Guardienne of the Tomes

Hey, y'all. How was your summer vacation? (That was a joke. I know librarians aren't on vacation during the summer. Don't hit me.) It's been awhile. I feel like I'm slinking back onto your screen. Whatever, life is too short, I'm here and I hope you're glad to see me because I'm glad to be here. Consider me jazz-handsing back onto your screen. It has been a big, long year already, and a crazy summer that started with co-presenting with my colleague Dr. Sohui Lee (our director of the Writing and Multiliteracy Center) at Computers in Writing in Findlay, Ohio, middled with a disaster of a move (home, not library), and ended with presenting at the Colloquium on Libraries and Service Learning up in Santa Clara, California. More about at least those summer bookends soon, since they're actually relevant to my librarianship. Right now the big huge work-related thing that has me resuscitating Guardienne is that as of my return to campus August 14th th...

Well, hello, there. It's been awhile. I shut this sucker down because I didn't know that I had anything interesting to say anymore. But it appears I do. And folks have asked me to put it in a place where it doesn't fade as quickly as a Facebook post. And suddenly the world of information, which I was merrily floating along in, has developed some serious tidal waves. Slapped me awake a bit. Sit. Have a coffee. Let's chat. Let's chat about this weekend. The marches! Come now, we can't pretend libraries are not, at their heart, places of political activism. Heck, in our Code of Ethics it flat-out says that we "uphold the principles of intellectual freedom..." For those who are rusty, the American Library Association defines "intellectual freedom" as "the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access to all expressions of ideas through which any a...

How I say BOOM to this day: 1. Two surprise student consults this morning because their professors told them to come see me specifically. 2. A professor just called in an emergency status, needs some research to support a major NIH grant, thought immediately of me. Yep, I can help with that. Due Thursday? No problem. 3. Finished and submitted a complicated "revise & resubmit" research article to one of the top journals in my field. 4. Chatted with a friend about researching grants for her business idea. 5. Made comments on a group report submitted by one of the groups of students in my experiential learning social justice class. 6. Had a phone call to clear up some things about the library leadership book manuscript. 7. Rejoined the local CSA - 12 biweekly deliveries of a giant box of farm fresh veggies. Back onto the Autoimmune Protocol. 8. Submitted a poetry book manuscript to a press 9. Already located some good sources for #2 - sent 5 articles to the faculty member 1...

The research paper. It's funny--I have my FJS students read Barbara Fister's article on " Why the Research Paper isn't Working ," but they still have to write a paper for me. It's an upper-level class, after all, and for the first iteration of this course, the research paper is how I'm scaffolding in information literacy as well as keeping students well on track to completing a larger project as they consider concepts throughout the course. Back on topic: for my FJS 340 course, my students are required to work on a research paper. Essentially, they get to explore any conflict or issue of interest to them that involves questions of freedom and justice, but they must explore their conflict from an information perspective (which is our focus for the class). I leave the subject matter wide open for a reason--the course I teach is an upper-level general education course, multidisciplinary and international in scope. I want students to choose a topic of interest...

Teacher- Librarians In practice here at CSUCI Broome Library, we are all teaching librarians. when I schedule information literacy sessions, all librarians are up for grabs for me--my Head of Public Services and Outreach, Head of Unique Collections and Scholarly Communication, my Collections & Technical Services Coordinator, my Electronic Resources Librarian, my Original Cataloging Librarian, even my dean/AVP. Everybody's on deck when there's an instruction need, and with over 120 information literacy sessions scheduled this fall alone, everybody bats, and everybody bats big. In addition to the many information literacy sessions we teach, many of us also teach semester-long classes. Before I talk about teaching my credit course this semester, some important background. Here at CSUCI, the librarians (who have tenure-track faculty status) regularly teach and co-teach credit courses in disciplines where we're qualified, in addition to classes actually certified under the L...

This semester has been a grueling one--it started with a bang, and is just now beginning to let up. And by 'let up,' I mean it's just now that I can start getting to my long to-do list of things I was hoping to accomplish this semester that fall just outside my primary duties of coordinating and scheduling instruction. That list includes reflecting on my teaching, Summer 2015 Summer was a wild one, with some rough health issues, then a week away at PhD camp for the Mythological Studies degree, then the first week of August in Seattle for the ACRL Immersion program, then coming back to welcoming the new faculty, developing the syllabus for my new class, and scheduling library instruction. September: All Information Literacy Instruction, All the Time In September, I taught 27 instruction sessions across all manner of subjects (including Anthropology, Art, Business, Education, English, Environmental Science & Resource Management, Communication, Psychology, Political Scienc...

