joy at moll projects dot com
I have run into a couple of people in the last week who numbered in the years how long it took to dispose of their parents' stuff. We won't be doing that, but I can see how it happens. Emptying a house is the kind of project that would normally be satisfying to me--the results are so visible. Empty bookshelves and closets represent progress but they are just depressing.
We're going home today. I suspect I need a little time that feels more like my normal life.
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The world is conspiring to put me in a paper-based Getting Things Done (GTD) system.
For my context lists, I'm taking a look at these two systems, Doug Giuliana's version and the Pierced Hipster PDA.
I bought, and was setting up, the Avery Extended Edge Document Sleeves to use as project support files. I've had project support files in a rolling file cart for about three years and they have never worked the way they are intended. They creep into reference files. Then they are too overwhelming to deal with during my Weekly Review, so I just skip that step. I'm putting the sleeves in a hot file holder near my desk. I'm hoping as Martin Ternouth and Merlin Mann suggest, that I will keep them de-cluttered because they won't hold all that much.
A somewhat un-related productivity tool: I have been using the "Mark All Read" link at the top of my Bloglines account in the past two weeks. I'm spending very little time on my computer, not nearly enough to keep up with all my feeds. So I read the ones I don't want to miss (the ones where I care about the author rather than the information) and mark the rest as read so they don't hang over me as a huge task.
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How to write an obituary in an hour:
You can stop after step 3 and someone at the funeral home will write the obituary from the information. It's difficult to find a sense of accomplishment in anything during the week after someone dies. Writing the obituaries for each of my parents was rewarding to me at two times when I needed it.
The obituary I wrote for my mother has already appeared in the Hannibal Courier-Post. It will be in the local papers later.
We also wanted a biographical sketch for the back of the funeral service bulletin. I started with the obituary, but it evolved into something else that we liked better. This is what we ended up with:
Sara Ann Hoover, the baby of a large family, grew up on a farm,
graduated from Purdue University, and then married Robert Dale Weese in 1961. Sara Weese was active in the church and community in her professions of church secretary and arts administrator and in her volunteer roles with many organizations.
Sara loved parties, particularly ones where people dressed up in
interesting costumes. She and Bob enjoyed traveling together, taking long road trips to visit friends and sites in various corners of the country. She traveled to Tipton, Indiana every year for the annual family reunion. At home, Sara enjoyed reading and was a frequent patron of the library.
Music was a recurring theme in Sara's life. Singing with her
siblings around the piano was a fondly remembered entertainment from her childhood. She traveled with a choir during college, made music in churches as a choir member and instrumentalist, and taught her children to read and appreciate music. Throughout her adult life, she always regarded her opportunities to attend concerts and musicals as highlights of each year. For Sara, making a joyful noise was a comfort during tough times and a celebration at all times.
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Some good things on a bad day:
My mother is critically ill.
Here's something I haven't seen on any of the lists of reasons to blog: writing a blog entry in your head is a good way to keep your brain sane while driving to the ICU where they are MediVac-ing your mother.
Mind you, that was hours ago, and I have no memory what those words in my head were, but I do remember the process was helpful.
They have precisely two scenarios where she gets better and a good many more where she does not. We'll appreciate good thoughts, healing energies, prayers or whatever of that sort of thing you could send our way.
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Meredith Farkas asks, in a thoughtful response to my post about research courses in library school:
If you do research studies or write for publication, where did your passion for writing and research come from?
My initiative for pursuing a research project this summer came more from the writing and potential publication than the research. Since I’m reading Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives by Anna Fels (at Dorothea Salo’s suggestion), I will admit that I’m ambitious about my writing. One path for a professional with writing ambitions to follow is to publish in a peer-review journal. There are other paths. Unless I end up at an institution where the tenure process limits my alternatives in the next few years, I’ll probably follow every path toward writing and publishing that is available to a practicing librarian.
Assuming this current research project is a reasonably satisfying experience, I imagine that I would do more in future. Any future research projects would have to have a bit more motivation than the writing (there are easier ways to pursue writing, after all). I would likely be pushed to do research by the desire to learn an answer to a question that has cropped up in my work and to share the results with other librarians. Plus, I suspect I would be motivated by a desire to push forward a new solution or technology, like Sherri Vokey's IM study that Meredith mentions at the end of her post.
