Google Books as index

October 3, 2011 – 9:59 am

This is going to be blindingly obvious to probably about 90% of my readers, but to the 10%1 for whom it isn’t, it might be a bit of useful knowledge.

I was teaching a class last week that focused primarily on print sources, and I was showing the students a selection of the books that had been put on reserve for their course.  One of the students asked, “are any of these books, or the other resources for this class, available online?”

Good question!

So I popped over to Google Books and showed them how many of the reserve books were online, but in “limited preview” or “snippet view” only.  One book, published in 1926, was out of copyright and therefore available in all its cover-to-cover glory.  So this was an enlightening diversion into the legal and economic ramifications of Google Books.

But one of the features (er, bugs, really) of some of the mid-20th-century books that this particular professor had put on reserve was their abysmal, or nonexistent, indexes.  Since the students would be combing through them looking for references to very specific items and issues, the lack of indexes was going to be a significant stumbling block for them.2

Enter Google Books as index. Side-by-side with the print edition, search Google Books for the term you’re interested in, and even if the book is only available in snippet view, you still get the page references for where that term is mentioned. And, even better than a back-of-the-book index, you can see the immediate context for the term, which will help you sort through all the references and see which ones are most relevant to your needs.

Like I said, this is probably blindingly obvious to most, but it was the first time I’d put two and two together to articulate this use of Google Books, and it was clearly news to the faculty member I was working with, as well.

 

 

  1. That would be, what, about 1/2 of a reader? ↩
  2. Not to mention students’ general lack of understanding of the existence, purpose, and use of indexes. ↩
By Catherine | Posted in Google, In the classroom | Comments (3)

Philosophy of Librarianship

September 1, 2011 – 10:38 am

There’s a meme that’s been going around lately about people’s philosophy of librarianship.  Since I had to write a statement to precisely that effect1 just last month for my pre-tenure review portfolio, it seemed an easy thing to toss mine off here.

Part of my statement of philosophy had to do with continually asking students “how do you know that,” which I’ve already written about here. The other part is essentially this: If I can get students to consistently ask, and vigorously pursue answers to, the question “why?” then I’ve done my job:

  • Why is this author making this claim?
  • Why can’t I find out who published this website?
  • Why are academic journals so expensive?
  • Why did I get a bunch of unrelated articles in my search results (and how can I change the search to eliminate them)?
  • Why do nurses use APA style but historians use Chicago style?

…and so forth.

It’s a very limited philosophy, to be sure, and there are many many many aspects of libraries and librarianship that it leaves out. But it’s what keeps me coming back to my office each morning.

 

  1. Actually, the form I was responding to said “Philosophy of libarianship,” which made me tempted to use that spelling consistently throughout the document, but somehow I didn’t think the Rank & Tenure Committee would appreciate the joke. ↩
By Catherine | Posted in Professional issues | Comments (1)

Why it matters how faculty view librarians

August 26, 2011 – 1:13 pm

I love it when my friend Vardibidian blogs about libraries, because he always has such intriguing and thought-provoking things to say.  Yesterday, he had a post that very neatly connected some dots surrounding the recent Ithaka S+R report and its contention that while library directors prioritize the library’s role in facilitating teaching and learning, faculty see the library’s role primarily as a purchasing agent.

What was great about V’s post was that he offered a compelling argument as to why this is a problem, which is essentially, that faculty who view the library primarily as a purchasing agent won’t necessarily think to recommend to their students that they go talk to a librarian when they’re having trouble with their research.

And that is a problem, because the research that I did last fall, which will be published in the Spring 2012 issue of Reference & User Services Quarterly, shows that students who are encouraged by a librarian (in the context of library instruction in their courses) to ask at the library for help are not statistically more likely to do so. But students who are encouraged by a faculty member to ask for help are more likely to do so — lots more likely.

So this is a problem, and one that we probably need to address head-on.

By Catherine | Posted in Faculty, Professional issues | Comments (9)

How do you know that?

