In simpler language, I’m a librarian now. And not only am I librarian, but this position specifically, and the institution for which I’ll be working, match exactly what I want to be doing and where I want to be. Holy Names is a small but historic institution that has been a part of the fabric of Oakland for well over a century. Founded on the shores of Lake Merritt, first as a convent for girls and eventually developing into a teacher’s college for women, the school moved into the Oakland Hills in the fifties and started to expand its programs into a broad variety of disciplines. It became coed in the 1970s and went from being Holy Names College to Holy Names University in 2004 (with the addition of graduate-level programs).

What do I love about HNU?

• It’s small. Enrollment just tops 1,000, meaning that I’ll get to know students and faculty personally, and work with them in-depth.
• The staff at Cushing Library are energetic and creative. While it is a small team, they are ready to adopt cutting edge ideas, such as trialing OCLC’s Navigator.
• Instead of getting lost in a big department at a large school, I’ll be on the front lines and get to do a little bit of everything: instruction, reference, digitization, and managing online resources.

The details of this position — which my new boss, library director Karen Schneider wrote about on her blog, Free Range Librarian, encapsulates much of my philosophical approach to the profession that I wrote about in my e-Portfolio. I believe strongly that information is information (and a book is a book be it paper or pixels). It is our job as librarians to provide the easiest and most convenient access to that information, be it digital, print, online or off. In this position, I’ll be responsible for the library’s digital assets and ensuring easy, navigable access to information to our patrons.

I also believe in educating our students and faculty about critically judging source materials and improving their searching skills both through the library’s resources and through the internet at large; I will be in charge of building a program to teach exactly that to our University community.

My duties will be substantial and the challenges significant. I can’t wait.

I start July 14.

It was fun.

This is the part of the blog post were I should be putting up a series of photos of our night out (since a handful of pictures are worth thousands of words). But I didn’t bring a camera. Imagine instead a photo of our three tables cobbled together in a gerrymandered conquest of half the bar’s floorspace; a late-night rendezvous at a taquería where we indulged in tacos, burritos and tortas; margaritas the size of a pint; frenzied debates on the worthiness of Oakland versus San Francisco. Oh, and we talked about libraries too.

It was so much fun that we’ll do it again. Join the Information Amateurs Social Club on Facebook if you want to hear about it when we do.

Changing the Metrics

The first plenary lecture, by Dr. Peter Hernon of Simmons College, covered a broad span of the issues he sees in the profession and some emerging trends. His shock statistic was that reference desk approaches are down 80% from where they used to be. This confirms what everyone has been saying since the advent of internet search: reference, as a department and core duty of librarianship, is in trouble.

I’ve written about reference before, and made it clear that I don’t believe reference is dead (see There He Sat With An Answer For All and my e-Portfolio Competency I). Still, even as an ardent backer of continued (though diversified) reference service, I have to agree that a MLIS graduate can no longer claim to be solely a reference specialist and expect to find work. These days, a librarian needs to have a wider set of skills; capable of providing reference, yes, but inevitably even a reference department librarian will have responsibilities in library instruction, collection development, electronic resources and so on.

The bigger issue is that many traditional statistics of library usage – reference inquiries, circulation, and so on – often indicate to university administrators that libraries are declining, ergo library budgets get cut. So libraries need to produce research – quantitative evidence – to show administrators all of the benefits of continued library support. It needs to become clear what value libraries are supplying students; what are students getting per tuition dollar provided to the library? New metrics can show just how vital libraries remain (some of the presentations I discussed in the Post-CARL Review, Pt. 1 had examples of just the sorts of quantitative research libraries can be doing).

Early Career Librarians

One of the final-day workshops I attended at the conference was a discussion of issues for early career librarians, hosted by Katherine O’Clair of Cal Poly, SLO. There was a lot of practical advice to be had, both in a general sense, and some for me and my situation specifically. Since it was an open discussion, a lot of the attendees had different points of view; some reiterated the commonly held belief that if you’re a paraprofessional (instead of a librarian) for more than a couple years, you’re stuck being a paraprofessional forever. Others disputed that assumption on the basis of the current economy; hiring managers will be more forgiving of non-professional level work on your résumé given of how few opportunities are out there right now.

The eventual consensus was that getting your first professional level job isn’t a function of how long you have or haven’t worked as a paraprofessional, but rather the relationship you’ve developed with your professional level colleagues, peers and professional organizations. It’s vital to develop connections, attend conferences, and write papers; these activities show a professional-level of interest and can make up for any deficiencies on your curriculum vitae.