Meredith mentions two studies that have been interesting to her--neither in a peer-review journal and both easily available on the web (now that Library Journal saw the error of its ways). I wonder if the peer-review process will prove to be too slow for a rapidly changing information world. And I wonder if the articles in journals will be too much of a black box, given the arguments that Jenny Levine made for Library Journal to keep their articles open to the Web.
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I haven't written about music here, largely because my tastes are so pedestrian that I have little of interest to say. One of my more embarrassing predilections is for pop Hawaiian music, songs like "Sweet Leilani" sung by people like Andy Williams--in other words, not truly Hawaiian at all. One of the most famous actual Hawaiians to sing this kind of music is Don Ho, but I've never enjoyed his music as much as that of the mid-20th century pop singers.
Recently, I have been thrilled to discover, belatedly, the music of Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. Right now I'm listening to his album, Facing. There is a funny Hawaiian variation of "Take Me Home Country Road," a delightful mashup of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "What a Wonderful World," and a whole bunch of beautiful songs in Hawaiian.
How is this related to the library? Because I try before I buy, by checking CDs out of my library.
Update: A disadvantage of library CDs is that identifying labels get stuck in unfortunate locations--the name of the album is Facing Future. I suppose I should also point out that one of the reasons I feel better about this music is that it isn't as sweet as Leilani--IZ recognized troubles in paradise because he lived with them.
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In my library school, Research Methods is a required course--I took it in the spring. It is acknowledged, by the teachers of the course, that this is not really enough of a research course for those of us who want to do research, become tenured academic librarians or doctoral candidates--the latter will get more as they go along. It is, possibly, too much of a research course for library students destined to become school librarians or public librarians.
There are statistics involved. The math-phobic among us fret about Research Methods from the instant they first hear the words "statistics" (usually within the first few weeks of starting library school, if not before), right through the several weeks of statistics instruction.
We don't learn a lot of statistics, of course, in just a few weeks with no prerequisite. The point seems to be to learn just enough that the student develops a healthy skepticism of statistics--just because there are numbers involved doesn't make it true. With good will or ill, not everything published in a peer-reviewed journal is correct.
Some library students, I think, find this class so traumatic that they never read another professional journal again. There might be statistics involved. And, besides, they learned that you can't trust it anyway. Is that really the take-away message we want to give?
Don't we want to teach future librarians that library literature is wonderful? That it can provide a fast track to evidence-based librarianship, because someone else has already provided the evidence? That it can be a way to connect with librarians who have spent a lot of time and energy considering an issue that interests me? That I might also be able to contribute something to library literature someday?
If I were queen of a library school, here's what I would do. I would have a required course called Library Literature. In that class, we would read tons of journal articles--mostly good, a few bad to teach that healthy skepticism. The final project would be to come up with the initial idea for a research project and to do the literature review for it.
Then, I would have another class where library students actually do a small, possibly publishable if it works well, research project. All academic librarian wannabes would be encouraged, or required, to take the course, as would future LIS Ph.Ds. I would also encourage any student who came up with a good research project and literature review to take this class as well--we need more school librarians and public librarians doing research.
For the second class, I would have a basic knowledge of statistics as a prerequisite. I would probably be flexible on how this was met, but the ideal would be to take a college-level statistics course from a really great math teacher within a year or two of going to library school--that's what I wish I had done and, given the opportunity, I may yet.
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If it's an ill wind that blows no good (Source? According to Bartlett's, misquoted Shakespeare, who was quoting a proverb), Dennis, for all the damage he did earlier, doesn't qualify as an ill wind. He is blowing us some much needed rain over the next couple of days.
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Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman is about books, reading, and writing. It is one of those books that is so beautifully written a writer may give up in despair of ever writing anything so well. Or, in a more confident mood, this book might send an inspired writer scurrying to the keyboard.
Here might be a good time to tell my other story about why I want to be a librarian, the one I tell at parties and interviews. For an embarrassing number of years, I was an aspiring novelist. "Aspiring" because I never completed a single novel. My pattern was to research a novel thoroughly. Then, I wrote two or three chapters. Then, I had a new, better, idea for a novel and went off to research it. After about six times, I realized that I preferred the research over the story telling. That realization led me to library school.
