Category: Musings
Threshold Concepts, Ten Years On
It has been a decade since threshold concepts swept through information-literacy circles, and the framework that grew out of them is now old enough to be questioned by the people it trained. That is healthy. A good idea should be able to survive its own middle age.
The appeal was always obvious. Instead of a checklist of skills, threshold concepts gave us a map of the troublesome, transformative ideas a learner has to pass through to think like a researcher. The notion that authority is constructed and contextual, for instance, is not a fact to memorise but a doorway to walk through, and like any doorway it can be uncomfortable on the way.
Ten years on, my reservation is a practical one. Frameworks are easy to cite and hard to teach. A fifty-minute session does not transform anyone, and we do students a disservice if we pretend it does. What the framework gave me, in the end, was not a lesson plan but a kind of patience. Thresholds are crossed slowly, in their own time, long after the librarian has left the room. Our job is to hold the door open and resist the urge to shove.
The Library as Makerspace
The makerspace was sold to us as a revolution: 3D printers among the stacks, soldering irons beside the reference desk, a bold break from the dusty past. I love a good makerspace, but I have come to think the revolution was oversold, because libraries have been making things for a very long time.
The medieval scriptorium was a makerspace. The public library's sewing circle was a makerspace. The microfilm reader, the photocopier, the first clattering public computer: every one of them turned the library from a place you take things out of into a place you make things in. The tools change; the instinct does not. People come to the library to produce, not only to consume.
What the current wave gets right is the permission. A makerspace says, out loud, that it is fine to experiment, to fail, to make a mess in a building that spent a century asking for silence. That cultural shift matters more than any particular machine. The 3D printer will be obsolete in a decade. The permission to tinker, if we protect it, will outlast all of us.
Reading the Odds: Information Literacy in an Age of Infinite Choice
We tend to talk about information literacy as though it lives only in the library, somewhere between the database tutorial and the citation guide. I want to make the case that it lives everywhere, and that the most demanding test of a person's information skills is not an academic paper at all. It is the ordinary, high-stakes business of comparing options online.
Think about what an everyday reader is asked to do. Confronted with a dozen tabs, each promising the best price, the best review, or the best odds, they have to weigh sources that are all, to some degree, trying to sell them something. The grocery comparison site, the hotel aggregator, the sports platform: each presents numbers that look objective and are in fact carefully framed. Reading those numbers well is a genuine skill, and it is the same skill we teach when we ask a student to interrogate a scholarly claim.
Take the way enthusiasts research a betting market before they commit a penny. A careful reader will cross-check the figures a platform such as betpas publishes against independent sources, look for the terms hidden in the fine print, and notice when a headline number is doing more persuading than informing. Whatever one thinks of the activity itself, the method is pure information literacy: identify the claim, locate the evidence, weigh the source's interest, and decide.
My point is not to praise any particular site or pastime. It is that the evaluative habits we prize in the seminar room are exactly the habits that protect people in the marketplace. If we taught information literacy as a life skill rather than a coursework requirement, I suspect our students would thank us, and so would their wallets.
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Open Access at a Crossroads
Every October I teach a session on finding scholarly sources, and every October the conversation drifts, inevitably, to the question a sharp undergraduate always asks: “Why is this one locked and that one free?” It is a good question, and the honest answer is that the scholarly publishing system is in the middle of a slow, contested renegotiation.
Open access was supposed to be simple. Research that is largely funded by the public should be readable by the public. In practice the movement has splintered into a confusing alphabet of green, gold, diamond and hybrid routes, each with its own economics and its own winners. Article processing charges have shifted the paywall from the reader to the author, which solves one injustice by inventing another.
Librarians sit in an unusually honest seat for watching all this. We pay the invoices, we field the complaints, and we teach the students who cannot afford either. My own modest position is that access is an information-literacy issue as much as a budget issue. A student who understands why a paper is paywalled is better equipped to find a legitimate copy, to request it through interlibrary loan, or to recognise a predatory journal when one lands in their inbox.
