Librarian X

One of my favorite authors, Cory Doctorow, just put up some Youtube videos discussing students and media literacy. I’m embedding this one since it’s the most directly relevant to library instruction, but it’s worth listening to the whole series (on his blog). I really love his ideas for assignments using Wikipedia.

In previous years the Emory library has had part of the official new student orientation day that we used to give library tours.  This involved the students being brought over en masse by handlers, whereupon we’d give them a 10-minute “this is the library” presentation and drag them around the building half-asleep for tours.

This year the college didn’t include the library on the mandatory orientation schedule, so we came up with our own show.  We put on an Open House night organized and masterminded by my colleague Erin Mooney.  There was a self-tour, with a map marked with several service points where students had to go to get stickers for their map.  They turned in the completed maps at the end to enter a raffle for several $25 gift cards, and had the option to fill out a survey for an additional raffle ticket.

Meanwhile, around the building, we had:

Library staff performing music by the ref desk.

An immensely popular quiz game with USB drives as prizes.

Food and drinks.

A fantastic student a capella group.

Apparently I only saw about half of what was going on. I was giving technology demos all evening (though at least half of my attendees were just waiting for the next quiz show to start).  The business librarians downstairs were doing trivia questions.  I didn’t even know until the next day that there was a student improv troupe performing elsewhere in the building.

It was a huge success in my book.  I heard many students say how much fun they were having and how glad they were that they came.  It took more work to set up than the old tours, but we got to have fun along with the students and I think everyone who came left with an impression of the librarians as friendly, helpful and approachable, and they learned something about our services and where to get help.

I admit I’m usually amused by articles like this:

More (Unintentionally) Funny Student E-Mail Messages to Professors

But check out this quote:

“A student who didn’t show up for class on Monday morning just Facebooked me to ask where the class was. I am not responding to a Facebook message! Cripes!”

…um. This just makes me splutter in incomprehension.

Why on earth would a professor bother to set up a Facebook account and then refuse to use it to communicate with students? Yes, it’s possible that she set it up to network with friends and colleagues, but I’m willing to bet at least a dollar that that isn’t the case here. If it were, she wouldn’t consider text transmitted via Facebook’s server to be somehow inferior to text transmitted via the campus e-mail server.

…because we have undead skeletons walking around.

I realized recently that I’ve been collecting subscriptions to a number of blogs by MLIS students or new professionals. I find I’m particularly interested in reading work by people at a similar point to me in their careers. I get a lot of good ideas and inspiration that way. (If an MLIS student can be recognized as a mover & shaker, surely some of us have ideas worth listening to.)

I didn’t actually realize how many I was subscribing to until I went to compose this post. Some of these I’ve been reading for months or years, and some I just added last week. My “New Librarians” subscription folder consists of:

heidi go seek
informing MUVEs
The Inspired Library School Student
Infogeek
Into the Stacks
Jan Dawson, 7/8 librarian
Life as I Know It
New Librarians Blog
nirak.net – Musings of an LIS Student
The Vital Library
What I Learned Today…

I think I’ll make I have made a “New Librarians” blogroll heading just for these. Share the link love. And if you can recommend additions, better yet.

My library is offering an XML workshop for staff, even those of us who don’t work in archives or cataloging.  This is a very cool idea (um, if you’re a library nerd), and I love that departments are offering basic training in their skills to those outside the area where it seems directly applicable.  These things can surprise you; I was a serials cataloger for a few weeks before I started working in reference and instruction, and I found that knowing a little bit about cataloging helped me come up with some non-stupid OPAC tricks later on.

Anyway.  For this XML class we’re working with actual digitized archival documents that need metadata.  I’m finding that this is a real motivator for me to do a good job and actually learn what I’m doing, even during a very busy week when otherwise
I wouldn’t feel very engaged with the material.  I’ve discovered the same thing in a web design class I’m taking in library school.  We’re designing websites for real-world clients, and I recruited our client — a good friend of mine who at this writing really needs a better website.  (Hopefully if you read this a few weeks from now there will be a lovely home page at that link.)  The fact that we’re learning, and creating, something that has a real-life application makes all the difference in the world; I care a lot more about the work I’m doing.

