On Being Part of the Solution, Not the Problem

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You know those moments when two separate ideas converge and become one, and that one idea feels so right that you're unsure how you never thought of it before? Well, that happened to me recently. The first idea came from a blog post that Jenica Rogers wrote a couple of months ago, “harm created not out of malice but habit”. It's a short post, so I recommend you read it in its entirety. As for me, the crucial part is in the title of the post. It's from a quote about how so many colleges have problems with students actually graduating, especially students whose lives are so different from our own. I've long had a certainty that for some of the students who attend my institution, we are doing as much if not more harm than good by forgetting they are not us at that age.

The second idea is from a particular document with which I (and a lot of us in academic libraries) work on a regular basis: "Standards for Libraries in Higher Education." I've had to revisit some ideas from our multi-year assessment plan because of personnel changes in other departments, and one of the recurring themes from that document is the need to demonstrate our value to our communities and supporting the mission and needs of our students, faculty, and staff. And I know the best way to communicate is to make it a conversation. I need to follow Roger's example and start some conversations.

I already have a relationship with our Student Government Association, and I'm lucky in that I have an assigned liaison each year with whom I have a good relationship. But I need to push this further. I need to dig deeper and do better with communicating. Also with listening. I don't know if it's true this academic year, but I know we were designated a "minority serving institution" in the past - that means that 50+% of our student population are members of racial minorities. That's why what Rogers wrote resonated so strongly for me.

I need to noodle on this a while longer, but I need to reach out and I need to stretch myself. We need to do the best we can for our students, and then we need to do better than that.

How about you? What are you doing to serve your community better?

They're Back: Giving Students the Respect They Deserve

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For me, the first few weeks of a semester are kind of like a party. Yes, I'm busy - crazily so, this year, with hiring and training two new part time library associates on top of all the other beginning of the year stuff. But still, it's a great time. Seeing all those smiling and familiar faces gives me a glow. And then there are the new students - our incoming class is exceptionally polite and eager and grateful this year. What do I mean by that? Well, I had an uncomfortable moment where a young woman was so grateful that she impulsively hugged me after I figured out what was going wrong when she tried to print using a library computer. It was uncomfortable, but seeing how relieved she was made me smile. Whatever else might frustrate me in my career, I can honestly say I love working with students. Are they perfect? Nah. They graffitti and have to be told - repeatedly sometimes - to be quiet in the quiet areas of the library. Is it fun when they lose their cool because they procrastinated and something isn't going perfectly? Nah. Was it a laugh riot when I had to fail a student for plagiarizing in my freshmen seminar? Not even. I had a stomach ache for days over that one. But taken as a whole, I truly find joy in working with our students.

That's why I find it so disheartening to look around at the so-called periodicals of record in higher education (which sometimes come across as upscale click bait lately), to see so many articles this time of year that bemoan the quality or attention span or even scent of our students. I was thinking this just the other day when I saw this tweet:

Another autumn, another season of reading academics inordinately whining about their students.

— S̗. D᷅ungeon (@scd) August 30, 2015

So glad to know that I'm not the only one who's lost patience with the practice. As grandiose as it might sound, we in education are involved with shaping the future, and I think we lose sight of that. Budget cuts and accreditation standards and crappy job markets in academia are deeply troubling, I'll admit. There are a lot of things I'd like to change about academia in general and academic librarianship in particular - I do tend to write shouty fist-shaking posts, in case you hadn't noticed. But I'm tired of us always blaming the students.

I'd like to suggest that we stop focusing on the problems and start working on the solutions. Maybe it's because I've predominantly worked at schools with big populations of First In Family Students, but I know a lot of the problems cited in those whinging articles mentioned above are really just cultural in nature. We all got into education for a reason, so let's educate - even if it's explaining the importance of getting the text books or showing someone how to write an email to a professor. We have a chance to make a difference in the lives of our students. Little things like making a goofy joke to help someone smile when they are stressed and big things like teaching student workers, who've never had a job before, how to be an employee... these are important teaching opportunities that the authors of those articles are missing.