We are at a crossroads, and the signpost is not especially clear. But the direction of travel seems settled: toward more openness, more slowly than the idealists hoped and more quickly than the incumbents would like. I will take it.
Preserving the Born-Digital: Lessons from a Decade of Web Archiving
When Daniel invited me to contribute a guest post to The Pinakes, I knew exactly which subject I wanted to raise: the strange, slippery problem of preserving things that were never printed. We have centuries of practice keeping paper alive. We have barely two decades of practice keeping a website alive, and the website is winning.
Callimachus could walk the stacks of Alexandria and point to a scroll. Our born-digital collections have no stacks. A single blog like this one is really a tangle of a database, a theme, a dozen plugins and a hosting account that renews, or does not. Lose any one piece and the whole thing can vanish between one capture and the next. The crawler that visits today may find a healthy page; the crawler that visits next spring may find a parked domain.
Three lessons from the trenches
First, capture early and capture often. The best preservation decision is the one made while the material still exists. Second, keep the context, not just the file. A PDF without its catalog record is an orphan; a web page without its stylesheet is a ransom note. Third, assume formats will rot. Plan for migration the way a gardener plans for winter, because the Flash players and proprietary readers of one decade are the dead links of the next.
None of this is glamorous. It is closer to plumbing than to scholarship. But it is the plumbing that lets the scholarship survive, and I think the old librarians of Alexandria would have recognised the instinct immediately. You index what you have, you copy what you love, and you hope the next generation is paying attention.
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Reframing the narrative: Upcoming CARL Conference paper
Do you know any exciting examples of historic academic library educational innovations? I want to know about them, and here’s why: my contributed paper proposal for the forthcoming CARL Conference was accepted. It’s titled Reframing the narrative: Librarians as innovators in the past and present, and it’s all about the educational innovations derived from the work of academic librarians. Of course, writing the application was the easy part - now it’s time to research and write! The conference assembles in April of 2016.
In keeping with the conference theme, What we talk about when we talk about value, my paper is going to argue that contrary to popular perception, academic libraries have a remarkable but often unknown history as centers of innovation on campus. This research will build on the work I did for my Kentucky Library Association Conference presentation, Blazed Pathways and Skillful Glancing, when I looked at a number of historical comparisons for the contemporary debate around literacy threshold concepts.
From my application:
There is a common narrative when discussing libraries and the value they provide on a college campus. According to this narrative, the traditional library was valued for the collection it stored, and the modern library is valued for the services it provides. Rapidly changing technology is seen as the catalyst for this change, and the library of today and tomorrow is described as a center for learning, one that fosters creativity and curates the expanding universe of information. While this future is exciting and places the library at the leading edge of innovation in higher education, this narrative undercuts the creativity and valuable services provided by librarians of the past.
This contributed paper will examine the creative strategies and innovative instruction methods employed by our librarian forerunners, and present a position that libraries have been at the heart of educational innovation for well over a century. The presenter will demonstrate that early academic libraries were far more innovative than conventional wisdom suggests, and provide historical research that shows many of the trends in vogue today, such as embedded librarianship, flipped instruction, and advocacy around scholarly communications, all have roots in the practices of those early librarians.
If you, dear reader, are aware of any interesting, historic examples of library innovation, please be in touch!
Continue reading Reframing the narrative: Upcoming CARL Conference paper »
The “Real Librarians” of Congress
The Librarian of Congress recently resigned. The New York Times had a rather unflattering portrait of James Billington’s time in office. Dr. Billington, a historian and Russia scholar by background, was nominated to the office by Ronald Reagan in 1987.
Dr. Billington was also the latest in a long line of white men to hold the office (the thirteenth, to be exact). I’d like to see the next nominee chosen from a diverse pool of experienced, professional candidates that can bring something different to the role – not an inexperienced political appointment. As the Times piece highlights, the Library of Congress is in need of tech-savvy and knowledgable leadership. This is important.