Why on earth should I be surprised to realize this?   I talk constantly about making my library teaching directly relevant to what students really need for their classes if I want to actually reach them with the material.  It makes me hope that I’ve unconsciously realized some more good teaching principles from the student side of the equation.

I was heavily involved in starting up our library’s first undergraduate research award last year. This year’s entry deadline is coming up in two days and the entries are starting to roll in. Last year I was afraid we weren’t going to have any entries, which I needn’t have worried about — we’re giving three $500 prizes! This year we’re designating one prize for first-year students so the less experienced students can compete on a more level footing with the upperclassmen.

Last year at this time I was really stressed out about everything that could go wrong.  There are a hundred tiny details to keep track of.  This year it’s about 50% less stress since we’ve been through it once and have all the lessons we learned under our belt.  I’m sure next year will go more smoothly still.

There’s some real work involved in putting this thing together, but this is a great project and I’m really excited to have been involved in getting it going.  The students seem really interested, have been consulting with librarians to get advice on their projects and clearly putting a lot of care and thought into it.

I’m emerging from a haze of cold medicine this week…. Is everyone I know sick?

Yesterday a colleague was looking through student feedback from a class. One student had suggested an improvement for future library class sessions: “Have the instructor wear a penguin costume because penguins rock.”

[photo credit: "Rock Hopper Penguin" by "Ginger Me" via flickr]

I’ve been playing a game called PMOG: Passively Multiplayer Online Game (currently in closed beta, but I have some invitations available; if you want one, leave a comment). It sort of adds a second background layer to the web — one with a game in it. Players install a Firefox extension and accumulate points as they visit different websites during the course of their daily surfing. You can lay mines as traps for other players on sites (in the first screenshot, I tripped a mine laid on wikipedia.org by another player; don’t worry, my browser was wearing armor so I’m fine), or leave portals (links) from one site to another.

What I’m interested in here is the missions feature. If you’re not familiar with MMOGs, a common gameplay feature is the quest-giver or mission giver, who offer tasks for your character to complete (in World of Warcraft, they have big yellow question marks over their heads so you can spot them). In PMOG, players leave mission starting points all over the web, and you either happen across missions serendipitously or pick them from a list on the PMOG site. (In this photo I ran across a mission on flickr.com.)

A mission is basically a tour of a series of websites with explanatory text. Since you get PMOG “datapoints” for visiting new sites, you get points as you complete missions — but the really interesting feature is that it provides a way for one user to lead another through a series of sites and comment on each one. I haven’t seen another application that does this sort of thing. My first thought was “Jeez, I wish there was an easy way for us to use this to create tutorials.” How cool would it be to add our own commentaries on database sites for our users? Or lead them from one database to another? Or to a research guide?

An application like this allows for commentary to take place without interfering with the actual browsing experience, or requiring any content to be added to the page itself. It makes me think of the help text that appears onscreen during a game play tutorial, which prompts the user to try certain actions but allows actual play to continue. I’ve been thinking for a while that game tutorials were a help model that libraries should try to emulate. They usually take place in the live game environment, so you don’t have to read a manual before starting to actually play; they just add a level of instruction to the live experience.

This afternoon I gave a presentation on library services to a group of student residence advisers.  I wasn’t quite sure what to show them — my directive was “a sampling of library services that they might find useful.”  So I made a slide show called “Ten things you (or your residents) might not know about library services.”  I went really broad, and showed them everything from placing storage requests, to interlibrary loan, to borrowing agreements with other local schools, to EndNote.  Since these were sophomores to seniors, I didn’t do any of the real basic stuff I might show to first-years, but tried to pick out tips and techniques that students often seem not to know about.

I was anxious about it, because I have a lot of back-to-school work going on this month (we all do!), and I didn’t feel I’d done as much preparation as I’d like.  Then again, I never do, and I rarely bomb completely.

Everything went great.  They were mostly a very outgoing bunch, asked intelligent questions, and kept the session going with some good back-and-forth discussion.  They loved EndNote and I got some “whoa”s as I created a bibliography out of thin air.  I put in a plug for them to request library programming in their residence halls, took them on a visit to our archives and technology centers, and I dare to think they even enjoyed themselves.  A very encouraging way to start the semester’s instruction work.