In academia, we constantly get to learn and teach. We get to grow while helping our students do the same. I'm not blind to the problems in our industry, so I'd like to think I'm not being overly simplistic when I say: let's be grateful for the opportunities our careers afford us and find ways to help our students if we aren't satisfied with their performances. They give us a reason to go to work, and they are (usually) grateful for the learning. So let's get with the teaching, and respect our students along the way.

"The Customer" Is Always Wrong: Managing Community Expectations

I tend to get a bit twisted about semantics, so I write about it frequently. Word choice matters. A recent piece written by one of my favorite anthropologists illustrates another reason why:

"Words matter WORDS MATTER this 'customer' stuff isn't just benign semantics and labelling it comes from an insidious framing of education."

That is something that Donna Lanclos tweeted and then quoted in a longer piece about the problems with managing college and university student expectations. That blog post also included the following paragraph, which made me want to give Lanclos a standing ovation:

"Student expectations are informed by their pre-university experiences. And those are not uniform. We have students with a variety of levels of experience and preparedness for what university education requires. And we do not, as educators, have to buy the argument that the purpose of our work is to prepare students for 'jobs.' Our work, collectively, in higher and further education, is to provide students with experiences and support within those experiences to learn, to grow, to find and shape their voice, to be prepared to exercise citizenship, to live engaged lives, to shape their world in constructive ways."

I loathe the word "customer" for people who walk into a library, but even more so for students of a college where I work. It really does set up the wrong dynamic. I can't tell you the number of times that I have heard "I pay your salary" or variations thereupon directed at me or at a coworker by a student who isn't being allowed to do one disruptive thing or another. That student who got angry with me and told me how much they paid to attend that institution because I wouldn't let them leave their possessions strewn around a busy area was a particularly fun example of that. Because there is already so much money involved, calling a student "the customer" makes it feel even more like we are supposed to bend over backwards. How far is it from adding a rock-climbing wall to eliminating prerequisites for a price?

But back to my original point: I would argue that those skills Lanclos lists are precisely the kinds of skills employers both big and small need in their work force. I'm not pulling this out of the air, either. I've read so many studies that talk about how employers want people who can think on their feet, who can write, who can investigate, who can think critically... Dr. Lanclos writes that managing educator expectations is just as important as managing student expectations, but I'm wondering if we need to take a step further and manage the expectations of our communities. If so much of this is predicated on the assumption that we are educating students to be employable, can we use the expectations of those employers to shape the conversation? It seems that educators and companies are all saying the same thing, and there's got to be a way to leverage that so that our students and, more importantly, our upper-level administrator and boards of trustees get back to trusting the faculty and staffs of their institutions.

Or am I just dreaming here?

Leading Means Teaching, by Patrick Wohlmut

As I write this post, I have just completed end-of-year evaluations for my library’s student staff of reference workers.

You read that correctly. We have students working at the reference desk.

We trust our student reference workers, who we call Lead Workers, with a lot. To be eligible for the position, student workers must have worked in the library for at least one year. Lead Workers offer research assistance to library patrons, make sure that the library runs smoothly when librarians are not present, handle difficult situations as they arise, take on small projects for librarians and library staff as needed, and refer patrons to the proper place for help when necessary. Where the student staff of the library is concerned, Lead Workers really are leaders. The cream of the crop. Some students look up to them as role models.

For me, assuming leadership of this team was daunting. I hadn’t had much experience with this kind of supervisory position before and, since I was a visiting faculty member and didn’t know whether or not I would return in the next school year or who would head the program after me if I didn’t, it kind of felt like this:

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I had to figure out very quickly how to do several things:

• combine authority with approachability;
• make the transition between supervisors as smooth as possible for the Lead Worker team;
• balance my work with the Lead Workers against personal concerns, including an hour-and-a-half commute, being a dad and husband, and the interview process for the tenure-track position that would replace my visiting one, not to mention my other job responsibilities;
•  take ownership of my new role while knowing that I may have to let go of it at the end of the school year;
• and make sure that the Lead Workers got what they needed to succeed and were impacted by as few of these struggles as possible.

