info-fetishist

Faculty should mean more than that...

Steven Bell has a post on ACRL Log today about tenure, librarians and faculty status.  I reacted to it fairly strongly and I need to tease out why.  Many of the individual things he said didn't bother me, but taken in aggregate -- well, there's a lot here that's not making sense to me.  So I'm going to do what I do when I can't make sense of something -- try to write it out.

Those who know me know that I reserve the right to change my mind about stuff as I go along ...

Bell's basic point seems to be that librarians, even when they have faculty status, are not "real faculty" because they don't work with students in the same way that "real faculty" do:

To my way of thinking, what separates the real faculty from librarian faculty is the relationship with students.

While this may seem simple, and even obvious, I'm having real problems with it.  I'm going to leave aside his use of the term "real faculty" because it seems clear that he's being intentionally provocative with that and focus on the other assumption in the sentence - that real faculty is someone determined by one single thing and one single thing alone and that that is the nature and quality of contact with students in the disciplines.   (I know this quotation above doesn't mention the disciplines - I'll deal with that below).  Basically, I think he's just being way too narrow.  With this incredibly limited view of what it is that makes 'real faculty' Bell's throwing out more than faculty librarians.  Not only do I think that's a naive and problematic view of the academy, but I think if we were to accept it, it would make what we do as librarians a whole lot harder.

Off the top I should definitely say that contact with students, supporting them through the learning process, is what got me into higher education to start -- first as a student in the disciplines (history) and then as a librarian.  That's what I want to do - that's the part of faculty culture that appeals to me.  And I don't disagree even a little bit that my contact and work with students as a librarian is profoundly different than it was as a teaching assistant or teaching associate in the disciplines.  My problem isn't with the idea that contact with students should be one of our core values in higher ed, or that teaching faculty do it differently - it's with the flying leap to the conclusion that this student work, then, is the sum of what being faculty means.

As I said, I started out in the disciplines with every intention of becoming a professor.  And the reason that I didn't end up becoming a history professor was largely because I believed then, as I still do now, that the kind of teaching I wanted to do -- I could do better as a librarian.  When I was a historian, my main focus was helping students develop the skills they needed to become lifelong learners and informed citizens.   I simply did not have the focus on the disciplinary content to be a great history professor - if they got the dates 500 years off, but still "got" the significance of the connections between the events I was happy.  If they made smart connections between the oral history transcript we'd just read and the secondary monograph we read last week, but got the subject's name wrong - I didn't have enough of a problem with that. If they took me off on a tangent unrelated to the topic the professor wanted them to write about, but they had learned something important about how to do history - I hated marking them down.  When I started working in the public library and teaching at the reference desk, I realized that this -- THIS was the kind of teaching that I wanted to do. Directly helping students develop those lifelong learning, critical thinking skills that will help them engage in public life for the rest of their lives. 

And the hardest transition I've had to make as a librarian has been losing that week-to-week or even day-to-day contact with students that you get in the disciplines. I frequently use the analogy:

emergency medicine is to family practice what library instruction sessions are to credit courses

I was a really good history teacher at the end there, and I'm still figuring out how to do this one-shot thing. As a graduate teaching assistant in history I can point to student after student upon whom I know I made a direct and lasting intellectual impact.  But here's the thing - that didn't make me faculty then.  And it's not what does or doesn't make me faculty now. 

What bothers me about Bell's post isn't that I don't value what he says he values in this post -- it's that according to his thinking -- an awful lot of other people aren't "real faculty" either.

And I suspect there are few tenure-track academic librarians who develop relationships with students in the discipline of the type and at the level that occur between students and the real faculty

First, in this post he seems to be valuing the teaching in the disciplines above all other kinds of faculty teaching.  I can say from experience, that he's leaving out a lot of insanely good teachers, who are also some of the most student-focused faculty members in the business by doing this. Here's the thing -- faculty, even teaching focused faculty, aren't all motivated by the same thing.

When I was in graduate school, and in the years since, it has become really clear to me that there are two kinds of teaching-focused faculty (of course, this is a deep oversimplification - go with it).  There are those of us whose passion is the brand-new scholars -- our excitement and passion for teaching comes from helping students make that transition into academic thinking, scholarship, research, and expertise.  We like to help the first- and second-year students take their first steps at creating new knowledge for themselves.  My friend Mark and I had a long conversation about this when I was working at the University of Portland libraries.  He was talking about why he loved teaching (Poli Sci) at an institution like UP so much - more than he thought he would at a school that focused on graduate study, or even at a highly selective school where he would be spending most of his time working with advanced undergraduate majors.  That just wasn't for him, and it wasn't for me.  Not like working with the first-years was.

