higher ed

Why the library should affect students' choice of university

jdupuis — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 15:27:10 +0000

Why the library should affect students' choice of university

When we think of outreach and recruitment, we don't usually think of using the library as a tool to attract students to our institutions. Here at York I do occasionally take part in Faculty of Science & Engineering outreach activities -- mostly when the library is included in high school science class tours of the institution.

Rather than do something really boring like a "here's the reference desk" tour, I like to take smaller groups down into our teaching lab and do (hopefully) fun and amusing interactive sessions on the current state of the information universe. You can get an idea of what I cover from one of the blog pages I created.

But maybe, just maybe, when we design our spaces, when we design our web presences, when we think about outreach and marketing, we should think about leveraging what we do well and turning it into something that can benefit our whole institution.

What got me thinking about this was an article that was bouncing around Twitter, etc., a little while ago, 4 Reasons Why the Library Should Affect Your College Choice.

If we can affect whether or not students choose our institutions, shouldn't we be aware of what we can do and strive to maximize the effect we can have on recruitment?

Here's the four things that the article suggest people should look for in a library, with a bit of the text from the article:

What is the staff like? Chat with a reference desk staffer or two. How helpful are they? What kinds of information can they provide? Do they seem like they are prepared and willing to help students? These are important questions.
How much does the library system and its librarians interact and work with faculty? Find out what, if any, types of collaboration professors have with the libraries. Fisher says professors and librarians at many schools work together to create course content or inform each other's work and research. If you can get a sense of the relationship and bond between these two major parts of campus life, you can get a nice picture of how smoothly you can research class topics and projects.
What's the atmosphere like? Walk into the library and go about your normal business. Some campuses have multiple libraries--one of which is likely to be more of a social environment than the other quieter, more serious locales.
Check the library system website and digital resources. This is a big one. It's a new digital age in information services, and academic libraries are on the cutting edge.

Why is this a good idea for us? First of all, the four points basically cover what the library is all about for undergrads -- space, reference, information literacy, online collections. It's a great way to make the case that our core competencies as libraries and librarians are part of what makes our institutions great.

Also, ultimately in higher ed funding is about butts in seats and the more butts in seats, the more money is circulating in the system that can get allocated. And, if the library is recognized as an important part of recruitment that certainly helps us make a case for funding. And longer term, happily recruited students become happily donating alumni.

We need to make the case that part of our job is to make our institution look good -- to help attract the best students.

It's worth thinking about.

Do you have any stories about your library being part of recruitment efforts?

(A slightly different version of this post will be part of the My Job in 10 Years outreach chapter)

jdupuis Thu, 07/15/2010 - 11:27

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The inherent insularity of library culture?

jdupuis — Wed, 12 May 2010 14:45:52 +0000

The inherent insularity of library culture?

Or is that the inherent insularity of academic culture in general?

Joshua Kim has some great observations (in context of a review of This Book is Overdue) (Amazon) about the great chasm of misunderstanding between the culture of the academic library and the broader academic culture.

As academia shifts and changes, as budgets squeeze, as millenials millenialize, it's a constant struggle to make the case for the library's role in academic life. It's hard to know both who our best champion's are and who our most determined opponents are. Sitting in the library talking to ourselves is probably not the best way to accomplish to figure that out.

I like Kim's straightforward, honest approach to figuring out what the heck we're all about. And I think it's worthwhile to unpack some of what he says.

The more time I spend thinking about the library world the more I realize how little I know and understand. I'm not sure if my lack of understanding is due to my own limitations of perspective (coming from a teaching and technology background), or due to some inherent insularity of library culture.

Ah, the $64,000 dollar question. It is most definitely our job to make the case for our role in academic life, to make the case for what we do for students, what we do for faculty and what we do for staff.

To the extent that the people we serve and work with don't understand what it is we do, it's completely our failure.

Is library culture inherently insular? To a large degree, yes. At the same time, I think all the various silos that make up the whole of academic culture are also to varying degrees insular. It's called the Ivory Tower, not the Ivory Commons, for a reason. It's not a coincidence that towers are silo-shaped.

So, yes, we are insular and it's totally our responsibility to make sure there's a broad understanding of our role across campus. Easier said that done, of course, but that's another post.

At the same time, universities would be better places if we all made an effort to understand what our colleagues are trying to accomplish. This is especially true of the various support units who I think often work at cross purposes. It's what I'm trying to get at with my embryonic Science Foo proposal.

A couple of recent articles that hopefully will help explain libraries to a broader campus community: The Place to Go: Libraries reinvent themselves to serve digital-age students and Gutenberg 2.0
Harvard's libraries deal with disruptive change.