Mostly I was successful; predictably, I also made mistakes. Here are five of the many important things I learned as a result of spending a year doing this job:

Leading Means Teaching

Teamwork, communication, initiative, acting on vague or missing information, and dealing with difficult people effectively and respectfully are just some of the skills Lead Workers have to develop. I was always modeling these skills for them. I quickly learned that in this position, leading means teaching, and teaching means modeling both my successes and how to learn from my mistakes.

Make the Expectations Clear

Young Adults aren’t always good at handling ambiguity, so they have to learn. Giving them a project with very broad guidelines, no concrete deadlines, and only a fuzzy idea of what I expect, and expecting them to do their best, is like asking a polar bear to fish without giving her any ice where she can fish. I learned to be very clear about my expectations.

Let Them Run

At the same time, dealing with ambiguity is a huge part of a Lead Worker’s job. I found that I had to give them enough opportunities to take ownership of what they do, make clear where and when they can run with a project or with the job in their own way, and in what areas I completely trust their decision-making and discretion.

Make Them Reflect

Aristotle was wrong: excellence is not a habit. It’s a process. I could follow a rubric and make sure that my student workers are able to do everything on that rubric, and they still might not grow, either as people or as Lead Workers. I learned that to really do their job well, my workers needed chances to reflect on what they do, on what they do well, and on what they could be doing better.

Connect With Them

I have a great library director, and one of the things I admire about her is her authenticity and how well she connects with her library staff as a human being. It makes it very easy to respect her, listen to her, and follow her lead, because I know exactly who is getting my respect. This is a quality I have tried to emulate with my Lead Workers. It bites me in the rear sometimes (I’m kind of a softie), but mostly it works.

Doing this job has been a yearlong, rewarding, confusing, joyful, scary, headlong-rushing balancing act. It has also been one of the best learning experiences of my life, and one that I have since been hired to do more permanently at the same library. I have so many ideas for the future, and I can’t wait to try them out.

Patrick Wohlmut is the Teaching and Research Librarian at Nicholson Library at Linfield College. He walked away from most social media around a year-and-a-half ago, and has never been happier. He’s also a produced playwright, and juggles a mean three-ball Mills Mess. He can be reached at pwohlmut@linfield.edu, and blogs very, very occasionally at patrickwohlmut.com/blog.

Welcome to Our World

We're wearing goofy hats this week - exams week - for comedy relief for students. #librarylife #librarydirectorlife pic.twitter.com/Q55sBbBtS6

— Jessica Olin (@olinj) April 29, 2015

I have this theory about libraries and students who are under-prepared and/or who learn differently (catch all phrase for learning disabilities, ADHD/ADD, autism spectrum, etc.): the library represents academic pursuits and things that make them struggle. It is so important to remember that we have patrons who struggle with the things we assume users can do easily. We've made our lives in the library, but it can be intimidating to others. We libr* types need to do something about that. As for me, one of the things I try to do wherever I'm working is to make the library more welcoming. We all have students who learn differently and who aren't as prepared. Besides, even if your patrons aren't under-prepared or learning disabled, it never hurts to enhance your relationship with the members of your community.

That relationship building and enhancing is something we're trying to do at my library, and towards that end we spent the entirety of a monthly staff meeting brainstorming and hashing out different ways to make our library more welcoming to students. That's why that picture above happened: one of the ideas was for all staff members to dress for a theme of some sort, like goofy hats. And so, once I determined that everyone was comfortable with the idea of the hats, we picked a week and went with it. Wow did it work. So many stressed out students would see me in my witch hat or my tiara, or the reference librarian in her pith helmet, and burst into laughter. At one point a colleague in another department said something like, "You should advertise that you're doing it. Otherwise people will think you're just being silly." My response: "But we are just being silly. That's the point." The best part? People in other departments around campus wanted to join in the next time we do this!

Other ideas we have for the future or that we have put into action:

• Student art exhibited in the library, either temporarily or permanently.
• Coffee bar at night during exams.
• Giving student groups the opportunity to design and put up book displays in the library.
• A library sponsored essay contest that ties into an existing celebration of student scholarship.

