image via Denise Chan on Flickr

The other day I read Lane Wilkinson’s excellent post about his thinking as he and others are tackling revising the ACRL Information Literacy Standards. This is important work since, as Lane points out, they were approved 13 years ago. Much has happened since that time and this is a document that affects a lot of libraries. Libraries around the country use it to guide their own teaching, college competencies, and accreditation. Lane talks about the idea that instead to simply teaching skills and abilities such as evaluating information, we teach intellectual virtues and dispositions.

This got me thinking about library instruction more generally and the way that it has changed through history and even the way my view of  it has changed since I was in library school. It seems to me that library instruction has undergone an evolution over the years in both the way we talk about it and the way we approach it and teach it. This evolution has been a three step process and each of them build on and are informed by the previous one.

1. Bibliographic Instruction

This type of focus is very tools based. In bibliographic instruction, students are taught how to use our catalog or our databases. They are taught how to do Boolean searching and how to use a table of contents. Many pieces of this instruction are necessary and also inform the other evolutionary iterations. Students need to know how to use our library specific tools to find and evaluate the information they need. It’s much easier to teach tools, but if we simply stopped at teaching students that we have stuff and how to use it we would be doing them a disservice. That is why an evolution was necessary.

2. Information Literacy (ACRL standards from 2000)

For the most part, our current evolutionary step, as Lane points out, is focused on teaching skills. These are important skills like locating and evaluating information. We use tools like the CRAP test and we teach research strategies. Much of the way we devise our own local competencies is based on the language of teaching student the skills and giving them the abilities to succeed in challenging research and in meeting their various information needs. But this language can be limiting. If we are only providing them the skills and abilities and not aspiring for something greater, students may be able to succeed in college but when they get to the real world will they be able to continue that success?

3. Information Sophistication

Something we talk a lot about at Champlain College is fostering “habits of mind.” This sounds similar to the idea of intellectual virtues that Lane was putting forward. I’ve heard other librarians talk about this same idea in different terms as well. We want to help students become not  just literate but sophisticated and fluent in their use of information. This involves not just learning skills but applying and practicing those skills to develop certain habits and dispositions. A student who is sophisticated when it comes to information does not just know how to evaluate a source of information, but would have have the habit of regularly questioning and critically examining information they come across instead of taking it at face value.

Teaching habits of mind is not something that is simple though, and it might involve different pedagogies. At Champlain we often try to use the inquiry method which is directed specifically at teaching habits of mind and helping students to form “an educated response.” Our awesome new Assistant Director for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Alan Carbery has had significant experience with Problem Based Learning and I’m excited to learn more about it and try some new methods. In both of these cases the methods focus on giving students experience in working through problems and doing critical questioning. These methods allow students to practice the habits of mind needed for someone who is sophisticated in their use of information.

Each of these evolutionary steps are necessary for students. They cannot develop skills if they cannot use tools to find information. They cannot develop habits of mind unless they have skills that they can practice. But when students leave college, they shouldn’t just be literate–they should be fluent, sophisticated. It’s an aspirational view of library/information instruction. I hope to hear more librarians continue to talk about it and I’m glad that Lane’s view will be represented when the ACRL standards are being revised. We have to remember that we are not just trying to help students succeed while they’re in college. We want to prepare them to succeed in life.

Image via Graham Blackall on Flickr

I recently spoke briefly at an all day retreat at our college about why I am involved with diversity work on campus (I’m a member of the faculty Multicultural Affairs Committee and completed a 25 hour intensive called Intercultural U). There are a lot of reasons for doing diversity work, despite it’s difficulty and the discomfort it can cause, including social justice reasons, and the opportunity for critical thinking and grappling with complexity. But the main reason I’m drawn to this work is because it’s personally enriching. It’s deep, meaningful, and authentic work. You get to grow and get outside your own lenses and biases and ultimately see reality more clearly.

This ability to challenge your own perspectives, examine your implicit assumptions, and inquire into the the viewpoints of others is crucial to diversity work, but also to the work we do in our organizations and the work we do as librarians. Most of the time see what we want to see or are conditioned to see. This can be the cause of a lot of the problems we face or lead to patterns where we get more and more frustrated. This can happen when serving students and faculty or working with colleagues.