When I started library school, I was actively trying to disconnect myself from my "writer" identity. That lasted until I wrote my first paper and remembered just how much I enjoy putting words on screen. Looking for more venues for my writing led to this blog and to other writing opportunities. Now I think of myself as a librarian and a writer.
I may never attempt to write a novel again. Then again, maybe having plenty of outlets for my research skills will free my inner story teller. Perhaps, a more realistic goal would be to write an essay somewhere near as lovely as one of Fadiman's. Although, I'd put my money on the Free Range Librarian as most likely to succeed among blogging librarians in writing creative nonfiction.
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There are actually two stories that I tell when I am asked why I chose librarianship for my next career. Both true, but one is more appropriate for parties. This is not that version.
Lots of people re-examined their lives on and after 9-11-01. I was still in the midst of that when my father died of a sudden heart attack on 11-28-01. And knew that I really wanted to make a change by the time I turned 40 on 5-12-02. I wanted something with meaning and purpose, something where I could help people--pretty much what I wanted when I was a teenager but lost out on some place along the way.
I think I've made the right choice. I still have nothing to do on days of great tragedy or celebration. But now I have ideas and am frustrated by the fact that I'm not in a library to implement them. This feels like progress.
Today I am thinking not only of the tragedy in London that we all woke up to yesterday morning. I am also thinking of the tragedy that my quiet suburb woke up to on Wednesday morning. One of our police officers was shot while on duty Tuesday night. He was only the second officer we have ever lost in the line--the first was in 1898.
I haven't been to the library this week, so I don't know what they have done in the physical space. I do know they haven't done anything on the website, because I checked to see if they had an answer to the question "what can I do?"
I decided to write a check to The Backstoppers. The Backstoppers was a favorite organization of Jack Buck who died shortly after my first Father's Day without a father. Jack Buck's death turned out to be a healing experience for me, being able to mourn a father figure along with an entire city. It was shortly after that when I began to take the steps that put me on my current path--a path that suits my talents and interests, that would have made my father proud, and that has meaning and purpose on wonderful days and tragic days and all the many days in between.
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Have you seen a "take one, leave one" library? I don't know how common they are. It's a library of paperback books. The idea is that you leave the paperback you just finished and pick up one that is new to you.
We have one at Innsbrook in two rooms attached to the woodhouse and I saw one during our Special Libraries class last summer at the Scott Air Force library. I have also heard of one in a cafe in a resort area.
At first thought, one might think that people would take advantage of free books and these collections would shrink. In fact, they grow. If a person uses the library as intended (leave a book, take a book, and keep bringing back each book they take), the collection has already grown by one. Sometimes people bring three books but only take one. They go away knowing that the library owes them a couple of books someday and are happy with that. I've seen people at Innsbrook bring in a sack of books and figure that they and their guests are covered for awhile.
I wonder if this would work at a college, particularly one where the campus library doesn't collect for pleasure reading. Would the exchange library grow or would it diminish in the presence of poor college students with nothing to read? Or, perhaps, it would breathe as Matthew Battle says in Library: An Unquiet History about academic libraries: exhaling books, then sucking them back in a quick inhale at the end of the semester when students clear out their spaces.
A "take one, leave one" library could be embedded in the campus library. But it might be a service that the library could use to reach out to where the students are--in a cafe, at the student center, or in the dorms. Once it was set up, it could be ignored--although it might stay neater and more attractive if a librarian checked it once in awhile, maybe alphabetizing the books by author and/or categorizing them by genre.
I finished writing the above while watching the London coverage on the Today show this morning. Now I'm listening to BBC Radio Five Live over the Internet.
Now that I'm on the Internet, I actually did locate instances where paperback exchanges are happening at colleges. The article "Paperbacks and a Percolator: Fostering a Sense of Community in the Academic Library" in Mississippi Libraries, Spring 2005, describes a program at Louisiana State University that began with 250 donated paperbacks on a shelf near the Reference Desk. The Outreach Librarian there had input from at least one other academic library providing a similar service. I accessed that article through the Library Literature database, but there is a pdf of that entire issue of Mississippi Libraries. The article begins on page 6.
