Week 10 Reading and Class Reflection

Last week’s class

I think the one-shot workshop was a good warm-up for the webinars, since it really drove home some of the issues faced by both the presenters and the audience. As a presenter, I felt a little frustrated to have such a big topic and so little time, and was glad that we put together handouts for our audience, since those made me feel like the things that we didn’t get to discuss would be available to them if they wanted to learn more. In the scope of our workshop, the quizzes that we opened with weren’t very useful by themselves, but they would have been fantastic if we actually were going to do a series of workshops. For example, a lot of people thought that ideas were protected by copyright, and the implications of that alone would make a great workshop.

As an audience member, my favorite workshops were those that taught something. Having a specific, manageable lesson made a workshop feel more relevant and more streamlined than having a vaguer goal of raising awareness or discussing an issue without trying to resolve anything. Our own workshop fell more on the “raising awareness” side, which I feel bad about considering that I preferred more educational workshops as a participant. I think having a nice balance of prepared presentation and group discussion was a positive as well. And a final observation: as much as I love cupcakes, they are a terrible idea for a situation like this. They’re messy and take more concentration to eat than cookies do, and dealing with the wrappers and napkins distracted the audience a little. Next time, they get nothing but a Werthers.

AALL Webinar

This was one of the few AALL webinars available to members for free, and it purported to explain the resources available with an AALL membership, which I thought might be useful since I’ve only been a member since October, and I’m sure there is information on the website that I haven’t explored yet. Unfortunately, most of what I learned from the webinar was what NOT to do in our upcoming webinars. For example, the screen consisted entirely of slides throughout most of the presentation; although the presenters referred to handouts that pre-registered participants received, there was no way to access those if you viewed the webinar from the archive, as I did. There were two brief polls during the webinar, one asking how long the participants had been AALL members and one asking which social networking tools were used by participants. The last 4 minutes or so consisted of a Q and A session, but the questions asked weren’t visible to participants; only the presenters could see them, and they repeated them back. Basically, the webinar consisted of presenters reciting a script over a series of Powerpoint slides. Aside from those few minutes of questions and the polls, there was no interactivity; if I had set aside time to attend this when it was scheduled, I would have been pretty upset, since the lack of interactivity meant that it wouldn’t have been any more helpful live than it was archived. I think interactivity really is key in producing an engaging webinar, and I hope to include live chat that is open to everyone in the webinar that we produce. I think the most irritating thing about the AALL webinar, though, was that it didn’t teach me anything new; all of the information that they presented is easily available on the website, so there was no educational value for me. So besides interactivity, I think the most important ingredient in a successful webinar is a definable take-away for the participants; people are likely to enjoy this kind of experience more when they can walk away from it feeling better-informed than they were when they logged on.

This Week’s Readings

Speaking of things that didn’t teach me much of anything, the Montgomery article would probably have felt a lot more revelatory back in January, before I spent several months immersed in technology applications for librarianship. Even then, the tone would have seemed a little out of date; I’m surprised that this was published in 2010, since most of the technology described has been around for years. The painstakingly thorough explanation of Facebook and sentences like, “If you want to connect with a college student today, go online,” would have made this feel outdated several years ago. I guess the references to Twitter were more contemporary, but even that has been around for a while now. I appreciate the intentions behind the piece, and that it tried to explain the relevance of embedded librarianship, but I think that the intended audience for this is a different kind of librarian than the kind SI produces: someone much less comfortable with social networking and emerging technology than are my peers and I.

How People Learn Chapter 7 raised some great points about the importance of knowing your subject matter when you teach. I imagine that the public library people won’t have found much value in this (or did you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!) but I thought it highlighted an issue I’ve been thinking about lately: how can an academic librarian effectively teach students how to research a discipline in which the librarian hasn’t been thoroughly trained? I’m getting a lot out of SI, but there’s absolutely no way I’d be prepared to teach law students if I hadn’t gone through law school myself. Worse yet, if I were going to become a law librarian without going to law school, I doubt if I’d have any idea how much knowledge I didn’t have. You’d have to learn on the job, which would make you basically useless for the first year or two. Why on earth does anyone hire a law librarian without a JD? In a law firm, librarians hardly ever have JDs; even in academic law libraries, they’re helpful but not always required. How can those librarians initially provide great service without knowing not only research methods but also the structure of the law itself? And yet, somehow that system must be working. Law firms are all about the bottom line, so it stands to reason that they hire librarians from whom they can get the best research at the most reasonable cost. What am I missing here?

And I know it probably sounds like I’m patting myself on the back an awful lot, but it’s actually more like breathing a sigh of relief that I’m not grossly under-qualified for the career I’ve chosen. By the time I graduate from SI, I’ll have almost ten years of post-secondary education under my belt. It feels good to know that most of that time and money wasn’t wasted, and that it will make me a better librarian.

I got a LOT out of the American University article about embedded librarians, though, mostly because it challenged my perception of what an embedded librarian would be. I guess one of the nice things about law librarianship is that law libraries are almost always either within or right next to the law schools that they serve; as an academic law librarian, I’ll probably be lucky enough to be physically present with the students and faculty. The online component is less well-established, though; I think most academic law libraries now provide reference via chat, usually on Meebo, but the business librarian in this article seems to have struck a great balance, complementing his physical interactions with the business school with his virtual ones. This article actually gave me kind of a genius idea, maybe, but I’m not going to write about it because I don’t want to jinx it. If it pans out, though, I will let you know. J Anyway, this was definitely my favorite of the readings. The nice thing about getting near the end of the semester is that all the disparate practical skills and pieces of information we’ve been accumulating for the past several months are starting to come together to form a coherent picture; this article really made that clear to me.