Halfway

As of today, my 6-month sabbatical is half over. I want to say that it seems like I’ve barely started, but when I really think over the past 3 months, I know that’s not actually true. It’s just that I don’t want it to end.

The full writeup of the ELIP program is currently undergoing revisions and may actually be published by December, which would be amazing. It’s amazing how much is clarified through the writing process that doesn’t come clear in the analysis or in any other step. I have also mostly completed the conference paper for the Library Assessment Conference in November, and I’m currently trying to coalesce some thoughts around what kind of space the academic library is and how that might reflect on the information literacy program.

I do understand now, though, that the sabbatical is not about outcomes, not primarily. I think I started to understand that when my fingernails kept interfering with my typing in a way that’s never happened before, and I realized that just incidentally they hadn’t been chewed down to nubbins. The space I can hold for creative energy is widening. It’s impossible to quantify the advantages of being free to think about your work and yourself in a new way, in a way that’s ultimately very sad because it will end. And when it does, I will face the task of how to bring this with me. But not before.

My Philosophy of Librarianship – A Manifesto of sorts

Recent events have required me to update my professional philosophy, which eventually attempts to answer the question “What are libraries for?” The text is largely attempted from my side of a conversation between myself and Barbara Sobol about library value presented at the UBCO Leader in Residence Conference.

The Library idealized is a kind of socialist utopia—abundant access to the sum of humanity’s knowledge and culture, regardless of personal demographics or situation. Perhaps it was this tenor of thought that lead Borges to imagine Paradise as “a kind of library,” in a quote that has graced many an office door, email signature, and social media profile of librarians ever since. However, the trap of advancing the library as an unqualified force for good—a utility player, the heart of campus, always ready to lend a hand—is the erosion of identity, the loss of boundaries, and an accompanying loss of core strengths. My job as an Assessment Librarian is to evaluate the library’s impact and demonstrate the library’s value—to ask and to answer whether and how the library is fulfilling its purpose. But to evaluate the library’s mission fulfillment requires a firm sense of its purpose and role, and what I have come to realize is that among the profession, there is no single, cohesive idea of what the library is.

In March 2020, my normally expansive job duties—liaison, instruction, assessment, e-resources, data services, website management—contracted to the point where I was spending the majority of my day-to-day work troubleshooting and fixing access problems with library e-resources. Corresponding with vendors, adjusting settings, tweaking EzProxy—all of that was now taking most of my time; the jump is evident in the stats for our ticketing system. While it’s tempting to believe that these problems were a byproduct of the COVID-19 lockdowns, it is far more likely that these were existing issues suddenly being reported, because access to usual workarounds—coming to campus, trying different computers, getting a print copy—was cut off. Conducting interviews for my web usability study on my last day in the office before the lockdown, a faculty member said as much to me: she would run into problems at home and then just try again from the office where it would usually work. It took a global pandemic to showcase problems that were already there—that we were ignoring, basically. At a university like TRU where Distance support already is, or should be, built into our bones, this demonstrated conflict with our stated value of open access had the makings of a reckoning. We started to make changes that we should have made years ago.

The opportunity that accompanies a reckoning is a new urgency to address the ongoing value conflicts within the librarianship profession. As an example, in those few moments in early 2020 where I had time to reflect, I was thinking about my usability study, where I was faced with the ubiquitous idea of “The Library is Everywhere.” This slogan was maybe once a rallying cry to expand our minds but is now treated as axiomatic: The library is everywhere. Libraries are for everyone. The unfortunate reality is that most of what I was encountering in my daily work-life were service or resource gaps where the library couldn’t reach. Setting aside the level of digital literacy required to access our systems in the first place, Internet access is far from universal, and in terms of our digital resources, libraries are almost completely reliant on the stewardship of external proprietary vendors in a way that I see as antithetical to both the purpose of libraries and the skillsets of library workers.

Additionally, the “library is everywhere” narrative remains fairly resource-centric; our services are necessarily confined by time and staff hours, and also by location. There were many times during the COVID-19 remote delivery period where I would wake up in the morning to have an online research consultation with a student in India, who would then go straight to bed afterwards because it was after midnight their time. Libraries need to pull back from “the library is everywhere” and “libraries are for everyone” because we use these slogans as a mantra, or perhaps a shield—to blind us to the myriad places where we’ve fallen short. And these blind spots have prevented us from answering that question, “What are libraries actually for?”

