Household Opera

Thoughts on libraries and a cultivated sense of curiosity

(This is a semi-stream-of-consciousness post. I'm thinking out loud rather than posing a question I have real answers to. But it's been on my mind lately; if any of you have any better answers than I do, have at it in the comments!)

A couple of the people I follow on Twitter posted links today to Heather Wilson's recent Washington Post article "Our Superficial Scholars," a dispiriting view of recent Rhodes Scholarship applicants as hyperspecialized and unused to thinking about larger questions. Then I scanned the New York Times forum on the question "Does college make you smarter?"—which cites the recent book Academically Adrift, a report on how little college students are learning—and was struck by Leon Botstein's response:

All many [high school students] know is rote learning, and fear of mediocre standardized tests and grades. No vital connection between learning and life has been forged in our schools, much less any affection for voluntarily using one’s mind in the rigorous, sustained and frequently counterintuitive way that leads to innovation and the advancement of knowledge.

But our colleges and universities do pitifully little about combating student passivity and absence of curiosity. ... Since the specialized and competing interests of faculty from disparate fields seem hard to reconcile, all but a handful of institutions fail to have significant programs in undergraduate general education designed to equip students with serious skills, inspire them to raise their sights and help them discover what they might be interested in.

Partly I wonder if things are as bad as that. I suspect that on a large number of campuses you can find both deeply engaged students and students who aren't learning much. As one Twitter friend said of Wilson's article, "Always mildly suspicious of decline narratives. Faults don't ring true." 

But I've also seen that lack of interest in one's own education in quite a few students myself. (Not so much since I became a librarian; the students I see in the library tend to self-select for engagement with learning.) It used to depress me a lot back in my previous life teaching freshman writing. There were always students who were interested in the larger world and who seemed to like learning new things, but there were also always students who just didn't seem curious about anything. And it was the lack of curiosity that really worried me, partly because I don't think you can really get an education with that attitude, partly because it just seems like a dull and miserable way to go through life.

But I can't really blame them, because if your entire education to date has been about jumping through a series of hoops all designed to lead up to the larger hoop of a college degree that will get you a decent job, it's not surprising if you haven't developed the habit of wondering about the world, of contemplating and looking closely and reflecting and asking questions. (This cartoon is in the back of my mind as I write.)

So I've been thinking about how to foster curiosity in students who maybe have never been encouraged to be curious, and what libraries might do about it. I would love to see some kind of program for small, customized research projects along the lines of "Figure out something you're interested in. Explore that topic. Talk to your librarian about how to do that. Let your exploration take you into other subjects you wouldn't have thought to investigate. Then talk to your fellow students about what you've discovered." Libraries are fabulous places for doing that kind of open-ended exploration, but I think there need to be ways to encourage students to do that—not for a grade—as well as to provide the raw materials for their research.

I'm also wondering if one of the pedagogical techniques I adopted while teaching literature might also be adaptable to a library context. If I wanted to get students thinking a bit more laterally about a given text, I'd have them all look at it for a few minutes and write down an observation or two. Then we'd go around the room and each student would have to find a way to connect his or her own observation to what the previous student had just said. Something about the "Here's an observation; here's an observation; now connect them" structure always seemed to push the discussion out of familiar territory. I wonder if that structure might also work to encourage research exploration as well.

And I'll stop there. Reader, what do you think?

Remembering the memory theater

Some days, it feels like my career trajectory from literature-scholar-in-training to academic librarian has taken me a long way from my old set of intellectual interests. The things that interest me now, that make me sit up and say "hmm!", aren't the kinds of things I even knew to look for when I started grad school. But on other days, it feels like everything, sooner or later, comes back around, and I'm just tracing the edges of a long and intricate pattern that eventually repeats, or at least rhymes, if one follows it long enough.

Case in point: Thanks to the magic of iTunes U, I've been downloading and listening to Paul Duguid and Geoffrey Nunberg's "History of Information" course at Berkeley. It's fascinating stuff, exactly the kind of thing that makes my librarian heart beat faster. When I got to the classes on manuscript culture and the impact of print, I was pleasantly surprised to find Duguid and Nunberg introducing the idea of the printing revolution by playing a clip from James Burke's BBC series "The Day the Universe Changed," which I still remember watching, at age eleven, when it first aired on PBS. And then, to my great delight, I realized that the clip they were using in the course was the episode that stayed with me the longest: "Printing Transforms Knowledge," in which Burke spends a couple of minutes near the beginning talking about medieval memory theater.