I want to bring this post back to where I started, so I can explain how I got from students who learn differently to the goofy hat brigade: it's about how our buildings make our students and patrons feel. If a member of the community is intimidated - for whatever reason - they are never going to come into our buildings and we won't have a chance to help them. However, if we make them laugh and show our human sides, it's going to help our patrons relax. If they are more relaxed, they'll be more likely to come in to our buildings to ask for our help... and that's where we can do our work.

We have other ideas for building the library's relationship with faculty, but I'm curious what you all are doing to build relationships with any of your stakeholders/segments of your community. And be warned: if you share your ideas here, I may end up stealing/borrowing them.

Not Mutants nor Ninjas nor Turtles, but Teenagers

It's that time of year again. A few new students just showed up on campus along with all those returning for the Spring semester. While we do have our fair share of nontraditional students, we do have a lot of traditional undergraduates. This has me thinking, of course. And what I've been thinking about is how traditional undergraduates are teenagers, even if we don't always think of them that way.

I know I make a big thing about how our students are not us at that age, but consider the fact that I was seventeen when I started college. (I didn't skip any grades or anything. Just the vagaries of the cutoff date for entering kindergarten where I grew up. I've got a December birthday.) This may be atypical, but it's not unheard of even today. Also, you can never forget the fact that their brains are still maturing, even after they turn 20. For most people, until they reach their mid-twenties, they have more in common with teens than they do with us.

We need to act and plan accordingly. I've talked before about the emotional responses of students, and how they really aren't us at that age, but it goes beyond that. We assign books for common read that are tough for adults to get through, program for our own interests, and use vocabulary that may or may not have any traction with this audience. We market to them on Facebook instead of taking advantage of word-of-mouth networks. We forget about their needs and think about how they "should" do this or that, instead of looking at what traditional undergraduates actually do.

I'll admit I don't always hit the mark with our programs and other efforts, but I've learned a lot by watching teen and youth services librarians. That's why I've built graphic novel collections wherever I've gone. That's why I've included gaming in my programming efforts. It's why I've spent so much time in my career building relationships with the students. If you build relationships, you build trust. When you build trust, you have an opportunity to do all the things we academic librarians want to do.

I'm not sure what else to say here, but I want to plead with people to please please please stop treating traditional undergraduates like they have the same reactions and sensibilities that we do. Yes, treat them like adults because they need to learn how to act like adults, but don't expect them to react like adults because they aren't.

You take away the mutant, the ninja, and the turtle, and you've got teenagers. That's exactly what a traditional undergraduate is: a teenager. We need to act accordingly.

Nice vs. Kind

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I should probably admit, up front, that my thoughts on this topic are a bit jumbled. Some of it has to do with "nice" being a gender expectation, and then there's the growing students-as-customers mentality. Those two ideas are coming up against the fact that things are starting to ramp up on campus (new students coming this week, returning students this weekend). The end result is that I've been thinking a lot about the difference between "nice" and "kind" lately.

My mental conception of "nice" has always had a slightly negative connotation. That overused cliche about giving a man a fish versus teaching a man to fish? In my mind, "nice" is the person who gives the fish. "Nice" is making it easy for people without thought of what that might cause in the future. It's catering to the whims of our students without regards to long term plans or research in the field. [Side note: no, I'm not complaining about my current employer or any past employer. This is mostly on my mind because I'm taking on a new role at my current institution - teaching a class in the first year program.]

The thing is, I'm not "nice." As a professor, I'm a hard grader. As a librarian, I have no problems calling students on it when they are loud in the library. I've told students, faculty, staff, and even upper administration, "no." I will push back when I disagree. I am, however, kind. I will bend over backwards to help a student learn, to put faculty members in touch with resources they can use, and to make any member of my community more self-sufficient. It may be hard to get an A from me, but it's also hard to get an F.