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As Walt Crawford likes to imply, metablogging can be a path to a boring navel-gazing blog. But in the last few days, I have benefited from other people's thoughts about blogging and work.
Dorothea Salo and Meredith Farkas (both of whom have provided excellent role models for me as I begin my job search) responded to Rochelle Mazar's excellent post about the tensions involved in having a blog that deals with professional issues while avoiding comments about the day-to-day frustrations in the work environment, issues that need to be handled in the trenches not in a public forum. I'm looking forward to similar posts from these three people and others as they begin to work out the questions, find the boundaries, and create the paradigm that will allow their blogs to grow and adapt to new circumstances.
My blog is doomed. The title and scope will only take me through graduation in December--or a bit longer if I don't have a job yet. Then what? I'm not sure. But I suspect that I'll have a better idea when I see how Dorothea, Meredith, and Rochelle manage it.
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If you are looking for a subtly patriotic way to spend an hour on the web today, I have reorganized my Chautauqua blog entries into a chronological diary. The Missouri Humanities Council has taken an interest in the entries and some of the pictures. By separating the entries from the blog, I gave them an easy way to link to my site.
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Via Sites and Soundbytes, I learned about a podcast I couldn't resist putting in my Bloglines account, at least for awhile. Radio Memories puts out a "new" old radio show every day. Appropriately given the recent movie release, last Friday's show was Orson Welles' War of the Worlds. I'm listening to it now--and emailing the link to my young movie-going friends who forget that War of the Worlds has a history from before Tom Cruise was born.
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Auditorium Speaker Series: Sam Weller Videoconference with Ray Bradbury
Monday, June 27, 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm
Sam Weller is Bradbury's biographer. He wrote The Bradbury Chronicles that was published this year. For this program, Sam Weller was in the auditorium with us, interviewing Ray Bradbury by live video feed. This session was filled with memorable Bradbury quotes.
"All the important women in my life are librarians."
"Instead of going to college, I went to the library." The library is a place where you can be present in the "ambience of all your favorite writers."
As a boy, he fell in love with L. Frank Baum at a Carnegie library (built in 1902) in Waukegan, Illinois. At age twelve, he moved across the country. Every night when they stopped for the evening, he rushed over to the local library. In many places he discovered that "his friends" (Oz books, Tarzan books) were not at the library. This is when he developed an interest in censorship that later led to the central idea in Farenheit 451.
Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 in a library when he discovered that a typewriter in a tiny room could be rented for ten cents for 30 minutes. He spent $9.80 in dimes and wrote Farenheit 451 in nine days.
He will be 85 in August. What is his secret to long life? "Borrow the energy from the ideas."
His advice to librarians is the same as his answer to everything: "Fall in love and stay in love." He fell in love with architecture, dinosaurs, and Buck Rogers while still a child and they have continued to inspire his career.
"The most important building on campus is the library." Bradbury says that teaching inspires dreams but the library fulfills them. Fulfilling dreams is the most important role of librarians.
His response to the provisions of the PATRIOT Act that disturb librarians: "Never be scared--only be angry."
When asked about writing groups, he said that they can be useful for short stories but they should never be used for novels. His advice for novels and other projects: "Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down."
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Policies and Practices of Institutional Repositories
Monday, June 27, 8:30 am - 12:00 pm
Most of the LITA events have been extraordinarily well blogged on the LITA Blog. Unfortunately, it looks like I'm the first to cover this session. I was rather hoping that I could do a quick summary and let others do the more substantive work. This was a session well worth the effort to blog, so here goes.
We had five speakers from five different universities--which will make this a very long post.
University of Rochester
At the University of Rochester, Susan Gibbons discovered that one should never let a policy get in the way of getting good content. A policy was written, but what actually happened was a "faculty-sponsored" model--if a faculty member wants something in the repository, it goes in. This includes student papers that faculty members are willing to sponsor for inclusion.
The University of Rochester uses DSpace, an open-source solution from MIT. The out-of-the-box interface failed their usability testing. Fortunately, the user interface of DSpace proved to be easy to modify.