I’ve also seen it going around the social internet that there’s only ever been one “real librarian” as Librarian of Congress (L. Quincy Mumford, 1954-74). I had always heard that the Librarian of Congress was usually a historian, so I assumed that factoid was true. But since I’m a librarian, I decided to research it. Turns out, it’s not.
The historical tipping point from which the Library of Congress expanded from being a small Congressional reference collection into a national library was 1864 (under the leadership of Ainsworth Rand Spofford), which coincided with the national public library movement, slightly predates the establishment of the ALA, and the point at which “librarianship” became a distinct and specific career path. That was 151 years ago. Counting from then until now, the sitting Librarian of Congress has had professional library experience prior to their appointment for 101 of those years.
Why is this important?
If we let the narrative be that the Librarian of Congress isn’t usually a “real librarian,” we’ll get another non-librarian – even if we’re protesting that fact. We should highlight the fact that the non-librarians who have served were the exceptions, not the norm.
The reason Mumford is being credited as the only “real librarian” to serve as Librarian of Congress is the assumption that in order to be a librarian, someone has to have an MLIS. What makes a person a librarian? It can’t just be having the degree:
- There are plenty of people with an MLIS who don’t consider themselves librarians.
- There are a lot of working librarians who don’t have an MLIS degree.
- There are other library professionals who are knowledgeable and vital who have neither the degree nor the word “librarian” in their official title.
And it can’t just be having it in their title.
- There are plenty of unemployed or underemployed librarians. They are still librarians.
- There’s a pretty wide range of titles out there (with and without the word librarian in them).
So what does it come down to? I’d say knowledge and skills in library services (and what a wide range those services can be! And there are plenty of specialities) and a dose of self-identification.
Obtaining an MLIS is one way librarians gain knowledge and skills and develop a sense of identity. It is one marker of experience and ability. But it is not the only one, and not the only way.
Let’s get back to the question of Librarians of Congress, and whether they were “real librarians.”
Quick history lesson: while libraries are an ancient concept that date back to the origins of writing (there is evidence of Sumerian libraries), “librarianship” as a modern American profession didn’t develop until the mid-to-late 19th century. As the public library movement caught hold, the earliest full-time librarians mostly came from a wide range of backgrounds (there was no degree in “library sciences”). “Library schools” started with Dewey’s school at Columbia College, but an advanced degree – the MLS and its variations – did not appear until well into the 20th century.
So we can’t judge whether or not the early Librarians of Congress were “librarians” by whether or not they had an MLIS. They only way we can judge whether they were “real librarians” is by checking whether or not they had library or related experience prior to their nomination.
Here’s the full list:
- John Jay Beckley, 1802-1807
- Patrick Magruder, 1807-1815
- George Watterson, 1815-1829
- John Silva Meehan, 1829-1861
- John G. Stephenson, 1861-1864
- Ainsworth Rand Spofford, 1864-1897
- John Russell Young, 1897-1899
- Herbert Putnam, 1899-1939
- Archibald Macleish, 1939-1944
- Luther Evans, 1945-1953
- L. Quincy Mumford, 1954-1974
- Daniel J. Boorstin, 1975-1987
- James Billington, 1987-2015
When the Library of Congress was first established, it was a small reference collection for the use of the members of Congress. Librarian of Congress was not a separate position, but just part of the responsibilities of the Clerk of the House of Representatives. That covers Beckley and Magruder. We’ll leave them completely out of this reckoning.
The first actual full time “Librarian of Congress” was George Watterson. The position was separated from the Clerkship since Congress had recently purchased Jefferson’s personal library to replace what was destroyed by the British in the War of 1812. Dealing with that influx of books required a full-timer. Watterson was a lawyer by education, a writer by craft, and a newspaper editor by trade. He did not work in a library or similar institution prior to his appointment. All the major decisions regarding the library were made by a congressional committee, not by Watterson. Watterson was not a “real librarian,” but “librarianship” was not an independent profession in his era.
