructional Services department was disbanded, and two new departments were created: the former head of IS became the new head of Outreach & Assessment, and I became the head of Learning & Research Support. The two remaining IS librarians were moved into this new L&RS department. Our primary project for 2019-20 was to gather information in order to make an informed proposal for how to restructure our liaison program going forward. I’ll write about that process later.
Shifting into this new role has meant changing some of the dynamics with the librarians on my team. One of them was here before I started here, and was even on the search committee that hired me. As peers, we butted heads on things somewhat regularly, because we tended to take different approaches to things. None of that was acrimonious – we were friendly with each other, I just felt like we saw things pretty differently. The other librarian started more recently, and I chaired the search committee that hired her. We became good friends, to the point that I’ve been on vacation with her and her family, which makes the shift in power dynamics awkward in other ways! So in both cases, shifting from being peers to being in a leadership position was and still is a little weird.
I’m really glad we started this department with the project of redesigning the liaison program as a team. Going through the process of gathering information, figuring out what other info we need and how to get it, what we want to be doing, and what we need to prioritize until we are able to hire more liaison librarians created the conditions for us to find more common ground. Looking back on past disagreements, it now looks to me like we were set up to not have the conditions we needed for more productive conversations. Like, I think there was more common ground than I realized at the time, but we both were frustrated with stuff beyond our control, and that translated into just agreeing to disagree instead of figuring out how we were talking past each other.
One of the things we did as part of the liaison program redesign was read a selection of articles on other liaison programs. Instead of using a jigsaw approach, we all read the same article and discussed it, then all read the same next article, and so on. I really enjoyed the article discussions, because all three of us took away different key points from almost each one of them. I got more out of the article because of their input, and I hope they felt the same way. But more importantly for us, I feel like that also provided a foundation to talk through our thoughts on librarian practices and what we want to do here going forward, without feeling defensive or frustrated or whatever about how things have been done here in the past, which I think was really productive.
Now that we have finished that project – we have shared the proposal for our liaison program for 2020-21, and are ready to start implementing that – we are continuing the shared article discussions. We’re hoping to eventually be able to hire at least one more liaison librarian (we made it through phone interviews for one position last fall, but then put the search on hold due to budget issues, and now who knows what the future holds, since COVID is throwing enrollment expectations and state appropriations into limbo). So we shifted our focus to articles addressing best practices in hiring.
Through a lot of this past year, taking on this leadership role has meant that I’m the one facilitating the meetings – putting the agenda together and keeping us on track – but otherwise not changing too much about how I interact with them. Yeah, the power dynamics have shifted, but they’re both professionals who do good work on their own, so that didn’t come up too much… Except when annual evaluation time rolled around. That was the first really awkward point in this new structure.
Until relatively recently, we have not had clear expectations on how to do much of anything. It felt like the sand was constantly shifting under our feet, and sometimes the “right” way to do something depended on who you asked. We had a clear procedure for doing our annual evaluations: I write a self-evaluation addressing my job performance, professional growth, service, academic achievement, evaluation of performance on goals for the year under review, and proposed goals for the coming year, and then send that to my supervisor, who reads it and writes an evaluation of my performance in that period. But we didn’t have clear expectations for how to present that information or how to write those goals.
When I started, I was told to write goals sort of like a check-list and make sure to include stuff I had already done before I wrote that list to make sure I had a head start for next year’s evaluation, showing how much I had done… Then we were supposed to tie them to the university’s strategic plan. Then they were supposed to be SMART goals. Then I got frustrated with neglect from admin translating into pressure to do all the things, more than could be done well within a reasonable workload. So I started treating that section as my strategic plan for the coming year. That started as a way to protect myself from unrealistic expectations, but I found that it was actually a useful exercise for me. Writing that annual self-evaluation became more than just a bureaucratic hoop to jump through: it carves out time for me to reflect on what went well and what didn’t go so well in the past year, how I want to improve my practice this coming year, and also strategize how I want to prioritize my time in the coming year. Of course there needs to be room for flexibility to respond to external pressures, but I see it as a way to tap the breaks, stop just reacting and think about how to get ahead of things proactively.