Learning from the experience at MIT (MIT's Institutional Repository had international press coverage, but they had to hire a marketing consultant to get their own faculty to use it), the University of Rochester hired an anthropologist to study the faculty--each discipline as a separate "tribe." With the information from the study, Rochester was able to insert the Institutional Repository into the workflow of the faculty members.
Each faculty member has his or her own page in the repository, since the anthropologist discovered that "faculty are like peacocks." Faculty also felt that an instutional repository, with its rather unfortunate label, was too impersonal. By giving each faculty member the power to put up pictures, personalize their own page, and organize the information on their page the way they saw fit, the repository became less "institutional" and more personal.
Another big issue (and this was a theme in several presentations) was that faculty members don't know if they can put their material in the institutional repository. They don't read the publisher contracts. Susan Gibbons found that professors will defer to the library on copyright issues. So it's up to the library to determine what can go into the repository. When an article has successfully been submitted into the repository, the library staff asks the author for his or her CV so they can check the Sherpa site and the publisher contracts to see if other publications can be deposited.
Susan Gibbons recently co-authored an article on Institutional Repositories for D-Lib Magazine.
Georgia Institute of Technology
Catherine Jannick discussed SMARTech, Georgia Tech's Institutional Repository. This implementation also uses DSpace. They have yet to change the user interface, but intend to do so.
Populating SMARTech began with the idea that the faculty would submit their own work. When this didn't happen, the library harvested digital output from campus units and other repositories and, like Rochester, began using faculty CVs as an index to potential content for the repository. The metaphor that they currently work under is that the faculty has always given their books to the library, which the library catalogs, classifies, and makes available. Now, the faculty members "give" articles to the library and the library does the work of getting them into the Institutional Repository.
"SMARTech is not the only repository at Georgia Tech." For this, the appropriate metaphor is of branch libraries and learning centers. Each collects material that is appropriate to the purpose, with duplicates as needed. The main library sees its collection in more long term ways and selects material that is worthy of preserving. SMARTech is the equivalent of the main library, collecting repository material that should be saved for the future.
Cornell University
Cornell University also has several Institutional Repositories, one is in DSpace.
Cornell has made an effort to teach faculty about scholarly communication issues through department talks and symposia. They direct faculty to "green publishers" as identified by Sherpa that allow authors to publish pre-prints and/or post-prints. They point faculty to the SPARC page about retaining authorial rights by amending the contract--a process the faculty members are surprised to discover that publishers accept with no argument.
DPubs is a repository for technical reports. The Computer Science department administers DPubs although the library provides the servers.
DSpace is a repository that has gone beyond technical reports to include student projects, books, periodicals, films, and electronic theses and dissertations. At Cornell, they have had few problems with self-submission of these resources. DSpace is where Cornell is exploring Open Access publishing ventures.
arXiv.org is a disciplinary repository run by Cornell University Libraries for physics, computer science and mathematics. They receive over 200 submissions a day. They have found that the faculty are more enthusiastic about submitting to a disciplinary repository than an institutional repository--but they are finding a useful argument in "multiple repositories increase exposure." They encourage faculty to store material in disciplinary repositories, institutional repositories, and on their own websites.
University of Pennsylvania
Sandra Kerbel was schedule to present for the University of Pennsylvania, but instead we had Jean whose last name I didn't get. She began with a quote from Benjamin Franklin:
Who is wise? He that learns from everyone.
The Institutional Repository at Penn is not a DSPace implementation. Instead, they used Digital Commons from ProQuest.
The School of Engineering provided the original funding for the IR. Because of this, the library used the goals of the school to develop a strategy. The school wanted high-impact and visibility.
The library took an activist approach. Usually the faculty member was not contacted until the library had the article in hand and had checked that the copyright allowed for submission to a repository. Then, they simply informed the faculty member that the paper was going into the repository. Since the department heads had already informed the faculty members of the merits of depositing material, the library receives no objections from faculty.
In some instances, the library has been able to negotiate with publishers to include material even when the initial contract would not allow it. When this does not worked, the library informs the faculty member that his or her material will not be going into the repository and why. This has proven to be a "teachable moment" and faculty behavior has changed--they choose publishing outlets that will allow re-publishing in an IR, they retain rights that they used to let go, and they request rights that are not present in the boiler-plate contract.