Have you ever thought, “if only students came to ask us for help, they’d be so much more successful on their assignments,” or “if only faculty consulted librarians when designing their assignments students wouldn’t struggle so much?”  We often see the issues we face through librarian lenses or our own personal biases and not as they really are.

There are ways to take off our librarian glasses though, and when we do we are able to work more effectively with our colleagues and serve our students in the ways they want, not the ways we want.

Cultivate empathy

Too often we make assumptions about our users and design services around those assumptions. This can lead to poor utilization of those services and frustration by both the users and librarians. The problem’s that we’re trying to solve are not our problems, therefore we need to put ourselves in our users’ shoes and uncover their struggles, needs, and motivations. There is already great work being done by some libraries in this area, such as the ERIAL project. If you want to dig deeper into empathy, Stanford’s d School has some great resources.

Uncover implicit assumptions

There are implicit assumptions and mental models that we carry as librarians and educators that constantly color our experience of the world and of which we are not even aware. These could be unsaid things like “face to face education is the most effective kind” or “students these days give up easily.” In the book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge says that mental models often are helpful at one point but “as the world changes, the gap widens between our mental models and reality, leading to increasingly counterproductive actions.” Trying to make these assumptions explicit so than can be examined is an important element of getting outside our own lenses.

Don’t just interpret, observe

One way to uncover your assumptions is to recognize the difference between observation and interpretation. In a Design Thinking in Education workshop I recently attended, the speaker showed us an image and asked us to tell her what we could observe. It was surprising how fast we moved into interpretations, saying that the person in the image was a woman, assigning motivations and speculating on what the person was doing. We do this with students, faculty, and colleagues all the time. “The students are just not interested.” “My colleague just dislikes change.” The idea here is to cultivate a beginner’s mind and make observations. From there you can ask about those observations and test out different theories or assumptions based on those theories.

Advocate AND Inquire

We so often simply try to push for our own positions and advocate on behalf of the library, but if you only do advocacy you are not seeing the whole picture. When you’re advocating you’re not open to other viewpoints and you miss out on opportunities to learn. I’m sure most people have had the experience of pushing for an idea in a meeting and both sides simply got more polarized in their positions. Senge says that “When inquiry and advocacy are combined, the goal is no longer to ‘win the argument’ but to find the best argument.” Just talking louder is not going to be effective.

The ability to uncover what is hidden can be really powerful. What are ways that you use to get outside your own experience and put on different lenses into the world?

image via khowaga1 on Flickr

It’s that time of the academic year when everyone is busy. At Champlain we’ve been having a lot of conversations about faculty workload and about how course load, advising, service, professional development keep growing as we try to do more and more. Librarians here also wear a lot of hats. Almost all of us teach, we all do reference, we serve on committees and are involved with campus initiatives, all in addition to our regular job duties. And students might be some of the busiest among us. They have various classes, jobs, internships, clubs, organizations, and important socializing to do.

In all of these cases, it can lead to a very transactional view of the work we’re doing. Instead of seeing the big picture of a class assignment, stepping back to understand why we’re doing something, or thinking strategically, we accomplish task after task, simply trying to put out fires without asking where it is leading us. There are several reasons for this. First, we continually take on new projects and tasks because we want to serve students, or add something to our resume, or because it sounds fun. Second, we don’t reexamine things that we are currently doing because they have “always been done that way” or they simply become routine and easy to miss.

“As with a tree, the more of it there is, the farther it is from it’s roots. The less of it there is, the closer it is to it’s roots.” – Wang Pi

Librarians are very service oriented and want to help, but constantly taking things on can lead to over-extension, loss of effectiveness, and ultimately burnout. We need to balance our desire to serve others with our need to take care of ourselves and maintain our effectiveness. There are several strategies that can help with this:

Say yes…strategically

At Champlain we had a presentation the other night from a group of interim deans and consultants giving us their perspective from the outside. They said that we have a “culture of yes” at our institution. A culture of saying yes is a much better environment to work in than a culture of saying no. It makes work more fun and can be a big strength in serving our students. But when we overuse strengths they can become weaknesses. While it’s important to have a culture of yes, say yes strategically. When you say no you can say, “this sounds like a great opportunity, but with what I have currently I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to give it the attention it deserves.”