Two of my energetic colleagues, Janet and Kaela, have been doing serious inroads with outreach to various student services offices on our campus. They titled the effort the PASS program, or Library Partnerships to Achieve Student Success. They set up a website here , and have built relationships with a number of offices on campus that directly serve student populations who may have special needs that the Library can help with. Now that they have done the hard work of building relationships with university staff in those areas, and developed some outreach materials, programming, and reference hours, they asked for folks interested n helping them continue the program. I was very excited to volunteer to be our liaison to the Disability Resource Programs office, and I'm looking forward to helping in this area for a few reasons, not the least of which is that I identify with the student population. If you're a Facebook follower of mine, you may know that I'm suffering from one o...

You don't even have to have your finger on the pulse of academic news to have heard about the Lacour and Green research debacle. It's been bouncing around in my brain since it's related to the way we maneuver in a world of information, and it is relevant to my work as a librarian and as a researcher. In a drama-filled nerdly nutshell (with links to further reading for the details), the situation: Brief Unofficial Timeline of the Study, and Discovery of Possible Misconduct an important study on persuasion coauthored by a UCLA political science graduate student (Lacour) and a big-name political scientist at Columbia University (Green) was published in (and then retracted from) the peer-reviewed journal  Science; the large-N study indicated that attitudes about same-sex marriage could be significantly changed long-term by brief exposure to someone who was gay; because this would be huge news, it was picked up by NPR's This American Life ; because the conclusions g...

I've been thinking more about research agendas and large-scale research projects lately. I'll readily admit (as will my CV) that most of my research before the dissertation consisted of one-off sorts of things. A lit review here, a best practices there, presentations on bits and pieces of my work that all together paint a decent picture of the sorts of things I was working on as a professional academic librarian. But they were never coherently planned as something to present as a set, or to build upon each other. My dissertation is truly the first time I've articulated a large, multi-stage, likely multi-publication research agenda for a particular phenomenon. My dissertation project itself can, I think, be carved neatly into three separate articles to articulate the research succinctly. The first part, on the relationship between academic library department experience and perceived leadership skill development, was published in The Journal of Academic Librarianship . Anothe...

Things on my librarian brain: Our library team is working on our MOU (Memo of Understanding) in response to the program review we recently had (where outside folks come in and evaluate us). [Side note: in my previous life as an Access Services manager, an MOU was the first step in the disciplinary process of an employee. Not so with this MOU, this is just a normal response with a 2 and 5 year plan to address each item where needs were noted.] Sort of related to the above, the 2015 ACRL Immersion Program has begun! Though I won't head to Seattle until the beginning of August, the Moodle course is up and running, our readings and pre-assignments have been posted. I'm hoping to leverage the Immersion program to inform how we want our information literacy program to evolve for a growing campus with semistatic resources. A "freemium " model of peer-review, where authors could pay for faster review of their articles, was pretty much unanimously shot down as privileg...

Those of you who know me know that I'm a perpetual student, addicted to lifelong learning (and the pieces of paper that certify I accomplished something). In September 2014, I started work on the  Ph.D. in Mythological Studies, with an emphasis in depth psychology . As I finish the readings for the first session of my third semester in my latest academic endeavor, I find myself thinking about the different ways of knowing in academic disciplines. I've had a lot of experience as a student. (I remarked to a class the other day that I've been doing homework for 30 of my 35 years. And then I nearly cried. They looked a mixture of horrified and awed.) At the undergraduate level, I overloaded my schedule each term (requiring the Dean of Students' signature) and did significant work in international relations and political science, economics, Spanish, and foreign language study (Spanish, Italian, French, German, Ancient Greek, and Japanese). At the Master's level, I've...

To my great delight, I've been invited to teach in the Freedom and Justice Studies minor in Fall 2015. I'll be teaching the three-credit upper-division interdisciplinary general education course FJS 340: Exploring Freedom and Justice on Thursday afternoons in fall 2015. The course description as it appears in the catalog is: Starting from philosophical understandings of identity, community, and democracy the course focuses on themes such as slavery and emancipation; migration, exile, and diaspora; violence and reconciliation. Using an interdisciplinary lens that engages fields as wide-ranging as economics and literature, students will engage in trans-historical, cross-cultural exploration of freedom and justice and the various ways different peoples have attempted to put them into practice. Students will engage tools to analyze the relationship between these concepts and the structure of identity and its material effects. Effectively the course chooses a wicked problem and expl...

Each spring semester, the CSUCI Broome Library throws the gala of the year, the Faculty Accomplishments Celebration. The Library hosts the faculty accomplishments database , where you can go ogle our faculty and their work. The celebration is a chance for faculty to get together and see what each other are working on, and discuss interests over delicious foodstuffs. Not only does the library host the shindig, but the planning happens months in advance. This was my first chance to attend, as a newbie, and what a wonderful time it was! The library hands out awards, celebrity-roast-style, such as the Golden Bookend, the Golden Clicker, and the Golden Key to the Library, with concomitant descriptions for why each faculty member won. There was much laughter, and it was just the point in the semester where I think we all needed that to lift our spirits. We played Cards against Faculty (a slightly more PC-version of Cards Against Humanity) as well as mad libs where nouns and verbs were remove...