Back to the fishing analogy, "kind" is teaching the man. Kind is about having patrons come back weeks or months or even years later to thank you. Kindness is why students come back to me and say, "thank you for pushing me when I was a freshmen; it made me a much better student." The difference between "nice" and "kind" is closely related to the differences between some students' expectations and institutional mission.

Further, it's also tied to why I refuse to call members of my community "customers." I've heard endless complaints about how self-entitled students, especially incoming freshmen, can be. I've been known to grumble about this myself. But I think we're feeding into it by thinking about students as customers. College is about learning to do things for yourself, including learning how to learn and learning how to think.

Being "nice" does a disservice to our communities in higher education. When I worked at a tiny two-year institution, I would often say, "the librarians at the school where you transfer might not be as available as we are, so I want to make sure you know how to do this for yourself." As a professor, I talk about how writing and public speaking are life skills my students will need in the job market. As an employer of student workers, I'm mindful of the fact that working for my library is frequently the first job our student employees have ever held and that we are teaching them how to be an employee. Holding students accountable after teaching them these skills will serve them better in the long run.

I know it sounds a bit paternalistic to say I know what students actually need, but with my experience and knowledge of the industry, especially with our accrediting bodies and the US Department of Education placing more and more emphasis on accountability, I do actually know better in some ways. I know we're a service industry and we want to take care of those who come to us, but it's much better if we teach them to care for themselves. Be kind, be friendly, but please... don't be nice.

How about you? What are your thoughts on the topic?

Textbooks, Students, and Socioeconomic Statuses

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I saw a tweet last week that read like a subtweet directed at every student with whom I've worked in my career as an academic librarian: "Or you could just buy your textbooks." (May not be an exact quote.) I'm not going to post it here, nor name the person, because that person is not my issues. No, my problem is with the major and minor misunderstandings that went into that tweet. Besides, I don't want to call out that individual because, if I'm going to be honest, these are misunderstandings that I held for years myself.

Misunderstanding #1: I've mentioned this before on my blog, but our students - even at the elite colleges and universities - are not us at that age. They are at college mostly because it's the next logical step and they've been told it will help them get a better job and so on. Even the most academically-oriented will usually only buy books for classes in their major, when they know they'll want to keep them beyond the class.

Misunderstanding #2: Two of my three library jobs have been at colleges with a high proportion of first generation college students. In both cases, more than 40% of the undergraduate population were/are first gen. They don't come to college knowing the culture, the expectations, the norms. They were given access to their textbooks in classes in k-12, and some even got to take them home, and so they won't expect this cost.

Misunderstanding #3: Speaking of costs, have you seen how expensive textbooks are these days? The prices have risen way way way beyond normal inflation. I've seen 150 page, flimsy paperback textbooks going for $100+. You know how so many libraries can't afford to keep up? Imagine that at an individual level.

Misunderstanding #4: Some of our students genuinely can't afford these books. They and their families are taking out loans and maxing out credit cards just to get the students to college.

Misunderstanding #5: This is a misunderstanding on the part of our patrons: No, most college libraries - heck, most libraries in general - aren't in the business of buying and stocking textbook-y textbooks, but a lot of people think "libraries = books," and think we will have them.

All of this is to say that some students can't just buy their textbooks. So please, if a student comes to you and asks for a textbook, feel free to inform them that your library doesn't carry them, but keep the above misunderstandings in mind. Please try to help them find a copy through your consortium if your library belongs to one, and definitely have sympathy for students who can't afford/didn't know they need to buy textbooks. It's hard enough for students to come ask us for help in the first place; you showing them scorn (and it shows, even if you think it doesn't) will only make things worse.

One final note: I've talked to a few other librarians who do stock some textbooks in their libraries, both college/university level libraries as well as private high schools. I've been talking with some of my allies at my college, and I've decided to try an experiment next academic/fiscal year: I'm going to buy and keep in the library a few copies of the textbooks for each class with a high proportion of at risk students. If that works well, we'll expand. I'd love to hear from anyone who's got experience with this kind of program.

When Expletives Happen, Or, What a Maroon!