Watterson was followed by John Silva Meehan. He was a printer. While Librarian of Congress, he was not allowed to choose books – those decisions were made by the Congressional committee chair – and the LOC was small, still intended only for congressional use. So Meehan wasn’t a librarian, either, but the Library of Congress wasn’t really a library (yet), and like Watterson, librarianship was not considered an independent profession when he was appointed.
Stephenson was a physician who continued his medical practice even after his appointment. So…not a librarian. At all. And not a good appointment (that one was on Lincoln).
But Stephenson’s successor was Ainsworth Rand Spofford, who had previously served as Assistant Librarian of Congress. Voila! Previous professional experience. This also coincided with the national public library movement, which saw “librarianship” as a standalone profession become a reality. Under Spofford’s leadership, the Library of Congress grew into a genuine national library. Even after he was replaced as Librarian of Congress, Spofford continued to work as Chief Assistant Librarian of Congress. He was clearly a longtime, dedicated library professional.
We can chalk Spofford up as the first “real librarian” to serve as Librarian of Congress, and his term also marks the beginning of the Library’s modern era.
John Russell Young was a political appointment with a background in journalism, business, and politics. He only lasted two years before his death. Not a “real librarian.”
Herbert Putnam was Librarian of Congress from 1899-1939. He’s the innovator of the Library of Congress Classification System, which arguably makes him on par with Dewey for widespread influence on library science. Before his post with the Library of Congress, he was head of the Minneapolis Athenaeum, head of the Minneapolis Public Library, and Superintendent of the Boston Public Library – at the time, the largest public library in the country. He was also a very active early member of the ALA.
Putnam was clearly a “real librarian.” One of the most influential in American library history.
Archibald Macleish was a writer and poet. Not only was he not a “real librarian,” that was exactly why he was nominated. According to the LOC’s biography of Macleish, “Roosevelt proclaimed that the job of Librarian of Congress required not a professional librarian but ‘a gentleman and a scholar.’” The ALA protested his nomination, but it passed Congress by a wide margin. This was the first clear, intentional shift away from appointing librarians to be Librarian of Congress.
Luthor Evans is a different case than Macleish. He was a political scientist by education, but he was director of the LOC’s Legislative Reference Service for six years before his appointment, and served as Acting Librarian of Congress when Macleish was absent. So he had six years of leadership experience in a library before he was appointed. LOC’s Evans biography also states that he “plunged into technical library issues.” I’d say that would make Evans a “real librarian” and not just a political appointment.
Mumford had an MLS [correction, 2/24: a BS in Library Science], worked for a long time at NYPL and Cleveland Public, and served as President of the ALA before his appointment as Librarian of Congress. Definitely a “real librarian.”
Boorstin is a tricky case. A Rhodes Scholar with a law degree, he had a long and successful academic career as a professor of history. Impressive, but not librarianship. But he also was the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of History and Technology, a significant cultural institution not unlike the Library of Congress in scope. You could argue he had comparable, relevant experience. However, ALA protested Boostin’s appointment, so I’ll put him down as not a “real librarian.”
Boorstin was followed by Billington. Not a “real librarian.”
So if we start counting with Spofford’s term – when the Library of Congress actually became a national library – we have four “real librarians,” and four who were not, and 101 out of 151 years with librarian leadership.
I think it’s a mistake to conflate having an MLIS and being a librarian. If the best candidate has had noteworthy practical and administrative work in a library, museum, or archive, that’s more important than the right master’s degree.
In addition to impressive professional credentials, it would be thrilling to see a candidate who brings a different life experience to the role than their thirteen white male predecessors.
We shall see.
Note: an early draft of this post was originally published on tumblr.