August 25, 2011 – 1:33 pm

I just finished up writing my pre-tenure review portfolio, and one of the things I wrote about in my “philosophy of librarianship” statement was asking students, repeatedly if necessary, “how do you know that?”

It’s a fantastic question to ask, when you’re trying to get students to think critically about the sources of information they find.  You’re essentially asking them to provide credible evidence for their claims (those claims being, in this case, “this is a good source to use for my paper”) but in my experience, saying, “you need to provide credible evidence to support your claims” gets blank looks, while saying, “how do you know that?” really gets them thinking.

Here’s how it might play out:

Student: This web site is a good source for my paper.

Me: How do you know that?

Student: Well, the author of the site is a noted scholar on the topic.

Me: How do you know that?

Student: She’s written several books on the subject.

Me: How do you know those books are legitimate works of scholarship?

Student: Well, on the web page for the books, there are quotes from other people praising the books

Me: How do you know those people are scholars and not the author’s friends or disciples?

…and so on, at each stage of the process, continually challenging the student to justify her conclusions, dig deeper, and question her own assumptions.

I’m going to try to remember to ask this question more often when I’m teaching evaluative skills — or even basic navigational things, like “how do you know which article to select from a results list?” — this semester.

By Catherine | Posted in Critical thinking, In the classroom, Instruction, Students | Comments (5)

ACRL Webcast: Classroom Assessment for Information Literacy Instruction

June 23, 2011 – 1:22 pm

So, remember those two presentations I did last fall?  Well, I’ll be reworking and expanding that content, and delivering it as a webcast for ACRL’s e-Learning program on Tuesday, July 19, at 2:00 p.m. EDT:

“Classroom Assessment for Information Literacy Instruction: Are They Learning What You’re Teaching?”

If you want to learn more about formative assessment in information literacy instruction, you might find this to be a useful learning opportunity! One of the ways I’ll expand the content is to respond to some of the ideas generated in the minute paper assessments from when I gave the presentations – those ideas were also what inspired the Conference Talkback series of posts here.

(Full disclosure: I get a portion of the registration fees for this event, but I’m planning to sign my check over to my employer.)

By Catherine | Posted in Assessment, Instruction, Professional issues | Comments (0)

Seven years of librarianating

May 23, 2011 – 1:02 pm

So I looked up the other day and realized that I’ve been a professional librarian for seven years now.  Wow. How did that happen?

I got my degree in May of 2004; spent two years working at a Fellow at the NCSU Libraries; moved to South Bend and worked for a year as a CWIL Fellow; took six months off to have a baby; and now I’ve been in my current position for three and a half years.  Which all adds up to seven years, if you do the math.

So that’s a lot of why I still feel like a relative newcomer to the profession: I’ve only just started to get my feet under me in my current position (and the brass ring of tenure is still almost three years away), and the three and a half years I’ve worked here is the longest I’ve held any job, ever.1

I also hang with a pretty ambitious and talented bunch of librarians, some of whom are widely-recognized experts in their specialties and sub-specialties, so my relative lack of recognition and expertise contributes to my own sense of Judy-come-lateliness.2 I’m constantly surprised that people who I think of as, if not senior librarians and mentors, then at least role models, actually got their library degrees after I did: people like Jason Puckett and Dorothea Salo.

Then there are my classmates from UNC-Chapel Hill, Jason Griffey (Head of IT for the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga library and ALA/LITA tech-blogger-dude) and Jean Ferguson (Head of Reference at the Perkins Library at Duke).  Jenica Rogers (Director of Libraries at SUNY-Potsdam) has been a librarian longer than me, but thanks to the expedient of not dithering around for six years obtaining a completely useless graduate degree (as well as a lot of hard work) she’s both a library director and much younger than me.3  Iris Jastram is also simultaneously younger than me and a more senior librarian.

Put all this together with the fact that I’m the youngest librarian (and newest hire) by a considerable margin at my current library, and you can begin to understand how confusing it can be to realize that, hey, I’m maybe not such a n00b any more.

