The big theme in the current era of librarianship is to be user-centered. Being user centered is the key to maintaining relevance, changing with the times, and erasing the barriers to access that turn many people off to libraries. In the background of the idea of user-centeredness are two parallel but very different theories: critical pedagogy and market-based democracy. The theory that underlies a call to user-centeredness is often obscure or not worked out fully. The difference between the two theoretical foundations concerns, among other things, conceptions of the user and of the user’s surrounding structures – what is to be taken as a given.

There are a number of different theoretical problems underlying the idea of user-centeredness, but I want to make note of an idea concerning just one of them, and that is the way assumptions about who the user is serve to determine the conclusions about what will work best in “user-centered design.”

Take the new “next generation catalogs,” for example. They are designed to work better for “the user,” and librarians who find it more difficult to do the things we are used to doing in a catalog are told to keep in mind that the catalog is serving our users better than the old one. These catalogs have discovery tools built into them that enable undergraduate students to find resources on their topics without having to mess with subject headings or reason from a known lead to a title or an author. What reference librarians are good at is less relevant in the environment of the next-generation catalog, because it has the smarts to make it easy for students to “find stuff” on their own.

The success of these catalogs in “finding stuff” for users can only be measured against an idea of what the users are looking for and what kind of research they are doing. The research that supports these new catalogs tends to assume a user base of millennial undergrads, rather than non-traditional students, faculty members, grad students, or librarian intermediaries. This research tends to gloss over rather than justify the choice to focus on a subset of users in creating a more “user-centered” service design. Therefore, it seems that the definition of a user profile that gets applied in a “user centered” redesign can be a way of achieving goals of the designers that aren’t necessarily related to serving users better. In this case, one outcome of the “next gen” catalogs is to increasingly bypass the mediation of a librarian. This means that the market for a next gen catalog is shifting from the librarian to the undergraduate student, which is as a group is going to be less critical and “more available” in terms of the effectiveness of branding, advertising, alternative business models, etc. If vendors’ products are going to be built increasingly on open standards, as promised, then librarians and other researchers should be able to hack together new tools that will allow us to do the kinds of power searching we have always done in OPAC’s; however, it is important to keep in mind how we are being cut out of the loop in the name of “user centered” design.

I think most librarians can count a number of occasions when vendors or administrators have told them about changes that are based on “what users want” where the idea presented to us of “what users want” is contrary to our own experience with students. When we offer our own insights about users they tend to be discounted as moldy preconceptions rather than authoritative information about the users at our own institutions. I think there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical, critical, and inquisitive about the way the user is defined and characterized in “user centered” solutions that we don’t create ourselves.

This is a new idea for me that I plan to write about at length later. If you find it interesting and want to help, please comment with useful citations or concepts. Thanks!

I want to suggest a possible strategy for reference departments in academic libraries.

I think a lot of library administrators who have an eye on the future see less of a role for reference, at least in the way we currently understand it. As they see it, it seems to me, it’s a waste of money to have someone with a graduate degree sitting at a reference desk helping only a few people throughout the day. And as they see it, the demand for reference service is declining. They’re ready to staff the desk with paraprofessionals or students, and they’re ready to outsource much of collection development and consolidate that function to a smaller group of staff members. There is a vague idea of deploying MLIS holding librarians in new ways, but also a sense that they can save a lot of money by employing fewer of us. As I see it, that puts reference librarians in the position of having to strategize a future path and determine a role for ourselves that we actually want and that is suited to our particular expertise as the library’s connection to faculty and students.

At the same time that we are facing that challenge, there is a trend in higher ed that I think we can use as an opportunity. It’s the emphasis on assessment. It is an opportunity because the assessment mandate gets worked out to favor activities that have measurable learning outcomes and disfavor those that don’t. An accreditation body visits a university and asks them to improve its assessment practices. The university responds by asking units – academic departments and others – to develop their own assessment plans based on a list of educational objectives. The template for the assessment plan is designed with academic units in mind, and non-academic units may complain a little and treat the requirement as a bureaucratic hassle and a meaningless task, since they are not directly involved in producing educational outcomes the way academic departments are.

The opportunity for reference, and for the library as a whole, is to use the new assessment plan to secure a role where information literacy objectives (or related objectives) are emphasized. We can elaborate on what it is we teach in classrooms and while we are helping students at the desk or in our offices in order to create assessment measures that support what we want to do.

We can describe research skills that are not taught outside the library. ACRL’s information literacy standards talk about them in very general ways. I like to think about how we help students understand aspects of the bibliographic landscape of a field. Teaching them to make sense of their search results in the context of their own research problems is important educational work. The assessment piece gives us the opportunity to tell campus administration that we want them to hold us accountable for teaching students how to do research. The process tends to be designed to allow us to set our own objectives, so it gives us an opening and an opportunity to be proactive about our future in our institutions. We can take the bull by the horns.