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Recently, I had an interesting (and funny) interaction with a student at my library. I was heading out of my office when the student in question, who was sitting just outside my door, cursed loudly. He blushed when he noticed me standing there, and stammered out an apology. The ensuing conversation was fun:

Me: "Do you think I've never heard these words before? Do you think I've never said these words before?"

Him: "But not at full volume in a library."

Me: "I work in a library and have for years. Of course I've said those words at full volume in a library."

Him: *laughing, obviously more relaxed*

I wasn't lying just to make him feel better (although I will admit I might have, given similar circumstances). I do cuss at work. Not as much as I used to, now that I'm the Head Cheese in Charge (of a very small library), but [expletive] happens. There are the occasional expletives of frustration. I've also been known to throw a few choice bits into conversations with students who I know well (and who I know won't have a heart attack). There's even, from time to time, a certain hand gesture that could be mistaken for someone miming rolling dice, but that is actually something quite rude. 

The thing is, most people I know use off-color language at least occasionally. Also, almost nobody I know gets really gets offended at these words; they just get offended on behalf of others. Besides, if they can say "ass" on prime time television, I figure I can say it in my library once in a while.

How about you? Do you keep it 100% clean? Or are you known to cuss?

And because no discussion of this type is truly complete without a word or two (or seven) from George Carlin...

Puppy Power!: Therapy Dogs in an Academic Library

I ran a therapy dog event last week. It went so well that this blog post will probably sound much more gushy happy than I've ever sounded, but really - I knocked it out of the park with that event.

In case you aren't aware of this idea, there are lots of college and university libraries that bring trained, certified therapy dogs during stressful times of semester (for my school, the event happened during the week before exams). The point of these events is basically for students to pet and play with the dogs.

How did it go at my library?

IT! WAS! AWESOME!

1. The dogs themselves were fantastic. Some were lap dogs, others wanted to play. All were sweet and gave boatloads of love to the attendees.
2. The volunteers who brought their dogs were wonderful, too. All of them talked to the students - asking their names, majors, where they grew up, etc.
3. The turn out was astonishing. When the dust and dog hair had been cleared, and all the counts counted, I realized that over 10% of the student body had come one or both nights. I was especially happy to realize that most of them were freshmen.
4. I saw, and got to talk to, many students who I've never seen in the library before that event. One student was telling me about his dogs at home, another talked about possibly changing majors. They were in the library and relaxing.
5. The best part? Student reactions. I overheard one student say, "This is the most fun I've had at college." Another clapped her hands, danced a little, and said, "yay!" when she got into the room where we held the event. One student wrote "DOGE" on the sign in sheet as her reason for attending.

I could cite research and talk procedures of running these events all day, but there are others better sources for that kind of information than my blog. If you're trying to get an event like this started at your library, let this post serve as the answer to why these events should be done.

My biggest bias in my work is towards the needs of the students, and bringing therapy dogs in served their needs in spades. Puppy power!

Content, Not Format

Can we PLEASE stop pretending that just because it's on paper it's good and just because it's on the web it's bad? #librarianlament
— Jessica Olin (@olinj) September 17, 2013

I sent this tweet (and posted it as a status update on Facebook as well) in a moment of deep frustration. Leading up to that point, I'd had a string of interactions, with students, faculty, and staff that left me slightly gobsmacked. Although the specifics were different, in each moment I was being told, "Paper good. Electronic bad." I don't want to share further details since I'm not interested in shaming the people involved. What I want is to educate them. Even still, I can't help imagining these people talking like characters from Animal Farm:

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When I posted the above to my social networks, I was expecting it to be one of the many many tweets/Facebook status updates I send off into the abyss. I was wrong. In fact, the response was so strong, that I realized there was a blog post in it. However, before I go any further, I want you to know that I know writing this post to my typical audience is preaching to the converted. I see this more as me giving you ways to present the topic to those who still need convincing.

