Guardienne of the Tomes

Let me preface this post by saying that I *love* to see children in libraries. It gives me hope that not all of the new generation will grow up to be illiterate idiots. Teaching children to learn to love libraries while young is something that lasts their entire lives. I encourage everyone to bring their children to a library regularly and grow their love of learning and adventure. On the flip side, while we generally welcome children, we don't always welcome the absentee parenting that comes along with them. We are librarians, not social workers or daycare employees. We are not qualified to tend your children, other than to sit them down and provide storytime, craft-time, or some fun and games. While we welcome children of all ages, we do *not* welcome their behavioral problems, and for parents to expect the library to shut up and deal with whatever comes through the door - um, I think not. that's what I have security for. "I'm tired of hearing from librarians who don...

My first participation in a meme! In librarianchat via the LSW wiki, a few folks decided that, in the interests of helping new graduates (and to amuse ourselves), we'd dust off some old cover letters and post them, with advice. The wonderful Rikhei (who shares my last name, even, and thus is doubly cool) started the meme here . I decided to post the cover letter that got me my current, most-excellent job. At 3 pages, I realize that this cover letter is far longer than what is usually prescribed. I received cover letter advice from one Professor Lisa O'Connor that recommended the strategy of bullet-pointing each requirement from the job ad and addressing it directly, so that's exactly what I did. I got over seven interviews for academic reference/instruction positions, and more than one offer, so while this length likely isn't the norm, it worked for me. Cover Letter I am interested in the position of Reference and Instruction Librarian at the University of Awesomeness...

Let's chat, folks. I know there are tons of things in LibraryLand we could discuss, but for a moment, let's talk about e-mail lists. I know quite a few people (like Griffey ) who think that email lists are the (outdated) devil. I happen to like receiving things in email because I haven't yet figured how to acceptably integrate feedreaders into my life, and I prefer conversations via e-mail than via the comment section of blogs, whcih I never remember to go back and check after I've left some inflammatory comment. Anyway, we can discuss fuddy-duddies like myself and our love of the e-mail later. We need to chat about lists, though. If you've been on the NEWLIB list lately, you likely know why. Lists are good things, if only to keep yourself updated on conversations/arguments/discussion/resource lists that generally make the rounds when people query via email. Lists are very often archived somewhere for future reference, which is super-useful is you know that someo...

Okay, so my professional bio is a lot more sparse than my creative writing bio. I'm supposed to send one in to book chapter people, and after reading everyone else's (which is all 'director of this' and 'president of that' and 'been presenting on this topic around the globe for 15 years', I'm feeling kind of bummed. I can't list my publications & presentations yet because everything's still in the works. *sigh* I feel like sort of a loser. I was going to say I could never use teh follwing bio, but all of my TwitPeeps liked it: "Colleen is a chunky library sort who stays at home and writes with her bossy dog on her feet when she's not teaching ungrateful ghetto kids how not to plagiarize their shit or use Wikipedia & Google as scholarly sources. When in doubt of her prowess, she distracts onlookers with her fierce bosoms." Thanks to tinfoilraccoon for reminding me about my fierce bosoms! And to everyone else for admirin...

Writing this book chapter on the digital divide made me consider my university’s current push for offering increased online learning opportunities. Because we serve students who generally come from lower socio-economic backgrounds, I’m wondering if administration isn’t going about this the wrong way. Is it really about offering more online classes and more online-only degrees and gen-eds? Or would it be more useful to decrease the digital divide that exists within our student body, between the higher-income kids who grew up with computers and gadgetry and those who may have had to make-do with less access? Many of our students still don’t own computers and make constant use of those available in our student labs and library. Many of our students – at least, the ones I see in our library – are not terribly comfortable navigating technologies used in learning environments, including BlackBoard and the library databases they are expected to use to conduct their research. These are the stu...

I am always better about getting things done when I write them down. And when I have some sort of accountability factor. Since I hate looking stupid, writing these here for public consumption will force me to get all my shit done. I am also attaching aspirational deadlines in cases where hard deadlines do not exist. Book Chapter abstract: deadline 4/30. (That's not aspirational, that's fact, per editor) Proposal for LI Cookbook: May 15. (Also not aspirational.) ALA poster, "Academic Library 2.0: Self-Paced Guided Training for Faculty and Staff," for Annual: deadline 6/16. Book Chapter: deadline 6/26. (Actual deadline is 6/30 per editor, but am leaving for ALA on the 26th.) Scholarly Article 1 (full 1st draft): deadline 7/18. Scholarly Article 2 (full 1st draft): deadline 8/1. Scholarly Article 1 (final manuscript): deadline 8/22. Scholarly Article 2 (final manuscript): deadline 9/5. Of course, this doesn't take into account various library projects like develop...

