10A: Class Discussion

Our discussion in the prior class covered a lot of territory, spanning themes like collection development ethics, the library as a civic/democratic space, inclusion and sanctuary for immigrants, free speech versus curation of materials, and whether libraries can ever fully exist outside of the political (our consensus seemed to be, no, the library is inherently politicized and the librarian is a political actor). There's a lot of ways to get at these threads, but I thought I would pick out two ideas I took away from our conversation:

• The question of "what materials are appropriate for kids?" is incredibly thorny. Some folks were comfortable applying the free speech/don't limit materials at all approach to youth collections, while others wanted to introduce some guidance via grouping and shelving of materials, and yet others believed in a kind of civic and developmental responsibility to ensure youth weren't encountering materials that others had agreed were toxic, full of misinformation, espousing the ideology of hate groups, etc. These approaches and issues challenge the idea that a commitment to freedom of speech is in itself enough - as we discussed, that may also be a specifically American ethic that other countries are much more comfortable contesting in practice. I guess the theme I take away from this particular thorniness is that, yes, we do have to be mindful of the choices we make, which may very well be inescapably imperfect, and try to make sense of them in the context of other values that guide us.

• We can think of public libraries as neutral spaces, or democratic spaces, or communal spaces, or healing/dialogue-facilitating spaces. While there is significant overlap between each of these approaches, they also suggest very different functions that public libraries might play within communities -- is the library the place you go for refuge? Is it a place where you should expect to feel safe regardless of your identity, and/or a space where librarians will specifically facilitate a safe space that is intolerant of hate towards you? Where does the ethical foundation of libraries spring from? I personally believe in libraries as spaces of direct democracy and one of the most beautiful expressions of who we are as a country. As Maya Angelou said:



"I always felt, if I can get to a library, I'll be OK."



I don't think there's an easy way to distill our conversation down into answers and conclusions and I'm comfortable with that. One thing I really like about this class is that it makes me more aware of my own ideas - which I sometimes experience more as a conviction or value than as a rational argument, for better or worse - while also helping me understand how that idea coexists with many others, and how we all belong to a community of thinkers on things like this. It's really neat and humbling thing to experience. :)

9B: Reactions to the Reading

These chapters definitely had me thinking about my experience at a small academic library in the Pacific Northwest. As a tech floater person who also helped with some reference, I interacted with assessment by writing down tally marks for different types of questions at the desk, and also more substantially by helping to redesign the web interface for our QuestionPoint portal.

Though I helped collect data or implement features, I ultimately was only at the very far end of this process, and didn't really fully understand what process the librarians were using to understand and improve assessment. Despite this, I remember how motivated and process-driven my librarian coworkers seemed to be about really understanding and addressing user needs. They seemed to have really internalized service and the goals of reference, and were trying their best to apply it to the complex tasks of supporting mostly Internet/distance-based learned in mostly-online classes, with a much smaller subset of students attending in person classes on campus.

The readings  made me wonder: how do academic librarians in particular advocate for learners and students within institutions that may, in other ways, fail or underserve students? Many times the librarians were more motivated than the instructors or the administrators especially around core competencies of information literacy. Our university had an attitude of pushing off responsibilities for learning and supporting skill development to librarians with an expectation librarians would succeed by pursuing these goals in a self-directed way. But in reality, the librarians often lacked the necesary support to make instruction successful. It seems like instruction as a goal for academic librarians in particular can't exist as a vacuum, but must be integrated into broader academic goals and experiences to be effective.

9A: Reflections on Music Reference (Due to Missed Class)

As I wasn't in class in our last session, I instead did a little research on music reference in libraries. One of the first ways I experienced the pleasure of geeking out about something via extensive Internet research was getting really into music as a high schooler. I loved the process of learning to contextualize a musician in a particular overlap of genres and historical moment, and how as I learned more about labels and important concert venues I'd find new ways to understand and connect with the music I loved.

And yet, I don't really know how librarians relate to music, in terms of items in collections or working with special music libraries. How do core reference skills like the reference interview and problem-solving with the customer play out when working with a very specific type of resources? And what are the particular challenges and concerns in special music collections?