So, we need to ignore my previous exhortations that all sources should be evaluated based on the Five Ws, and pretend that we know absolutely nothing about the merit of different resources. Let's look at the kinds of arguments that might work to convince someone to change their stance on this issue:

• There is no such thing as a source that is never appropriate (go ahead, write an essay about Wikipedia without citing Wikipedia, and see what kind of response you get).
• Also, there is a risk in professors taking this kind of stance around students, particularly those who are younger than 25 and whose brains are still maturing, is that students can be so literal. I have, more than once, tried to bring a student over to a computer to show him/her how to use the online public access catalog, only to be told, "Oh, I'm not allowed to use online sources."
• What about all the craptastic, self-published books?
• What about all the refereed, web-based publications? One example is Disability Studies Quarterly, a source that, in the past, I required my own students to read.
• We also need to remind people that so many online sources are faithful reproductions of publications that were originally hard copies.
• A more practical argument is that, with book budgets being slashed, the books in the physical library can sometimes (though not always) be terribly out of date.

I tell people all these things, and yet some of them still insist that paper is supreme. Usually, though, if I'm persistent and keep presenting examples, I win them over.

How do you change people's minds about this? Also, why do you think we're still fighting this fight? Is it that nobody has tried to convince the "Paper good; electronic bad" crowd? Or is it something deeper?

Me, Too!: On Agendas in Libraries, Especially Mine

If you haven't yet read Chris Bourg's fantastic post, "Agendas: Everyone has one " and Barbara Fister's response, "Admitting Our Agendas," please do. The TL;DR synopsis of both posts is that both of these women are coming clean about having a driving force, an agenda behind their work in libraries. In Chris' case, she claims "a feminist and queer agenda for libraries [that] is a unapologeticly activist agenda, rooted in values of democracy, inclusion, and equality." And Barbara's push is reflected in her statement that, "We shouldn’t help students 'prove' something that is contrary to the evidence. We should help them find information and encourage them to form opinions based on the evidence."

While I am also a feminist who pushes students to deal with all the information they gather, not just the information that supports the opinion they had coming into their research, my own agenda is slightly different. And here's a hint:

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It's the reason I teach information literacy skills the way I do and the thing that drives me to make the library as appealing and inviting as I can. I want to get members of my community into my building, literally or figuratively, where I have a better chance of achieving my agenda. Why would this be behind everything I do as a librarian when I work at a college, and why would I admit it? Shouldn't I be focused on purely academic skills? Nope, nuh-uh, and not even, because my agenda is tied to knowing the truth about my students, even when the faculty members don't agree with me (which is thankfully less and less often as time goes by).

What I know is this: even at elite colleges and universities, most students will not go onto be professional academics. The majority of undergraduates are pursuing higher education because of the promise of better jobs. I've said it so many times in work conversations that I've lost track, but I'm putting it here because it is a (slightly pompous but) perfect way to capture my agenda: our education system is churning out a generation of Spartans, but what we need is Athenians. We need people who can think for themselves, not people who march lock step because it's what they were told to do. We need people who actually take the time to learn the stance of someone who's running for political office, not people who support the candidate who seems like s/he would be a good drinking buddy. To put it bluntly, my agenda is that I want to help graduate critical thinkers who are, therefore, well informed voters.

We've all got agendas when we think about it. For some of us, it's something that pushed us to pursue this career field in the first place. I applaud Chris and Barbara for coming clean with theirs, and have added mine to the list.

What's yours?

Librarians as College Recruiters

I've written before about how student retention is part of the responsibility of academic librarians, that it takes a whole college to graduate a student, but the truth is that it also takes a whole college to recruit the student in the first place. That's why I've spent time, a lot of it recently, building a relationship with the office of admissions at my new institution. It was long overdue, but I finally attended an admissions department meeting recently and I'm so glad I did,

I'm not 100% sure what they were expecting, but when I said, "I want to know how I can help you," they were obviously, and pleasantly, surprised. (Well, everyone but the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Enrollment, with whom I'm friends because we bonded over our shared love of Doctor Who shortly after I came to campus.)

