librarygrrrl.net

(Bad, jiggly) videos of the interludes from the recent ACRL President’s Program at ALA 2006. Seems that I set my camera’s resolution a tad too high, so each video was initially 100+MB. Oops! Downloaded DivX and converted them to “portable” format so I could upload them to YouTube. Enjoy.

• Information Literacy Cheerleaders
• IL Headline News
• Is Information Literacy Working? A Video (of a video - how meta!)
• The Magnificent Carnak

Okay, now my rant. Can you even BELIEVE someone thought the Carnak thing was either funny or relevant? Yes, yes, yes, we are a greying profession in some respects, but it’s no wonder librarians have an image issue, when you try to pull off skits based on skits that are originally more than 25 years old. ARGH. I was embarrassed - mostly because half the audience was too young to know who Johnny Carson is. I know who he is, but only barely. I’m of the Jay Leno era, and I’ve been out of grad school for 10 years. CAR-freaking-NAK? [facepalm]

[tags]ALA 2006, ACRL, information literacy, carnak[/tags]

WSS Program: Doing Information Literacy Differently: The View from Interdisciplinary Studies

Tiffini Travis, CSU-LB, Sara Heitshu, U of AZ, and Sherri Barnes, UCSB

We had 95 attendees about 15 minutes after Tiffini began speaking. The speakers each talked for 15-20 minutes, and then we had a half-hour worth of questions and answers.

Although many people left to go to the security line for Laura Bush’s talk, about 30 folks stuck around for three lively roundtable discussions ranging across many areas of interdisciplinarity and information literacy.

There was only one disaster – I dumped water and ice all over the presenters’ table while the second presenter was speaking. Super-embarrassing, but everyone in the audience laughed, and Sara said it helped her out, as it “broke the ice”. Haha.

A group of nine of us (including all three presenters) went out for lunch at Mulate’s afterwards and continued the conversations from the roundtables, as well as simply socializing.

I thought it was a fabulous program and was highly successful. The presenters were engaging and gracious, the questions from audience were thoughtful and helped presenters bring more issues to light than they could discuss in their presentations, and the facilitators of round tables directed and recorded ideas from the wide-ranging conversations. Wahoo!
Once I get my wits about me again (yesterday was a hellish day trying to get home from NOLA, and today I was bleh, headache-y, and pooped), I’ll write up the program in much more detail.

[tags] ALA 2006, WSS[/tags]

(My notes - incomplete and comprehensible perhaps only to me - from the just-completed ACRL President’s Program at ALA 2006 in New Orleans.)

“Questioning our core values is appropriate.”
Affirmative – Stanley Wilder, Jeff Rudenbeck
Negative – Julie Todero, Gary Radford

Pulse of room: 350 disagree, 50 agree with assertion

Interlude 1: Info Lit top 5 list a la David Letterman

How can you tell that your IL class is going down the tubes?

5. students cry out in unison dewey or don’t we?
4. students complain that they thought BI was bartending instruction
3. students all simultaneously break out in Olivia Newton John’s “Let’s Get Physical”
2. Librarians march outside classes with signs reading: “Faculty Status: Who Needs it?”
1. students ask if “on bullshit” will be required reading for class.

First Talks

SW: Classic bandwagon of bluster, absence of teaching faculty and students on it. Set out and failed to build national following outside library – only in library, not in education. Single comprehensive critique? Magnificently untested! Misguided. IL is not synonymous with education function of our libraries – only one portion of it. Obligated to test it, weigh it against other ways. Are students who have IL training measurably better at lifelong learning than those who don’t? Operate on heartfelt beliefs rather than empirical evidence. Pause – step back – consider what kinds of things to ask of any education function of libraries. Agenda for a fad-free teaching function. (laughter) Being by acknowledging that student objective is course work. Assessment – does our instruction result in better classwork? Immersed in larger teaching discourse. Systematically reconnect with what students do. Replace il classes for students with student literacy classes for librarians. Allow for vigorous debate, civil. Crucial moment in our profession – wastes our time – less able to pursue education function for the future – headed for short-term relevancy. Rant on search.

