An anecdote, and thinking about people as reference sources

February 2, 2009 – 8:49 am

I was listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young‘s “Ohio” the other morning, and it reminded me of one of my favorite anecdotes. My apologies if you know me and I’ve regaled you with this one before:

When I was in my senior year in high school, I was working on a paper and needed to know whether the Kent State shootings had happened in 1969 or 1970. I knew I could have looked it up somewhere – an encyclopedia, probably, though I was unsure whether the event would have been included in an encyclopedia1 – but I was a lazy 17-year-old. I was sitting in my school library at the time, and looking at the librarian, I figured she was probably about the right age to have been alive and paying attention at the time, so I walked over and asked her.

“Excuse me, I was wondering if you happened to know whether the Kent State shootings happened in 1969 or 1970. If you don’t know, that’s fine, I’ll just look it up, but I thought it’d be faster just to ask.”

“It was in 1970,” she replied.

The anecdote doesn’t end there, but I’ll pause it here to talk about what I did, and how I was thinking about it this afternoon.

So what I realized this afternoon, was that even at 17, I was a pretty savvy information-seeker. I knew where I could find the information I needed, but I also knew that it might be a lengthier and somewhat frustrating search, especially with the resources available to me at my high school library, than I would ideally prefer. I also knew that all I needed was the year (this is important), so precise recall wasn’t necessary; if the librarian I was talking to could just remember roughly when it happened, that was good enough. So that’s pretty interesting.

But it also got me thinking about how often we do (or don’t) use other people as reference sources. Oh, sure, we refer students to other offices on campus when appropriate, or we call up other offices to find out, for example, whether the dorm beds are regular-twin-sized or XL-twin-sized. But how often do we call someone up or stick our head into someone’s office and say, “hey, do you happen to remember what the capital of Zimbabwe is?”

My husband teaches English literature at Saint Mary’s, and he taught a course last semester on Literature of the Environment. As an early assignment, he gave the students a take-home quiz where they had to answer questions like, “what species of trees line the main avenue into campus?” and “what, if anything, is done to manage the migratory population of Canada geese on campus?” and “where is there a stand of walnut trees on campus, and does anyone harvest the nuts?”

Since he’s married to me, and he knows that questions like this give reference librarians fits, he was careful to give us a copy of the assignment in advance, and to emphasize that while some of the questions could potentially be answered with traditional reference sources, many were better answered (and some could only be answered) by talking with members of the campus community, and that we should absolutely not hesitate to make appropriate referrals.2 Part of the point of the assignment was to get students thinking about who knows what about the local environment on campus, and how little of that information is preserved in traditional sources.

So all that’s interesting and got me thinking a bit today. But here’s the end of the anecdote:

The librarian looked me in the eye and said, “It was May 4, 1970. I was there.”

Whoa.

So I sat and talked with her for a long time that day, hearing what it had been like from her perspective. I wish I could remember, now, more of what she told me. She talked in detail about the geography of the campus, where she’d been standing, where the National Guard troops had been, and I don’t remember any of that, just that she said it had been chaotic and terrifying, and that the troops had been the same age as the students, some even younger.

What are the odds that I’d’ve walked into any library in the country and found someone with that knowledge? Now granted, I went to a fairly unusual high school, but I still realized that I’d encountered a unique slice of oral history that day.

And that’s the other thing I think is really valuable about using people as reference sources: you sometimes get way more information than you expected, and that can be a really meaningful exchange for both parties.

 

  1. I was in high school before the internet. No, really. Okay, it existed, but it hadn’t progressed further than NSFNET by the time I graduated. There, now you know pretty much how old I am. ↩
  2. To his credit, he also warned the appropriate members of the campus community, like the Grounds Department and the bird specialist in the Biology Department, that they might be temporarily besieged by questions from his class. ↩
By Catherine | Posted in Off-topic blather, Reference | Comments (5)

Thinking about “scholarly” vs. “popular” serials

January 30, 2009 – 2:27 pm

We’ve all done the classic “how to tell a scholarly journal from a popular magazine” lesson, usually with a face-off between something like Newsweek and The Journal of Neurobiophysiology or Critical Discourses in Freudian Meta-Rhetorical Analysis.  And we all tell our students that one of the classic hallmarks of a “popular” or trade magazine, as opposed to a scholarly journal, is the presence and prevalence of advertising, right?  That’s one of the easiest aspects to teach, and one of the aspects that students grasp quickly and thoroughly, right?