After that general offer of assistance, I talked to the members of the admissions department about why I want to help them. Not everyone realizes it, but prospective students and their parents do take the library into account when making a decision about colleges. You won't be shocked to hear that the ACRL has a guide for prospective students to use when evaluating university and college libraries, but it might surprise you to hear that US News & World Report has something similar. In fact, at my previous institution, we created a page on the library's website that linked to those two documents as well as to the admissions department's web presence.

After I talked the admissions department up, I made my big move and revealed the reason I had wanted to connect with them in the first place. And that was this: I offered to come up with a list of talking points about the library for the admissions counselors and the student tour guides. I have overheard some wonky things being said by people leading these tours in my six months here, and I wanted to correct them, but I didn't want to overstep my bounds and offend the very people from whom I want help. I've worked at colleges where admissions got a bit huffy about how tours were conducted and, while the library was encouraged to correct mistakes that were made, we weren't really supposed to tell student tour guides what to say. Those admissions departments had their reasons for wanting the content to come from the tour guides instead of the library. Since I'm still learning the culture of my new institution, I tread very carefully as I tried to further my agenda.

I'm pleased to say that my offer was very warmly received. Huzzah! A major librarian win over which I'm still smiling a couple of weeks later.

If you're curious, here are the points I sent:

• Close to 40 computers available exclusively for students;
• Access to/delivery of the materials of almost 50 libraries in the state of Delaware through the Delaware Library Consortium (if we don’t have it, we can usually get it for you in 3-5 days);
• On campus access to some of the best electronic subscription based resources available, even from the dorms, and the library is close to making it so that anyone who is part of the Wesley College community will have access to these resources from anywhere with an internet connection;
• Open 90 hours per week during the school year, including being open until midnight Sunday through Thursday;
• In person assistance is available whenever the library is open, but we will soon be providing 24/7/365 online research assistance through the library’s website.

Since then, I've been doing some judicious eavesdropping. Some of what I've asked them to say was already in their repertoire, but most of those things weren't really on admissions' radar. I've heard them using the new talking points (yay!) and only had to pass along one correction to the assistant director. I want a consistent message going out to prospective students and their parents, so I'm going to have to keep vigilant. At the same time, I want to be sure to keep the admissions people happy, so I don't want to ride them too hard about it. The whole thing will be a balancing act of sorts, but it will be worth it.

Besides, when all else fails, I can interact with tour groups myself. Seeing the director when they come through lets parents know that we aren't kidding about the personal attention students get in a small college setting and it lets prospective students know that I'm approachable. That way we all win.

How about you all? Those of you who are (or who want to be) academic librarians, how much do you work with your college/university admissions department? Any tips to pass along?

Library or School Supply Warehouse? You Judge!

Picture by ME!

I've been thinking about office supplies a lot recently. To be fair, it's not just recently, but it is more on my mind now that I'm in charge of the budget where I work. More specifically, I've been wondering when it was that libraries got in the business of supplying pens, pencils, staplers, hole punches, and so on. To my mind, it's not a natural association.

Although I know better than to judge the members of my community (or any library's community) by my own standards, I can't help thinking about my behavior when I was an undergraduate. I would never have presumed even to ask to borrow a stapler or a paper clip or the like, let alone assume that one would be provided. And yet, now that I'm on the other side of the relationship, my undergraduate population does assume. It is such a matter of course that I've actually seen and heard students at multiple institutions getting testy when the stapler runs out of staples.

In the past, I wondered at the presumption, but now that I'm the boss lady, I'm also flinching at the money involved. This kind of thing isn't sustainable, obviously, and even less so with ever-shrinking budgets. I do have a few ideas of how to address the money vs. student needs issue, for instance I saw someone tweet about office supply vending machines in academic libraries and LOVE that idea. I've already started, in a somewhat desultory manner, to investigate what it would take to have such a set up in my library. I will definitely pursue this idea with more gusto in the future.

However, beyond how I'm going to slowly ween our community off of expecting the library to provide such things, I'm wondering what you all think of this phenomenon: is this normal? Do your patrons get huffy when you won't loan them a pair of scissors? Am I being obtuse by objecting to spend my budget replacing broken stapler after broken stapler? And, finally, when did this become a thing?