JT: When asked about program, was told it was on clothes. Only question often about clothes is, “Do I look fat in this?” First professionals in higher ed, then librarians. Profession of higher education – requires scholarship of its professionals. Define approach to scholarship – five elements. 1. school of discovery/collection of new info. 2. school of integration/new knowledge/info. 3. school or application – discipline elements connected to affairs of society. 4. school of teaching/transmission of knowledge. 5. appreciation of existing and creation of new knowledge. True scholarship is never definitive. Look at full spectrum of IL – is it a fad? Where does it fit into our talent and time? Been around since turn of last century…flexibility in contributing to teaching. Best of what we can offer to academy – 1. discipline expertise, 2. bibliographic expertise, 3. info lit. Students/teachers don’t have a clue what we do. Integrate what we do into seamlessly into life of student and education process. Fad? Coined in 1974 as term. Is waste of time/talent? Part of primary responsibility. Component parts of what we do. Research on IL varied and changing. No one piece of research proves IL, but research proves elements of IL. Multi-pronged plan for insinuating ourselves into lives of students, like health sciences. Awareness, prevention, treatment, cure, lifestyle changes for the future.

Interlude 2: ACRL – need a cheer! ACRL Official Pom-Pom Squad.
(Video - I’ll link to YouTube when I post it - IF my camera worked.)
Second Talks

JR: Bolster about some of SW’s perspectives with research on literacy. Decades-long critique of literacy, peeking into IL. Is literacy something you have? Critical literacy scholarship thrown out idea that literacy is functional skill that can be attained, assessed. IL about what? At what point in time? Toward what end? Avoid hitching wagon to horse that’s stumbled and is dying! Important in literacy literature – literacy practice w/in particular social construct. Elevator literacy, grant literacy, information literacy, cheer literacy? Does that exist? Cause for pause w/ in the movement. Calls into question literacy as a tool to achieve an end – disempowers, positions knowledge – all you need is knowledge to be a “better person”. Print-centric history of literacy, linear, hierarchical, anthropocentric, formal, rational, etc. etc., as you extend concepts into non-linear, meaning-focused, polycentric, experiential, myspaced, it’s different world. That is the world most students are in, exist in. to what extent have we done heavy lifting to move print-centric IL to digital world? Do a search on (blank) literacy – so washed-out and openly available in the literature that it’s meaningless… golf literacy, shoe literacy, snake literacy. New literacy studies – extensive and growing, literacies are always situationally and socially determined, embedded in particular social and cultural practices. It si a practice, something you do, not something you have! Literacies are ideological practices – identity, mobility, power, favor ways of thinking and organizing! What does it favor as expressed now? SELF-SERVING for libraries! Digital world complexifies the landscape. Struggle with literacies in plural – never use in singular form. Package deal w/ forms and functions that individuals bring to them. Literacies of the new – implies that river runs – students, individuals, faculty, producers on knowledge.

GR: applaud efforts and initiatives, crucial and necessary component in helping him do his job as teacher. Sense of wonder, curiosity, adventure, not chore. Students don’t get excited about assigned stuff, but do get excited when they have the ability to find it themselves. IL person has means to develop healthy skepticism, sides to stories, question, challenge dominant voices. Textbooks not enough – students who content to use only text are destined to be corporate drones. Others need to be encouraged, grow the spark of curiosity. Orwell (1984) – info controlled by govt – Winston – move beyond info given to him. Students learn because compelled to, get to a desired end. Info to be use for pragmatic goals – few students who have intrinsic desire for more knowledge. Skills are necessary but not sufficient condition for IL – IL is a new liberal art, critical reflection on nature of info, social, political, economic situated. Act of critical reflection requires access to network of texts to contextualize knowledge – ad infinitum. This is where it proves to be a challenge. No single end – true IL person doesn’t find answers, but only more questions. Eco’s Name of the Rose – scraps of parchments compiled and re-read for rest of life. What meaning in them? Textual journeys – texts may have no meaning, figures to be venerated, eventually exhausted meaning in the texts. IL creating changing in attitude less than learning of skills. Way of being in a world of info. Need info to understand info. Fear and uncertainty – textbook students avoid. Challenge – his students need us not to give up on them – afraid – conditioned to view info with fear.