Have you looked at the New England Journal of Medicine lately?

I just copied an article from it to use in a nursing class next week, and Holy Pharmaceutical Advertising, Batman!  It’s just chock-a-block with ads. So many, in fact, that I had trouble finding the page numbers to locate the article I actually needed.  Now granted, the pages with the actual research article had no ads at all, and if I were accessing it electronically (which, sadly, I am not, though we do apparently have online access from one or two specific public terminals…another issue entirely) I might not even notice the ads, but still, it’s astonishing.

And then there are the nursing trade journals, which I’m having the nursing students compare with peer-reviewed research articles for this assignment.  I’m trying to figure out how to explain that these aren’t scholarly articles, even though I’m sure they’re not.  Yes, the articles have photos, especially on the first page or two, that are more mood-setting than informative, so that’s a vote in favor of non-scholarly.  And while they’re written in a more conversational style than the research articles, as a non-nurse I can tell you that the professional jargon flies pretty fast and furious in these articles, so that might be a vote in favor of scholarly.  And every one of the longer articles has references at the end.  Now that’s confusing, since that’s one of the criteria that’s almost as easy for undergrads to evaluate as the presence of advertising.

And then there’s Nursing 2009, which is clearly (to my mind, at least) a trade magazine, but describes itself as “the peer-reviewed journal of clinical excellence” and has been peer-reviewed and evidence-based since its inception in 1971.  So how on earth do we explain this to students? I think I’m just not even going to mention that it’s peer-reviewed, and focus on the audience and purpose of the journal: advice to nurses in their clinical practice, vs. disseminating research to other researchers.

But dang, they don’t exactly make it easy, do they?

By Catherine | Posted in Instruction, Reference | Comments Off on Thinking about “scholarly” vs. “popular” serials

The things students don’t know…

January 27, 2009 – 2:21 pm

I just had a student come to the reference desk with a question about a business assignment about India for a class I taught last week. (Every student in the class has to write the same memo about India, so I’m not worried about her confidentiality: she could be any one of the 19 students in that class.)

In the course of helping her sort through a bunch of factual information about India, I found myself providing all kinds of context for that information: pointing out that the fact that the population was 1.2 billion people, but the land area was one third that of the U. S. meant that population density was very high; mentioning that although the main religion is Hinduism, there’s the whole Hindu-Muslim thing (not to mention the whole India/Pakistan thing!); commenting that while yes, it is factually correct to say that India achieved its independence in 1947, it’s much more meaningful to say “India is a former British colony” and what that implies for the relationship between India and Great Britain (ever wonder why English is so prevalent in India?) … that sort of context-building information.

To her credit, she did notice that the stats she had (from the CIA World Factbook) showed 300-plus airports, only 250 of which had paved runways. “Hm,” she said, “I wonder what’s up with that?” “Well, India is a very poor country,” I said.

I’m always surprised at how little they know about the world, and how much they can learn from us, even in the most unlikely situations.

By Catherine | Posted in Reference, Students | Comments Off on The things students don’t know…

In which I slap myself in the forehead

January 21, 2009 – 4:56 pm

WHY didn’t I think of this sooner?

I’ve been struggling to explain EBSCO’s “My EBSCOhost” feature to students for a year now. Most times, when I explain that it’s a way to save citations and articles (and other stuff, but I generally don’t go into that) from one session to another, or a useful way for students in group projects to share their research, there are a few students who seem to get it, but most have that kind of blank look that says, “and I would want to do this…why, exactly?”

I finally found an analogy that actually seems to work. At least, it did in the Biology class I taught this afternoon: it’s a shopping cart. Or rather, the “folder” is a shopping cart, and creating a My EBSCOhost account is like creating an account on a shopping site: it lets you save the items in your shopping cart and come back to them later. That seemed to get a reaction, or at least recognition, from them.

Just call me Captain Obvious over here.

By Catherine | Posted in In the classroom, Instruction, Students, Those dang databases | Comments Off on In which I slap myself in the forehead

Why I’m not on Facebook

January 18, 2009 – 4:40 pm

Okay, I’m admitting it: I’m not on Facebook. Not at all. Don’t have a profile there, and never have. Do I have to turn in my NextGen Librarian card now?

It’s not that I’m social-media-challenged; I’ve got a blog (and not a hosted blog, either), don’t I? I’m on Twitter, del.icio.us, and Flickr; I use both Bloglines and Google Reader. I flatter myself that I’m pretty social-media-aware, actually. So why not Facebook?