Maria, Emily, and Alana met in Google Chat, as they did often over the course of this book project, to reflect on the process and product of Critical Library Instruction: Theories & Methods.

Alana: Hello!
Emily: Morning, y’all!
Maria: Hi!
Emily: How’re we all doing?
Maria: I’m doing okay. Nervous about my presentation at noon today. I’m talking about Critical Library Instruction for our library’s “A Little Knowledge” series. It’s a monthly event the Library hosts, where we invite someone on campus to talk about their research in an informal, conversational lunchtime session. Faculty, staff, and students are all invited. I’m starting by talking about critical pedagogy, and then information literacy, and then putting those together, which is where the book was born. And then I focus, like my chapter, on assessment.
Emily: When you say you’re talking about ‘critical pedagogy,’ what do you mean by that? I know that my own definition has sort of changed over the course of the book.
Maria: Well, I define it first in Freirean terms, and then i explain how other critics and theorists and etc. have expanded upon it and so on. For me, bell hooks is my inspriration. I have a slide up there with some quotes from “Teaching to Transgress.”
Alana: Is there a part of hooks’ work that’s especially significant to you, Maria?
Maria: Yes. She cares about students. Learners are people with souls, and we should teach in a manner that respects and cares for their souls.
Alana: I feel there’s also a strong emphasis in her work on teaching as a practice of living, a part of everyday life — especially in her work on engaged pedagogy. This connects with our shared interest in thinking about the selves & embodiments we bring to the classroom, and how we interact w/our students’ (whole) selves, their personhood?
Emily: Part of what’s helped my perspective has been moving from Sarah Lawrence to LIU-Brooklyn, and working with two very different student populations. I just don’t see how we can do anything but start with who is sitting right in front of us–not the ACRL Standards–when interests, needs, and experiences are so different.
Maria: Exactly. Standards erase difference– “pasteurized processed student product” is the phrase i used in my chapter.
Alana: They also erase context.
Emily: Exactly. I’ve been doing some work lately on the Greek idea of kairos, which means ‘the right moment for speaking.’ What it’s possible to say and what it’s possible to hear depends entirely on a complex set of intersecting factors. That’s one of the reasons I really loved the Smith and Eisenhower chapter (”The Library as ‘Stuck Place’:Critical Pedagogy in the Corporate University”). It addresses these factors directly. While it says some scary things about the context in which we work, it’s helpful to have a sense of what limits what we can do.
Alana: I love the way those authors move well beyond the classroom, and beyond the institution, to situate our practice in broader contexts of neoliberalism & global capitalism, emphases on flexible labor, and creating flexible laborers. They give us a model for how to think-through our situation.
Emily: And it’s a challenging perspective–what are we supposed to do under so many constraints?–but the fact that we might actually find real freedom in our marginality was an interesting perspective.
Maria: But still, there are things we can do, which the book makes clear.
Emily: Yes–we have methods! Like problem-posing instruction, student-centered instruction, etc. Then again, much of this is pretty standard in the instruction approaches recommended by ACRL. Do you think having a politics around this stuff–which we and our contributors do–makes a difference?
Maria: Well, it makes a difference to me!
Alana: It makes a difference to me, too, especially since learning activities are just one part of teaching and learning. There are cases when, if I’m taking power-sharing seriously, I might step out of my role as Expert, and that doesn’t seem like part of the ACRL approach.
Emily: Yes. It also requires changing the way I teach things like ‘authority.’ That’s probably the biggest thing that has changed for me since we started putting this book together.
Maria: Yes. Authority is complicated.
Alana: It also means, as some of our contributors show, that what we teach — in terms of resources, critical approaches to library tools themselves, nontraditional/alternative resources — matters, too.
Emily: And that commitment, for me, comes entirely from my political commitment to acknowledging and making clear the constructed nature of all knowledge.
Alana: Right. For me, it comes from an investment in paying attention to how knowledge is produced.
Maria: Yes. Yes to all of the above.
Alana: Were there other things from our contributors that surprised you?
Emily: I worked with one author (Margaret Torrell, “Negotiating Virtual Contact Zones: Revolutions in the Role of the Research Workshop”) who is a composition teacher. She wrote very clearly from the other side of the fence much of what librarians struggle to articulate about questions of authority. It was a real reminder to me that we need to be talking to our comp friends!
Alana: And I was pleased to work with Lisa Hooper (”Breaking the Ontological Mold: Bringing Postmodern and Critical Pedagogy Into Archival Educational Programming”) on her chapter. Somehow, even given my own interest in critical archival studies, it hadn’t occurred to me that we should collaborate with archival educators, too.