Anecdotally, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania claims that he gets more downloads from the Penn repository than from either his own website or from a disciplinary repository. The faculty recieve a monthly report with the number of downloads of their articles. This encourages them to continue to submit material to the repository.
Using the marketing truism that it takes seven exposures to raise awareness, the library took multiple approaches to letting people know about the IR. They made brochures, took advantage of contacts with administration and faculty, and used coupons for the library café.
The library spends 18 minutes per paper checking if it is eligible for inclusion in the IR and developing appropriate metadata. Someday they may be able to implement a more self-service approach, but for now they feel that this service is what makes the IR work at the University of Pennsylvania.
Florida State University
Robert McDonald spoke about the Institutional Repository at Florida State. They began with breakfast focus groups which seemed to help bring key people on board, but he warned that they don't tend to stay on topic. "FSU opted for a hosted solution BePress." They felt that a fast start-up would allow them to build on the momentum from the focus groups and other early PR work.
A large part of FSU's motivation was to do research and development in digital preservation issues. This included developing metadata and metadata crosswalks.
They started by collecting student content from two undergraduate programs as well as electronic theses and dissertations. As of the fall of 2005, they had all FSU dissertations from 1951 to the present in the repository and all masters theses from 2003 to the present. FSU has each student sign an agreement about copyright, based on a Creative Commons licensing model.
Using the student content, FSU has been able to test several systems and build an infrastructure. Now they want more faculty content. They are looking at ways to "tie-in with Student and Faculty Portfolios."
Questions
The questions at the end were about access (Note to self, try OAIster), submission processes, and work flow. DSPace has (or had at one time) a five page/step process for submission. Cornell consolidated this to two pages--one for the license to give the repository permission to hold the work and one for the metadata. I forget which one answered the work flow question but they said that student workers do the digitizing when the work is not submitted in digital form and that the email account, which is a unique identifier, is the key to the authority file for authors' names.
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Yesterday's post about last Sunday's conference session on learner-centered teaching, opened up my mind to be ready for these two posts on blogging and education:
Blogs have great potential in learner-centered teaching.
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Teaching, Learning, and Leading: Key Roles for Librarians in the Academic Community
Speaker: Maryellen Weimer, author of Learner-Centered Teaching
Sunday, June 27, 1:30 pm - 3:30 pm
Saturday's session about teaching to adults had left me with a big question about how to teach college-age students. This session began to answer that for me, although I think I need to read her book--I just requested it from Mobius.
She attempted to bring her ideas to librarians, aware that we often teach one-shot sessions to classes that have a much longer history and future, that we usually have no influence on the grading, and that often our best teachable moments are one-on-one, hands-on opportunities. She wasn't completely successful at pulling herself into our realm, but a number of the ideas are helpful anyway.
A lot of her ideas are mostly attitudes, ways for the teacher to be a guide, coach, or midwife rather than the center of attention:
We broke into small groups for a minute at one point to talk about how to establish credibility without hogging all the power in the classroom. The best idea that came from that was the same one my group partner told me--grant the subject mastery to the student and claim the resource mastery as the librarian. This will mean it takes both the student and librarian working together to fulfill the information need at hand.
She mentioned several times that our educational systems have created students that are after grades more than learning. This seems to put librarians at a huge disadvantage since we specialize in the learning, not the grades. Weimer has found that most students love to talk about the future--so discuss how the topic at hand will be useful in the career and life of the student. This seemed like it would work well in the library setting--perhaps bringing up the topic at those odd moments when the computer's chomping away at something or while walking a student over to a resource like the Encyclopedia of Educational Research. "Are you majoring in education? Do you intend to be a teacher?"
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ALA/ProQuest Scholarship Bash
Saturday, June 25, 9:00 pm - 11:00 pm
By evening on Saturday, I had been up way too long, eaten way too little, and stressed way too much over an interview that almost didn't happen but ultimately did. I was tempted to skip the Bash, but already-paid-for food and a visit to a museum (The Museum of Science and Industry) that I had fond memories of from childhood was enough to get me on the bus. I was satisfied on both counts. I didn't see a single person I knew, but here are pictures to prove I was there.