Ask “does this add value?”

I’ve almost finished The Lean Startup and the really important question that Eric Ries asks is “which of our efforts are value creating and which are wasteful?” Are we solving library problems or the problems of our students and faculty? We have limited resources in terms of time and budget. Are they being used in ways that are benefiting our users? Could they be used more effectively elsewhere? We need to focus on services and initiatives that people need and want. As the economist Thomas Sowell succinctly put it, “Producing things people don’t want is a road that ultimately leads to the bankruptcy court.” In the case of libraries it means becoming irrelevant.

What can you drop, automate, delegate or reorganize?

I’ve talked here before about reducing clutter and asked the question what can we drop? Dropping things can sometimes be difficult because it may involve tradition or someone’s territory. But there are other ways to drop things. Are there different workflows or organizational structures that will do the same things more efficiently? Can tasks be delegated or automated? Perfection is the enemy of good enough. If someone else (or an automated process) can do something 80% as effective as you can, delegate.

Focus on what’s important but not urgent

“If you were to do one thing in your professional work that you know would have enormously positive effects on the results, what would it be?” The effectiveness guru Stephen Covey says that our time is best spent on things that are important but not-urgent. These are the things that we believe will be really beneficial but we never seem to get to. Instead they get shifted to the backburner while we attend to what is urgent and get in the habit of putting out fires. By carving out time to focus on things that are high impact as opposed to urgent, we can use our time more effectively and we won’t have as many crises.

To maintain sustainability in our work lives, not feel overwhelmed, combat burnout, and avoid the busy trap, it’s crucial that we don’t simply put our professional work on autopilot. We need to regularly step back and see the bigger picture of our work. What do I really want to accomplish? Why am I doing this? Is this adding value to students, faculty, or other community members? Do I have to do this or do it this way? We need to slow down sometimes and we need to take care of ourselves, or else we’ll do a poor job at serving others.

I’m currently reading Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup. Ries talks a great deal about experimenting and validating learning. Often we provide products or create services because we think it is what has an impact or is what our users want. But in a number of examples that Ries provides, adding new features or services does not create any change at all and a lot of what organizations do is superfluous. This leads him to ask “which of our efforts are value creating and which are wasteful?”

To answer this question he says that we need to identify and test our assumptions through a number of small experiments. He also says that we need metrics that can tell us something as opposed to vanity metrics. An example of a vanity metric in libraries would be something like gate count. It says “we have a bunch of people coming in and out of the building,” but it doesn’t go to much farther than that. Why are these people coming in? Does it have something to do with our efforts?

He also talks about “success theater,” (the work we do to make ourselves look successful). It’s good to have charts and graphs that go up and to the right, but do those actually tell us anything? Is it our efforts that our making a difference or something else? Are we accidentally getting it right? Is it a fluke? What happens if the numbers go down?

So this brings me to my question: what are the assumptions we have in libraries and how to we test them?

Assumptions abound in libraries: students need research help from librarians, we need to be on social media, students need to be taught how to use a database. These assumptions might be different from institution to institution, but each place has their own assumptions.

We also have a variety of metrics and numbers that we can pay attention to in libraries: gate count, database statistics, circulation numbers, reference statistics, number of classes taught, assessment data, student surveys, etc. Which numbers are really valuable for testing assumptions and which are just noise?

What are some of our assumptions in libraries? What assumptions do you test at your library? What assumptions would you like to test? What metrics do or could you use to validate your learning?

“Librarianship is not a set of skills to be learned, or a set of degrees to be mastered. Librarianship is a conversation that has taken place over millennia.”