Maria: I found it exciting to work with Troy Swanson’s chapter, especially. I’d read his previous work so it was pretty cool to get to correspond with him personally. His exploration of personal epistemology was really thought-provoking. As critical teachers, we resist the banking method model of teaching. But what happens when students prefer it? Troy takes this up in an interesting way.
Emily: One thing that really amazed me was how on time our authors were, which is more than just a hey-we’re-lucky! thing. I had the sense that people were really anxious for a place to put down the incipient ideas and practices that many of us are working through in isolation. I heard a lot of “I’m so grateful for this project” from my writers.
Alana: And I was so happy with how willing everyone was to really respond to our questions, to elaborate their arguments, to really revise
in ways that meant re-thinking or re-visiting initial arguments. I think this was a tricky collection to contribute to, in part because we’re interested in both theory and practice, trying to bring those two together, creating space for ideas in ways that we don’t usually see in the literature on instruction. It’s hard work!
Emily: I was so grateful to get some of those heavy-theory chapters, too. Practitioners are rarely asked to think very hard, which is a real shame. For me, the book has been like finding a home. As a thinker who goes to work every day, having a place where those two identities can exist has been really amazing.
Alana: And it’s been a reminder that it’s okay to take time to think, to question.
Maria: It is! It has been like that. Working with my authors challenged my thinking. It helped me realize that I wasn’t the only one thinking about these topics, that there is a conversation happening, and that we were helping to facilitate it.
Emily: It’s not a perfect book.
Alana: I’d be really worried if it was the perfect, definitive volume on critical library instruction.
Emily: I’d really like a more extensive discussion of critical library instruction and service learning, and I’d like to see more stuff along the lines of institutional/global critiques.
Alana: I’d also like to see more critical engagements with race,
Emily: and queerness,
Alana: and disability.
Maria: It’s a conversation starter, I think.
Emily: Yes, and one of the core themes in this book is learning as a dialogue, that knowledge doesn’t ’settle,’ isn’t ‘final.’ We don’t offer a Top Ten Critical Pedagogy Tips and Tricks. It’s about having conversations, between students and teachers, students and students, teachers and teachers, and everybody else.
Alana: And this is why we need more, better instruction about instruction at the level of LIS programs.
Emily: I didn’t have a single instruction class. Not one. Nothing about pedagogy.
Alana: Me neither. Well, one-half of one of my reference class sessions addressed instruction.
Maria: Neither did I. The one class Pitt offered didn’t fit with my schedule.
Alana: I got my training and experience at Ohio State, where I experienced critical pedagogies from the position of teacher and learner, in my Comparative Studies courses and through working with the first-year writing program.
Emily: I’m getting it now in my composition and rhetoric program.
Maria: I first learned to teach in the writing center and then the composition classroom in my MA program at the University of Louisville.
Alana: I was so hungry for examples of classroom practice when I started learning about critical pedagogy.
Emily: Me too. I was in a conversation with faculty recently about this book, and I said, with no guile whatsover, “I believe this book could be a game changer.” It elicited huge laughs! I mean, the book is about library instruction! But I really think it could be, if it invites people to step away from ‘mastery’ and towards discussion and engagement with critical teaching practices.
Alana: That approach feels aligned with what happens in our individual teaching — we experiment, make mistakes, find some things that work super-well on one context & not in another…
Emily: We have to be able to struggle and fail, which is all political work is anyway, or the work of life.
Alana: Right on. Excellent connection.
Emily: I made the shittiest yam and bean stew over the weekend, but I’m having it for lunch because it’s what I have to eat. But now I know for next time–fewer chipotles.
Alana: And you’ll make other soups.
Emily: Many many others, probably a new one tonight. And that hooks back up with hooks–this is all part of the wholeness of us as instructors, right?
Maria: Yes, we are imperfect creatures, soft animals, even when we are teachers.
Emily: I have to go to a desk shift in a minute, so can I ask one last question? I always say in my classes, “If you take one thing away from this session, it’s that.. You can do this/you can come see me/you have a right to succeed here, etc.” What’s the ‘one thing’ you hope people take away from this book?
Maria: I hope people will take inspiration from the book to try something new, to rethink their practice.
Alana: For me I think it’s what we’re already talking about: what happens when we create spaces of possibility — by taking time to think, to experiment, to take risks in (thought-out, reflective ways).
Emily: I guess I would hope people would read the book, or even part of the book, and then turn to the librarian next to them and tell them what they thought. I hope we start conversations.