Interlude 3:
IL Headline News
Video on YouTube when I upload

30 Minutes of Audience Speakers

(negative) Semantics – what we do is to help students learn how to articulate and recognize that they’re interested in something. Navel-gazing. What we do is not on ACRL website. Best state to reach is the state of “what do we need to know next?” When we do right things w/ students, the same thing happens to them.

(affirmative) 5% of academic libraries that are liberal arts colleges – only two choices on voting – neutral not available even though she is. If we want lifelong learners, IL to be accepted as important part of higher education – with small #s of librarians, how do we reach everyone? What about WAC model? We need that kind of partnerships w/ faculty.

(negative) get faculty on board, get them teaching IL in classroom. If we want it to happen, need institutional support.

(affirmative) IL possibly a symptom of what’s wrong w/ higher ed. Profoundly pessimistic, students do not, will not, and cannot think/explore for themselves. We can encourage and guide, but we can’t force/tell them.

(negative) Our lit. needs to be informed by critical lit. education. Rant on postmodernism.

(affirmative) important tool is ref. interview – traditionalist. Skills of IL are traditional parts of librarianship. Is it new function? Does it need new term?

(negative) IL is important – mom had to buy stock – smart woman – bought w/ investment group – factiva – two weeks before buying stock, published going into bankruptcy – IL not just in classroom, but in real life. Lifelong learning important!

(affirmative) 1. many students arrive w/ no library skills! 2. faculty do not know library or how to teach students how to use. 3. how to reach 25K students? We cannot do it! Teach online, blackboard.

(negative) 1966 teaching medical faculty how to use medlars – “spoonfeeding”. Lot of names for what we do over years. Whole spectrum of what is happening: today we are learning something with great humor, good way to examine what we do and what’s going on, what we’re doing in future.

Interlude 3 – Is info lit working? A Play.

Video on YouTube when I upload.

Rebuttals

GR: not a state or goal, but ongoing practice. Problem is with “education factory”, students not encouraged to think for themselves. System is designing to hold them back. All are frustrated – students, faculty librarians. Get beyond literacy as skill/psychology. IL is an ideal we should strive for, not a goal or state.

JR: ironic that from outside looking in that IL movement doesn’t engage w/ lit on literacy. Recognize PM currents in the ocean. Look at what you do in critical way. Want to hang out with librarians all the time! If assume that literacy is something you have/don’t, need/get, missing the point. It is a PRACTICE. Reform the question to info practices. Formal exposure to what we call IL is not only way this happens. Lit. literature – out-of-school learning – how kids learning ropes from each other. Important in our own way to open ourselves up to own info practices. Develop personal relationship w/ own info practice. Allow conversation to lean towards radically reshaping what we’re talking about. There is no center! PM or not, world is vastly distributed.

JT: cannot wait for someone to identify is as success outside of own world. Does it match institution/faculty needs? Student’s assignments. If does, do it. Must insinuate yourself into work by expertise. Use your time and talent to figure out what part of IL to tackle in curriculum – awareness, prevention, cure, etc. for folks in your institutions. Come out of library step into rest of academic institution. Educate students who don’t come to college informed about information environment – neither are your faculty fully formed. Partnership is critical part. We do more than organize info we’ve purchased. Connection of what we do.

SW: IL is not the same as teaching/educational function of the library. Put yourself in the role of 17-yr-old and read the standards, and find out how you don’t know what you don’t know. Yuck. IL grounded in assumption that search skills – skip the mechanics and get to content (google scholar v. compendex). Is IL the last word in library instruction history? Invite folks to start from scratch! What works?

Interlude: Carnack – questions/answers (YouTube when I upload)

Vote again: similar results as first vote

IL continues to be priority and core professional value.