Coming from a private liberal arts background, I do have to admit that I didn't immediately understand why universities would offer for-credit classes in information literacy. Isn't all that information essentially interwoven through the courses students take? I mean, it's essential for any discipline. Let's back up. I went to a very small, private, expensive (I will have student loans to bequeath my grandchildren) liberal arts college. You know the sort - kids who drive cars daddy bought practically (if not actually) new, who clerk at daddy's law firm during the summers, and who don't drink beer because frankly, that sort of thing is for state school fraternity boys - Crown and Jack welcome, all others will be booted at the door. On the other hand, it was an extraordinarily rigorous academic atmosphere: if you missed three classes, you automatically failed. Fifteen page papers were the norm. There was no such thing as multiple choice, and we regularly hobnobbed...

I know how to write an academic article. I train people how to do their research, and how to structure their papers. I'm a peer reviewer for a number of journals, and I read such articles on a regular basis. Given all of this, why is it so gosh-danged hard to compose myself and get myself together to write one myself? I have a good seed of an idea. I've printed all my research and have ILL-ed the books we, of course, don't own. The problem is that I cannot seem to pull my brain together in similar fashion. I can't decide where to start. I can't stop the hamster on its wheel in my brain for long enough to sit with the articles and just READ. My trouble is that I have developed work-induced ADD. I have grown accustomed to putting out fires and working in fifteen minute blocks of time (generally interrupted by meetings, emergencies, backing up at the refdesk, teaching, and random folks wandering into my office). This is the nature of the beast. I recognize that, and I ...

Just when I am finally broken enough to blog something like this , another student provides a refreshing moment of wisdom and interest in being the best researcher they can possibly be. (Much like "being all you can be" for the army. Except an army of one isn't very intimidating, whereas a researcher or scholar of one can inculcate thousands before they're stopped.) I got my little librarian hands on two upper-level English classes yesterday, and we worked with thesauri and subject guides in various databases, learned all about how our crappy link resolver (soon to be replaced with Gold Rush - yay!) works, and delved into some of our more advanced, subject-specific databases. We discussed inter-library loan, and the coolness that abounds in librarians, who I framed as professional nerds, ready, willing and able to come to desperate students' aid in times of crisis. I may have also mentioned in passing that we occasionally wear capes, attract the hottest men, and...

All right, folks. Let's sit down and have a chat about all of the authors you're angry at because you were "touched" by their memoirs, and whom you then decry as demons when you find out they made the memoir up. It's a long overdue conversation, and it's one I really want you to think about. Oprah took James Frey to task for making up the majority of his book A Million Little Pieces after she had endorsed it and made a good portion of the housewives of America read it. Oprah, the crusader that she is, took Frey to task publicly, outraged at having been deceived by his occasionally fictitious "memoir." He was, in fact, a drug addict, and many of the pieces of A Million Little Pieces are, in fact, true. Lots of fact there for you to enjoy. More recently, Misha Defonseca admitted that her Holocaust memoir Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years was entirely fabricated. That's right - she fabricated her memoir of her survival of the Holocaust ye...

I just spent the last fifteen minutes trying to explain to a young college girl why she should *not* be using The Onion as her news source for a serious research paper. Let me back up. It started with a relatively simple question - she came to the desk and asked whether she was supposed to cite her news article as a newspaper or as a web source. She held out an article from the Onion. "I know it's a newspaper, but I only have the online version," she said. STOP Because I wanted to be sure, I asked, "You know The Onion isn't actually a real news source, right?" *blank stare* "What I mean to say is, The Onion is a fake news source. They make things up. it's a parody of the news, meant to make you laugh." *blank stare* "Erm...it's not a real newspaper at all. It's just a fake news website." Face brightens. "So I cite it as an online source?" "Yes. But it's not real news. Do you need a real-life news artic...

Woo-hoo! I made the March issue of InfoCareerTrends , the online professional newsletter for librarians-in-the-know. You can read "The New Academic Librarian: Setting priorities, Setting Goals" here . I have to admit, writing that was a nice excuse to step back and take a look at what I Should be doing, as opposed to what I do, which is generally crisis and deadline management. Given the gorgeous weather of the past few days (makes me think beach ) and that a bunch of deadlines will be off my back once march is done, I'm going to have to re-pace myself. Here's to surviving March!

Today I taught a mixed-bag class of repeat English class offenders. And I had the most fabulous time teaching them how to evaluate information sources, break their topics into keywords, and e-mail themselves their articles - complete with MLA-style citation - to their Gmail accounts (because we all know that our university e-mail is not to be trusted). The usual fare, but I made it extremely informal - they'd already been through the library session once, the last time they took the class. Among others, one topic that came up when discussing the importance of scholarly articles' bibliographies included: the G-Spot and recent reports that some women don't have it. (comment from student: "Aw, hell no, I'd want to see that bitch's citation for sure! You can't go sayin' that with no data.") These are the days when I love my frickin' job. Now I am left to wonder it means, that I am apparently in tune with the academically challenged demographic, an...