Let’s turn the question around and ask, rather, “why should I be on Facebook? The usual argument for why I should be on Facebook goes something like this:

  1. All of our students are on Facebook; it defines how they interact with each other and with information. We need to understand how our students understand information and the web, so we need to understand Facebook, and the best way to understand Facebook is to create an account and start messing around with it.
  2. Come on, everyone’s on Facebook? Don’t you want to join in?

I’m going to address these arguments in reverse order, since I think the first one is actually the more important one. To address the second argument, why wouldn’t I want to join in the fun? Well, I would like to join in the fun, actually, and I’ve been seriously tempted not a few times. But then I think, “do I really need another online social site sucking at my already insanely skimpy free time?” I spend quite a lot of time each day reading blogs, checking in on Twitter, looking at my contacts’ photos on Flickr (mostly their adorable kids’ photos, actually), and participating on old-school forum sites. Given that, for me, free time is a zero-sum game, what am I willing to give up in order to do this? The answer turned out to be, not much.

Then there’s the problem of overlapping online identities. As I see it, I have three distinct online identities/presences:

  1. my professional one, which encompasses this blog, some of my Twitter activity and contacts, some of my del.icio.us bookmarks, and my Google Reader feeds;
  2. my personal one, which encompasses my Flickr photos, some of my Twitter and del.icio.us stuff, my Bloglines feeds, and my other blog; and
  3. a pseudonymous profile that I use on one or two forum sites where I’d prefer to protect my privacy.

Which of these do I establish on Facebook? Obviously not the pseudonymous one, but I still have this image of a bizarre collision of librarian colleagues, distant family members, and college classmates that I haven’t seen in 20 years. Thanks, but no thanks.

The first, and more important, argument for why I should be on Facebook revolves around the theory that the best (some might argue the only) way to understand a technology is to jump in and muck around with it for a while. I don’t disagree, but I also think there’s room for the possibility that you can, if you pay attention, absorb what you need to know about a technology without actually doing that technology. When a technology is so endemic in a community, as Facebook is, and there’s enough backchatter about the technology among those who serve that community, as there is among librarians about Facebook, I think we can hardly manage not to know a little about it.

That’s what happened with me and instant messaging, in fact: for years I’d been hearing the call to “get on IM” because “all the students are doing it and we have to know where their heads are at.” Well, I didn’t get on IM at the time because nobody I conversed with regularly made a point of asking me to do so, but I understood the concept well enough that, when I took a job in 2004 that required me to use AIM for intra-office communication, I got an account, jumped in, and was up and chatting in less than 5 minutes.

So, I know that Facebook consists of profiles, and photos, and networks of friends and groups, and photos, and everybody has a “wall” that people write stuff on, and there are photos, and status updates that tell you about what a person is doing (digression: Pride and Prejudice told through Facebook status updates), and did I mention the photos, and there are games you can play and sheep you can throw.

Do I really need to throw a sheep (or have one thrown at me) to understand that there are sheep, and you throw them?

More seriously, though, if our library decided to establish a presence on Facebook, or decided that librarians needed to be present on Facebook to do outreach to students, or if I had the slightest indication from our students that our presence on Facebook would be welcome, I’d establish an account and jump into the fray, just as I did with IM (which, I have to point out, I use a whole lot less now that I’m no longer in that job). Until then, Facebook is on my radar and I’m keeping tabs on what’s going on with it, but I don’t really feel a compelling need to be there.

Update, Feb. 3, 2009: Laura Blankenship makes some of the same points I just did in her post, “The Problem With Facebook.” I like the way the article she cites identifies the problem as a lack of granularity of friendship. Flickr does this pretty well, with its categories of Contacts, Friends, and Family, but ideally I think you’d want to have a whole lot of categories, with varying degrees of access and notification and flexibility to change who sees what. Something more akin to WordPress’s roles and capabilities (which perhaps is too much granularity, but at least you don’t have to use all of it).