I don’t believe libraries want to be everywhere; the idea of everywhere is unsustainable, and the concept of the “everywhere library” leads to our professional boundaries dissolving outside of our control. Not only are libraries everywhere, but there is looming pressure to be everything—for library workers to be social workers, and healthcare workers. We’ve expanded past our traditional services to the point where I understand why the public fixates the image of a building full of books: because it’s tangible and easy to grasp. 

Ultimately, any resolution in value conflicts comes down to making choices about priorities. I don’t think that many in the library world like making choices, because it means that not everyone can win. But the only way we can demonstrate care is by making conscious, deliberate choices. In order to define what libraries are, and from that what our values are and how we can make an impact, we are going to have to identify and prioritize our core services, and from that, make decisions about where we will invest resources. Possibly the most important thing we can do is to recognize the choices we are already making, both public-facing and behind the scenes. Allocating resources and devoting time are choices that reflect priorities. Resources and time lead to growth and potential.

The COVID-19 lockdowns and the associated remote delivery years were in many ways a monkey’s paw answer to everyone, including me, who always wished that we could get to a place where no one could honestly say “we’ve always done it this way.” We saw very quick innovations and adaptations in the ways libraries provided service—some type of touchless borrowing/curbside pickup pretty much everywhere; research consultations moved to the remote environment, and instructional techniques adapted for the virtual classroom. But more importantly, we’ve finally seen glimmers of recognition of the need for flexibility and care in the way that employees approach their work. Work-lives can never be fully separate from our home-lives; trauma cannot be compartmentalized, either by library employees or by library users. We still have the opportunity to establish ongoing trauma-informed, care-centered practices and to expand as far as we can in making value choices that center care in library policies and operations.

And so, to progress towards this end, I must provide some kind of answer to that question, “what is the library for?” And my working theory is this: that the ideal library provides care for our communities through a just redistribution of access to knowledge and creativity resources. In order for this vision to be realized, changes are needed. First, we need to divest ourselves of paternalistic notions of care, because learning analytics and surveillance technology have both co-opted care rhetoric almost beyond recognition. But real care isn’t punitive; it’s building trust that flows outward and downward first before we can expect it back from our communities. Second, we need to cultivate an inclusive and accessible understanding of what “community” means, which is especially difficult in academic libraries, which are already exclusive to those who can afford the tuition. And as library workers, we have to recognize ourselves as a part of those communities we serve and assert that we are also entitled to a caring, respectful library environment.

The final, most drastic change needed is that libraries need a real, collective understanding about what a just redistribution of knowledge resources looks like; and I don’t believe this is possible while we remain beholden to proprietary systems. For example, while I imagine that Discovery layers were conceived partially as equalizers in terms of access to resources, the reality is: we have EDS, which is an Ebsco product, so when we’re looking at big deal packages, we end up choosing a lot of other Ebsco offerings in part because—surprise!, they work really well with our Discover layer. Then Information Literacy classes go on to teach a conception of authority that lionizes these proprietary resources in the name of getting students to “use the library.” So, the truly caring library would need to own our own systems, which would require at the very least, a massive redistribution of time and monetary resources into infrastructure. Is this achievable? It’s not impossible, but for librarians it necessitates a collective commitment to a vision of ourselves that’s very different than the current reality. To succeed in my work, I must balance two warring premises: first, that the ideal library—providing care through just access to knowledge resources—is the goal of my work; and second, that I am not meeting this goal and cannot under current conditions and systems. To lose sight of the first is to feel uprooted, burnt out, and to forget why I chose this place and this profession at all. To forget the second is to continue uncritically, perpetuating the systemic injustices that the ideal library would seek to remedy.

I’m great at relaxing: Non-professional accomplishments from my first week of sabbatical

I want to be clear: I’ve done a lot of work this week, and I am well on my way to having a draft paper for submission on the ELIP program.

However.

