Week 11: Twitter Reflection

So, this week is Twitter week in SI 643! I missed class on Monday (see image below for explanation), so I didn't get to hear anything about this assignment (and consequently don't have a class reflection post), but, well, I kind of adore Twitter, and I've been using it for years, so I'm pretty sure I can manage.

(screen-captured from Weather.com)

Or, at least, I was sure. Until I realized that I don't actually really read my Twitter feed these days, because that takes time. And time is in short supply lately. In some ways, Twitter is a good thing for people with no time--140 characters can't take more than a few seconds to read, no matter what they say. Unfortunately, when you're following 270-odd people, many of whom seem to spend all of their time reading fun things and re-posting them to Twitter... you get a full book's worth of reading every day.

So now I'm trying to consume enough librarian tweeting to have something to talk about in this blog post, but a lot of it is the same stuff we've been talking about in class and other blog posts. And the things my classmates are posting are seriously interesting, but mostly I have to save them to read later. Maybe I should've written about Twitter for my SI 500 case study. Hopefully I'll spend tomorrow's procrastination time reading all these articles and find something more interesting to say here...

As far as people I've started following (besides classmates), I've found myself drawn to people who have some sort of gimmick (for lack of a better word) to their librarianship--they're into gaming, or knitting, or bondage, or whatever. Or they're fake accounts dedicated to mocking the enemies of libraries. These people seem to have more attitude than the people who tweet seriously--and I've always used Twitter as much for my amusement as for actual information (especially lately), so I'd rather read their snark than add yet more fascinating-but-time-consuming articles to my list. It's not that Twitter can't be a serious medium, it's just that it doesn't currently benefit me to use it that way. Maybe that'll change once my inner self stops sobbing and shaking and pulling at her hair from finals-time-stress, but that remains to be seen.

Bonus fact: The best way to get me to follow you is to put "PRAGMATISM IS MY SUPERPOWER" in your description.

Week 10: Reading Reflection

"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.

"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.

Week 10: Class Reflection

Last week was one-shot workshop week in class, and I have to say that everyone in my group taught me something totally new... so clearly they were a success!

The workshop that Laura and I did was intended to be an introduction to talking to patrons about ebooks and the issues surrounding them, a topic that we'd noticed was conspicuously absent from most of the blogs and had only been briefly mentioned in class. In my opinion, engaging patron interest and action in issues like these is key to deciding how we as librarians deal with them--after all, the ebooks are there (or not there) for the patrons.

Our 'icebreaker' went over extremely well... because it involved construction paper. People made some awesome signs to alert patrons to the ebook situation, and we posted a few of them in the SI lounge after class, to remind our friends and classmates that books do still matter (do I sound bitter? I'm only a little...). People had great ideas, and they definitely set the tone for the rest of our session. We'd have liked to have some more discussion about the ethics and advantages of involving patrons in this sort of discourse, but that will have to wait until we have more time.

Our whole group was primarily concerned with issues related to activism and the changing role of libraries, so everything worked together well--it was like our own little conference on controversy in libraries! Mary and Ashley once again provided a break from the theme (they had the only non-death-related reading for the book club) with a fun lesson on how to craft a thesis statement.  I had fun reimagining my Pretentious English Major youth.

Week 9: Class Reflection

I love reading everyone else's blogs before I write mine, because you all give me so much more to think about than I'd come up with on my own! This post is sort of an amalgamation of things I expressed in comments on your entries from this week.

Last week in class we discussed the Toronto Public Library's decision to put advertising on the back of their due date slips (I think the fact that we don't just call these 'receipts' is interesting, by the way). About half the class was against it, but there didn't seem to be a lot of agreement as to why it was such a bad thing. Terms like "slippery slope" and "commercializing" were thrown around--but the only really convincing con I heard was from the article we read in class. It suggested that legislators, seeing a library producing some revenue of its own, would take this as a signal that the library didn't require public funding--rather than as a last-ditch attempt to make up for an already-scanty allocation. This fits in with what I thought of reading Mary's entry, in which she (rightly) stated that worrying about libraries being empty of patrons is not the most effective use of our time. I agreed with her, but also realized that libraries being full and vibrant doesn't necessarily mean they stay funded.

The only thing we have to be afraid of is that legislators, school boards, and universities don’t necessarily know that–and they’re the ones with the money. It’s encouraging to me that every time Ohio’s evil state government slashes funding to libraries (I gather this happens elsewhere too, but I’m most familiar with my home state), there’s a huge amount of public outcry. Unfortunately it doesn’t always accomplish much. So, we don’t need to worry that nobody will come to libraries, or that they’ll fade away from lack of interest–but we need to make sure the legislators know that as well as we do, and have no excuse to take money away from the very important resource we provide.

I'm not positive that putting ads on due date slips will cause this to happen--especially if libraries communicated to legislators exactly why and under what ideology and constraints they are implementing this measure. Creating a discourse with the people who hold the purse strings is every bit as important as communicating with patrons--because, unfortunately, individual voters only have so much power, and governments have quite a lot.

Additionally, I think a lot of the backlash against the advertisements comes from a wish to see libraries as non-commercial, and a knee-jerk feeling that all advertising is a bad thing. What if the ads were for local animal shelters, or charitable organizations, or local businesses that have been part of the community for decades? The strip club example in class was hilarious, but realistically there would be plenty of space for librarians and administrators to decide who can advertise on library paper. I don't see this as being in conflict with the directive to provide free and un-censored information, because advertisements are unsolicited--unless patrons ask for strip club ads, in which case the library might have a bigger problem.