Of course, there’s also the consideration that these evaluations go into your tenure and promotion packages, so it’s useful to think about how you’re presenting your accomplishments and what will stand out to the reader.
So the annual evaluation process this year went a little different. They both submitted their self-evaluations, and I suggested some revisions, and then wrote my evaluation based on those revisions. In some cases, I knew this person did this really impressive thing, but they failed to mention it or just threw it into half of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph about something else in their section on job performance. And some of those suggested revisions related to goals – *why* are you doing this thing, how does it fit with these other things, and are you sure you’re not doing too much?
I don’t know how much of it was my fear of pissing them off, and how much was actual frustration, but I felt like one of them at least was frustrated by this request for revisions. That was my first tense moment in this supervisor role…
But then I read the revisions, and was like, holy shit, they’re both rock stars! Like, thinking of this as just an annual evaluation process between you and your supervisor, sure, I know how much work you put into this thing, so just a nod to it could work between us. But when you take the time to think about how to describe it as if I didn’t already know, it really highlights just how much you’re accomplishing.
Despite that little tense moment when I asked for revisions, the actual evaluation meetings went really well. My worst criticism for either was that I am concerned that if they continue at this rate they could burn out, because they both do so much, so maybe think about what you’d like to take off your plate when it becomes possible. Who knows when that will be, since we’re dreadfully understaffed right now, but some day…
Another part of this shift is changing how I interact with others in the library. I now have a seat at the “Leadership Team” – the meeting of the Dean and department heads. Becoming a peer to the person who used to be my supervisor has been a whole other sort of tension. I was moved out of the Instructional Services department, to report directly to the Associate Dean, in 2016, so it wasn’t as abrupt as it would have been if I went from reporting to her to being her peer. But there are still times when she tries to influence what my department does, and I have to send a clear response that we have already established our priorities for the coming year. That’s all complicated by a whole lot of baggage related to her role in my past low morale experience here, but it’s an interesting shift to reflect upon.
I’m still figuring things out as I go, but I’m really glad I got the opportunity to step into this role. It’s not something I sought out, but I’m glad I was asked to take it on. I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished so far in the past year.
↧
↧
A new focus in 2022
I’m not big on New Year’s Resolutions, but a lot of little reflections really coalesced for me around this new year. Until the past year or so, I was planning to spend the rest of my career where I am. I have tenure and a respectable salary, and I have not yet had a chance ... Read more
↧
Comprehensive review of library programs
I’ll start this new series off with this project, since it’s currently in progress. So, if you’ve worked on a project like this before and have helpful suggestions and things to watch out for, I welcome hearing from you! This started because my campus announced plans for a campus-wide comprehensive program review. At first, it ... Read more
↧
2021 in review
As part of the annual evaluation process at my university, we each draft a self-evaluation describing our major accomplishments over the past year in the three big areas of librarianship, service, and professional growth and development. Every year I tell myself that this is the year I’m going to get organized and track major work ... Read more
↧
Editing books
Two of my favorite projects I’ve worked on as a faculty librarian have been the two books I’ve co-edited (one of which is still in progress). The first of those, Critical Approaches to Credit-Bearing Information Literacy Courses, was a collaboration with Jessica Critten. We both started working at the same academic library in September 2011, ... Read more
↧
↧
Thinking about toxicity in libraries, and what to do about it
Back in January, I wrote about a major project I’m currently working on: a comprehensive review of library programs. Through a really extensive schedule of meetings, I’m mapping out the major work done across the library to achieve programmatic goals, the goals we’d like to achieve, the resources we would need to achieve those ideal ... Read more
↧
From mentoring to coaching
One of the things I have most loved about my academic librarian job has been mentoring junior colleagues. Each relationship has differed, of course, but they have always felt rewarding. So when I started exploring what else I want to do with my life and came across coaching, I thought it would be a natural ... Read more
↧
Representation is not enough
This weekend, there are protests, demonstrations, and vigils being held across the country in response to the release of the video recording of another horrific incident of police brutality, in which police officers beat Tyre Nichols to death. The twist this time is that the 5 police officers are Black. This changes nothing for those ... Read more
↧
More Pages to Explore .....