I do not wish to make a habit of posting my professional accomplishments for the week, because there will be weeks when there will be more and weeks when there will be less. And sometimes weeks where less will look like more and certainly weeks where more will look like less.

But one week out, I am kind of thriving. I feel rested. I feel free. I have not squandered that freedom by watching TV. This may not last either, but here are my non-professional accomplishments for Week 1 of sabbatical.

  • Finally finished reading Dune (it’s pretty good!)
  • Had a beach day before the heat dome
  • Got back into Friday Night Lights (finished season 2 finally!)
  • Went bouldering 3 times (I usually go twice)
  • Finished a short story draft
  • Cleaned my house (it is dirty again now)
  • Made a sunken apple cake and chocolate chip cookies with sprinkles and Skor bits
  • Experimented with new art mediums and made 2 pictures
  • Hung out with like 4 different groups of friends
  • Slept in until like 9:30/10 except for that one day where I was in charge of bringing the overnight French toast to brunch

1500 words most people will happily skip: Thoughts on a lit review

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the lit review is the most tedious section of research essays in the social sciences. When students ask me pointed questions about how to read research papers, I have bluntly opined that if a section needs skipping, this is the section. I mostly glaze over them myself. The literature review is mostly good (and by good, I mean interesting) for one thing: making low-key bitchy comments about other peoples’ substandard research, and for that it is woefully underused.

Frankly, I would much rather read only articles that are good and interesting -like what I tell students to find – but generally peer reviewers demand a level of comprehensiveness that requires me to read the bad and boring ones too. It is of course impossible to be comprehensive on a topic so vast as IL instruction, so my goal is to accurately represent the state of the field until a saturation point, or when my eyes glaze over, whichever comes first.

What I found in this particular review was a preponderance of uncritical thinking towards one of the most prominent/important of librarian duties. One study declared the one-shot session “just enough of a good thing” because students were able to regurgitate the most conservative of perspectives about authority (the US government is a better website than Wikipedia!) weeks after participating in one. This same study asked a bizarre array of demographic questions as a precursor, including of all things, students’ marital status. I was greatly amused by one meta-analysis that included as part of the discussion, all the ways the author had had to correct some of the other studies included.

And yet, there was also interesting thoughts – on the increasing irrelevance of Boolean modifiers, on the importance of reflection and presence to teaching – especially decolonized approaches to teaching, on the “organizational fiction” of librarians as teachers, and on critique as care, a mindest incredibly dear to my heart.

While I suspect my synopsis will be largely passed over by eventual readers, I did learn, and I have new questions and ponderings now, which is usually the greater part of learning anyway.

The Sisyphean Task of Evaluating Information Literacy: A Beginning

Today is the first official day of my 6-month sabbatical. While I have some ambitious ideas for the time and I hope to be able to expand into many areas of professional interest, my first priority and ostensible purpose is to evaluate the ELIP program, based on both the feedback and the assignment data that were collected this past year.

In the last, lazy days of June, I was able to make a start with my analysis, reading the librarian journals, the student survey answers, and the faculty survey answers. What remains is the bulk of the student assignment data, especially the search strategy worksheets, which formed the major assignment in both semesters.

Even taking into account the increased communication and collaboration with course instructors, truly understanding the long-term impact of our instruction (if any) remains outside of our capabilities. The bulk of literature on one-shot instruction sessions notes the difficulties incumbent upon evaluating any lasting impact of the instruction; we at least have the perspective of the whole semester, as reported by course instructors.

The initial goal of the research was (somewhat vaguely) to evaluate the impact of the program on students. After teaching, collecting data, and keeping this project on my mind almost constantly throughout the past months, the questions I think we can answer are the following:

  1. Did the ELIP program help students succeed in their English 1100 courses?
  2. Does further integration of instruction aid in relationship-building between the library and the TRU community?
  3. How can we improve our instruction practices to better meet student and program needs?

I feel like potential answers have been swirling in my brain since the beginning of all this, but at this point, my most important goal will be to forget all that and start at the beginning.