Inspecting the Frame: The Draft Information Literacy Framework, Pt. 2
In the first half of “Investigating the Frame,” I addressed the threshold concept theory at the heart of the new Framework for Information Literacy Instruction, currently in its third draft. I closed with the comment that we should shift the focus of our discussions to the details of the six frames, and how they serve us as instructors, rather than continuing the debate over the legitimacy of threshold concept theory.
I also argued that the move from the standards to the frames is not as dramatic a shift as it might appear at first. By tracking our instruction sessions and reference interactions, my colleague Nicole Branch and I have noticed that certain frames align consistently with existing standards. This is not a bad thing - it eases the transition from one guiding document to the next.
Rubric Soul
One concern I had as an outside observer of the new Framework was about methods of assessment (I even asked the committee about that during the open forum at ALA). I’m not alone in this; I’ve seen the same question asked by many others. However, I’m feeling more confident about assessment under this new model thanks to a recent exercise we undertook at my place of work.
My library uses a rubric to evaluate information use in senior capstone papers in order to assess our information literacy instruction. Our rubric is an amalgamation and adaptation of several of the rubrics available through RAILS, and was built in relation to the ACRL Standards. Each area of evaluation relates to one of the ACRL Standards. For example, ACRL Standard One (the information literate student determines the nature and extent of the information needed) is represented by two criteria: defining the topic, and defining the research question or thesis statement. Each paper is scored on a zero to three scale for each area of evaluation, and we have twelve criteria total.
As we were updating our rubric for the fall semester, we also looked at the six threshold concepts in the new framework. Could each of our areas of evaluation be directly connected to one of the six threshold concepts? Would each threshold concept be represented? As we try to determine if these six frames genuinely represent the discipline of information literacy, retroactively assigning them to our working assessment seemed like a good way to investigate their accuracy and breadth of coverage.
It turned out each of our areas of evaluation did fit into one of the six frames, and five of the six frames were represented.
There was not necessarily a direct one-to-one relationship between the frames and the standards; we had four areas of evaluation connected to ACRL Standard Three, and while we assigned three of them to “Authority is Constructed and Contextual,” one of them was a better fit for “Research as Inquiry.” Our areas of evaluation connected to ACRL Standard Five were similarly divided, in this case between “Scholarship is a Conversation” and “Information Has Value.”
The only frame we could not assign to one of our areas of evaluation was “searching is strategic” (to use the third draft’s verbiage). That wasn’t a surprise. We only evaluate the capstone papers themselves, and we do not witness the student’s information search and retrieval process. We had omitted ACRL Standard Two from this particular assessment tool when we first devised it. Standard Two (the information literate student accesses needed information effectively and efficiently) and the Searching frame are clearly connected.
Do they know Magellan died?
Forgive me for making a pop culture analogy: on a recent episode of the TV show Top Chef, the eight competitors were divided into two teams and each team was tasked with opening a restaurant in 48 hours. One of the two teams couldn’t settle on a unifying theme for their menu, so they decided to go with an “explorer” theme and a globe-trotting menu. In a fit of optimism, they named their pop-up restaurant “Magellan.” Do they know that Magellan died? So did their direction-less restaurant, and their team lost the challenge.
I bring this up because one of the most burning topics between draft two and draft three was the verbiage change from “searching as exploration” to “searching is strategic.” Both Jacob Berg and Donna Witek disliked this change; Jake wanted to shift it back, and Donna suggested “searching is investigative.” I think highly of both Jake and Donna, but in this instance I disagree.
I think “searching is strategic” is the best language for this frame. In fact, I think it’s a significant improvement over the alternatives. Exploration is a romantic ideal, and we all want our students to eagerly cast off from the pier on a voyage to discover new ideas and information. However, it’s far more effective to set sail with a plan. Strategy is a scaleable term; it does not imply expertise. Even the simplest Google search can be far more effective with some simple strategies in place (for example, substitute academic synonyms for your typical keywords, and you’ll get a completely different set of results). That’s a strategy we teach our first-year students (in fact, search strategy is the first lesson in our curriculum map).