Then there are the scholars and researchers who really want to work with advanced majors and help those students move from creating new knowledge for themselves, to creating new knowledge -- full stop.  They want to teach major seminars, capstone courses, advise theses, they love the relationships they build with their advisees... my husband is one of these teachers.  We knew in graduate school that while on the surface we were both teaching- and student-focused academics, we had this difference in what really excited us about academic teaching. 

And then there are those, and there are a lot of them, who get into the academic game for the research.  To create new knowledge themselves.  They might like working with graduate students, or the occasional talented undergrad, with whom they can engage with the big questions of their own tiny subset of the disciplines -- or they might not even want that.  They go into academia and they end up teaching because it is part of the price of admission for doing research for a living -- or they end up as research scholars on the tenure track and they don't teach at all.  So are all of us -- the foundational teachers, the teachers in the disciplines, the researchers -- faculty?  I think so. 

The interesting thing to me here is that Bell is reflecting a very typical attitude about what should be valued in higher education - and that's an attitude that inherently devalues what librarians, and writing faculty, and basic math instructors, and tutors, and gen-ed teachers with mostly undeclared students, and a lot of other people on our campuses do.  The idea that the teaching in the disciplines is the "real teaching" is exactly what leads to the devaluing of the undergraduate core.  It's what leads to huge general education courses taught by harried adjuncts and graduate assistants.  It's what leads to students who lack the basic skills - and I do count information literacy as one of those basic skills - to really succeed in their academic life.   And it's what leads to students who never get the help they need to develop those skills because those skills don't have a strong disciplinary home. 

In other words, I think there are a lot of people that would agree that teaching in the disciplines is what "real faculty" do - but I think that they're wrong and not only wrong but destructive when it comes to my goals of creating lifelong learners, critical thinkers and informed citizens.

Larry Hardesty is the place to start when it comes to librarians understanding faculty culture.  And where Hardesty is most useful, in my deeply personal and idiosyncratic opinion, is in the how he clarifies this concept  - the focus on the disciplines is, in a crucial way, one of the key barriers keeping foundational skills like information literacy (and writing, and basic numeracy) from being supported as institutional goals should be:

Faculty culture emphasizes research, content and specialization. It de-emphasizes teaching, process and undergraduates - even at the liberal arts colleges where I have spent most of my career." (Hardesty, 1999, p. 244) Faculty do not think in terms of setting goals and objectives to measure development of "the independent lifelong learner" (Hardesty, 1995, p. 356). 

Basically, if developing relationships with students was every "real" faculty member's main goal, then I think our job as librarians would be a lot easier.  And  think it would be a lot easier for us to think of ourselves as "real" faculty.  A lot of our faculty don't have that as a goal because it is not valued by those who have power over them professionally (most of them don't get tenure because of their work with students) and a lot of our faculty members don't have that as a goal, because that's not why they got into the game in the first place.  And while that's not me, I don't have a problem with that. 

Our colleges and universities are in the business of knowledge creation -- and some of our scholars don't do that with students.  They're not good at it, or they don't value it.  That doesn't make them less faculty members.  Some of our campuses have teaching loads that leave their faculty working with 30 to 40 students a year, with TA's to do the grading.  Some of them have teaching loads that bring them together with several hundred.  Some departments have teaching/research loads skewed at 80/20 -- some the exact opposite.  My campus has extension faculty who work entirely with the broader community.  The point is, all of these people are faculty. By telling librarians that because they don't do everything typical teaching faculty in the disciplines do they aren't "real faculty" Bell is lumping librarians in with everyone else who doesn't do what typical teaching faculty in the disciplines do -- and I just don't think we want to be making the case that none of these people are faculty.  It's a too-narrow view of what higher ed does, and a too-narrow view of librarians' role within the academy.

And then I totally agree with Bell's conclusion - that academic librarians should take the time to read faculty blogs.  (But I think we should be reading research blogs as well as those that talk about teaching and work with students.)

The key difference between us is that where he seems to think we should read them so that we can understand how we are not real faculty, I think we should read them to see what we have in common, across the academy.  What better way to find new partners, and new ways of talking to those partners, than to listen to their voices?  The great thing about this was, I have been trying to figure out a way to fit this blog post in to one of my posts and now I can.