We hope you’ll join us in talking about critical approaches to library instruction. Maria, Emily, and Alana will be making room for these conversations at http://librarypraxis.wordpress.com.

   

Library Juice Press / Litwin Books gift certificates are great as personal gifts or as library-related awards. You can pay for a gift certificate in an amount of your choosing with funds in your PayPal account or with a credit card.

Today’s New York Times has an informative little item comparing the environmental impact of producing an ipad versus that of a paper book: “How Green is My iPad?“

Lauren Pressley is an Instructional Design Librarian at Wake Forest University, and the author of So You Want To Be a Librarian, from Library Juice Press. I interviewed her about her book by email the other day so that you could hear what she has to say about it at this point, now that the book has been out for a little while.

Why don’t you describe the book So You Want To Be a Librarian?

So You Want To Be a Librarian is a book for those thinking about entering the field, or those just starting library school. I was excited to work on the project because I find it really rewarding to work with people who are just getting started. This book seemed like a way to reach a broader group of people, rather than those who happen to be part of my network or geographically nearby.

The book is structured around basic information about the field. The background it provides will be useful for readers who are trying to imagine what type of work they might like to do and the different possible career paths they might take. I give an overview of types of libraries, types of jobs within libraries, current professional issues, and getting the MLS. I also was able to interview several librarians about the field and the included interviews provide a variety of perspectives and a broader view of the field than I could have provided alone.

So You Want To Be a Librarian is designed to be a quick and easy read, while still containing a lot of useful information. If you have questions after reading it, feel free to leave them on the website: http://laurenpressley.com/librarian/questions/ I’d be happy to continue the discussion in the blog!

What has the response to the book been like?

It’s been surprising! I’ve heard more than I expected from people who have read it and are already working in the field. I didn’t expect current librarians to read it, but several have said they were interested in reading my perspective. These librarians have said that they were surprised the book made them appreciate their work and profession more. Now that I’m further from library school, and more specialized than I was in the beginning, I can understand that reaction a little bit better. It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture, and the book is designed to provide just that view.

I haven’t heard directly from very many people just considering the field, but I have heard good things from those who have contacted me. There aren’t many reviews up on sites like Amazon or GoodReads, so at this point I’ve either heard from people directly or seen messages pop up on Twitter or in discussions on library related blogs.

What was the process of writing it like and what have you learned from doing it?

I learned that writing a book is a bigger project than I realized it would be! Getting the words on the page was pretty easy for me, but the follow up work was challenging.

Since I only have one job, I wanted to be sure to have experts in each area read through what I had written to make sure I didn’t misrepresent anything. I had to write pretty quickly, and get the text into a format that I was comfortable with early in the process, so I could divide up the text and send it to people working in different areas and in different types of positions. People very kindly took the time to read through what I wrote and gave me some good feedback. Organizing the interviews also took a while because I wanted to find people to represent many different types of libraries, positions, and perspectives.

Writing a book was a meaningful experience from me. Both the easier and more challenging times helped me learn how to take on projects of this size. And the process itself helped me gain a better understanding of what life is like for the faculty members that I work with every day.

Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed for Library Juice. I’m glad that writing the book was rewarding. As you know, I am very happy with how it turned out and thank you for your work.

This is big news for anyone dealing with politics or gov docs collections. The New York Times is reporting today that C-SPAN has made its entire archive of programming freely available on its website. The archive contains 160,000 hours of programming. It seems that this will be a major resource for studying domestic politics in the years to come.

Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods

Editors: Emily Drabinski, Alana Kumbier, and Maria Accardi
Price: $35.00
Published: March 2010
ISBN: 978-1-936117-01-7

Bringing together the voices of a range of practicing librarians, this collection illuminates theories and methods of critical pedagogy and library instruction. Chapters address critical approaches to standards and assessment practices, links between queer, anti-racist and feminist pedagogies and the library classroom, intersections of critical theories of power and knowledge and the library, and the promise and peril of reflective instruction practices. Rooted in theoretical work both from within the profession (James Elmborg, Cushla Kapitzke) and without (Paolo Freire, Henry Giroux, Deborah Britzman), contributions are complemented by stories of critical approaches put into practice in institutional settings ranging from the community college classroom to large urban research universities to virtual worlds. The intention is to begin a conversation among librarians who teach, library instruction program coordinators, faculty and instructors interested in bringing librarians into the classroom, and librarians interested in developing liberatory and anti-oppressive professional practices.

Critical Library Instruction is available directly from Library Juice Press, from Amazon.com and other online booksellers, through vendors of books to libraries, and in electronic form through ebrary.