Week 8: Class Reflection

Apparently I love book clubs! Especially because two of the stories assigned to my group, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "Murder and Suicide, Respectively," were two I was really hoping to be able to discuss. And two I have "real" book copies of, which was an interesting facet of my experience, especially since we started out discussing the comic that Laura and I submitted, "All the Books in the World... Except One," which deals with books as physical artifacts--not just paper copies in general, but specific copies owned by specific people--and the emotions they can hold (especially the nostalgia they evoke). My copy of Salinger's Nine Stories is ancient and battered--I've had it since mid-high school, and the permanent bookmark stuck in it is a receipt from a café on Unter den Linden in Berlin, where I ate lunch during a trip in 2004. I'd be seriously sad if I lost that copy.

On the other hand, Terence mentioned the experience of going back to a story he loved as a child--and finding that, within his adult context, it was actually rather offensive. In this case, it wasn't the physical book but the experience of innocently reading a story without looking at its broader implications that was the cause of nostalgia. We discussed the impact of reading this comic about physical books as a web page (it doesn't exist as a physical book outside of Croatia, as far as we can tell)--and more or less agreed that it didn't change our emotional responses to the story.

I came away from that thinking about my attachment to certain physical books versus the ephemeral experience of reading something for the first time, or on a web page that you don't have any control over (though I did download a copy of the story, since I loved it and would hate to lose track of it because the site goes down). My conclusion is that a book and a story are two different things--an idea I've had before, for sure, but never in quite so concrete a way. Reading a Salinger story on my Kindle doesn't take away from the beauty of it, and I can still smile at books on my shelves that I'll probably never open again, just because I remember where they came from and how much I enjoyed them in the past.

Week 8: Reading Reflection

"Dangerous Questions at the Reference Desk" Mark Lenker, 2008.

My primary though throughout this article was "So ... where do these things stop?" The text presupposes a fundamental divide between the reference librarian and the available library materials (or just the internet access provided in the library). It also assumes that patrons with an obviously "dangerous" question are likely to approach the reference desk, which seems rather unlikely to me. When it comes down to it, librarians are just another resource--a lively, sparkling, brilliant, awesome resource... but in some ways we're just a path to information, same as a library catalog or Google.  Even if we don't help someone find instructions for building a bomb or growing marijuana, he can still find the information on his own. This seems more a question of personal liability and ethics than a larger policy question--with emphasis on the liability aspect.

On the other hand, I really appreciate that the emphasis of "virtues analysis" is placed on the librarian him/herself as an ethical being, rather than an evaluation of the patron. I've read a couple of blog/twitter posts from people (not any of our star bloggers) who were pretty darn sure they could tell which people were asking for information about illegal substances/actions for research purposes and which people wanted to break the law--the answer to the latter basically being "teenagers" in every case. Considering how upset I got at those people, I really value Lenker's article for avoiding this kind of evaluation, and placing the burden of ethical decision on the librarian.

Two small notes: "vice" seems like a rather poor word choice in the present day, considering the connotation has shifted from "negative personal quality" to "self-indulgent habit." Similarly, I can't help laughing at the Victorian quality of the "virtue" vocabulary--"personal dissoluteness" rings in my head in the voice of a disapproving nineteenth century matriarch, disparaging her grandson for his drinking habits. But maybe I just read too much.

Week 7: Class and Reading Reflection

So, I admit I am a little skeptical about the Socratic Seminar process. I'm all for Socratic Method in pedagogy--but I'm always hesitant to buy into a teaching method that has this many rules involved. Good teaching is about flexibility and responding to the class--this method seems more like winding a key and letting the class go. It is open-ended, which I like, and relies on the students' responses--but still seems weirdly claustrophobic to me.

I also think that the point of a teacher in a seminar of any sort is to give input and act as a leader in a discussion, so stepping out of it entirely seems counter-intuitive. If the author of the article (whose name I cannot, unfortunately, remember) was asked to step out of the discussion by her students, maybe she just wasn't that good at teaching? Or, at least, choosing the wrong questions? I got the impression she was sticking to a list rather than responding to her students' discussion. But maybe I'm just remembering the bad stuff. I'm definitely looking forward to trying out this style of discussion today, since it's totally new to me.

On the books: Almost every single story in my book club is about death. And every one of them is hilarious, charming, sweet, or thought-provoking on the subject. Not one (in my opinion) is morbid or unnecessarily depressing. I started reading them on the way home from ASB, immediately after finishing a big fat book of Victorian Things... and at first it was so nice just to be reading fiction again that I was overcome with delight. And then the delight changed, and was actually at the stories themselves, rather than their genre. And then the headache from reading on a tiny screen in a dark car started, and I kept reading.

Note: This was written before the Book Club class, but is being posted afterwards.

Week 7? 8? 9? I've lost track.

What I did on my Alternative Spring Break: read a lot of poetry, made a finding aid, saw old friends, spent too much money.

What I did not do on my Alternative Spring Break: sleep, comment on blogs, write blogs, look at anything (besides internship work) on a screen bigger than the one on my phone.


Sorry all! Consider this a placeholder post (and an apology) until I have a chance to finish my real posts.