Christensen, Du Mont, and Green (2001) describe how music libraries tend to elicit requests that require a great degree of domain knowledge, often to find a very specific item. In this setting, librarians and paraprofessionals appear to do quite well, outperforming other academic library departments on the whole. However, this environment is challenging for student workers -- and whether they were music majors or not did not affect the outcome. I wonder whether this sense of specialized knowledge and an intimidating environment for student workers might reinforce the music library as being the domain of highly educated, "elite" music librarians. I wonder, then, if there is an implicit devaluation of other forms of music, such as punk or rap, and the bodies of knowledge required for those types of music. Also, how might a student musician have a different experience at a music library than a student writing a paper about opera?

Kirstin Dougan's 2012 paper focuses on music student information seeking behavior, and makes the interesting claim that performers and music editors have more in common in their search behavior than musicologists and other researchers investigating music. Across these different needs and search strategies, Dougan notes a general lack of information literacy and search skills when it comes to music collections. Given the separate disciplinary silos between the players/educators and researchers -- pragmatic research for playing and education versus more free-form investigation for meaning and context -- perhaps more education about music tools would be a way to expose all users to more dynamic skills and search experiences. Lai and Chan's (2009) study suggests that libraries could respond to these disparate needs by more carefully crafting their collections and developing targeted reference services for each audience - for example, helping conductors find scores more easily. I like the idea of users driving new types of reference interventions a lot - and for me this also sparks other opportunities for exposing users to types of resources they may have never even considered before.

To what degree should libraries attempt to create serendipity? When should librarians serve the conductor by providing prompt, exactly-as-requested scores and targeted resources, and when might they have the opportunity to introduce them to musicology research that would inspire an entirely new direction in their work? This may be overstating the role of libraries in explicitly guiding discovery - but there seems to be an opportunity lurking here for some types of programming or services. Maybe something like "musicology for guitarists" -- I'd go to that workshop! :)


Sources:


Christensen, Beth, Du Mont, Mary and Green, Alan. (2001) Taking Note: Assessing the Performance of Reference Service in Academic Music Libraries, A Progress Report. Notes: 58(1), pp. 39-64. https://doi.org/10.1353/not.2001/0127

Lai, Katie and Chan, Kylie. (2009). Do You Know Your Music Users' Needs? A Library User Survey that Helps Enhance a User-Centered Music Collection. Academic Librarianship, 36(1), pp. 63–69.

Dougan, Kirstin. (2012). Information seeking behaviors of music students. Reference Services Review, 40(4), pp. 558 - 573. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00907321211277369

8B: Reflections on Readings (Diverse Populations)

Both "Reference Services for Diverse Populations" and the ALA Code of Ethics provide a lot of context for the different ways we've engaged with diversity and libraries over the semester so far.

I appreciate how Cooke clarifies that equitable service delivery requires an attention to the particular needs and experiences of underserved populations and not simply a "be inclusive across the board" approach. Indeed I think this really succinctly describes the difference between equity and equality -- which is also beautifully demonstrated in this meme:

Source: OutFront Minnesota via Everyday Feminism. Full article here

Cooke then goes on to illustrate what attentive inclusion means for particular groups of patrons. Reading this definitely led me to reflect on working with recent immigrant communities in Saint Paul. I remember working with a Hmong father who was working hard to get his daughter into our reading tutor program (which had an unfortunately huge waiting list). We eventually were able to add his daughter to the program, but in the chaos of the scheduling process I neglected to communicate things clearly and consistently to him, which made him extremely frustrated. I didn't initially realize he was so frustrated because he was showing me a degree of respect as somebody working in a library -- but when I asked my Hmong coworker to help translate our interactions, she later told me that he was masking his frustrations and that I should instead consistently confirm with a Hmong speaker. The whole experience reminded me that while I had perceived myself as both "doing the best I can and handling mistakes with good cheer!" and "I had solved the problem of placing his daughter, so we should be good!", it wasn't until I really involved other folks with more cultural and linguistic backgrounds that I could actually provide him and his family with service that matched his expectations. To be honest I was pretty embarrassed by how much I had missed, and how much I had coasted on belief that my own approach was enough, and I've tried to really learn this lesson and express it in practice ever since.

What would it look like for a wide variety of library services - including technology in library contexts - to regularly listen to its diverse communities and incorporate their perspectives in the heart of their work? How much the insights of user research and other HCI methodologies help in this sense, or perhaps other continuous evaluation/community based research approaches? 