Advancing Care as an Evaluation Tool for Beginning Researchers

Despite garnering a plethora of criticism and the emergence of myriad replacement metrics, the CRAAP test for evaluating resources remains the most well-known and widely-used standard in research guides and information literacy classes. I myself have always held a vague distaste for the tool, but I had not put serious thought into my reasons until recently when I consulted with a faculty member to develop an introductory library session for her class.

The argument that the CRAAP test inculcates intellectual laziness by reducing information value to a series of empirical question does not always hold water when the students in question are first-year researchers, new to both writing and to critical thinking practices. After all, any evaluation is better than no evaluation at all! That the test asks students to consider the source in front of them as a starting point, rather than as a single point within the holistic landscape of information, falls similarly flat when students have not yet developed the knowledge base to begin navigating their chosen fields.

However, putting all other considerations aside, the basic premise of the CRAAP test—the question, “Is your source CRAAP?” fails students through its implication that low-bar satisficing is the gold standard of source inclusion. If a source isn’t “crap” as per these rote questions of currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose, then it must be worthy of time and inclusion in a paper.

Instead, students should care about the topics they choose and the sources they read and cite. I do not wish to advance CARE as an alternative test but as a series of reflections that students may use to gauge not only the source of their investment in a resource but the factors that can make a source worthy of their investment.

With CARE, I ask students to consider the following themes along with associated questions and prompts:

Confirmed authority

Accessibility

Researched

Ethical

The goal of these questions is not to find easy answers that will determine whether or not a resource passes the test. Students need to understand that just finding a resource that speaks passably about their topic is not enough, and that they can use resources that they disagree with or even despise, if it is provoking a reaction in a way that is worth discussing and exploring.

I suggest that the main point of assigning first year students research at all is to nurture curiosity in their academic fields. Ensuring these same students care about the things they are reading and writing is the next necessary step.

A place of failure, a place of play: Academic libraries as third place

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking to the Faculty of Arts on the declared topic of integrating library instruction and support to increase student belonging and academic engagement. As enthusiastic as I was to deliver this talk, I admit that I first needed to check in with myself to make sure that I did in fact agree with my premise-that libraries support student belonging and academic engagement. Much of the research supporting this point is correlative rather than causative, and student socioeconomic status is often the elephant in this particular room. I do, however, believe that academic libraries play a central role in student belonging, and upon reaffirming this, the question became why this should be so.

Ray Oldenburg’s work on third places is surprisingly underused in the library field, because it seems to me to cut right to the heart of libraries’ role in building academic community. In brief, third places “host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work” (Oldenburg, 1989). So, if home is your first place, and work is your second place, third places are the other places to go and chat and build community. Not just any place can be a third place; there can’t be a price of admission, there can’t be pressures, there can’t be obvious socioeconomic distinctions. Conversation and play should be the main activities, which isn’t what a lot of people think of when they think of libraries, but it’s what we want to be. Not just a place of quiet study and research, but a place of failure, of play, of experimentation, of trying.

Public libraries are some of the last lingering third places in any community. Academic third places are always slightly complicated by the fact that there is quite a hefty price of admission to being part of the academic community at all. But if we permit (as I think we must) universities to exist as learning communities in their own right, these must have third places, where members can gather and where grades and success are not of primary concern. Waters (2023) posits that not only are libraries the academic third places, but that librarians are unique in being “third people,” not centrally located within home and school groups. Which means that we are people who can provide guidance but also who can accommodate failure.

Going over the interviews from the Makerspace research, I came across this student quote:

I like the idea of this place, that it is a place where you can make mistakes. And I think really getting the understanding of that creates so much [thinking pause] comfort in coming here and trying things. So, I would try, and then when I get only so far, I know that there’s someone will help me get a little bit further

Makerspace user

I think this wonderful attitude is so prominent in the Makerspace right now, but it actually describes ideally what the library is or should be to the students. This is what we want to encourage from the students who currently feel like experts when they use Google. To let go of the need for expertise and embrace the curious unknown.

I didn’t entirely realize when I put the talk together that what I was asking is for me to help them help students fail, but I think that failure is key to building our academic communities, and the role that libraries can play in student success is bound up in their capacity to be a safe place for failure.