This is an academic blogger who wrote a post recently on why she, at a particular kind of school with particular kinds of students, thinks it is important to teach literature.  This post really resonated with me as a librarian because I think she's talking about those things I value - how what she does gives her students the foundational skills and understanding they need to engage in public life.

(Full disclosure - my husband decided to riff on this post in his own blog - I think it's also well worth reading on this topic)

Like Stephen Bell, I don't really care about the titles.  I don't call myself an assistant professor now except in cases, like my dossier, where I have to.  When I started at OSU I was a "professional faculty" rank employee, and now I am a tenure track faculty member, but the way I approach my own work hasn't changed at all. I'm fine with being "librarian faculty" because I think we're all real faculty -- all of us different kinds of faculty who are engaged in the business of teaching, learning and knowledge creation.

Why I'm disappointed in Ebsco's new visual search, part 1 of ?

So the other day I got an email from a colleague pointing out that Ebsco had changed its visual search interface. I haven't seen much discussion about this, and in the past year or so I haven't found many people who routinely use the visual search in library instruction (or if they do, they don't really talk about it). This is a little surprising to me, because most of my colleagues at OSU use it regularly, and find that students like it.  I'm really disappointed with the new interface - I think that everything my students liked about the old interface has been lost, and I'm really not sure how to introduce the new one to them. 

This probably won't be the first post I make on this topic, and I expect to get pretty far afield from what we can expect from Ebsco visual search, so bear with me...

In the last year or so the visual search has become one of those must-see things to show undergrads -- the standard trio for our beginning composition class is citation generation, Lexis-Nexis and Ebsco's Visual Search (they've already had a little experience with standard Ebsco searching before the class starts). 

Last term, I kept an eye on the comp students when they moved to the hands-on computers for the second half of the class to see where they decided to start looking for resources.  Admittedly, my methods weren't that rigorous, but I'd say that about a third of the students in any given class would head to Lexis-Nexis first, drawn to the new thing they hadn't tried before.  One or two students would go to the library catalog.  The rest of the class went to Ebsco, and the vast majority - maybe four out of five of them - went straight to the visual search.

This is what the visual search looked like then. Results were grouped by subject (the circles) and students could click on a big circle, to find further subsets or refinements of their topics.  Individual articles were represented as squares.

(the link above shows the 2 new result displays in the new interface)

Now like Caleb here, I don't really like visual search for myself. When I'm searching, I like to feel like I haven't missed anything and when the articles were sorted for me by a computer I don't really trust, I never felt like I am getting everything.  A long list of citations I can check off as I go works a lot better for me.  But - also like Caleb, I had decided a while ago that just because it didn't work for me, didn't mean that it didn't work for them.

One thing that I did think the students were getting out of the old search was the ability to browse related articles on a topic easily - they could zoom deeper into a topic, and if things weren't working out for them, they could back off and go in another direction.  The Playful Librarian points out that the visual search is really mis-named; it's not so much a visual search but a visual way to browse and refine results.  And I don't disagree with that - in fact, I think that very thing is what made it so useful for my students.

When I look at a long list of text results, I'm usually conversant enough with the topic or the discipline I'm exploring that I can mentally sort things into relevant-not relevant-potentially relevant-not at all relevant but still interesting types of categories.  When the students in my classes are starting off their research, especially in a course like beginning composition where their topics aren't grounded in the rest of the class material, they can't necessarily do that.  When we start them off exploring on their topics in that course we send them to Wikipedia so they can learn a little bit about the topic - at least enough to be able to start placing their own ideas within the larger discourse. 

The visual search interface gave them another way to do that exploring, right within the search tool most of them used to get their articles.  Even though we could complain about the indexing in the databases, and criticize the topic groupings that Ebsco would come up with, for a lot of our students it was a way to start.   They didn't need a list of 10,000, or 5,000 or even 1,000 results.  They needed help making sense of those results.  They needed a way to say "I want to look at this subset of my results, and that subset -- not so much."

For a course like first year composition, it's not like they need to be comprehensive on their topics.  They have a requirement to use eight sources, and of those eight, some must be books and websites.  So finding seven or eight relevant articles of sufficient quality on a topic is more than enough research to get them started writing these papers.  And a browsing interface gives them a way to start thinking about the results in an analytical way - it helps them start to think about classifying their results, thinking about the different dimensions of their topics.  So yeah, it is a visual browsing/ refining tool - and that's just exactly what a lot of them need.