Let's talk about plagiarism, folks. It's a topic that seems to be all the rage lately, both in politics and in academia, and it's one that dearly needs to be addressed. CNN has the latest on a Columbia professor who has been caught plagiarizing. That's right, plagiarizing , the bugaboo of librarians and professors everywhere who are attempting to educate students on the proper way to give credit to others for their hard work and original ideas. The law firm report states that "in two dozen cases, Constantine's published works contained language similar to passages in papers written by others, including a former teacher at the school and two of Constantine's former students." (See how I did that, made a note of the article, linked to it, and stuck quotes around the phrase I took that someone else wrote? Yes, we'll come back to that.) So, not only is she stealing from her colleagues, she's also cherry-picking from her (likely) best and brightes...

Today, an article at InsideHigherEd.com attempts to address the death of liberal arts in the American higher education system. I call shenanegans. Proportionately, liberal arts colleges graduate more students who attend graduate school, receive higher degrees, and become part of a skilled labor force as doctors, lawyers, PhDs, and various other professions. The universities churning out "vocational" students, as referred to in the article, are doing a poorer job at this. Small liberal arts schools have far better records of alumni giving. They are also less beholden to state funds, and so don’t suffer nearly as much in quality when the state slices the budget. For instance, Centre and Transy will be less devastated than UK by the Kentucky governor's plan to make a 12% across the board budget cut to institutions of higher ed. Of course fewer people know what liberal arts means — the larger universities are churning out diplomas to people who can barely read. (Heard m...

A university is not McDonald's. I should clarify that. Some of you will think that's a ridiculous statement. Of course we're not McDonald's. We are, indeed, in the business of training people to be on the other side of the counter than the one they might occupy without the university in their lives. McDonald's is an un-nutritious, quick-fix, fast-stop solution bound to lead to obesity, heart disease, and intestinal distress. Some others are likely saying that the university is indeed like McDonald's. Our kids drive through, pick a major from our menu, and try to get in and out as quickly as possible without laying out much effort (or cash) for something that is "good enough." understandably, most want a college education because of the career paths it opens, and that's a fine enough reason. Both camps have a point. I'd like to make mine: administrators and educators who encourage this fast-food approach in the name of "incorporating busi...

I work for a living, just like you do. Not exactly like you do, since I don't have the venerable onus of grading 300 terribly written exams on ancient history, but I promise I'm busy. I'm busy making sure you have the resources you need, and checking for the software programs your students need when you tell them to come to the library and use Photoshop (better check with us before assigning that, plz). I am planning lessons to teach your classes how to do actual research, since you feel they already know what they need to and don't much care how they get the right information so long as it's valid. I am reviewing books, reading reviews and making purchases for your curriculum, attending department committee meetings, attend university committee meetings, and serve on the faculty senate. I am informing you about database trials, trying to wrangle an invitation to your department meetings to keep you updated, attending job candidate talks all over campus (because ev...

There is an article in the December 17th issue of Publisher's Weekly on the ethics of book reviewing. 34.4% of survey respondents "claimed they thought it is acceptable for a reviewer to back out of a review to avoid negative criticism of a book," (though the same percentage of editors find it unacceptable to back out of writing a review for that reason). This all comes from page 8 of that issue, for those of you who are interested in other statistics they garnered. Someone also recently (within the past 2 months) blogged about this, but I cannot for the life of me find the post. (If someone would be so kind as to send it, I'll link to it.) I decided to write on this because I review quite a few books a month - I usually have one item to review for Choice , one for , Tennessee Libraries , two for Library Journal , and occasionally I review for Journal of Web librarianship. I consider it my job to read the book (or examine the online resource, in some cases) with an...

I taught three sections of the second-semester English students this morning, and I have to admit, despite my now-froggy voice, that this is why I became a librarian. Answering questions also nurtures the nerd in my soul, but teaching people how they can find what they need is my true love. There are very few ways to make database searching interesting for students, no matter how much I love the Thesaurus or RSS alert options. I am left wondering if this is the spot where the 2.0 folks are relying too much on technology. Tutorials and podcasts are useful for introductory topics and basic training, but eventually, you need to get the students hands-on, with a librarian available for help. An electronic lesson is fine, but having a live person help you brainstorm keywords and re-framing your topic so that you can get the most out of your resources should be a personal experience. This, of course, helps me keep my job. But it should also inform our practices - before we outsource all of ...

I have to admit, I don't expect to become famous in my first two (or even three, or four) years of librarianship. (I do hope my boss doesn't mind.) Mind you, this doesn't mean I'm not working hard. I am working on coauthoring an article on something practical with my dean (I know, practicality and publication don't necessarily go together), I'm still learning the ropes and such at my position since I've been here all of five-and-a-half months in my first professional position. I'm learning more about areas outside my subject expertise, because we're a smaller university and haven't an abundance of separate libraries or subject specialists - we're all happy know-it-alls (or at least, know-most-of-its). I'm reviewing regularly (6 book reviews published since August, one chapter reviewed), and just getting on the ball with creating tutorials. I enjoy my reference desk work, and I love, love , LOVE teaching library instruction, because I...