Tag: library value

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.

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.

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.

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.