Update, Mar. 18, 2009: Michelle Boule has a post about her long-delayed entry into Facebook, which makes the excellent point that nearly everything that Facebook does, is done better by other online services (blogs, Flickr, Twitter, etc.).  But she also notes that “for someone who has no other online presence, facebook is pretty cool. You can join groups, find friends, chat, send messages, send presents, microblog… [emphasis mine]”  And I think this points at a very interesting phenomenon:  Facebook is a one-stop shop for folks who don’t have or don’t want to learn the technical skills to do all of this on their own.  Okay, so it’s not that hard to set up a Flickr account or install an IM client or set up an externally-hosted blog, but it’s all done for you (essentially) on Facebook.  And it’s all seamlessly integrated.  And that’s really awesome – it’s a little like what Apple does, in bundling all the essential “fun” software and hardware (iPhoto, built-in webcams, etc.) and having it all work together without the end user having to configure everything.  Worth thinking about.

By Catherine | Posted in Professional issues, Students | Comments (2)

Friday Toddler-Blogging

December 19, 2008 – 1:12 pm

It’s my last day of work before two weeks off for the holidays (HALLELUJAH, and thank you, Saint Mary’s College, for your generous number of days off near the winter holidays), so I leave you with this:

James is dubious about Mom's plan to make a snowball

By Catherine | Posted in Off-topic blather | Comments Off on Friday Toddler-Blogging

LOEX and the “small conference” problem

December 18, 2008 – 8:42 am

If you’re an instruction librarian, you know about LOEX, the organization that holds the leading annual library instruction/information literacy conference in North America, also known as LOEX. And if you’re an instruction librarian who’s ever thought of going to LOEX, you probably know about the insanity that is LOEX registration. If you don’t, here’s the deal:

LOEX organizers believe very strongly in the value of a small conference, so they cap registration. I’m not sure what the cap is, and I haven’t been able to find any hard numbers online, but for some reason I have 250 in my head. (I’m not sure if that includes presenters or not.) For the purposes of argument, let’s say it’s 250.

There are many more than 250 librarians who want to attend LOEX each year, so registration is done online on a first-come, first-served basis. They open the website at a designated hour (usually 1:00 pm EST), and close it once registration has filled up. In recent years, it’s filled up in under an hour, and sometimes in as little as about 30 minutes. Folks who don’t get registered in the first round get put on a wait list.

This leads to the spectacle that is hundreds of instruction librarians around the country hunched over their computers at 12:55 pm, hitting “refresh” over and over again, and then frantically filling out the registration form as fast as they can, in hopes that they’ll be able to get in. If you have to teach a class at 1:00, or have technical difficulties, well, you’re just out of luck that year. Although I understand that a fair number of people get in off the wait list, which suggests that people who think they might want to go to LOEX register proactively, and then cancel before registration payment is due if it turns out that they can’t/won’t go.

Now, this strikes me as problematic on a number of levels: first of all, because not all the librarians who want, or need, to go to LOEX can go, and because there doesn’t seem to be an equitable system for deciding who gets to go and who doesn’t. There’s no accounting for whether you (or someone else from your institution) has gone to LOEX in the past, no possibility for “you didn’t get in this year, so you get priority for attending next year,” and no system for accommodating someone whose technical issues make it difficult or impossible to register rapidly online. (Screenreading software, anyone?)

Admittedly, I don’t know how many people try to register for LOEX, as compared with how many slots there are. It’s possible that, after cancellations are taken into account, nearly everyone gets in off the wait list. But it’s also possible that dozens or hundreds of librarians aren’t able to go every year.

And this is where, to my mind, the “small conference” idea breaks down. Sure, it’s nice to have a conference that’s reasonably small and manageable, and certainly there’s a difference between, say, 250 attendees and 2000, or even 250 and 750. But is there really a qualitative difference between 250 attendees and 350? Either way, you still won’t be able to meet and talk with everyone who’s there, and I doubt very much that moving from 250 to 350 would affect the kind of conference hotel and meeting rooms that the organization could book; if anything, it might bump the conference up to the next level of volume discount. (I could be completely wrong about this, of course, never having booked a conference hotel, so feel free to tell me I’m full of hot air here.) If increasing the registration cap from 250 to 350 would allow nearly all of the librarians who want to go to LOEX to attend, wouldn’t it be worth it?

Several years back, at the conference in Maryland I think (Spring 2006?) I seem to remember there being talk of overhauling the way that registration for LOEX worked. But then last year, for LOEX in Chicago, it was exactly the same deal, with the online free-for-all. I wonder what kinds of changes they were considering, and why they ultimately didn’t implement them?

By Catherine | Posted in Professional issues | Comments Off on LOEX and the “small conference” problem

in which I date myself, and also crack myself up

December 17, 2008 – 12:47 pm

I just got asked a question about citing multiple authors in APA style, and to illustrate the point, I used Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, and Howe as an example.  I’m virtually certain it went right over the student’s head.

