Posts Tagged ‘ traditional library ’

Listening to [Google Generation] Users #erl13

The ER&L 2013 conference began with a great intro by ER&L founder Bonnie Tijerina who provided her personal theme for this year — bridging our community with other communities and cross-pollinating ideas. Introducing the keynote speaker, it seems an apt theme, as we aim to continually bridge the ER community with our user community.

Michael Eisenberg (University of Washington Information School) provided an overview of the Google Generation (1993-2013) and their information seeking habits informed by the results of the Project Information Literacy. Reminding us of the “stack of needles” information environment in which we and our user find ourselves, Eisenberg offered insights and possible responses to the information needs of this generation. He also offered some interesting projections for the ??? (to be named) Generation of 2013+, like GoogleMS (a Google Microsoft merger) and brain-controlled environments (Google glasses, as a start).

Project Information Literacy (PIL) has to do with questions of how people find information, what they do with it, and what problems are encountered along the way.  Eisenberg presented the findings of the study and provided an excellent worksheet with one column outlining all the results, and another (blank) one for the takeaway lessons for libraries.

The results may not surprise librarians or teaching faculty.  These users have expectations for perfection, and yet believe the best approach is Google.  Their course research sources are limited, but do include course readings, databases, instructors, and, yes, Wikipedia — ignoring faculty recommendations to avoid it and just intentionally not citing it. Their personal research, however was quite different.  Here users start with Google and Wikipedia first.  Don’t you?  Takeaway: Librarians should consider Wikipedia as another social media resource for being where their users are.  Begin reviewing, updating, and writing content here — where users can find it!

Other results of the study emphasize that there are legitimate reasons for all-familiar user procrastination, including multiple jobs, studying, and extra scholarly-curricular activities. Takeaway: Have we changed our thinking and staffing and services to accommodate this or are we just judgers?  Their needs change across the academic year for which opening later hours at crunch time is insufficient to address.

The study also shows these students are in fact applying evaluative criteria to online resources and are asking for help, but still they are not asking librarians.  These users consider librarians as assistants with resources.  Given the stack of needles, they don’t need help with resources.  So what do they need?

What the Google Generation needs goes back to a generation-ago of LIS research — formulating research questions, understanding the research process, and the ability to assess themselves through it!  Carol Kuhlthau anyone?  While K-12 prepares students in writing techniques alone, it is lacking in the steps of the research process. Helping users understand the development of research ideas and managing the process/project of research is a critical need for which Eisenberg challenged the audience of mostly ERLs to think of solutions beyond one-off instruction.

Another interesting portion of the PIL study results was the handout (faculty syllabi) assessment.  [Six out of ten – not sure of this stat, but most!] handouts refer students to print resources and almost none to relevant databases.  Takeaway: Librarians should offer to faculty help with updating these.   At my institution, I attended a new faculty luncheon in which “front loading” course design/content was recommended again and again, especially for new faculty.  So that you “do it right the first time” and recycle/tweak the content in ongoing years.  This and these PIL results continue to make me wonder how the library can help the front loading process both from a distributing the workload and “getting it right” perspective.  This is a big opportunity area for the library to play the role it talks about playing in outreach, course design, copyright, information literacy, etc.

Another surprising finding  was that the library desktop/laptop was seen as a valuable tool in how it helped avoid distractions in ways users’ own technology might not.  This continued a more tried and true notion of the nature of focus and an emphasis on the library as place (they liken it to a monastery). Users used terms like “IT fasting” and noted it requires planning ahead (with parents, with peer expectations, etc). Takeaway:  All of this would be good marketing and outreach ideas.

 

What was great about this keyonte, besides the useful data shared, was Eisenberg’s approach to put it back on librarians.   This included an actual audience participation in completing the sections of  the PIL results/Library Lessons handout.   My group had the result:  “Defining the task and assessing the process are harder than finding the resources”  One tool my library uses to help with this is an assignment planner tool  (which could use a new name, maybe).  Another interesting suggestion was to use information literacy language that makes sense to user, like using the term credit vs cite, or calling it an article search engine rather than a database.

All of this also supports of the oft-repeated concept that we are transitioning the librarian/library from content to service — which was also highlighted in the closing session, The Courage of our Connections: Thoughts on Professional Identities, Organizational Affiliations and Common Communities by Rachel Frick (well-played ER&L, well-played).  So, have we told our users about all this?  Have we trained our librarians?  Have we adjusted our library spaces? Takeaway: What are we going to do about it?  I would encourage you to find out more about the Project Information Literacy research, and share with your communities what you’re doing about it!