Ethiopian proverb: two kinds of people – mountain people, no matter how far stand away from each other, can only stand side by side, river people no matter how far begon away from each other, ultimately flow towards each other. We are river people – librarians important part of life of mind and scholarly enterprise. Disagree on how, but not on whether we do.

[tags]ALA 2006, ACRL, information literacy[/tags]

I’m starting to get tired, I admit it. The wake-up call at 6:30 a.m. was a pretty rude jolt. For those who know me in real life, you’ll know that there are like 3 times in each year when I get up that early - all three usually related to airplanes. But somehow at ALA this year I’ve got two 8:00 a.m. things going on, so I’ll have used up my allotment of 3 early-mornings by the time this conference is over.

Anyhow, on to the day! Rolled out of bed and headed to the Sheraton to meet with the WSS 2006 Program Planning Committee. We’re hosting a program tomorrow that promises to be quite fun - “Doing Information Literacy Differently: The View from Interdisciplinary Studies.” We’ve got three great speakers lined up, a good amount of time for Q&A, and plan to hold more extensive break-out discussions after the talks. So the committee met for an hour to finalize all the things we need to do.

After that, I headed to the convention center to get the evaluation forms from the ALA Offices and to stop by the exhibits quickly. I found my friend Justin at the Harrasowitz booth and we had a good time catching up. We worked together at Swarthmore for a few years, and both left in the last year to take other jobs. I miss seeing him routinely, as he makes me laugh so hard my sides hurt.

From 10:30-12:30 was the WSS All-Committees time. Since my committee met eariler, I only had to wander around a bit to chat up folks about facilitating the discussion tables, and to chat with the chair of the Awards Committee to find out tips and tricks for doing the awards work at Midwinter.

Kelly and I bugged out of the meeting early and headed to the exhibits at the convention center again. She found some good (free!) manga for her son, and then we hit the Microsoft booth (free Nalgene bottles!), the Ms. booth (1/2 price subscriptions to the magazine!), and the Google booth (answer a fun quiz and get a baseball hat, knock-off Moleskine, or other Google swag!) I’m going back to the Google booth tomorrow to get a hat. If my bags weren’t already so heavy, I’d have probably gotten a lot more pre-pub books, but I resisted and only picked up two. So proud of myself….

For lunch, we wandered over to Mulate’s. I had my second-favorite po-boy, a crawfish one. Yummmmmmmmmy! Then it was time for the WSS Executive Committee meeting. We got through the whole agenda, minus one item that Kelly and I can email to the group later. We voted (four times!) (we never really vote on much) on things that will make a difference. We discussed scheduling of meetings to allow for more time to do non-WSS things at conference. We all oooohed and ahhhhed when Erin told us about her opportunity to be the librarian for the Semester at Sea program in the spring, and were heartened when Piper offered to do the web work while she was gone. We met Adam, the new ACRL guy, and heard from our ACRL Board rep, Lynne. We gave committee reports that weren’t too long or too short. And most importantly, we laughed a lot. At the last Exec meeting, in San Antonio, there was a pigeon that kept wandering into the room (long story) and we giggled about that. It was all good.

To end the night, a lot of us went to a reception that Susan’s employer threw. Susan (one of the funniest women I know, and my neighbor in the Boston area) told us the most HILARIOUS story about her early-morning cab ride to the Kinko’s with the cab driver who somehow managed to take the conversation from PETA to hunting and fishing to Whole Foods to comparing a certain group of women to Chihuahuas and others to Bulldogs. Again, my face and sides ached from laughing so hard. She was worried it would lose something in the translation to the written word, and I agree, so suggested she podcast it. If she does, though, she wants only to share it with a super-secret set of people - and I think that set is People Who Know Susan.

And now I’m in the hotel room, ready to prep for all the MCing I get to do tomorrow at the program. Wish me luck - I think it’s going to go well - and I’ll post late tomorrow night, after the program, the other program I’m going to go to, and the baseball game that the Gale folks take subscribers to ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) to. I’m not in that group any longer, but the fellow who organizes it said I could come anyway. Excellent! I love minor league baseball. Ta and have a good night.