Upper division students might employ more nuanced strategies, such as controlled vocabulary searches in research databases. Another example might be the PICOT methodology I teach to the students in our graduate School of Nursing. The right search strategy depends on the information need, and this is important for students to understand. I don’t think “searching as exploration” accomplishes that.
Processing • Binding
The hardest threshold concept to fit to our rubric’s areas of evaluation (aside from the aforementioned “searching is strategic”) was “information creation as a process.” I think this frame has suffered an identity crisis through the revision process. It was originally titled “format as a process,” and defined as follows:
Format is the way tangible knowledge is disseminated. The essential characteristic of format is the underlying process of information creation, production, and dissemination, rather than how the content is delivered or experienced.
In draft three, both the title and definition had changed:
Information Creation as a Process refers to the understanding that the purpose, message, and delivery of information are intentional acts of creation. Recognizing the nature of information creation, experts look to the underlying processes of creation as well as the final product to critically evaluate the usefulness of the information.
This frame - especially in its earlier form - seems focused on the user understanding the intent of the information creator in order to understand how to best use that source. With online research, you can’t easily judge a source’s format by how it is processed and bound. This can be as simple as an undergraduate understanding the appropriate research use of an online reference entry, or can relate to more complex questions such as the reliability of social media reporting in the wake of breaking news.
But the change in title implies the committee would like this frame to be about more than just format. It should be about the complete circle of the information creation process, from beginning to end. If that’s the case, the knowledge practices and dispositions need to reflect the creative act as well as analysis of the final product. In that case, it may need to inherit some of the knowledge practices and dispositions currently assigned to other threshold concepts.
Donna Witek, in her excellent line-by-line analysis of the third draft, noticed that some of the frames (most notably “research as inquiry”) were much longer than the others. “Research as inquiry” includes knowledge practices and dispositions such as “organize information in meaningful ways” and “manage information effectively.” Those could be a better fit with the information creation frame. If not, the committee might be better off returning to the original “format as a process.”
Defining Value
The best change from draft two to draft three was the “information has value” frame. Gone is this original definition:
Information has Value acknowledges that the creation of information and products derived from information requires a commitment of time, original thought, and resources that need to be respected by those seeking to use these products, or create their own based on the work of others. In addition, information may be valued more or less highly based on its creator, its audience/consumer, or its message.
It has been replaced by the following:
The Information Has Value frame refers to the understanding that information possesses several dimensions of value, including as a commodity, as a means of education, as a means to influence, and as a means of negotiating and understanding the world. The flow of information through systems of production and dissemination is impacted by legal, sociopolitical, and economic interests.
I see this change as a very positive move on the part of the committee. The former definition explicitly privileged content creators (and by extension, copyright), reducing information seekers (our library users) to “those seeking to use these products,” and not agents with their own rights and privileges (as governed by fair use, the first sale doctrine, etc.). Content creators should, of course, own the rights to their work, and the ethical use of work belonging to others is important. However, this new definition, while still acknowledging information’s role as a commodity, does a better job of encapsulating the bigger picture.
Blazed Pathways
The open period for comments on the third draft closed on Friday, December 12, so now those of us on the outside must eagerly await the next revision.
In the meantime, my next step will be to study the information literacy threshold concepts from the historical perspective: on January 14th, my Kentucky Library Association talk Blazed Pathways and Skillful Glancing: Using the Lens of Library History to Focus on the New Information Literacy Framework will be reborn as a webinar, sponsored by the ALISE Historical Interest Group. Participation will be free for ALISE members and the first 20 non-member registrants. We will be exploring the writings of pioneering, 19th century instructional librarians to see if there is evidence of encounters with the same threshold concepts we are discussing today.
I will share registration details as soon as it opens up in early January. Please join me if you can!
Continue reading Inspecting the Frame: The Draft Information Literacy Framework, Pt. 2 »