“I can see that being unobtrusive will be difficult:” Brief notes on Makerspace observations

I took advantage of some increasingly rare downtime this afternoon to continue writing up the results of the Makerspace study. While I hope that we can get shape this into a fully submittable form at some point before my sabbatical in July, my project for today was to massage the results from the naturalistic observations into a narratively digestible format.

I remember doing this observations, almost a year ago now, and honestly thinking that these weren’t much, these tiny thoughts. Part of the goal of having me carry out this exercise, of course, was to fumble towards the futility of objective research. I’m not connected to the space; I don’t have a preconceived picture of it on any scale. I don’t have built relationships with the users there. I’m almost surprised when I find patterns in my own notes, the same words used over and again in disperate sessions.

A note from my very first session reads, “I can see that being unobtrusive will be difficult. People want to talk to me.” And then, in talking through the observations with the staff, hearing their thoughts about their influences on the space culture. It’s the same for the library as a whole of course, not to mention the university, but in these larger spaces we lose sight of it: there is no firm line between users and staff, and for a productive pedagogical culture, we don’t really want there to be. Learning is playing, discussing, and collaborating, and the way that works best is when no one is truly separate.

Against first-year research papers

I am far too sick today to do any real work, so instead I find myself reflecting on the end of three weeks of the ELIP program and in particular on the 60+ search strategy and citation mini-assigments on which I found myself in the position of providing feedback. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve never had such a connection to where students are really at in their research journeys than in commenting on these assignments, not even when I taught this as a semester-long course – perhaps because at that time I was honestly more focused on getting students their grades than actually helping them.

I don’t know why exactly I thought that these mini-assignments would be simple things, that the comments would be straightforward tweaks, rather than mostly scratching the surface of what would ideally require some real, intense course correction. I’ve come into some opinions while marking these; I don’t know if I’m quite ready to proclaim all first-year writing courses ill-conceived, but I feel quite strongly now, that unless and until significant changes are made, first-year students should not be writing research papers.

Fostering intellectual curiousity will always be a chicken vs. egg sort of problem, whereupon final essays in first-year writing courses are often assigned with open topics so that students may follow their bliss. But often these emergent scholars have not yet any bliss to follow, and the course instructor does not have the disciplinary-specific resources to provide inspiration. Direction on a topic is not enough. We can tell students what is too broad or what is too narrow, but we can’t tell them what’s truly interesting, and more importantly, why. No single person can take simultaneous kernels of interest in, say, colony collapse disorder, or the economic ramifications of the housing crisis, or the myriad long arms and looming shadows of A.I. and nurture them all so that they sprout equally. Students by and large don’t come to higher education because they have deep disciplinary interests to pursue; they come to explore and make connections, both with their peers and their instructors. The latter of which are posed to be considered by these students as inspiring people, whether or not they have any claim to deserve it.

Further, the typically librarian advice to narrow a research topic often ends up at cross-purposes to fostering interest in it, because big questions always come before small questions. And big questions need to be answered, at least in a superficial way, before any of the smaller questions can emerge with clarity. Finding scholarly resources that help answer big questions about a topic is nigh-impossible within the space of a single course, but without these strong foundations, any small corner of a topic will end up, at best, vaguely ethereal to a first-year undergrad, or at worst, actively repellant. Impelling students to engage with scholarly sources when they do not have the foundations to actively participate in the conversation only sends the message that they do not belong in their chosen field.

If you invite me (or someone like me) into your course, the reason I am there is generally to coax students into finding, identifying, and using scholarly sources for their research papers; but a librarian visiting a classroom once is like a ship passing in the night if there is no scaffolding in the curriculum for any of this engagement. More importantly, scholarly sources are not written to converse with undergraduates. I have tried to pick apart the equation of scholarship with reliability and authority, but I don’t know that this is a popular tack to take in our profession, even when the first Information Literacy frame purports to speak to this. I can tell students in class that scholarly sources are not written for them, I can give advice on how to read them, but I cannot change the overall landscape of accessibility in scholarship.

