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.”

The library as unreality: The case of process mapping

This week I am in London (Ontario – which I did not expect to lean quite so hard into the whole London but Canada thing) at the Canadian Library Assessment Workshop, a conference I have previously enjoyed and found very useful. This year, I am finding it…unnecessary, a description I could expand on, except that I’d rather shift this post to more interesting musings.

It’s becoming increasingly clear (to myself) not only that I am intellectually bored with my job but that this boredom is increasingly bubbling out in varying degrees of weirdness that I’m sure are visible to others. The reason I made the trek to CLAW this week is to give a workshop on process mapping, which is useful in practice but dreadfully boring to explain. My slides were due a couple of weeks ago, so I put together a milquetoast workshop and sent it off. The problem started when I set up a lunch date with a former STU professor, and in my head I kept picturing her asking me what I was there for, and (again, in my head) I kept having a fair amount of trouble justifying this topic, and what I finally landed on was: I won’t get promoted if I do anything too interesting. And I cannot find the lie.

Is process mapping interesting? I admit that there is a kernel of interest to me, but I had not heretofore examined why that should be. Unearthing interest in what I already do would of course be infinitely better, or at least more convenient, than attempting to forge into something new. Fortunately, the book I happened to bring for the plane was William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the ultimate nature of reality. The book engages in an interdisciplinary discussion of reality, the self, perception, and uncertainty; and in the introduction I encountered the following quote from Borges:

“We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.”

Borges, cited in Egginton

Therein lies much of the interest in both process mapping particularly and libraries as an intellectual project. We have spent our days maintaining (and at one time – I fear passed – developing) structures to describe reality and are the first to be shocked when these are developed or executed imperfectly. Our processes are the world that we dream, but they refuse to emerge consistently in practice. Egginton argues that “minimal forgetting” is conditional to the formation of the self and therefore no one person can access the truth. Process mapping as a collectively-formed representation, exposes these cracks, whether or not we admit they exist.

The importance of a figure like Heisenberg in this conversation is that the act of observing reality changes it. We make choices about what aspects we wish to observe and in doing so change the future (Heisenberg’s entire premise is of course predicated on the quantam world playing by different rules, but neither Kant or Borges would of course be proscriptive to that domain). Libraries are inclined to “make idols out of our tools,” and need benefit from an overly healthy dose of unreality.

So, in the words of Borges, “Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities that confirm that nature.”

Not Just Supporting Students: More thoughts about adapting Library Program Learning Oucomes

Today, I am on the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CELT) blog talking further about the ways the library has adapted Program Learning Outcomes for Program Review. You can read my full thoughts here: https://celt.trubox.ca/not-just-supporting-students-adapting-program-learning-outcomes-for-the-tru-library/

My throughline remains that libraries don’t just support students; we support educational infrastructure, and it’s important that we do that from an academic lens because technology on its own does not contribute to learning outcomes. Technology is a tool whose ends are determined by those in control. When we talk about library outcomes and library value, we need to be including that infrastructure support as part of the essential, invisible labour that sustains our education systems.

500 dollars, a room of ones own, and a secret third thing

It’s time, mostly. The secret third thing.

I think a lot about the library as a space for play, because whenever I wonder what exactly what we’re for, I come back to thoughts about third places, which I think, for adults even more than children have to be for play. In the past, I’ve been frustrated by liminality during times when I’ve been focused on progress, but that’s not what liminality is for.

I don’t know if the academic library can always be a true third place, because for most of these students, we essentially are their workplace. But I think there are still degrees to which we can cultivate safety: for experimentation, for difference, for freedom from regular expectations.

Though the trend I see in academic libraries is that we don’t want to.

We don’t take student cards at the doors here like some academic libraries, but our study rooms are very clearly for study only and the list of rules about them has always been longer than I’m comfortable with. The resistance against coffee shops and relaxing furniture always simmers in the background. The academic library is a place to study, of course, but particularly with the diminishment of print collections and the distribution of research help away from building reference desks, there needs to be something to mark the library as place other than a giant study house. We should the place on campus where you don’t get graded, where you can think about things and try things out without judgement and with structures to encourage you.

I spent the morning coding interview data from Makerspace users, which I think is one place in the library that does this very well. Students go in, specifically to experiment, often with no particularly academic purpose, and they feel welcome, they feel encouraged, and then they feel inspired. The staff are seen as helpful and present, and the community and space encourage creation and accept failure. It would be hard to replicate that atmosphere for the entire library, simply because the Makerspace is relatively compact and the library building is very large, but when our mission is “Inspiring knowledge creation” I sometimes wonder, how exactly we are doing that, beyond the regular provision of study carrels, and books and journals. What could make our library spaces more welcoming? More inspiring?