It was fascinating to hear it again, because that couple of minutes inspired my dissertation. The whole "memory theater" concept fascinated me, and I never forgot it. (Especially since Burke visually recreates an example involving punning mnemonics for the seven liberal arts. The one I remember best is a snake — an adder: get it? — standing for arithmetic.)* More than a decade later, I thought of memory theater while working on a graduate seminar paper, and that paper topic in turn spawned my dissertation. At my defense, when my chair asked me to talk about where my dissertation started, I began that origin story with "The Day the Universe Changed."

And now, in quite another context, here it was again. Perhaps I've always been interested in information retrieval and its long, occasionally bizarre history, even before I started thinking about it in that light. And I've now got "The Day the Universe Changed" in my Netflix queue, for old times' sake; I suddenly want to watch the whole thing over again.

* I tried in vain to find that scene on YouTube so I could link to it, but no luck. There's a "Day the Universe Changed" channel, but I can't find the memory theater bit. I suspect the series was edited somewhere along the line.

ACRL wrap-up, part 2 (point 0)

I went to a bunch of other ACRL sessions besides the ones I talked about in part 1 of my conference wrap-up. There were a few common threads that probably say as much about my own preoccupations as about the general tenor of the conference. I went to a mobile devices demonstration, which suggested using Twitter as a content management system for mobile versions of library websites, and a paper on Twitter,  which stressed Twitter's mobile-device friendliness. I also went to a web-2.0-oriented session at which one of the findings, from a study at Ohio University, was that undergraduates, grad students, faculty, and staff all have their own distinct patterns of technology usage, and "only librarians use Twitter." At which point all of the Twitter users in the audience (and there were lots of us) posted Twitter updates to that effect. For me, the most useful part of the session was the reminder that each institution's patron base is a little different, and it's important to know something about them rather than relying on generalities. Also, from the other paper in the session, that in some cases students will use Web 2.0 features on library pages only when required to. Not entirely surprising, but worth remembering.

And then there was the storytelling component of the program, in the form of the two keynotes by Sherman Alexie and Ira Glass. Ira Glass (who sat at a table with his CD players and mixing console, blending music into and out of his talk as he went along) talked about the story structure they use on This American Life: the narrative anecdote, with one thing leading to another and to another, with some suspense and an ending that satisfies the suspense, and a moment to consider the larger thought embedded in the anecdote. (You can see him talk about it on YouTube.)

Sherman Alexie spun out anecdotes of his own, but in a less linear format, with digressions sprouting here and there and looping back around to the main story; one of them involved his grandfather's World War II service, catching the flu on a plane to Chicago, X-rated totem poles, and the Oprah Winfrey show. Both of them, but especially Ira Glass, made me wish I were teaching composition again so I could assign experimental anecdote/narrative formats and see what happened. Ira Glass's talk also made me wonder if I could get away with anecdote-reflection-anecdote-reflection the next time I have to give a talk. It would beat PowerPoint, at the very least.

And then it was off to a really good lunch, and a last stroll around downtown Seattle, and then home. I'm looking forward to ACRL in Philly in 2011 already.

ACRL wrap-up, part 1

The thing about a big conference like ACRL is that there are enough different themes going on that everyone can pick out their own program and find their own connections between different events. For me, the big themes were the education of librarians and the use (or not) of social web technologies, plus a strong information-literacy component to the poster sessions I went to. More on the Web 2.0 and information literacy threads in another post or two; first, the question of what kind of education librarians should have.