By Catherine | Posted in Reference, Students | Comments Off on in which I date myself, and also crack myself up

Reference traffic vs. reference questions

December 17, 2008 – 11:31 am

It’s hard to compare the experience of working the reference desk at my current job with the experience at MFPOW, the NCSU Libraries. Just trying to explain one to the other is hard, as I’ve discovered in talking with my co-workers here.

At Saint Mary’s, we have one person on the desk at a time, no Saturday hours (except during finals, which is when I’m writing this post), all the people who staff the desk are MLS librarians, and we’re pretty flexible about leaving the desk unstaffed for brief periods if someone needs to be away.  At NCSU, there were at least two people on the desk at any given time, plus one person on backup, plus one person handling email and chat (and sometimes the phone) in a separate location; the desk was staffed by MLS librarians, paraprofessional staff, grad students, and undergrads; it’s now staffed 24 hours a day thanks to the hard work of my friend Jennifer Calvo; and we were really vigilant about always keeping it staffed.

But the most interesting difference has been the difference between reference traffic and reference questions.  At NCSU, we almost always had traffic; it’s why we had two or more people on the desk at once.  But I can’t begin to describe to you how much of that traffic concerned the excruciatingly complex nuances of printing, photocopying, and paying for same.*  We also got our fair share of “how do I read the files on my flash drive?” “how do I print Powerpoint slides six to a page?” and “where’s the bathroom?”** of course.  Not to mention the classic “I need three scholarly articles on my topic for a paper that’s due tomorrow, and can they please all be online, and I’ve never heard of a periodical index or database before, and my cell phone is going to go off in the middle of our conversation.”  Tons of those. I honed my five-minute BI session on finding articles to a fine art while at that job.

What we rarely got were actual reference questions.  And that’s what we do get here at Saint Mary’s.  Oh sure, we get plenty of the other kinds of questions (not so much about the bathroom, though) and we spend plenty of time troubleshooting various technology (ask me about printing double-sided from a Mac, go on, I dare you!) but we get a startling number of actual reference questions.  Some examples:

Yesterday I got asked which Western industrialized nations had universal health care.  (Flippant answer: “all of them but us!”  Turns out to be pretty much true.)

A student asked for books about the KKK; after talking with her a bit, I found her some books but also recommended the article on the KKK in the Encyclopedia of Racism in the United States, with which she was delighted. I never once saw an NCSU student happy to be directed to a reference book, and most wouldn’t consult them no matter how hard we tried.

Over IM, I got asked for articles about a particular philosophical theory and a contemporary romantic comedy film.  After a little explaining that it was unlikely that the student was actually going to find an article on that topic (the “improbable source” problem), we realized that really she just needed to understand the theory, so I suggested the article in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the philosopher, and the article in Magill’s World Philosophy: Essay-Reviews of 225 Major Works on the theory, as well as an article in the apparently free, online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

None of these were anything like 99% of the questions I got asked at the NCSU Libraries.  In fact, just in my first semester on the reference desk here at Saint Mary’s, I was asked more real reference questions than in two years at NCSU.  And that’s with many fewer total questions to start with.

I don’t know what this says about the differences between a large, land-grant, technical and agricultural university and a small, Catholic, women’s liberal arts college, but it sure is interesting.

*To be fair, my time at the NCSU Libraries predated the Learning Commons, and I’m not sure how many of the issues with printing and photocopying have been made simpler in the Commons.  But Holy Black Text On White Paper, Batman, it was mind-bendingly complex when I was there.

**Though oddly enough, when we moved the reference desk to a place where the location of the bathroom was much harder to describe, we almost completely stopped getting asked where it was.  Freaky.  I do wonder how often they get asked that question now in the Learning Commons.

By Catherine | Posted in Reference | Comments Off on Reference traffic vs. reference questions

Spam conundrum

December 13, 2008 – 11:46 am

Why is it that this blog, which has been online for, what, less than a month? has already had its first piece of spam caught by Akismet, while my other blog,* which has been up for three years and was on WordPress 1.5 until just two months ago, hasn’t gotten any?

*Sorry, no link – it’s a family group blog and we’re all posting under our first names only to preserve privacy.  If you know me in real life, you probably know what it is, and if not, ask me and I’ll give you the link.

By Catherine | Posted in Meta, Off-topic blather | Comments Off on Spam conundrum