If students are compelled against their will to use scholarly sources that are not written for them on topics on which they have a burgeoning interest at best, then what else is to be concluded but that we first make plagiarists and then punish them? We are not setting students up for honest engagement when even those who push through, following instructions to the letter, and even maybe reading whole articles, do not likely comprehend most of what they are reading. So how do they develop a voice, lost in thousands of articles on the most minute of topics that seem so far removed from whatever their original spark of interest? I tell students they can argue with authors, that they can and should read things they don’t agree with, but the problem is that I don’t think that means much when they have had no guidance or experience finding their own voice, and very few paths to feeling confident in any opinions that they manage to surface. So much of the conversation about engaging with texts is focused on anti-plagiarism that it’s impossible to rescue the notions of relationship-building and having a conversation in the space of a single library instruction class. Even the entire course wouldn’t be enough.

So what do we do? My humble recommendations would start with engaging with primary sources rather than scholarly ones. I wrote many essays in the first year of my undergrad, and the ones that were quite good (for a first-year) were written on what I thought one or two primary source texts were saying about a very large topic. I wrote two essays that year that were research papers, and all I remember about them was the 0/1 I got on the metric of my criminolgy paper devoted to using just one scholarly source. I remember thinking at the time that I had used a scholarly source (after all, I’d found it using a library database), but ultimately, how was I supposed to know?

Scholarly sources aren’t the first step to becoming scholars; we need to prioritize developing a voice and a perspective in order to scaffold participation in conversations. Similarly, this would ground citation practice in a few deliberately-chosen sources that the whole class would participate in. Primary sources often engage with the grandness of topics and ideas in a way that is readable and interesting, which would allow students to take up the thread of the source that interests them and to follow it. I’m not the person who can or should fix academic writing courses, but I do question what they actually are. As in, shouldn’t individual disciplines reiterate academic writing concepts throughout the student journey, instead of trying to pack it into one class? And I wouldn’t be a librarian if I didn’t point out the visible need for integrated information literacy instruction along the way.

Ultimately, we need to recognize that students don’t become scholars by reading scholarship and writing research papers; they become scholars by developing their curiousity through discussion and exploration within a welcoming academic community.

“I feel like an expert when using Google”: Reflections on 2 weeks of ELIP

I am almost through the second week of the three-week English 1100 library tutorial. It has been a whirlwind, particularly today having just returned from CLAW last night. But in the classroom itself, that’s when it doesn’t feel draining. It feels smooth, and natural, and both the content and timing are working very well. I have 5 sections, with numbers ranging from 1 student in my Thursday morning to 42 in my Friday afternoon.

I gave comments on the first batch of mini-assignments in a flurry this morning. Students were supposed to answer questions relating to what kind of sources they would be using for their topic (which most of them don’t have) and what factors they would be looking for to choose their sources. While not having topics made it a little trickier, many of the students still default to words like reliable and authoritative, without really thinking about what they mean. That being said, a lot of them put visible effort into the assignment, asking curious questions and revealing their thought processes. My favourite observation: “I feel like an expert when using Google.” Because it’s true. And that’s what Google wants, and that’s how it hooks people. I had to think hard on what to say, but the answer I gave had to encourage the student and all the students NOT to feel like experts when you approach your research, to instead embrace a standpoint of open curiousity as a learner and novice. It’s a hard sell, I admit.

The work we’re doing, it’s making a difference, I think. This is the first time we’ve been able to really work iteratively with students on their strategies. I think when we worked on filling out the Effective Search Strategies sheet today, every single person had at least one question or comment about their particular strategy. When I gave them the last 20 minutes of class to do their work, most of them stayed until the end and really put in the effort. I felt proud of them. One of the students who initially said they would use the first page of Google results for their paper came to talk to me about his search strategy twice and each time went back to fix it and improve it. And even in the second week when students still came without topics, every one of them left the class with a preliminary topic that they could work with.

Perhaps the oddest thing is that a group of students brought two of their friends to my evening class tonight, and the guests stayed, filled out the worksheet and even participated, asking questions and offering input. As they entered the class, I overheard one student explaining: “It’s a library thing we have to do for English…but it’ll make you smarter.” I know the jury’s still out, but it just keeps making me think that what we’re doing here is helping, is making the students understand a little better what research is and how to do it. And at the end of class, my favourite comment so far: “If this was a course, I’d take it every year.”