One of my official reasons for going to ACRL was to participate in a roundtable on "PhDs in Academic Libraries: The Role of the Scholar-Librarian," with several of my fellow current and former CLIR fellows. (Hi there, those of you reading this!) I think we were all thinking that at 8:00 on a a Saturday morning, we'd mostly be talking to each other as our fellow conferees slept in or went to other sessions. But we were very pleased to have 14 people show up, in various stages of PhD consideration and completion. We ranged all over the topic, discussing what an academic librarian might gain from the PhD (in-depth research experience was one answer that a bunch of people agreed on) and what the liabilities might be (cost, time, and the likelihood of taking a pay cut if one moved from library administration—one common career track for PhD-holders—to teaching in an LIS program). I did warn one person who was considering a PhD in English against getting sucked into the prevailing "tenure-track job at an R1 is the One True Career Path" mentality of English departments, but it was lovely to hang out with a whole bunch of people who approached the PhD from another point of view entirely. It was a really good, lively conversation, and we might get to reprise it on the web at some point.

In a similar vein, I went to a debate with the provocative title "Resolved: The Master's Degree In Library Science Is Not Relevant to the Future of the Academic Library," with Arnold Hirshon of NELINET taking the "pro" side and Liz Bishoff of BCR taking the "con" position. She argued that with widespread digitization of library resources, training of new librarians is more important than ever; he argued that LIS programs aren't teaching the right skills, and aren't selecting candidates with the right combination of ambiguity tolerance, learning agility, and talent for improvisation. There were lots of great questions from the audience, and something of a consensus at the end that LIS programs need an overhaul, starting with much closer connections with what people are actually doing in the field of librarianship.

James Neal of Columbia University moderated the debate, and also appeared on a panel called "Subject Librarian 2.0" (blogged in a lot more detail here), at which the major themes were the need for a lot more collaboration with faculty, a more active role in instruction, and "embedding" in various parts of the curriculum. Kara Whatley of New York University coined a phrase I liked: "librarians as middleware." (She also said "We don't have to be it all or do it all, we just have to build partnerships"—good to keep in mind, especially since the expanded role of the subject librarian sounded, in some of the presentations, like a nonstop commitment.)

More on ACRL tomorrow, and at some point I must post about the utter awesomeness of Ira Glass, who was our closing keynote speaker and who actually made me wish I were still teaching composition (this is no easy feat) so that I could encourage my students to experiment with his method of storytelling.

Conferences and memory supplements

I spent the second half of last week at the 2009 ACRL conference in Seattle, having a generally great time, going to a lot of panels and poster sessions (of which more blogging to follow), helping to facilitate what proved to be a very popular roundtable on Ph.Ds in libraries, visiting the Seattle Public Library in its strangely appealing Rem Koolhaas building, eating excellent meals at, among other places, Cafe Campagne and Place Pigalle, and fitting in some tourism time (cheers to Jane Dark, who steered me toward the Underground Tour and the Smith Tower, not to mention some lovely Italian sandwiches and gelato).

I ended up with a lot of notes and impressions to review, in a variety of media. I took notes in a notebook, as is my wont, but I also posted a bunch of updates using the conference Twitter hashtag. I subscribed to a search for that hashtag, so several hundred tweets are sitting in my Bloglines reader waiting to be scanned. I wrote down a bunch of people's Twitter handles (hi @shinylib, @ijastram, @srharris19, @shawncalhoun, @uinen, and everyone else who was at the meetup!) and a bunch of recommended readings. ACRL itself is posting a lot of the conference materials on their website. And as I wandered around the poster hall, I saw lots of fellow attendees taking pictures of the posters they wanted to remember, which struck me as a great idea, so I did likewise.

There's also an ACRL 2009 Flickr tag that everyone's been encouraged to use for their conference pictures, which I'm planning to do, as soon as...well, there's a slight problem. On Saturday night, while stupidly trying to take a picture while getting my gloves off, I dropped my camera, damaging the lens and making the camera refuse to start up. So there go a lot of the things I was going to say about the poster sessions, plus some neat shots I got inside the Central Library, plus a shot of a monkfish in the fish market that I just had to preserve for posterity. I'm hoping it's fixable, but until it's fixed, some of my conference impressions are unshareable. Alas.

It's ironic, because my dissertation was about the ways people supplemented their memories before the digital age, and the anxieties about permanence that sometimes went with that—and here's a proof of the fragility of memory supplements. At least I didn't drop my notebook into Elliott Bay, or lose my iPod (though I very nearly lost my phone).