The fact that librarians are so engaged in rethinking their profession and institutions probably would not come as a surprise to any librarian, but to an outsider this is an eye-opening notion. You will have to tell me if this observations means that librarians should be spending more time talking and engaging to non-librarians about their ideas and plans for change and re-invention, or if non-librarians need to spend more time hanging out with our colleagues (at library conferences, library blogs etc.).

As I mentioned above, it is 100% libraries' job to make our case to other parts of the campus, not the job of other units to figure us out. If we're rethinking what we're all about (and we are), it's up to us to engage others in that exercise. On the other hand, there's nothing more boring that other people's navel gazing, so non-librarians can be excused for not being that interested in the gory details of our introspections.

That being said, it is completely our responsibility to get the hell out of our libraries and talk about what we are becoming within our campus context, to engage our communities in our reinvention so we can serve them better. It is also completely our responsibility to go to non-library conferences and talk about what we do and what we're becoming.

Of course, I have no objections to people outside the library world inviting their local librarian out for a coffee and sharing some ideas about the future. So all you faculty, faculty support, instructional technology and campus IT people out there, you can also feel free to share with us where you want to go too.

Given all that however, there are some complicating factors.

Size Matters. Libraries are usually quite small compared to other units in terms of professional staff. For example, we're 40ish librarians on a campus of 1200+ faculty members and 50K students. The branch library I work in has about 300 seats for a student body of about 6k. It's a challenge getting noticed.
Silos are us. As I said above, academia is pretty insular as a whole. It can be a challenge to get through to busy people who are deeply involved in the mission of their corner of the institution, whether it's an academic department or campus IT.
Competition rather than collaboration. Many of the different silos are set up to sometimes provide competing similar services. The ones that affect libraries the most are for services such as student space or for access to technology. To the degree that some of these services are truly zero sum games (or even just perceived as such), the incentive for these different units to understand each other and collaborate rather than compete and cut each other down can be hard to get across.

At the end of the day, I'm not as interested in my own potentially insular responses to the question as I am to exploring both the library's and the broader academic institutional culture.

So, my questions for all of you out there:

Is academic library culture inherently insular?
Is it more insular that other parts of the academy, be they faculty or other support units? Why?
How should librarians fix that? Are there specific things that we can do?
For you non-librarians out there, any ideas about insularity in academia in general or about how different units can reach out to each other and work on common concerns?

(My Job in 10 Years: part of the chapter on campus outreach)

jdupuis Wed, 05/12/2010 - 10:45

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My Job in 10 Years Book

Don't academic libraries go through strategic planning processes in which they get specific and targeted feedback from their customers? They should!

Don't the liaison librarians go to staff meetings and symposia in their departments? Join department listservs? Consult the departments every year with the inevitable cuts?

How could they possibly be insular and do their jobs? Who are they serving?

BTW - pinging on behalf of DrugMonkey who weighed in on his blog.

One problem we have had here at Small University Academic Library is in simply getting the faculty to talk to us.

We offer to come to Departmental Meetings, we invite them to discussions, we send them lists of journals that might be canceled, we send them lists of books we are planning to withdraw, we send them lists of books we are thinking of getting, we offer to prepare pathfinders for their classes, and so on - all to no or little response. And many of them persist in sending their students to look for materials we do not have, despite our repeated communications.

It is as if many faculty think that we are simply magical genies whose job is to fulfill their wishes by reading their minds. Perhaps we should try showing up at their Departmental meetings without an invitation.....

Thanks, Christina. Yeah, those are all things that libraries should be doing to reach out to other campus groups. And I imagine that most places are doing at least some of them. I was tempted to include a list of the kinds of activities that libraries could engage in but thought it might be too distracting from the main point.

Also, I suspect we tend to do better connecting with academic units rather than academic support or administrative units. That's a problem too as they are often the units that either influence the budget or offer "competing" services.

Prof. P, it not just SUALs that have those problems. It's all of us. I do liaison for several departments and some of them are great about including me in stuff. Others, I have trouble getting people to respond to my emails.

John - I think this is a great posting and you've raised some interesting points. For what it's worth, here are my two cents:

1) Stop going to library conferences and start going to disciplinary conferences, IT conferences (like EDUCAUSE) and educational conferences. We spend way too much time talking to each other and not enough time talking to our constituencies. Get to know what your campus is interested in, not just what your library wants to do or thinks it should be doing. If they start seeing you at their conferences they might start thinking about you as a partner.