2013
03/18
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Strengths in Action

((cc) BY-NC-ND) by praecepitum

I am about to start back to work from a 10 week vacation of strategic planning.  Yes, I meant to call it a vacation not because my email backed up, or because deadlines were missed, or others had to pick up the slack of my absence.  It is because I feel as energized as if I’d been spending that time relaxing on the beach and sipping a cool beverage while trusting someone else to  watch the kids.  I’ll admit (let my freak flag fly)  — I do  LOVE strategic planning!  But beyond just being weird in this way, I want to talk about one explanation for this energy (and why I’ve bolded these key words).

Strategy is one of my top five strengths.  I also have Learner, Analytical, and (thank God, or nothing would ever get done) Activator.  My fifth strength, Individualization, means in a nutshell that I’m also good at seeing others’ strengths.  This has all brought me to a point recently where I am just bursting to tell a wider audience about Strengths,  specifically the breakthrough I had using my strengths in this most recent work experience,  and why I continue to promote Strengths in work and life.  A wonderful and succinct background on the  Strengths movement can be found here.  So, I’ll just briefly touch on the concept and focus more on my own experiences.

At my library, I work with the staff  and organizational development council who secured a grant to build individual and organizational awareness of our strengths.  This  groups’ strengths work started a couple of year ago when we traveled together to see Marcus Buckingham speak.  Buckingham is a very engaging speaker. It certainly helps to be smart, funny, handsome and have a British (Australian?) accent, but he is best known, I think, for taking Strengths beyond a mere personality test to a practice, a movement.

After this talk, I ran out to get a book — any book — that would get me the Clifton StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment.  My results are from the book Strengths Based Leadership.  However, my 20/20 hindsight advice to you is pick up any other book than this one.  I was anxious to get started and this was the only one in the student union bookstore at the time.  I am currently re-reading through the Buckingham versions — try this to get a test, then  this and this — which I recommend as more approachable starting points.  The other key wisdom to getting this and taking it beyond a personality test, is have someone or group of someones go through the test with you and talk about the results — better yet, a certified strengths coach.

((cc) BY-NC) by Joming Lau

I know it sounds like a racket, especially to academic-minded individuals, and hey, it is in a way because it is a business, for-profit product.  But let’s take it from Creating the Agile Library(1995!), shall we?  Libraries will need to increasingly adopt more business and for-profit models of organizational agility to survive 21st century pressures.  Are they not already? Not all, mind you, but certainly some. Beyond that reason, though, what can we actually learn about the effectiveness of this “better mousetrap”?

I can tell you what I learned from reading and talking about it within my HR and development circles.  I can tell you a great deal more about it from working with my team, learning their strengths and how we might use them together more effectively.  The most powerful lessons came to me from a combination of all of this and what Buckingham pointed out in the video above:

At some point in your career you will be using your strengths most of the time [rather than just some of the time] and it just doesn’t feel the same.

While I feel like I’ve kind of been using my strengths throughout  my career, the lightbulb for me is how different I feel after spending 10 weeks  intensely using my strengths.  Not only am I happier and energized, but I found myself functioning way better at things I usually struggle with.  I’ve been quicker to engage in conversations (my husband is both thankful and annoyed). I didn’t stumble for words in our unit’s  f2f meeting.  I even had several new ideas and have pitched them to folks.  In the language of strengths, this is managing weakness.  But it didn’t feel like managing.  It felt fluid, more like swimming or sailing.  What’s more (and to the point of Strengths), I found where I usually excel, I excelled better and faster.  I  taught, lead, and problem solved off the cuff  — a credit I think to better practice in pulling my learner, analytical, and strategic strengths into action (activator strength).   I tell you the pistons were firing this week in ways that I know are strengths-based, because it’s what the books said they would do.

A final point about my vacation ties back to that Strength Based Leadership book I started with — trusting the kids.  Sure, there were things that during my strategic vacation my staff had to deal with in my absence.  Not a lot, but some.  The point is I trust my staff with our work in large part because I know their strengths and they know their strengths.  Email did get backed up, but it got tackled it much quicker.  Imagine if everyone’s strengths were put into play in this way. We would not neglect to attend that development opportunity because no one else can cover our work for us.  We wouldn’t have to laboriously cross-train skill sets to make that happen. We all would begin to trust ours and our colleagues’ strengths and our organizations will be the better for it in all the ways that matter.

————————————————–

Buckingham & Clifton (2001). Now, Discover Your Strengths. New York: Free Press.

Buckingham (2007) Go Put Your Strengths To Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance. New York: Free Press.

Buckingham & Coffman (1999). First Break all the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Haricombe, L.J. & Lusher, T.J. (1995) Creating the Agile Library: A Management Guide for Librarians. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

better mousetraps is a term Jim Govan (1977, as cited in Haricombe & Lusher, 1995) used to refer to “potentially useful ideas  that we should examine carefully and then employ as best fits the local situation” (p2).