I also brought home some commemorative smoked salmon and See's chocolates, which will probably be gone very soon, and a lovely souvenir head cold, which I hope will also be gone soon. But apart from the rhinovirus and the camera breakage, it was a fantastic trip.

On library anxiety and not knowing enough about wine

Yesterday I finally went to a wine tasting at Thames River Wine and Spirits, which hosts these evenings every week. It was a nice event, and I love their cavernous underground cellar space, which looks like a stage set for a prison scene in some Verdi opera or another, only with wine racks lining the walls. All the same, I could feel my Wine Store Anxiety ratcheting up: the feeling that I really should know a lot more about wine that I do, the dread of revealing my wine ignorance to other people, the fear of being laughed at by more knowledgeable oenophiles, the sheer baffling information overload of all those bottles and regions and names and types of grape. (Plus I didn't know anyone there, which, for me, creates anxiety of a different kind. Maybe I'll find someone to take with me next time.)

It's ridiculous, because I know there are plenty of people out there who are happy to help, but Wine Store Anxiety still plagues me every single time I try to pick out a bottle of wine. I always feel like I should be able to teach myself about it on my own, but I never know where to start, and the prospect of asking for help makes me want to run and hide. Most of what I do know about wine I've learned from knowledgeable friends who were willing to give me pointers; I think if I had more conversations like that, or maybe a little semi-formal instruction,* I'd probably feel less intimidated by wine stores.

It occurred to me that this is probably how students with "library anxiety" feel when they walk into a library: overwhelmed, ashamed of their ignorance, afraid to ask for help, and in over their heads. It's not a perfect analogy, of course, but I suspect that many of the same approaches might help both types of anxiety: friendly outreach, a bit of class time, the chance to work with a peer and feel a little less alone, small manageable assignments (only one database at a time; only red wines from northern Italy) rather than trying to learn everything at once.

None of these ideas are earth-shattering. But it's probably good for someone in my job, with years of library-related education, to know how it feels to be a panicky newbie.

* I always meant to take a course at the Wine School of Philadelphia back when I lived a couple of blocks from it, and I never had time. Ah well. Someday.

Current awareness needs to get more...current.

Now that faculty outreach and collection development for English and American literature are officially part of my job description, I've been making an effort to stay more up-to-date with the field. I'm scanning a much bigger field than I used to when I was a grad student in English, though, and I have fewer hours in the day to scan it in. Gone are the days when I could spend hours combing through the MLA Bibliography to find everything ever written in my sub-sub-specialty. Instead, I'm using as many shorcuts as possible. I've got RSS feeds to notify me when new journal issues come out, and when new books in relevant subject areas are published. I read blogs. I skim tables of contents and keep a running file of topics that scholars are currently working on. The start of a new semester reminds me to look over the course list for the English department and see if there are areas where I need to think about developing the collection. And so on.

I've also realized that I've come to expect certain tools to be available as part of my current awareness repertoire, and to work well. It strikes me as odd when journals don't have RSS feeds for new issues. I roll my eyes at databases that only offer email alerts, because come on, it's the 21st century—who needs more email when there are other tools that work better? I'm surprised at any online scholarly resource that expects me to bookmark it and check back frequently for updates. It's not like the technology to simplify the current awareness process is new, after all. Or obscure. Or hard to implement.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided it would be useful to have the University of Pennsylvania Calls for Papers mailing list on my radar again, after being unsubscribed for at least the last four years. But it's no longer even a mailing list; it's now a web-only archive. Without anything resembling an RSS feed. I tried to kluge together a homemade RSS feed, using first Page2RSS and then Feedity, but with no luck. The CFP announcements are divided up among separate pages for different fields, so one would have to set up individual feeds for each page (and get lots of redundant results, because they cross-post a lot of the multidisciplinary calls for papers). I futzed around with Yahoo! Pipes for a while, trying to combine multiple feeds and de-duplicate the repeated announcements. But something about the way the CFP pages are set up confuses both Page2RSS and Feedity such that they can't tell which announcements are new. At which point I gave up because it was becoming too much of a time-sink even for me.