2) Be willing to do something outside of your normal range. Ask the faculty "how can i help" but be prepared to do something that may not be your typical librarian duty. We're asking ourselves "what is the future of our profession" but I find that too often I hear "that's not librarianship". If we limit ourselves to that which is normally defined as librarianship we may be marginalizing ourselves. Think broadly.

3) If someone asks you to participate in something the response should be "yes, i'd like to participate, thank you". Dont over analyze it.

4) Don't fret if a faculty member doesn't return your calls. Find one who will and devote your time and energy to building that relationship. Eventually word will get out and others will seek you out as well.

5) Space is a valuable asset. Libraries have lots of space. Our physical collections will be declining. Offer space to partners where it makes sense. Invite your faculty development center into your library --- an honors program---a writing centre----etc. It's better to make the offer than to have space taken away, which will happen as others realize how little some of our spaces are used.

6) Partner with other non-academic units (marketing, development, etc). In particular, partner with your research services office. Tell them what you can do and they will link you to faculty. Again, word will get out.

I like your comment about knowing our chief supporters and our chief opponents. I think sometimes we are our chief opponents. As a profession we can be conservative and constrained by tradition. We need to get beyond that. We need to be creative and take risks. The future of our profession depends on it.

I think the whole issue stems from the fact that Librarians and Library services are taken for granted! For example take Power supply or Water supply.. We are so accostomed to regular supply that we don't EVER acknowledge the folks who work behind the screens! Aah.. If there is an interruption, we all join the chorus and yell at them..

After my Ph.D in Library Science I moved on to the technology side of board..This is why ( I think) our profession always thinks and re-thinks on our role (unlike other professionals)

i) Not sure how many of us agree - but in general our professinals OPPOSE change!

ii) Do not really know how to market/publicize our services. Organizations have something called "Technical Support", where in, staff are always ready to support via Phone/email to customers' calls/mails. Yes - we do some kind of Reference Service. How many of us are always on top of the technological advances and answers queries in a flash?

iii) Rather than waiting (?) for the faculty to come to us, why not we make it ESSENTIAL for them to seek our attention. Attractive & sensible bits of regular research such as the most cited articles in each subject, Most popular research areas etc etc (I think we should debate on these techniques) should adorn the librarian's corner. May be we can have some teasers like "Coming soooon" stuff..

To do all this, I suppose we should view publicity as a major part much like our other conventional house-keeping operations..

Blogs as a Knowledge Management Tool in the Classroom

jdupuis — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:23:34 +0000

Blogs as a Knowledge Management Tool in the Classroom

Nice article by Delaney J. Kirk and Timothy L. Johnson on Blogs As A Knowledge Management Tool In The Classroom (via).

Based on their experiences in a combined 22 business courses over the past three years, the authors believe that weblogs (blogs) can be used as an effective pedagogical tool to increase efficiency by the professor, enhance participation and engagement in the course by the students, and create a learning community both within and outside the classroom. In this paper they discuss their decision to use blogs as an integral part of their course design to contribute to both explicit and tacit knowledge. In addition, suggestions and cautions for using this new technology are presented.

The article definitely repays a close reading. I'll hit a few of the high points here.

Reasons to use a class blog:

"using a class blog allowed us to be more effective and efficient in communicating with our students"
"We also believed it important for all of our students to participate in class discussions but, despite our best efforts, on many days only a small percentage of the students ever had anything to say."
"And finally, and most importantly, we wanted to see our students take greater ownership of their own learning, not only for our classes but in their future lives."

The three main types of blogs they highlight were instructor focused, student focused and community focused:

Instructor-focused blogs. "The simplest way to use a blog is as a one-stop source where the professor posts syllabi, announcements, assignments, and links to articles and websites for the students to read. Faculty retain ownership of the site and students are expected to access the blog on a regular basis to obtain class information."
Learner-focused blogs. "In this approach, the professor would expect the students to be more active participants in the blog. Learning can occur peer-to-peer in addition to teacher-to-student."
Community-focused blogs. "A third approach to using blogs is to involve participants from outside the class itself. Students could be required to find, read, and evaluate blogs from "experts" outside class on assigned topics and then to share this information with their classmates."

The section on nettiquette for students is very good:

Another consideration is respect and privacy for others. In one of our classes, students were assigned a consulting project with local small businesses and not-for-profits. If a student writes disparaging comments on his or her blog, it can have an adverse impact on that organization. In addition, it makes it difficult for the professor to convince other businesses to be involved with projects for future classes. This instructor now advises students to speak of these companies (and their management) in general terms which would not specifically identify them.

Two of the overriding themes that students need to understand when expressing themselves on blogs (or other social media) are common sense and common courtesy. One of our students wrote about a variety of psychological disorders and personal problems which she was experiencing. While this information put into context some of her other classroom performance issues, it was not relevant to the assignment and was certainly more information than she needed to provide.