8A: Reflections on Class (Virtual Reference, Lib Guides)

Blog Post 8A:

In our previous class session, we focused on a mix of frantic Gchat virtual reference interviewing, looking at transcripts of successful and not-so-successful exchanges, and presenting our libguides. A few moments and themes that jumped out at me:

- There's not always an easy consensus when Monday morning quarterbacking (ha this is my favorite sports metaphor..) virtual reference conversations. The class as a whole paid attention to pivotal moments in the not-so-successful virtual reference transcript and tried to identify critical shifts that happened -- and while we could intuit shifts in engagement or how an overly-professional attitude or overly-specific recommendation at one point may have lead to the souring of an interaction, it's hard to know for sure. The biggest takeaway from that exercise, for me, was that that rapport we build with patrons is a unique, specific, and complex relationship, and like any relationship it needs to be tended to appropriately and treated with an attitude of unconditional goodwill (to borrow Alyssa's framework of always approaching the interaction assuming the best).

- Our class seems to have really adopted a relationship and person-focused approach to reference, which is really nice to see. It was also helpful to hear from folks who work in virtual reference and hear about their experiences with training, supervisors, etc. -- as well as those strange experiences like prank/bizarre reference questions! But as somebody who likes to think about things theoretically, it's really really helpful to have a constant sense of how a certain approach plays out in practice, and how the ambiguities inherent in reference conversations play out when you are forced to make a decision to how to respond in the moment. It seems like a lot of pressure in some ways, and clearly many folks have found ways to be graceful in those situations and interact in a way true to their values, which I definitely appreciate.

- I enjoyed seeing all of the libguides, and kind of wish we had some time to actually explore the pages digitally ourselves. One thing that I noticed was that we didn't really discuss the accessibility and usability of our resources. I would have liked to have discussed how we expected our resources to be used in actual libraries, and also how the design of our sites (such as the contrast between text and background colors, the use of alt-text and standardized headings/formatting) affects how somebody with low vision or somebody using a screenreader would experience the resource. I hadn't really thought about the role of intermediaries in libguides, but after seeing a wide variety of hyper-useful resources (the citizenship resources stick out to me) I thought more about how a libguide could be targeted to a librarian who would facilitate learning and exploring these resources, perhaps in an open computer lab or out on the floor with patrons. I'm actually unsure, would this use fall outside of the realm of libguides and into something else, like a guided librarian tutorial? Regardless there was a lot of potential for learning and guiding patrons through a variety of resources, and it was neat to see all of the ways that manifested across projects.

Blogpost 7B: Readers Advisory, Goodreads, and Snapchat!

Thorton-Verma, Henrietta and Schwartz, Meredith. (2014). "The State of Readers’ Advisory". Library Journal. Retrieved on November 1, 2016 from http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2014/02/library-services/the-state-of-readers-advisory/

University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (2016). "Readers' Advisory Guide for Literature: Goodreads". Retrieved on November 1, 2016 from http://guides.library.illinois.edu/c.php?g=347638&p=2344499

Graves, Alanna. (2016). "http://www.slj.com/2016/05/teens-ya/how-to-use-snapchat-for-readers-advisory/" School Library Journal. Retrieved on November 1, 2016 from http://www.slj.com/2016/05/teens-ya/how-to-use-snapchat-for-readers-advisory/

I approached this search with two main questions in mind, which come from my vantage point as a tech-focused academic library person: (1) how have social networks like Goodreads influenced in-person readers advisory? and (2) how might librarians accomodate these new ways of relating to text and media by recommending specific digital platforms and tools, and providing a kind of "tech advisory" interaction (I was responsible for a version of this while working as an Academic Technology Assistant in my Seattle academic library job, and now a little bit with the Digital Project Studio here)?

I was definitely surprised to find the 2013 study referenced with an infographic in Thorton-Verma and Schwartz's LJ article, which showed that a third of librarians (34%) refer patrons to social networking sites for books such as Goodreads. I wasn't really sure what librarians thought of Goodreads, but it makes a lot of sense - SNSs that focus on reading can help facilitate a reading habit that also links a patron up with their community both locally and across the Internet. Plus, while sites like Goodreads do push readers to Amazon and other online booksellers, they also can definitely be integrated into library usage (picking up books you find online at your local library, or even librarians drawing upon Goodreads as a tool/resource while holding in-person readers advisory conversations -- I have a fond memory of a public librarian in Seattle giving me advice on new feminist sci-fi authors and plugging those names into Goodreads immediately after).