  1. I realize that, at my age, this doesn’t paint a very flattering picture of my previous work history. It doesn’t bother me much. ↩
  2. For the record, I am perfectly okay with my relative lack of recognition.  If I were the kind of person for whom ambition and recognition were important, I’d've stayed with the NCSU Libraries, where such are highly valued.  But that’s not me, and I’m better off where I am. ↩
  3. Actually, I can top that: in 2005, while I was still in my first professional position, I went to ALA in Chicago and ran into a woman who I’d known as an undergrad while I was doing my first graduate degree. She was a library director too, way back in 2005! ↩
By Catherine | Posted in Meta | Comments (1)

Friday Early-Reader Blogging

May 13, 2011 – 1:12 pm

It’s Friday, and more than that: it’s the last day of the semester! This particular semester has been a bit of a slog, and I’m not sure why. It’s possibly because I’m becoming more involved in more initiatives, both here on campus and in the wider librarianship community, that pull me in disparate directions. These are all good directions, of course, and things that are important and making a difference on campus and in the larger world — but they do leave me feeling like I’m squeezing my instruction into the cracks between them, rather than instruction being the core focus of my work.

But summer is upon us, and I have grand plans:

  • May will be the month when I finally write up the results of the research I did last fall and submit it for publication.
  • June will be devoted to preparing my pre-tenure review portfolio (see “publication” above!).
  • In July, I’ll be preparing to transform my presentations on assessment versus evaluation into a webcast for ACRL, scheduled for July 19.  Stay tuned for additional blatantly self-serving announcements; if I can’t pimp my webcast on my very own blog, where else can I? :)
  • And then August will be getting back into the swing of things and getting ready for the new semester.

So, with that in mind, here’s a gratuitous photo of an early reader:
Bookstravaganza

Have a good weekend, everybody!

By Catherine | Posted in Meta, Off-topic blather | Comments (0)

New guest post at ACRLog

April 12, 2011 – 11:25 am

This is just a quick post to note that I have a guest post up this week at ACRLog, entitled “Context Matters.”  Mostly I’m musing on issues of local campus and classroom contexts, and how they affect what works (and doesn’t work) in a library instruction classroom, building on my not-very-successful experiment with no-demonstration classes.

Go check it out!

By Catherine | Posted in In the classroom, Meta, Students | Comments (0)

Changing domain registrars, possible interruptions

March 31, 2011 – 7:00 pm

Just a quick note to let you know that I’ll be transferring this domain, and the other domains that I own or manage, from GoDaddy.com to a different registrar in the next few days.  I don’t know what this will mean for DNS stuff, so the blog may disappear for a day or so and then reappear.

By Catherine | Posted in Meta | Comments Off

The No-Demonstration Class, Or, Not

March 28, 2011 – 11:12 am

Wow, it’s been pretty quiet around here.  I’m sorry about that; the semester got kind of busy.

So what have I been working on this semester?  Well, to begin with, I made a real effort to move toward fewer database demonstrations in my instruction sessions. A lot of the one-shot instruction sessions that I do, after I consult with the faculty member about what their students need in order to succeed on their assignments, end up with the same basic pattern:

  1. Practice turning a topic phrase (e.g., “reducing juvenile delinquency through after-school sports programs”) into a Boolean1 search string (e.g., “juvenile delinquency AND (sports OR athletics)”).
  2. Basics of the user interface for whatever the relevant database is for the class. Because of the way our database subscriptions are configured, 9.5 times out of ten, it’s an EBSCO database.
  3. Locating the full text of an article, whether online, in print, or via Interlibrary Loan. Our link resolver, she does not have the most intuitive UI design in the world.

Now, in the corners of Information Literacy Instruction Land where I hang out, the conventional wisdom is:

  • Students learn better by doing than by being told.
  • Today’s 18-22-year-old college student is pretty darned good at figuring out online interfaces.
  • Therefore, they can, and should, do better by figuring out how to search a database on their own.

And thus was born the Holy Grail of database instruction: The No-Demonstration Class. No more standing in front of the class and futilely waving your hands at the projector screen! No more “click here, type here, and don’t forget this radio button!”  Student-directed, active learning!  Hands-on practical practice!  Social learning, because they do this in groups!