So, basically, there's no way to monitor the Calls for Papers archive except by revisiting the site, page by page, whenever I manage to remember to do so. As the kids today say: EPIC FAIL.

Not long after I abandoned Project Roll My Own CFP Feed, I learned from a friend on Twitter that there won't be any internet access at all at the upcoming MLA convention. Which, in this day and age, is even more of an epic fail. I'm thinking, not at all for the first time, that the humanities badly need an influx of hackers, programmers, and tinkerers.*

* The nice thing about my current career path is that I can say this kind of thing and people nod in agreement and suggest nifty solutions I hadn't heard of before, instead of looking at me askance like they're wondering why I care so much about this newfangled interweb contraption.

Ph.D.s in libraries: Yet once more

Catching up on several weeks' worth of articles in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, I spotted Todd Gilman's ominously titled "Subject Experts Need Not Apply," which reports that librarians with subject Ph.D.s aren't getting jobs at the rate one would expect. Writes Gilman:

Many recent job postings for humanities librarians, reference librarians, or those specializing in research education do not list subject expertise as a requirement. In place of subject expertise, those job postings require relevant library experience (variously defined) and, more often than not, technology skills, neither of which, to my mind, makes up for a lack of advanced education in a particular discipline.

Having just come out of a job search, I've also noticed that there aren't a whole lot of library jobs that specifically require graduate study in a subject field. I applied for a range of jobs, some of which didn't require a Ph.D. or master's in any field outside library science, some of which did. Lots of the postings I responded to were in the format Gilman describes.

I'm not sure I'm as worried about it as Gilman is, though. Maybe it's the number of nibbles I got from places that were definitely interested in my subject knowledge (although there were several jobs I applied for that did call for a Ph.D., but all I got was a skinny envelope; I suppose I'll never know why). My Ph.D. turned out to be an asset for the job I'll be starting at the end of the month; even though the initial job description didn't specify English literature expertise, it turned out to have a subject specialist component. I suspect, also, that people with both a Ph.D. and an MLS aren't terribly thick on the ground, and that search committees don't always put "advanced graduate study in X field" into job descriptions because they want to make sure they get more than a handful of candidates to choose from.

On the one hand, I do agree with my fellow CLIR fellow Daphnée Rentfrow (whose essay is quoted in Gilman's article) that someone needs to bridge the librarian/faculty gap, and that people with expertise in both worlds are in an excellent position to do just that; it's one of the things I most want to do. But part of me wants to qualify Gilman's point. The Ph.D. put me in a splendid position to talk to faculty, understand their research processes, and anticipate what they might need from libraries. But it also encouraged me to zero in on a smaller and smaller area of specialization, and to think about other areas of specialization as outside the scope of my knowledge. (I still have all sorts of lacunae in my awareness of literature from periods and regions I didn't specialize in. I can tell you a lot about early modern English poetry, but don't quiz me in any great detail on the 19th-century novel.)

By contrast, the subject specialist librarian's knowledge of a field is necessarily broad and wide-ranging. I'm not saying that the Ph.D. precludes any kind of generalist approach to a field, but it does tend to steer people away from thinking that way, and certain habits of thought can be hard to break.

In the end, I think it's the Ph.D. in the humanities (and also the way we train academic librarians who plan to be subject specialists) that really needs to change. But that's something I've already said many times before.

Ghosts in the stacks?

Personally, I think the alleged ghost in the New Paltz library is a bug crawling over the security camera lens. But the video's still kind of eerie to watch. (Paging agents Mulder and Scully!)

My conference paper, let me show you it.

Since several of you who read this have asked about it, I wanted to point out that the Questioning Authority conference proceedings are now online, and you can get to my conference talk from the page with the rest of the papers from my panel. The slides should go up too, at some point. If not, I'm going to be putting the whole thing in my online portfolio anyway, and will supply the link when I have time. (Translation: probably not this week or next.)

Job search status update: In-person interview #1 was yesterday, in-person interview #2 is on Tuesday, and phone interview #3 is coming up a couple of days after that. I'm hoping I'm not a complete zombie by the time the end of next week rolls around!