But of course, it’s not just the space, it’s not just the price of admission. When I ask the students about barriers, there’s a number of things, but the one that makes me sad is time. I don’t know if it’s just the third places that have disappeared, it’s the time to engage with them. Basically, the time to think about concerns other than home, other than work. When do we do that? The library can create the space, but who creates the time?

I don’t think we’re anhedonic at least

I presented today to the library staff about the current academic program review the Librarians’ Departmet is embroiled in. The requirement for an academic program review came down from above in an already tumultuous year (but aren’t they all), and we are making our way through it, steadily.

I have to admit, there have been some outcomes to this review process so far that I’m very pleased with. We developed Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs) for our department for the first time, aligned with the 6 frames from the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy. I know there are varying opinions of how much these high-level goals documents matter, but I sincerely do love finding the points where these goals and ideals interact with our day to day. It made it clearer for me when designing the ELIP program to see how what we were doing there factored into our outcomes, and in discussing where we wanted to go with outreach the other day, I suggested going back to the PLOs to figure out ultimately what we wanted to acheive. It’s the same principle as backwards design for courses.

Of course, the major problem with mapping library services directly to PLOs is that it glosses over the massive amount of infrastructure support work necessary to providing these services. Unlike other academic departments on campus, we largely support our own technology and infrastrucure, they are essential to the services and resources we provide, and the amount of labour required needs to account for this support. Technological infrastructure can’t directly support learning outcomes but it can support the programs and services that do. So, my favourite innovation we’ve made on the standard process was to design an infrastructure support crosswalk, mapping all of our systems and software infrastructure to our programs and services. One of the goals of this process should be to communicate the work we do and the work required; I’ve been fairly relentless in attempting to communicate to academic leadership what it means as faculty to support infrastructure, so I feel really satisfied with how the pieces fell into place on this one.

The other perpetual challenge that we (both us specifically and librarians as a whole, I think) face is connecting directly with students and faculty as a pan-institutional program. Surveys, focus groups and the like typically target library frequent and habitual users, so that there is never an opportunity to hear from who we don’t hear from already. This year, rather than attempt to send out our own surveys, we’ve developed some standard survey questions that will go out in other program review cohorts’ surveys to be answered by their students, alumni, and faculty. We developed 3 questions for each survey, and I’m honestly excited to see the responses.

The current major project is the self-study report, which the Program Review team will work on over the next few months in preparation for inviting 3 external reviewers to campus. I can’t think of an external review report without hearkening back to my very favourite report, the UBC Library External Review from 2012 or 2013. I can no longer locate this report on the Internet, so instead it will live in my head forever as the most elegantly scathing report I have had the pleasure to read. I remember a well-placed use of “anhedonic” and a quote from Anna Karenina (“All happy families, etc.”) in particular.

In mentioning this to a colleague, she brought up and was able to send me a copy of the TRU Library External Review report from a 2007 Program Review. While not quite rising to the level of UBC, the 2007 report offers its own particularly delicious nuggets, including the following:

It may be that the lack of change has contributed to lower morale in the library and the perception that nothing will change. The librarians appear to be suffering from “learned helplessness”; ie their belief in their ability to lead change is almost non-existent and they are skeptical that positive change is possible.

Kimberly B. Kelley and Michael Ridley, Review of TRU Library, 2007

I imagine that would have felt like a gut punch to read back then, but from my position of distance, I don’t think the review is targeting the TRU librarians, so much as TRU’s lack of support for the library. There are recommendations in the 2007 report that didn’t happen until long after I arrived. There are some recommendations that I don’t believe have happened yet. I don’t know that any “learned helplessness” has entirely gone away; I catch myself at times wondering why I should bother with certain things or even when we think of goal assessment, realism and achievability are touted as important factors. That being said, I do think we’ve made changes and I think we want to make more. I think we’ve at least made it to a place where our anxieties have not prevented us from having aspirations, which is a starting place if nothing else.

Welcome to ELIP

Today is the first day we start registering students for ELIP – the English 1100 Library Instruction Pilot that I have been preparing for in some way since the beginning of the year. After consultation and contemplation and actually considering what would work, we are attempting to replace one-shot library instruction with a series of three tutorials.

We’ve aligned outcomes with the newly-developed Librarians’ Department Program Learning Outcomes, with the Framework for Information Literacy, with the English Department Program Learning outcomes and with TRU Institutional Learning outcomes. That can sound like a lot of bureaucracy but it’s my favourite part in a way, to take a bunch of disparate goals and find the places they fit all together. The three classes themselves are essentially tied to three of the ACRL frames:

  1. Authority is constructed and contextual (evaluating sources and identifying academic sources)
  2. Searching as strategic exploration (search strategies and tips)
  3. Scholarship as conversation (citation and academic integrity)

Honestly, the content we’re attempting to cover in these tutorials isn’t much more than what would happen in a one-shot; what I think will make the difference is spreading it out over the three weeks, building relationships and getting feedback on what they hand in. Even more than that, it’s so difficult to ever try anything new when you have something that maybe isn’t working that well, but is by all accounts…fine. I’m excited to try something new.

