"Online Webinars! Interactive Learning Where Our Users Are: The Future of Embedded Librarianship" Susan E. Montgomery
My thoughts while reading the beginning of this article were along the lines of "Why does she think she needs to convince people that college students use the internet a lot?" That's pretty much a given. It was a given in 2010, too. She also uses statistics on internet use and cell phone/computer ownership from 2005 and 2006--though it's only been six or seven years, they're very outdated. And they don't take smartphones into account, because smartphones didn't really exist in 2006. Add that to clunky phrases like "as online use by students continues to grow..." (310) and I'm just confused. I can't tell exactly whom the audience for the paper is--I'd assume it's librarians, but then she makes statements like "Librarians are familiar with the value of using Webinars for instruction" (309), which sort of goes against the notion that they don't know or believe that college students do a lot of "online use." She makes a decent argument for why webinars are useful, but I'm not sure it really needed to be made, at least not to the people who are reading this article.
My thoughts while reading the beginning of this article were along the lines of "Why does she think she needs to convince people that college students use the internet a lot?" That's pretty much a given. It was a given in 2010, too. She also uses statistics on internet use and cell phone/computer ownership from 2005 and 2006--though it's only been six or seven years, they're very outdated. And they don't take smartphones into account, because smartphones didn't really exist in 2006. Add that to clunky phrases like "as online use by students continues to grow..." (310) and I'm just confused. I can't tell exactly whom the audience for the paper is--I'd assume it's librarians, but then she makes statements like "Librarians are familiar with the value of using Webinars for instruction" (309), which sort of goes against the notion that they don't know or believe that college students do a lot of "online use." She makes a decent argument for why webinars are useful, but I'm not sure it really needed to be made, at least not to the people who are reading this article.
"The Embedded Librarian Online or Face-to- Face: American University’s Experiences" Michael A. Matos, Nobue Matsuoka-Motley, and William Mayer
This essay has a lot of typos, and it's really bothering me. "Verses" substituted for "versus" makes my head explode. I hope it was actually a typo and not a real misunderstanding.
Anyway... I'm not particularly into this idea of moving library collections directly into the departments they correspond to. The article gives a few logistical and administrative ways in which the plan can go wrong, but to me it seems that physically splitting apart the library by topic breaks down the ability of a researcher to make connections across fields. This particularly dangerous in humanities fields where the research for one subject has a large overlap with another. Obviously there are already many specialized libraries for things like film, music, engineering, et cetera... but I think encouraging students to think of the library resources as a whole, rather than considering them as a set of unconnected sections that happen to be in physical proximity to each other, makes for better research.
I do think that the emphasis on building direct relationships with faculty and students in a given department is spot-on, though, and that connecting the collection to the department is important. It should just stay physically in the library.
I feel like I'm overwhelmingly negative in this post... I do think both articles bring up interesting and useful points. The weaknesses are just easier to write about.
I'm also not completely sure how I feel about webinars as a library tool. Both of the articles talk about the need to have librarians accessible often, and via a broad range of tools--the idea of webinars doesn't seem to fit so well to me, because (unlike pre-recorded tutorials or real-time chat) they are time-based and have to be scheduled. Students want individualized answers when they actually need them, and scheduling time for a webinar among other commitments is difficult. I think they're a good teaching tool, but one-on-one interaction and accessibility seems more important to me.
But......... that might just be because it was so hard for me to find time to do one. Archiving past webinars is definitely a huge help.
This essay has a lot of typos, and it's really bothering me. "Verses" substituted for "versus" makes my head explode. I hope it was actually a typo and not a real misunderstanding.
Anyway... I'm not particularly into this idea of moving library collections directly into the departments they correspond to. The article gives a few logistical and administrative ways in which the plan can go wrong, but to me it seems that physically splitting apart the library by topic breaks down the ability of a researcher to make connections across fields. This particularly dangerous in humanities fields where the research for one subject has a large overlap with another. Obviously there are already many specialized libraries for things like film, music, engineering, et cetera... but I think encouraging students to think of the library resources as a whole, rather than considering them as a set of unconnected sections that happen to be in physical proximity to each other, makes for better research.
I do think that the emphasis on building direct relationships with faculty and students in a given department is spot-on, though, and that connecting the collection to the department is important. It should just stay physically in the library.
I feel like I'm overwhelmingly negative in this post... I do think both articles bring up interesting and useful points. The weaknesses are just easier to write about.
I'm also not completely sure how I feel about webinars as a library tool. Both of the articles talk about the need to have librarians accessible often, and via a broad range of tools--the idea of webinars doesn't seem to fit so well to me, because (unlike pre-recorded tutorials or real-time chat) they are time-based and have to be scheduled. Students want individualized answers when they actually need them, and scheduling time for a webinar among other commitments is difficult. I think they're a good teaching tool, but one-on-one interaction and accessibility seems more important to me.
But......... that might just be because it was so hard for me to find time to do one. Archiving past webinars is definitely a huge help.
Wow, I didn't even notice all the typos (probably because I make tons of them...)! I really like your comment about thinking about libraries holistically. I know in my own experiences, I definitely required resources from other fields, and it was really useful to have them located in one central location. As librarians, we hope to maximize the experiences of the user, to make their research processses a little easier. I agree that the separation of libraries into departments would definitely impact that.
ReplyDeleteHAHA I have the same thought! Oooh, that probably reflects the way I write as well.
DeleteI also like the sassiness in this post. Having resources located centrally is a good argument. Also I believe that keeping the librarians near the library helps with the branding of the library in general (some times I think some of misconceptions of databases has to do with bad branding.
I would caution against being to centralized. No reason to cling to spaces that aren't working. No reason to fix what isn't broken.
I agree with your response to the Montgomery reading. I wasn't sure why she was giving her readers a bunch of statistics about internet use. The fact that college students use the internet is something that most people would agree with and I don't think she needed to spend so much time making that argument.
ReplyDelete