Some of the things they learned:

Blogging invites more students into the conversation
Blogging extends the conversation
Classroom blogging provides a "safe" mechanism for introducing students to social media
Blogging makes the students into subject matter experts
Blogging helps students take ownership of their own learning

Some selected advantages:

Allows "quiet" students a forum for expressing themselves
Promotes learning community between and among students and gives them a feeling of ownership
Students may put more effort toward their writing knowing it will be read by their peers as well as the professor

And selected disadvantages:

Can create more work for the instructor (developing content, reading student blogs and comments)
Students may be uncomfortable sharing information through this medium
Student writing might be more casual and sloppy compared to turning in hard copies

jdupuis Wed, 03/24/2010 - 06:23

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They more want a CMS (Content Management System) than a blog. You can tightly control who sees a CMS with granular security. Not so on a blog.

Sure, and systems such as Moodle are also pretty popular. But blogs really are just mini-CMSs, especially some of the thinks you can do with Wordpress.

I find blogs much easier to manage and control than a CMS, perhaps because I have both my class blogs and my professional blogs hosted by Typepad. I can password protect each class blog separately to control access.

Thanks for sharing our research article with others!

I've never used LMS seriously, because I believe in the openness of blog. However, I'm planning to migrate to LMS next year... I'll compare the experience.

Higher Education: We are shovel ready!

gregladen — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:55:44 +0000

Higher Education: We are shovel ready!

And I'm not talking about new building projects such as the Bell Museum, though such projects certainly are shovel ready as well.

I'm speaking about the simple fact that funding higher education, mainly by funding students, is one of the best possible ways to stimulate the economy.

The American workforce is under educated and under trained. This is almost always true to some extent, but in times when the centers of gravity in industry and business are shifting, it becomes even more true. The simple fact that the nature of the job market has changed dramatically over the last 20 years demands that we attend to this knowledge and training deficit. A couple of decades ago, we were a society in which most individuals in the workforce trained-up and learned-up for a career, engaged in the career, moved along, or up, in that career, and retired. Now, people often change careers a number of times, for good reasons and not because of any lack on their part. The old fogeys who run things include a lot of pre-transition lifers who do not viscerally understand this new dynamic. But these out-going power brokers are ... well, outgoing. Or they are beginning to understand that the new normative career path is a zig zag for almost everyone.

Even without this change the American workforce is poorly educated compared to the European workforce. We are poorly educated compared to the Cuban workforce. Let's not even talk about Canada and Japan.

So we need more education, and President Obama recognizes this, and during his Big Speech before the Joint Session of Congress said so. He told us that four years of high school is not sufficient for a patriotic American. We need to add to this a minimum of one year of college.

(I love the new patriotism!)

If I was the owner of a road construction company, and stimulus packages were being run through the legislative process in Washington, and the President called a Joint Session of Congress and announced that we would be adding one lane to every road in the nation .... (think about that for a second) ... I'd be doing certain things.

I would not be cutting staff. Which is what some universities and colleges are doing. I would not be freezing hires. I would not be raising the cost of services at my business. I would not be panicking. All these are things we are seeing in higher education in one form or another, and it does not make a lot of sense.

Granted, if you live in a state with a history of Republican control, you have no way of knowing if the stimulus money distributed through the states will get to higher ed, because Republicans have long recognized that there is a correlation between education level and liberalism, and thus, they are afraid of education. Granted, if you are a private university that runs on endowments, then you are hopelessly lost in the quagmire that is the free market (during doldrums ... to stir my aqueous metaphors). But don't worry, your endowments will be kicking ass in a few year's and you'll own the world again.

But if you are a public university in an "Education State" with a populous supportive of education and a legislature that is not too dumbed down, it is time to paint the waiting room, start finding some extra classroom space, and run a sale on your services.

And most important, crank up the lobbyists and the grassroots power base that you presumably have been cultivating over the last twenty years or so in preparation for this sort of revolutionary eventuality.

(You have been working on that power base thing, right?)

There is some increase available in Pell grants. There is some retraining money that can go for tuition (this has been available for some time). But you will need to go to Washington and get more, because it is worth it. There are states and regions where education is such a big industry that stimultion in this sector alone can alleviate unemployment and enhance the local economy measurably.

And every new customer you get is equal to one or more new customers in every subsequent generation. Parents with college degrees want their children to have college degrees. The best long term investment a University or College can make is in a first-generation scholar. But only if it is done well.

We are higher education and we are shovel ready.

gregladen Thu, 03/19/2009 - 05:55

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