Some very good personal advice I received from an established librarian attending the session was that my digitization experience at the California Academy of Sciences, while archival by nature and not at an academic library, still provided me a skill-set a lot of libraries don’t have on staff; he made the point that even if I’m applying for a reference or instructional-heavy academic position, I should promote my digitizing experience. That skill – even if a library hadn’t considered it a priority – could make me a more attractive candidate. I’m capable of stretching a job description (and an FTE) to include new responsibilities, increasing my value.

That concept really holds true to any skill you might have. Don’t discard arrows from your quiver just because they aren’t listed in a posted job description. Make sure a library that is hiring knows all the different things you can do (budgeting experience? supervisory experience? Mention it).

Overall, I feel I came away from the conference with a better idea of current trends in academic libraries and how to better market myself in what is a competitive market. And those are marks of a successful conference-going experience (another mark would be a good time socializing and networking; I’ll make that Pt. 3 – coming soon!).

About ten of the twenty-four official discussion sessions were focused on information literacy and instruction. Of these, I attended several, and came away with a lot of good ideas and an appreciation for the serious research going on in the subject right now.

Longitudinal Research

Three staff librarians from Cal State-Long Beach presented their ongoing, 6-year research endeavor to determine the effectiveness of their library instruction program. Their presentation, “Are They Getting It: Seeking Evidence of Students’ Research Behavior Over Time” described their grant-funded project from its inception to its current state, two years into the study.

I’m impressed with the depth of their research. They started by developing a large sample of freshman students with the intention of following them throughout their education. Their analysis of the students’ research skills extend to studying the students’ research paper bibliographies for source and citation quality. This sort of extensive, longitudinal study is difficult to implement and ties up a lot of staff time and resources, but the results — sure to be published — will be of use to universities and colleges throughout California and beyond (which is why CARL was the main grant-giving body behind the project). It’s easy to suppose how and why information literacy programs are successful or not; it’s another thing to really study what’s happening in a quantitative manner.

One interesting takeaway from their presentation was their use of a statistician to analyze the substantial data their surveys were generating. You can’t merely collect information — it needs to be analyzed in a meaningful way. Sometimes it is best to bring in an outside expert instead of relying on in-house staff. Their statistician was able to model their data in several dimensions and changed their whole perspective on the information they had gathered — and saved the time and energy of the librarians themselves.

The presenters — Susan Jackson, Karin Griffin and Carol Perruso, all of CSULB — also provided extensive survey details in the form of handouts, including a timeline, survey questions, and project budget. While the survey will run for several years yet, I’m looking forward to their eventual results and what it will teach us about what works and what doesn’t, and how research behavior is evolving.

Working With a Campus Assessment Coordinator

Another example of using outsider expertise came from the presentation “Upstairs-Downstairs: Working with a Campus Assessment Coordinator and Other Allies for Effective Information Literacy Assessment” by Golden Gate University librarians Amy Hofer and Margot Hanson. In this case, their outsider was really an insider: the existing GGU Campus Assessment Coordinator. Still, they were reaching outside the lines of library staff to work with someone with a campus-wide responsibility, and more importantly, an understanding of program assessment.

According to their presentation, the advice and administrative approval they got from their use of the Campus Assesment Coordinator was essential for the success of their program study, which involved the startup of a new, embedded library instruction program that moved away from “one shot” instructional sessions in favor of an ongoing, semester-long engagement with a class. Their Assessment Coordinator started by asking what a successful program actually looked like, who was the audience for their study, and suggesting the use of a control group to put the study’s findings in context. They also devised measures to test discernible improvement in actual information use, rather than relying on the students’ self-assessment of their own information literacy (in the form of traditional satisfaction surveys).

Hofer and Hanson narrowed their research by focusing on a specific segment of the GGU student body, a special program for foreign-born students developing their English-language research skills (the PLUS program). Golden Gate University has an unusually high level of international students due to its emphasis on graduate-level business programs and location in the heart of downtown San Francisco. They were able to measure student research skills based on written tests and an analysis of work performed at the beginning and at the end of the school term, and saw marked improvement in two of the three categories they measured (the hardest area to improve was the students’ choice of subject, which is a critical thinking skill that can extend beyond the library’s sphere of influence).

The Golden Gate University study was a well-orchestrated example of research that would be easier to implement than CSULB’s expensive, time-consuming longitudinal study that would still yield relevant institutional results. More information about this study, including some of the test questions and suggested further reading is available here.