[tags]ALA 2006, WSS, New Orleans[/tags]

Today was the first of two WSS-heavy days. Starting at 10:30 was the WSS Leadership Orientation, a meeting for incoming and outgoing section officers and committee chairs. It’s a time for folks to pass on tips and tricks about how to work in the section, play nice with ACRL, and to meet with their incoming/outgoing counterpart to pass on wisdom. I think I freaked out the incoming vice-chair of the section a little bit with my random rambling about all the things she’d be doing over the next two years… I’ll have to call her after the conference and let her know that sometimes I just get a little overworked and that she shouldn’t take me at face value.

Lunched solo in the Starbucks in the hotel, when Amy and I talked and she let me know that my little beastie had been hurt, but that she will be okay. Long story, and maybe I’ll tell it later. But yeah, lunch was sad.

Then at 1:30 some folks gathered for the annual WSS/COSWL/FTF meeting. It’s normally scheduled for an hour, but thanks to the wacky ALA time slots, it was 2 hours this year. *grumble* I think that scared away some people. We ended up finishing a little after an hour anyway. BUT the meeting was a good one - the folks from FTF and COSWL talked a lot about the work their groups do and can do and can’t do, and I talked about the types of things WSS does. As it turns out, COSWL was the group behind ALA’s stance on Alito during his confirmation hearings (ALA was against confirming him). Being a committee of the ALA Council, like COSWL is, means that they can really affect some policy changes when they put their minds to it. I spent some time talking with the current chair, and think that in a few years, when I’m ready to jump back into ALA work, I might look to COSWL as a place to put some energies. Interesting stuff. After we all talked about our groups, we had a wide-ranging discussion on work/family issues that affect women library workers. It was good!

KB and I headed outside for a while to warm up (hey, the hotels are frigid here!) before the WSS General Membership meeting. This year’s meeting was better attended than some others lately, which was heartening. The usual flow of the meeting is for us to all introduce ourselves and talk about what role we might play in the section, then the committee chairs all talk about the work of the committees (which was different this time, since this is the first time we’ve had this meeting before the All-Committees meeting). After that there’s the round-robin of open positions in academic libraries and announcements about goings-on on campuses related to women’s studies (new majors, new departments, department name changes, etc.) We talked about a few things that came up on the WSS-L list recently - namely the differences and strengths and weaknesses of two full-text women’s studies databases - GenderWatch and CWI. Then we talked about how many departments are changing their names from women’s studies to women and gender studies, or simply gender studies. Did the section have any feeling about that, and did folks feel like the name of the section was working? That conversation fascinated me - many programs are women’s studies, but include gender and LGBT studies within then, while others have separate women’s and sexuality studies programs, and iteration after iteration. I don’t think that there was any pressing desire by anyone who spoke up to change the name of the section, but I suspect it’ll come up more seriously in a few years or longer.

Then a bunch of us tromped on over to our social hour location, the Bridge Lounge at 1201 Magazine St. On the walk there, I was a bit nervous. We were in what appeared to be a *very* quiet section of the Warehouse District - as in, nothing was open, there were a lot of boarded up places, etc. We finally got to the place, walked in, and were treated to a wonderful location, beautiful interior, dogs on leash with their humans, fair drink prices, very little cigarette smoke, friendly bartenders, and enough room for us all to sit and talk comfortably in a big group of small groups. The only downside? No food. BUT the friendly bartender whipped out the delivery menu of a close-by place, and we ordered a couple of pizzas for the group. Very fun! After a couple of hours of catching up with friends, meeting new people, and laughing until our faces hurt, six of us die-hards finally closed up the WSS Social and headed back to the French Quarter. Four of them headed for dinner, one went back to her lodging, and I headed to my hotel for a shower, a write-up, and prep for my meetings tomorrow, in that order. Which means it’s time for me to sign off and get ready. Ta!

[tags]ALA 2006, WSS, New Orleans[/tags]