For all the various evaluations we do and the anecdotal data we collect, we’re not actually sure if library instruction works, or perhaps more importantly, how it works and in what ways. This is the first time we’ll have a significant amount of data to play with, and I think whatever else happens, the partnerships with the instructors in developing this material and this program will be worthwhile.

What I’m less certain will work is the logistics. The tutorials are connected to classes, but they’re outside of classes, so certainly some of the instructors are worried that they won’t go or they won’t have time to go. That’s valid. Student lives are hectic and over-scheduled. We’ve asked instructors to designate marks for the completion of the tutorial as an extra inducement to attend.

At 4pm I walk into my first class to tell them about it, and we will see how it goes!

How do we measure, measure our years?

It is annual statistics time for libraries, which requires that I round up various numbers related to our collection, use, facilities, and personnel and report these numbers to the consortia that compile them. On its face, it is the most tedious kind of work that I do, steeped as it is in quantatative metrics and tweaking reports, but it also provides an opportunity to check in and reflect on our reporting infrastructure, to ensure it’s still working and that the procedures make sense.

I’ve always said that being an effective assessment librarian requires holding on to two contrasting beliefs: first, that every single number that you ever report will be wrong; and second, that it absolutely must be wrong in a methodically consistent way that represents the highest level of accuracy that we can aspire to. It hurts me in a way, that my most fundamental professional duty is to be wrong, but meticulously so. When I wish feel more noble about it, I can hearken back to Socrates’ knowing that he knew nothing. We’re basically the same, he and I.

The interesting part of the stats process is after it’s all done, to find the most compelling stories the numbers are telling and to inquire further why they should be this way. I’ve seen a lot of our traditional metrics starting to rebound this year after COVID, which leaves me with a lot of complicated feelings. At the British Columbia Library Conference in 2021, I said the following about usage stats as indicators of value:

Let’s start from a very broad shared ground of believing that libraries have some sort of value to some set of people. And the way we have traditionally measured that value is primarily through quantitative usage metrics…gate counts, head counts, workshop attendance, circulation, reference questions, etc. And for over a year, most of that was just…gone. Gate count: 0. Circulation…even when our curbside service started, the numbers were a fraction of our regular circulation…And yet, I’m completely confident that if I asked you all if libraries largely lost value this past year, I would hear a resounding NO. If I asked you if there was less work put in to these virtual and curbside services than the in-person one, I’d also hear a lot of NOs.

And I think it’s very easy for us to say that our traditional metrics did not work this year, but I don’t think we can just say “well that doesn’t describe our value this year” about gate counts and info lit sessions and physical checkouts without making the next logical hop to…they never actually did.

Paterson, Amy. “How do we measure, measure this year.” BCLA, 2021.

To see our metrics bounce back, for me, is partially to see a grand opportunity for change slipping away, that opportunity to rewrite the library narrative closing. But I suppose libraries alone cannot collapse neoliberalism, and defining our value by our values within neoliberal academia is always going to be Sisyphean.

There are some changes, though. The shift from print to electronic collections stands out in both our collection numbers and circulation figures. While this change might seem semantic, it requires a major shift in thinking about not only the library as place, but who our users are; how, when, and where they access us; and ultimately what the library is even for, which is the question all our metrics should seek to answer. Gate count numbers I still report, but we haven’t tracked our overall gate count figures at TRU since we moved into the new building with the Tim Horton’s in the lobby. I say that last a little facetiously, but I have a glint of hope that we’re moving beyond seeing anything signifcant that the gate count number has to say.

The other number I always like to check on is the librarian consultation statistics that have increased almost every year since I implemented the new booking system in 2017-18. This is one of the figures that for me come closest to getting at a library value story: building relationships and cultivating care for our communities. This past year, the numbers increased by over 200, which is the most significant increase since the 2017-18 year. This is to me in part a story about potential; we’re limiting in how much we can see students by our capacity. How much more could we do if had the capacity?

When I interviewed librarians for my research on academic librarian work during COVID, one of the biggest changes seemed to be the shift from forward-facing (countable) services to infrastructure support (a lot less readily countable). That’s a challenge we’re facing in our current program review work, and it’s a challenge that less flashy services will always face. This would seem to feed into the unfortunate trend of gradually offloading infrastucture onto vendors, which I of course have a lot more to say about but will not follow that snake hand right now.

My BCLA talk from 2 years ago ended with choices:

We make choices all the time, and sometimes we don’t like to admit that’s what we’re doing. If we just sit back and let decisions make us by doing what we’ve always done, we lose our value by losing ourselves.

We are still making choices, and I like to think we (here at the TRU library at least) are doing that a little more deliberately than we used to.