The Post-Google World

The final presentation at the conference I attended was an informative workshop built around information literacy program curriculum, and improving lesson content by reverse engineering the process: start with the (desired) results, and work backwards to build your lesson plan. Korey Brunetti and Lori Townsend of CSU-East Bay were joined by Julian Prentice of Chabot College to lead this session (Let’s Try This Again: Redefining the Content of Information Literacy for a Post-Google World) that combined an initial group presentation with a workshop-style open discussion using Prezi to capture the assembled attendees’ ideas.

There were a few big concepts that emerged:

• Keep your goals simple — reduce, reduce, reduce superfluous objectives in favor of imparting a few key, simple ideas on your students.
• Emphasize critical thinking skills across mediums. Ultimately, the source of a citation doesn’t matter (open web vs. subscription database vs. government website etc.), it’s the quality and verifiability of that source.
• Understand how contemporary students work and integrate better tools and critical decision-making into their existing study patterns.

This sessions’ notes and final “Prezi” will appear in the forthcoming CARL Conference Digital Proceedings.

Take-Home Lessons

I found a number of take-home lessons in this focus on information literacy programs. Beyond the simple opportunity to see how different libraries and universities are pursuing information instruction, it was instructive to see the value of both long-term and short-term research for improving existing programs, jump starting expanded programs and ultimately — and perhaps most importantly — proving the library’s enduring value to campus administrations.

Through each of these sessions were also woven excellent ideas for instruction curriculum in the 21st century; how best to capture the students’ attention and impart meaningful lessons that will actually impact their research methods in a positive way.

My next post will cover some of the career-development issues discussed at the conference, including Dr. Peter Hernon’s plenary lecture.

Thus the idea of the Information Amateurs was born. Early career (ish) professionals getting together to swap stories and job seeking hints, all over a libation or perhaps two. This is a non-discriminatory concept;  I like breaking down silos, so public, academic or special librarians are all welcome, as are archivists, current students or various other denominations.

The first Information Amateurs Happy Hour is going to be Friday, April 30th at the Latin American Club in San Francisco’s Mission District (22nd Street at Valencia). It’s entirely possible it might be just Greg and I. Or 30 people could show up in a crowded bar. So far the invite list includes people I just met this weekend at CARL, people I haven’t run into since a class a couple years ago, some of my closest friends in the profession, and people I’ve never even met that are connected through Greg.

If you’re reading this and haven’t been invited, you’re invited. If you’re interested, contact me via the options on my “about” tab or just respond to this Facebook invitation.

If we get a big response, the Information Amateurs Social Club will officially be born.

It’s a bittersweet departure because of the fun I’ve had, the skills I’ve learned, and the connections I’ve made. First, credit for how enjoyable it’s been should be given to the people I work with: Christina, who for my months as an intern was my roommate in the Corsi Digital Lab, and then, when she went on maternity leave, the reason I had a professional opportunity; Becky, who is funny, lively, takes long runs in the rain and taught me a lot about life sciences librarianship (taxonomy!); and most of all, my supervisor, Danielle, who has patiently taught me how to handle the Academy’s historic materials, how to curate an informative archival display, and all sorts of digital asset management details they never get to in library school. I appreciate the patience they’ve shown in teaching me the rigging of the good schooner Academy.

Working in the Academy’s archives is quite an adventure. These aren’t dry and dusty collections; I learned about Alvin Seale, a headstrong turn-of-the-century scientist and adventurer who scoured the South Pacific for feather cloaks and cannibals; the great matriarch of botany Alice Eastwood and how she rescued specimens in the midst of the 1906 disaster; and scientific explorers like Rollo Beck and Templeton Crocker and their high-seas voyages to the Galapagos and beyond. I spent weeks delving into our materials on the arctic north and became an accidental expert on pelagic sealing, the Pribilof Islands, and the strange things that happen in the Bering Sea.

But all this was temporary, and I’ll be moving on. Fortunately, the skills I’ve learned are not.

My image in this week’s “temporary” diptych is the iconic orange band that’s been around my neck since last summer, the one that I’ll soon be giving up.

I used a printing service called Moo to make my cards, and one of the options they offer is to print a photograph on the reverse side (fantastic print quality, by the way — I’m very happy with the results).

I chose six different images, all taken by me.

The one in the upper left is a photo of the grand reading room of the New York Public Library, which was one of the first things I posted on this blog and the background image on my twitter feed.