David Lankes recently had a great post about engaging in the big questions in the profession. He said that “bad conferences are filled with ‘how we do it good’ pieces.” His point is that what is really important is to invite others into a bigger conversation as opposed to talking about just what you do or how to do something.

There is a great deal of value in talking about how to do something. It’s practical and people can see the tangible effects right away. My posts on this blog about iPad apps or Twitter are by far my most popular. But our profession isn’t solely about keeping up on the newest tech or trends. It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day of your job or focus on new technologies that you can bring back from a conference, but if we don’t regularly ask bigger questions we’re compromising our future.

I see this other places as well. In library instruction its easy to concentrate on tools or how to do things, such as how to successfully navigate the databases. We’re experts in these things and students need to know how to use them to succeed on assignments. But they are just tools. If we only spend time on them we’re giving students skills for the present, but compromising their future. Tools change. We have databases and catalogs and discovery and Google today. There’ll be things we can’t imagine yet. That won’t be true in the future. In addition to teaching students how to succeed now, we also need to give them the skills to succeed in the future. We don’t want them to succeed just in their upcoming assignment. We want them to succeed in life. And knowing how to use a database is not the answer, or at least not the whole answer.

We need to be helping students develop the habits of mind that are crucial in research and lifelong learning. These are things like critically evaluating different pieces of information, perseverance in the search for information (not just giving up after a failed Google search), and a spirit of inquiry and constant questioning. These skills will last much longer than learning a database whose interface will change in the next few months.

We need to be playing both the short game and the long game in teaching and in the profession. There are tangible, practical skills that students need and that we need as professionals to succeed in our short term pursuits. But we can’t get so caught up in what we are doing right now that we forget to teach habits of mind or have the bigger conversations that will shape our future.

“While mobile technologies are ubiquitous among students and increasingly used in many aspects of libraries, they have yet to gain traction in information literacy instruction. Librarians at Champlain College piloted mobile phone polling in a first-year classroom as a less expensive and more versatile alternative to clickers. By utilizing a technology that virtually all students have in their pockets librarians found that it increased engagement from previous iterations of the session. In addition, by asking poll questions about students’ experiences, librarians were able to facilitate in-depth inquiry into information literacy topics. Ultimately, from direct experience in over 30 different classes, we found that mobile phone polling is a useful tool for any librarian to have in their pedagogical toolbox.”

The journal is open access you can go download the PDF right now. And apparently they are going to experiment with making our article available in EPUB format as well!

Whether you’re starting out or just looking to refresh your library social media presence, one of the best resources I’ve found is the Social Media Examiner’s Resource Guide. It gives you a social media marketing industry guide and tons of practical articles on topics like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and blogging. In addition, the popular tech/social media blog Mashable has some solid guides on topics like Facebook and Twitter.

I’ve also found that there are a few important things to remember to make your social media presence effective and fresh without burning yourself out in the process.

Influence and Engagement not Numbers

The two most important questions to ask when starting out (and regularly after that) are “what are my goals for having a social media presence,” and “what am I trying to accomplish?” People often think that having a lot of fans or followers is really important in having a social media presence. This is misguided. What matters in social media is not the quantity of followers, but the quality of the conversations. There are plenty of reasons to be on social media and number of fans/followers can be a helpful metric, but your focus should on user engagement and influence as opposed to becoming popular.

Use a dashboard

Using a social media management dashboard is the best way to stay abreast of conversations and keep your content fresh. You can use free tools like TweetDeck and Hootsuite to manage both Facebook and Twitter and schedule posts. Doing this in a single block can save you time and ensure that you regularly have fresh content being posted. Dashboards also help you to see things like mentions, posts, replies, and saved searches all in one place. These one stop shops will help you you see what people are saying about your library and be a part of that conversation.

Include your users

Talking only about yourself is a quick path to losing the attention of your audience. One of the best ways to get engagement on social media is to make your users a part of the conversation. Our library Twitter account regularly retweets posts from students and other groups on campus. On Facebook we post things like student artwork, and on Twitter we often retweet photos from the library’s third floor.