Increasingly, I'm thinking that we focus too much on the search in library instruction, and in libraries more generally as we develop tools to find library resources.  A couple of years ago at the Access conference in Ottawa, when some of the presentations focused on different ways of visualizing information, I started thinking how many of the students I encounter would benefit from rich, powerful browsing interfaces.  I hear frequently, from colleagues around the library world, that our students don't care about the metadata and that normal people just want the fastest access they can get to the article they need.  But I don't think that's entirely true.  I mean, I do think they do want the fastest access possible to the information they need - who doesn't want that?   But they do care about the metadata.  They just want it used in a way that gives them results they can manipulate, browse, move through in a way that makes thinking about them fun, productive, useful -- that can actually help them make sense of the results they find.

Most undergraduates go into their research process not only knowing that they need to find information, but knowing that they need to find specific types of information.  They are constantly given arbitrary requirements like "five newspaper articles" or "a peer-reviewed journal article" as part of the their assignments.  Those students care about more than just finding an article - they want to find the right kind of article.  They care a lot about that.  And they're not always sure how to do it -- while these requirements might seem simple, they require the student to know some pretty sophisticated things about how information is produced, indexed, and retrieved. 

When we focus on the search at the expense of that context, then I'm not sure how much we help them.  When I sit at the reference desk, I often feel like the students that ask for help are already frustrated because Google, or other powerful search tools, have failed them.  They either can't find what they want, or they can't make sense of what they find. When the trouble is that they're not finding anything - the trouble tends to be with the initial query -- with choosing their keywords -- which again comes back to their thinking about their topics.  Just as often, they have found results, they're just not sure how to classify or prioritize those results; they don't know what they've found.  I think we can spend hours talking to these about how to drive the different interfaces, or about how to connect or manipulate keywords, and we're not going to help them at all.

A lot of this really came together for me when I read Gary Marchionini's 2006 article Exploratory search: From finding to understanding.*  Marchionini argues that there are three different kinds of search activities: looking stuff up; learning; and investigating.  Of these, only the first is improved by focusing attention to the query --

In general, lookup tasks are suited to analytical search strategies that begin with carefully specified queries and yield precise results with minimal need for result set examination and item comparison.

Learning searches won't be improved by better queries, because by definition they require the user to go back and forth in an iterative process, changing the query as they learn more.  Similarly, they won't be supported well by a search tool that focuses on bringing back the perfect result, fast and on the first try.  When searching to learn, as scholars must do, the first try just isn't ever going to be the only try --

Much of the search time in learning search tasks is devoted to examining and comparing results and reformulating queries to discover the boundaries of meaning for key concepts. Learning search tasks are best suited to combinations of browsing and analytical strategies, with lookup searches embedded to get one into the correct neighborhood for exploratory browsing.

More and more, I think undergraduate research instruction needs to focus on analyzing and contextualizing - the higher-order thinking about their topics -- which comes down to what they know about them and if they have the vocabulary to articulate what they know. 

And more and more I think that the tools themselves also need to help them do that.  And that's where I think visual displays, and browseable results, can be powerfully useful for new scholars.  Lorcan Dempsey referred a while ago to the concept of glanceability, which is a term usually used to describe interfaces or displays where users can pick up the information they need at a glance.  Dempsey used a slightly different definition, which I find extremely useful in describing what I think visual browseability can do for undergraduate users: 

Glanceability is about enabling users to understand information with low cognitive effort.

The first time I read that definition, I thought of the Presidential speeches tag cloud --

As a former historian, I love the way this simple interface takes familiar texts, and by redisplaying them sparks new ideas and connections, as well as a sense of change over time, in the user's brain.  It's quick, it definitely takes low cognitive effort, and it's even fun if you're a politics geek like me -- but it's not cheap nor is it superficial.  One couldn't learn everything worth knowing about these speeches with this tool, but it can spark actual higher order thinking in a low-effort way.

The Neoformix blog presents a lot of different ways to manipulate and present texts, visually.  One of my favorites is the Document Arc diagram, which shows the connections between authors and arguments within a paper - here's the document arc of a paper I co-wrote a few years ago on using blogs in the classroom.

One of my favorite things about this is that it shows at a glance where the key in-text citations repeat - showing that the argument in the paper is connected to the larger discourse.

The American Studies tagline project takes the Presidential speeches idea in a slightly different direction -- focusing on the discourse within a discipline.  Taking a collection of standard "significant documents" from the American Studies discipline, this tagline presents the texts visually, letting the user see at a glance the evolution of discourse within the discipline.  It's not hard to see how a student could use a tool like this to locate their own ideas within a discipline or discourse.