The second image, upper right, is a little more personal to my family. In the late 1920s and early ’30s my grandfather was a marionetteer, and the image is a detail from the letterhead of his company, the Domino Marionettes. The surviving collection of his handcrafted wooden puppets — a mix of billy goats, characters from Greek myths, and Punch and Judy handpuppets — is one of our most treasured family possessions.

The third and fourth photos were both taken in the printing press room of UC-Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. I find the iconography of print — both in its historical context and the newer, digital iterations — fascinating, so I took a few photos during a Lissten-sponsored tour and chose to use these two on my cards. One is the stack of type trays, the other is a page laid out ready for printing.

The fifth photo, on the lower left, is the first image I used in the ongoing Diptych project. It’s actually a photograph of the penguin tank at my erstwhile place of employment, the California Academy of Sciences. Obviously, there are no penguins in the photograph — it’s just an abstract image meant to capture the concept of “water”. The sixth photo, on the lower right, is a spinning sand table at San Francisco’s Exploratorium (I recommend going to their webpage and pressing the button. The one they tell you not to press).

Full size images — plus an uncropped version of my grandfather’s letterhead — are available on flickr.

The Papers and Proceedings of the ALA for 1891 and 1892 – available freely on Google Books – are filled with interesting personal and professional notes on the event, including one late night tour of subterranean Chinatown haunts (complete with Chinese opera). Librarians have been writing up accounts of their adventures for far longer than the Age of Blogging!

In 2010, the ALA Conference remains a mainstay event, but with far more than the 50 attendees of 1891 (and developed in ways that Cheney, Dewey and Windsor likely never anticipated). Meanwhile, there is an endless number of focused events a librarian can attend based on specialty, region, and various other factors. Some now take place entirely online (robbing us of the charm of the three month train trip…)

So far I’ve only dipped my toe in one library conference, the 2008 California Library Association (CLA) Conference. I was a San José State SLIS student at the time and was able to attend free of charge in return for volunteer hours at the Infopeople Booth. It was a worthy trade. I found a presentation on Zotero to be quite useful, and greatly enjoyed the keynote speakers Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. The booth time itself turned out to be a great hands-on learning experience with a variety of interesting gadgets and gizmos (with varying degrees of library-related usefulness). However, because of other commitments my time at the conference was limited.

I’ll have a more substantial conference experience with the upcoming California Academic and Research Libraries conference in Sacramento, April 8-10. I plan on attending the entire event (I’ll be commuting in each day with my friend Carolyn in lieu of the cross-country train ride). And while my experience in Sacramento may lack late night adventures in Chinese Opera, I’ll still do my best to write up accounts of my adventures on these digital pages here.

I feel fortunate that I am now able to turn those promises into concrete action.

I am very proud and excited to announce that I have been nominated to join the Ilene F. Rockman Scholarship Committee on behalf of the California Academic & Research Libraries (CARL) association. CARL is the California chapter of the ACRL, which in turn is the division of the ALA (American Library Association) that focuses on the needs of academic and research librarians. I will be one of five committee members who promotes the scholarships, reviews applications and helps select winners (current Master’s Students in Library and Information Science). The scholarship is given to two recipients in even numbered years to help fund the recipients’ participation in the biennial CARL conference, and in odd numbered years it sponsors one student’s trip to the national ACRL conference. The hope is that budding professionals will have the opportunity to participate in conferences and thereby learn themselves how to become active in their profession.

This opportunity is due entirely to the great Penny Scott, outgoing chairperson of the Rockman Scholarship Committee, a fantastic mentor who has provided me a sterling example of how to give back to the profession, and whose path I feel honored to follow.

So what will my responsibilities entail? The bulk of my workload will be digital archiving — scanning the Academy’s impressive collection of archival and curatorial photographs (from prints, books, slides and transparencies) to CDL standards, creating the accompanying Dublin Core-based metadata, organizing the servers, and operating the Cumulus digital asset management system that stores the collection.  I will also pitch in on archival reference questions, serving as the aide-de-camp for the Archives and Digital Collections Librarian as needed.

Of course, it’s great to find a paying job in the current economic climate. But beyond the wages, this job is a fantastic opportunity because of the new digital archiving skills I’m learning, the fantastic workplace and coworkers (with whom I’ve been interning since the summer), and the overall mission and orientation of the Academy, very much in line with that of my former longtime workplace, The Nature Conservancy. It further burnishes my credentials in the natural sciences, an area of interest of mine.

As a temporary position, this role adds to my résumé while still leaving me free to pursue longer-term appointments for after it wraps in mid-April. It all adds up to being the perfect opportunity.