RT @champlainedu: RT @xxplosions: This view never gets old @champlainedu #CampChamp twitter.com/Xxplosions/sta…

— Champlain Library (@champlib) January 18, 2013

Use the richness of the medium

When using social media tools it’s important to leverage them to their full potential. A text only post is going to get a lot less engagement than one that is rich either visually or contextually. In Facebook include images in every post. Period. It’s been shown to increase engagement by 120%. On Twitter include links, hashtags, and @mentions. There is a lot you can say in only 140 characters. And depending on your audience there may be other social networks you may want to experiment with such as Pinterest or Tumblr.

“Connections create value” and there is “power in community.” These are rules of the social era that libraries have known for long time. There are now ever increasing ways to create these connections and build community. What advice would you give to someone trying to start a social media presence for their library?

Image via scottkellum on Flickr – CC

It’s that time of year when upcoming library school grads will be applying for jobs. And while gaining real world experience is extremely important, it is just as important to be able to sell yourself in your application materials. I’ve chaired and been a member of a number of search committees for both librarians and faculty and have read hundreds of resumes. Through this process I’ve learned one simple trick  to make your application stand out among others who might even be more qualified than you. It’s not really a secret, but so few people do it that it might as well be. The trick is similar to advice for a first date. In writing your cover letter:

Don’t talk about you, talk about them.

This might sound a bit backwards. The whole point of a cover letter is to talk about yourself, your experience, and let the search committee know who you are. But this is where just about everybody gets it wrong. The people doing the hiring don’t care about you (don’t take it personally). They care about themselves. How is this candidate going to benefit my organization? How are they going to help us become better? These are the real questions that search committees are asking. So when you focus on yourself and what you’ve done in the past it makes it that much more difficult for the search committee to picture you at your organization.

Of course they want to know about your experience, but put it in the context of them. Instead, just tell them what you working there would look like! Instead of saying “I’ve taught numerous information literacy sessions using active learning techniques,” say something like “My significant teaching experience using active learning in the classroom would be an asset as you’re trying to grow your information literacy curriculum.” Instead of saying, “As part of a class I created video tutorials for use in undergraduate instruction,” say “I’d love to bring my knowledge of creating engaging video tutorials to help enhance your instruction and web presence.” It’s only a slight shift but it makes all the difference.

Search committees are dense, lazy, and have dozens of applications to read through. Instead of making them work to imagine you at their institution, do the work for them. Instead of assuming they will make the mental leaps between your experience and their needs, make that connection for them. It will make their job easier and set you apart from everyone else. They’ll already be able to see how you fit because you’ll have told them.

If you focus your cover letter on them first and within that context discuss how your talents, experience, and attitude will enhance the work they’re trying to do, you’ll already be ahead of the game.

You can get other cover letter ideas at this awesome library cover letter project. Are there other tricks, tips or advice that you’d give to new grads and others preparing for the job search?

Dan Pink, the author of Drive and most recently To Sell is Human, talks about this importance of problem identification:

“The premium has moved from problem solving to problem finding as a skill,” Pink said. “Right now, especially in the commercial world, if I know exactly what my problem is, I can find the solution to my own problem. I don’t need someone to help me. Where I need help is when I don’t know what my problem is or when I’m wrong about what my problem is. Problem solving is an analytical, deductive kind of skill. The phrase ‘problem finding’ comes out of research on artists. It’s more of a conceptual kind of skill.”

This is a skill that can be hard to learn and especially hard to teach, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore it. It’s a lot easier to teach how to search a database or how to properly cite, but teaching students how to ask the right questions and identify problems will better prepare them for the world they’re entering.

A real world example of problem discovery comes from the folks at the design firm IDEO. In this this video, the CEO Tom Kelley talks about redesigning a toothbrush for children. Based on observation and asking the right questions they are able to see the problem in a new light and design a brush that not only tops sales but fits children perfectly. By finding the right problems and asking the right questions the solutions that follow are going be exponentially better.

This skill of asking the right questions and identifying the right problems to solve is something librarians should definitely be teaching our students. It can be done both in the classroom and at the reference desk. What are ways that you teach this skill?