The Amelia Bloomer List is for the “best feminist books for young readers” published each year. This year’s list has just been announced.

My friend Ramona Islam shared with me an interesting blog post by chemist Jean-Claude Bradley, discussing the reliability (or non-reliability) of scientific reference sources that are considered trusted within the discipline. I find it especially interesting in terms of implications for projects like Wolfram Alpha and other attempts to build automated reasoning systems around inconsistently-defined and questionable data.

San Francisco Public Library has added a professional social worker to the staff to manage issues relating to library users who are homeless or in poverty. They’re paying her a lot more than they pay the librarians, which is annoying. However, it looks to me like they are addressing the needs of poor people in the community in a serious way, and what they are doing might really work. Worth thinking about in other urban public libraries.

Byron Anderson’s Bibliographic and Web Tools for Alternative Media has just been updated.

This is a good collection development resource for librarians and others who want tools for going beyond the usual lists and collection development resources, especially for finding books on the political fringes or otherwise outside of the usual academic or corporate channels.

Adorno and Horkheimer might have something to say about this, too.

I thought I had noticed this beginning to happen and was actually planning to post something about it soon, but Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has the full story: “Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention.”

Read through this and then consider what an inconvenience it is for searchers like us librarians who are searching on many different things for many different reasons. The record of past searches interferes with the results of subsequent searches. I have noticed this happening for a little while and find it very annoying.

So there are two issues with it. From a librarian’s perspective, it makes it a little harder yet to control our results. From a social perspective, it further fragments the culture by making our exposure to media yet more isolated and individualized. I’m looking for the good in this decision but frankly it seems to me that they’re working on a problem that doesn’t exist. The more their AI tries to do our thinking for us the less power we have to do what we want with the search. It’s not good.

LIS Critique is an international (primarily Latin American), independent open access journal founded in 2008. The full title is Library & Information Science Critique: Journal of the Sciences of Information Recorded in Documents. The second issue has just been released. Most of the articles are in Spanish, but they have translated the issue’s editorial into English and are interested in maintaining a presence in the U.S. I think it’s good to see what librarians are thinking about in Latin America. Like Progressive Librarian, it is an intellectually-oriented journal situated outside of academia.

Press Release

Baker & Taylor Acquires Blackwell North America
and James Bennett

– Blackwell U.K. Acquires B&T’s Lindsay and Croft in the U.K. As Part of Deal. Customers to Benefit from More than 300 Years of Bookselling Excellence –

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – December 7, 2009 – Baker & Taylor Inc. today announced it has acquired Blackwell Book Services North America (BNA) and Blackwell’s Australia-based James Bennett bookseller.

Also as part of the deal, Blackwell U.K. will acquire Baker & Taylor’s Lindsay and Croft business in the U.K.

“Our organizations share a passion for bookselling, a rich history and a reputation for superior customer service,” said Tom Morgan, CEO of Baker & Taylor. “With our collective knowledge and breadth of scholarly inventory and value-added services, academic libraries around the world will be extremely well served.”

The combination of Baker & Taylor’s YBP Library Services and Blackwell’s North American and Australian businesses brings together the world’s most respected and trusted academic and research library service providers. The shared commitment to service through partnerships with libraries, consortia and suppliers, coupled with outstanding reputations for professionalism, knowledge and integrity, will allow the expanded U.S.-based YBP Library Services to better meet the rapidly evolving information and workflow needs of academic libraries around the globe for years to come.

In addition to the acquisitions, Baker & Taylor’s YBP Library Services and Blackwell U.K. have entered into a strategic sourcing agreement under which YBP Library Services will source all U.K.-published academic material from Blackwell U.K., and Blackwell U.K. will source all U.S.-published academic material from YBP Library Services. This agreement will enable both businesses to offer their respective customers all over the globe the largest and most in-depth supply of scholarly materials.

Andrew Hutchings, Group CEO of Blackwell, said, “I am confident that this reciprocal agreement will enable Blackwell and YBP Library Services to build on their respective strengths and continue to deliver the high quality services that academic libraries around the world require.”

With this acquisition, Baker & Taylor’s YBP Library Services will continue to offer the collection development and workflow services – print and electronic approval plans, firm and rush orders, continuations and technical services – that customers have relied on for years.

Additional services that were previously unique to one provider, such as Blackwell’s Table of Contents Catalog Enrichment Service or YBP Library Services’ GOBI3 bibliographic service, will soon be offered to all customers. By combining mutual best practices, the companies can provide a superior level of customer service that was never before possible.

###

Amy Baldwin
Communications Manager
Baker & Taylor
p 704-998-3136
c 704-519-6232
www.baker-taylor.com