Robby the Robot greeted us at the front of the robot exhibit:
The robot exhibit was based on some guy's collection of old toy robots--many made of tin and holding up better, I suspect, than today's plastic toys.
I also enjoyed the model train exhibit where we went from the El in Chicago, across the midwest farm country, through the mountains, and ended up in Seattle. Here's the trestle bridge in the mountains:
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Opening General Session, Keynote Speaker: U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill)
Saturday, June 25, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Mayor Daley welcomed us to Chicago during the Opening General Session. He believes that libraries are part and parcel of a city's commitment to education. He knows, from experience, that the library can be an anchor in a community, an important tool in economic development. If a new library goes into a neighborhood that every one has given up on, it signals that the city has an interest and, soon, neighbors and businesses begin to care about the area as well.
Since 1989, Chicago has renovated or built 45 libraries. The city is opening seven new libraries this year.
Daley got a standing ovation when he said that we should never allow the federal government to interfere with the library system.
Barack Obama's first line was "that's a lot of librarians" as he looked out over an audience of several thousand.
He said that those in power have always, since antiquity, gone after libraries in attempts to control the word. Controlling books, the powerful hope, will enable them to control the people who read, or who might read if allowed. He says we need to continue to be aware of this possibility at a time when truth and science are affected by ideology and when words are used to obfuscate. What role do libraries play in this? Truth is about who has the right information, not the loudest voice--libraries provide the right information. Obama said that faith is not in contradiction to fact.
Barack Obama is working to pass in the Senate the House bill, the Freedom to Read Act, that would correct the problems in the PATRIOT act. He believes that we can fight terrorism and protect civil liberties. We don't have to choose between one or the other.
He spoke of the importance of education and libraries in a new economy with new kinds of jobs. It's all about "what you know and how fast you can learn what you don't know." Reading is the "gateway skill" for success in this new economy. How do we prepare people to prosper in the 21st century? "Get books into our children's' hands early and often." Libraries are a critical tool to help parents do this.
Barack Obama knew what librarians do and what issues concern them. He was a very impressive speaker, making the job opportunity I have in Illinois just a bit more attractive--I could actually have a senator that truly represents me.
This session received a lot of coverage, including newspaper reports. See the list at the ALA conference wiki.
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Back to School: Teaching Information Literacy to Adults in Public Libraries, Academic Libraries, and Adult Distance Learning Centers.
Saturday, June 25, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Three speakers discussed adult learning, a public librarian and two academic librarians.
Brook Berry of the New York Public Library described the Click on @ the library computer classes. Offering about 200 classes a month, the program has, to date, provided computer training to over 60 thousand patrons. They have had good attendance from every demographic except one--19 to 34 year-old black and Hispanic males. A special marketing effort raised awareness of the program in that group but did not get them in the door.
Elizabeth Mulherrin is the Instructional Services Librarian from the University of Maryland University College. UMUC has had a long-term commitment to distance learning, including classes for overseas service personnel. Their faculty includes adjuncts from all over the world teaching both face-to-face and on-line classes. They have discovered that adults, who tend to be self-motivated learners, will take an on-line library class with tutorials and exercises, even when it is not tied to any course.
The Library Instruction Coordinator at Long Island University, Robert S. Nelson, conducted a study recently of adult learners during library instruction. He discovered that one of the most effective presentations was demonstration software--where what the teacher does on the computer happens simultaneously at the student computers. This allows the students to observe and, most importantly, take notes. They will later use their own notes (rather than handouts) for replicating the activities.
A second strategy that worked well with adult learners at Long Island University was to assign a research counselor to each student. This strategy, in fact, snowballed. A student would have a good interaction with his or her research counselor and then would tell friends to contact the same librarian for assistance.
Nelson said that these two strategies work for adult learners because they use their life experience. Adult learners were taught to take notes and prefer to work from notes. Adults, unlike traditionally-aged college students, are used to making appointments for individual consultation (doctor, insurance agent, stock broker, etc.) and were comfortable with the same set-up for working with a librarian.
These last observations made me more confident that I can work with adult learners--just teach them the way I like to be taught. But they left a big question in my mind about how to teach 19-year olds. If they won't take notes and they won't meet with me, what is the best way to reach them?
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