2012
03/15
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confessions of a truthbrarian

To all the kind friends who have shared nonamerah’s A Girl You Should Date on my fb wall or spread it across the interwebs for the promotion of reading and librarianship, to those who may be reading my blog or following this truthbrarian in hopes of literary comradery, I confess.  I can relate to nonamerah’s post perhaps only in its painful description of my own young dating failures.  I think I was nerdy and pretty enough to attract suitably interesting and intellectual boys, only to disappoint them with a lack of disciplined bookishness.  You see, I am one of those librarians who doesn’t really read a lot of books — mostly nowadays, I claim, because I’m too busy.  But the whole thing has got me thinking about my entire literary past and inspired me to take stock.

Past elementary school, I couldn’t tell you my librarians’ names, and I don’t recall story times or visits to the public library that involved anything more than a place to do homework and have fries at the Hardees next door.  I actually did. not. believe. my college voice professor who told me the library had books with the full English translations for the various language arias I was working on.  “It can’t be that easy!”, I thought.  And since I never recall seeing what might have been a librarian anywhere in that college library, I never followed up to verify this outrageous claim.

What?!  I know!

As a truthbrarian, I’m obviously not proud of this.  And it’s not even that I have trouble reading or that I don’t enjoy it as a pastime. I do!  In fact I boast at home that among the larger tomes in our recently reestablished home library,  I’ve read the largest of them in their entirety. My husband, the main collector for the library, has read some or all of more of the books and is certainly the more read in our family.  Our eldest daughter is not far behind. But I am a late (or perhaps, interrupted) bloomer.

Leo the Late Bloomer, by Robert Kraus and José Aruego

While I don’t remember my parents reading to me at home, I do have fond memories of my elementary school librarian and that library. I can still picture the reading bathtub, where the Judy Blume books were located, and what a big deal it was to have visits by author/illustrator, Tommy de Paola, and also Jose Aruego, who showed us step-by-step how he illustrates animals. Fascinating!  I can also recall my mom supporting our local bookstore and my particularly intense preteen reading spree of the entire Sweet Valley Twins series and Garfield comic books – don’t judge.  I also  loved my church library, but only have 3 solid book memories:

  1. The Giving Tree (and other Silverstein poetry)
  2. Joni, an autobiography of diving accident victim turned artist
  3.  a crazy cartoon book about a boy who got bit by a dog with rabies.

My current reading choices retain this pattern for creative humor, biographies, and a touch of morbidity.  But what I remember having an even greater fascination for in these libraries was the organizational system of the books, the act of checking out books, and wanting very badly to stamp and sort.

Many librarians, of course, share this organizational proclivity. But, I’ve always felt that every other librarian must have always loved books in a way that I never fully grasped.  I now know,  that truthbraries give you more than books.  They give you the ability to seek, discover new things, be curious,  and seek even more.  This has always made me a good problem solver and information organizer/seeker.  But that seeking within books and stories in the traditional sense has been late to bloom in my life.

The problem with lackluster seeking (as opposed to desperate seeking)  in books is not just less reading, but that my bibliography relied almost solely on the recommendations of others.  This, for better or worse, boils down to the company you keep.   My first recommendation I count as a plus. My big sister gave me Catcher in the Rye, which led me to inquire and read the entire Salinger bibliography,  articles about him, and his daughter’s biography of him.  However, in my high school naivety, I once settled on a recommended Danielle Steele novel  for a book report, making me reading adverse for quite some time!  However terrible that reading experience was, though, I see now the silver lining was a new-found appreciation for its opposite —  good writing, and the skill to critically evaluate for it. Today, I love to edit and to write.

I recall one more remarkable recommendation through a senior English reading essay (not really recommended as much as part of the reading requirement of the class).   It was a timed essay exam where I nailed a comparison of themes in the Red Badge of Courage.  I remember being super energized by a  feeling of discovery and impressed with how quickly I organized my ideas on paper.  This probably speaks again for my analytical skill and enjoyment of writing than it does for my love of reading.  But it is certainly connected, and I can see, through nonamerah’s A Girl You Should Date,  how those who have immersed themselves more fully and regularly into reading would develop a self-perpetuating love of it.   I am also totally into the concept there that exposure (through reading) to a variety of both creative and factual stories will only make one a better and more creative thinker, conversationalist,  writer, and even lover.  This truthbrarian seeks all of these  adding mother, friend, and leader. A tall order!

While I’ve got a late start to it (overall and in this late 2012 new year’s post), I have recommitted to the avid reading side of my dear profession.  This new year, I  firmly resolve to a reading regimen and welcome suggestions for its  structure and content.  You can keep up with my #2012resolutions progress by following me (@atruthbrarian ) on twitter.

 

2012
02/29
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