Different librarian instructors handle this differently: some turn the students loose from the get-go and gradually move them from their inevitable initial Googling into more and more specialized resources, while others give them a head start by pointing them to the library databases to start with. Some have the students present what they’ve found to the class after a certain amount of time spent fumbling around, and have the rest of the class critique the search strategies that  are presented, moving towards more and more sophisticated strategies.  Some provide more structure; some less; and some none at all.  All of them report dynamic, engaged, actively-learning classrooms, instead of classrooms full of snoozing, texting, Facebooking students.

Sounds great, right?  Of course it does! So I had to try it out for myself, and since so many of my classes seem to devolve into “how to search EBSCO databases,” and since I’m relatively comfortable with completely unstructured chaos in the classroom, I figured, what better opportunity to try it out?

Now, I should start by saying that I didn’t exactly jump in with both feet.  We still started the class with a brief discussion and exercise (in pairs) on constructing keyword searches.  I have enough experience with my students to know that, if we didn’t cover this ground first, I’d be turning students loose who would just do this to the poor unsuspecting database:

using an entire phrase as a keyword search

Or this:

single keyword search with a far too general keyword

Or, heaven help them, this:

What would this search retrieve, exactly? I don't even know.

So we went through the Boolean part of the lesson plan, and then I got them into pairs or groups, sent them to Academic Search Premier, and turned them loose with one of the two search strings we worked on in class — which were derived from their own topics, not “canned” topics that I had brought into class. And…

…it kind of bombed.

What did they do? Well, they dutifully went to the database, input the search more or less as one would expect, got some results, and were promptly done.

What did I expect them to do, based on what I’d heard from other librarians was happening in their classrooms? Well, for one thing, I’d expect them to look at their search results a little more carefully than just long enough to say, “oh, there’s an article that looks good.”  Maybe notice that a lot of their results were from, say, the New York Times and think twice about why that might have happened.  I’d hope that they’d explore the interface a little, poke around, try some options, discover the limiters (limit to peer-reviewed articles, limit by date, etc.).  Heck, even making a gonzo mistake like searching by subject heading right off the bat would be good, if only because it would make a useful example to talk about with the rest of the class.

But instead, they did what they were told: no less, certainly, but also no more.

Why didn’t it work as well for me as it clearly does for many other librarians?  I really don’t know.  It’s absolutely possible — even probable — that it’s something in the way I’m presenting the task that constrains them.  Either I need to give them more direction, or less, or different directions.  It’s convenient (and plausible) to blame the existing classroom dynamics that have developed between the faculty member and the students over the course of the semester.2  It’s also convenient to blame a campus culture that is not especially hands-on, experimental, techy, or DIY (our campus is kind of the opposite of MIT). Some of the campuses where, anecdotally, I hear about the No-Demonstration Class working very well, have more of those hands-on qualities as part of their campus cultures.

So what can I do to improve on the situation?  I can’t really change the existing classroom dynamic between students and the teaching faculty member, nor can I change the campus culture.  The only thing I can change is how I approach the lesson: how I frame the activity, what I tell the students as I turn them loose, what specific prompts and questions I direct them to answer (or not).  That’s clearly where I’m falling down, and where I could use some help.  Ideally, I’d go visit a bunch of campuses where librarians are teaching this way and see how they do it, but that’s clearly not practical (hellooooo, sabbatical project!).

In the absence of a grand cross-continent tour, then, I’ll have to ask for suggestions: How do you make this work in your classroom?  What has worked for you — and not worked?  How do I get my charmingly dutiful students to break out of their constraints and experiment a little bit?

  1. I never use the word “Boolean” in class. Ever. ↩
  2. We know that whatever dynamic and form of instruction the faculty member has established for a class will be the form of instruction that, when the students arrive in the library, they are most comfortable with. If the faculty member lectures, they’ll be most comfortable with a librarian lecturing at them, and uncomfortable with active group work.  And vice versa. ↩
By Catherine | Posted in In the classroom, Instruction, Students | Comments (9)