After doing some more searching around on Goodreads and libraries, I actually found an academic libguide for Goodread! (this kind of felt like the perfect convergence of a bunch of themes we've focused on in the course so far ha). Interestingly, the UIUC guide relies very heavily on screenshots -- thus violating a principle that we tried to stick to in our group's libguide process. On one hand, I can see a very visual libguide being helpful for the type of user who might be passionate about books and is also somewhat unfamiliar with technology in general - but at the same time, are these the individuals who are likely to access an academic library website? This kind of approach would definitely require a lot of upkeep to avoid becoming outdated after a major site update -- and I see that it was last updated on April 12th, 2016, which is fairly recently! Hmm, so I'm not 100% sure of my verdict on this libguide, but it's a neat resource.

Finally, readers advisory with Snapchat. I thought this was so inventive and teen-friendly and just a really great take on an engaging version of readers advisory. I also love Graves' point about Snapchat as a means to make patrons more comfortable geeking out about books:

"Despite these small challenges, Snapchat is an invaluable tool that can help alleviate patrons’ feelings of library anxiety. For example, adults who read young adult books but feel slightly embarrassed about it might prefer watching booktalks on Snapchat to asking for suggestions at the library or browsing the Teen Room when teens are there.""

When I was a kid, the East Branch of the Lexington Public Library was a safe space where I could stop worrying about social anxiety and life and really get lost in ideas and words. But I know that many young folks feel almost the exact opposite -- that books are a place of demands placed by adults ("read this!!") and evaluations of skill ("take this test on the reading") and not a space to be expressive and creative. I absolutely love the last moment in this article:

"One of my favorite Snapchat success stories is when a boy asked me, “Hey Ms. Alanna? Can you put a hold on that comic book that you talked about last Tuesday? The one about the girl superhero who just wants to be normal?” He meant Strong Female Protagonist by Brannan Lee Mulligan. Snapchat helped me convince a young teen boy to read a comic book that was located at another branch. He probably wouldn’t have picked it up, or even known about it, on his own."

Graves' article provides another way to think about social networking sites and emerging technology -- not just a big societal trend to be chased, but a set of tools with which to approach those enduring human processes of boldness and experimentation and expressiveness and curiosity, all of which are familiar territory for librarians and afford us a place to really shine and help others.

Blog Post 7A: Reflections on Virtual Reference

In an in-class presentation, we heard about the success of virtual reference on campus. One slide in particular included the following finding from internal evaluation:

Data indicate: people love personalized assistance; more complex questions come virtually than in physical spaces; convenience and expertise matters

Virtual reference seems to sit as this fascinating intersection of the practice of reference and librarianship, the changing place where most people/users typically "are" when working and thinking, and also the way that our needs for connection and affirmation have shifted with our use of digital spaces. I've been thinking about what it means that people actually want to connect more online and over more complex problem-solving -- and I don't have a specific answer, but a number of questions:

• How does a shift from an interaction in a communal physical space to a one-on-one digital space relate to broader shifts in the United States away from institutional affiliations and more towards customization and personalization? (Beyond the tech aspect, I'm thinking here of some of Robert Putnam's arguments in his 2000 book Bowling Alone
• If virtual reference librarians are not wholly bound by physical spaces anymore, what is their relationship to the physical or institutional library? Would their success in virtual reference pave the way for new types of virtual help/assistance/relationships/advising? What do virtual reference librarians have to learn from e-counselors, for example, or vice versa?
• How does the degree of "personal thumbprint" in the virtual reference interaction - such as including a name and photo of the librarian - impact the success of the virtual reference encounter? (There's probably a strong parallel here to therapy/counseling practices, which AFAIK show that a little disclosure can be helpful for building rapport but too much personality/ego presence from the clinician can worsen the efficacy of the interaction)
• What does "roving reference" look like online? Is it those annoying little chat boxes on sites trying to sell you something!? I hope not.. are there other possibilities for meeting online users where they are, perhaps?

I really enjoyed the talk in class and am curious to see how virtual reference continues to shift and evolve, and whether some new format beyond text-based online chat is inevitable/emerging right now.