But where I really think the power of visualizations as a way to help students understand scholarship, and discourse, can be seen is in tools that show how the different voices within a discourse are connected.  It's probably not surprising that Citegraph, a legal research tool, illustrates this well, given how overtly connected legal texts are.  This shows how the connections between ideas and citations within related texts can be displayed and manipulated visually.  And I've long been intrigued at the thought of using Many Eyes' social network visualization tool to visually examine the connections and networks between scholars.

For too many examples of scholarly visualizations to capture here, look at these possibilities using CiteWiz.  These are the figures and tables from a 2007 article in Information Visualization, and they include timelines, concept maps, tag clusters and more.  The whole article (cited below)** is worth reading - but the figures alone are plenty to pique my interest.

So that's part 1 of why I'm disappointed in the new Ebsco visual search.  It may be more of a search than a browse, though I'm not sure about that, but that's a loss I think for my students.  And I think that browse, especially visual, exploratory browsing, is something to think about further.

______________________

*Marchionini, Gary (2006). Exploratory search: From finding to understanding. Communications of the ACM, 49: 4, 41-46.

**Elmqvist, Niklas & Tsigas, Philippas (2007).  CiteWiz: a tool for the visualization of scientific citations networks.  Information Visualization, 6, 215–232

in their flow

When I saw the Matrix for the first time, I was enthusiastic about it, but I don't remember thinking it was particularly special.  We see almost a movie a week in the theater, and I had no expectation that this one was going to have any kind of intellectual staying power for me.  But for the next few days, I would catch myself thinking about it in slow times.  I didn't think so much about the content of the movie - the matrix itself - but about the look and feel, the fight choreography, the art direction and the visuals. 

And then later, when we saw the Phantom Menace, I disliked many, many things about it.  I was surprised to realize that one of those things was -- it just didn't look very cool.  As important as the original Star Wars films had been to me, movies that looked like that just didn't do it for me any more.  It wasn't just The Matrix that led me to this, of course, and The Matrix itself references a bunch of other stuff that I also like, but something about it came together and pushed my thinking about what studio-produced action movies could be.

So I didn't notice it until later, but I had taken the blue pill when I saw that movie.  Seeing it affected how I saw things from that point on.  This happens to me with other things too, especially things I read.  I read a lot of things every day, and take a little bit from this and a little bit from that.  But every once in a while I read something that really really changes the way I see almost everything else.  And most of the time, I don't realize that right away.  I read it, think "that makes sense," and don't really realize its impact until I notice that I've come back to it over and over again.

Lorcan Dempsey's In the flow is one of those blue-pill readings.

When I first read it, I thought it was just a more nuanced and useful way of thinking about the idea that libraries need to "be where the users are" -- a phrase that I have heard about one million times since becoming a librarian, but about which I am still ambivalent despite the repetition.  And on one level, it is a more nuanced way of considering that concept.  I pull it out frequently as a corrective when faced with a service idea that just doesn't make sense to me -- is doing reference via texting just being where they are?  Or is it being in their flow?  I think it might be the former.

Dempsey says there are two themes that recur in discussions about flow.  The first emphasizes being where they are --

the library needs to be in the user environment and not expect the user to find their way to the library environment

The second, though, goes beyond this --

integration of library resources should not be seen as an end in itself but as a means to better integration with the user environment, with workflow.

Being in the users' flow isn't an end in itself - it goes way beyond just being where they are.  To do it, we need to understand what our users are doing when they are where they are.  And to understand how they are doing it, what they are to do it, and what they would like to be using. 

The first time I saw something that really illustrated the difference between being in the users flow and just being where they are was when I read about the University of Washington Libraries' putting links to their collections in relevant Wikipedia articles.  The other day, John Pollitz sent me a link to another.  This is totally awesome -- the University of Oregon has added a button to their library catalog records that allows users to text the call number information to their own cell phones.  Jason Eiseman has a nice summary (with screenshots!) of it on his blog.  We talk a lot in higher ed about how all of our students have cell phones, they're addicted to their cell phones, they're never without their cell phones.  And that's all true.  But they don't use them for everything.  And this is a simple little thing that lets them use their cell phones in a way that they are already using them to do a thing that they're already doing.  That's being in their workflow.  That's putting ourselves where they are in a way that makes sense.  And that's just awesome.