18 posts tagged “higher_education”

I am honestly not sure what to make of this. This webinar, "'Big Challenges (and Opportunities) for Academic Libraries" (see the link here for some details) was something our director pretty much made us watch recently. I honestly expected a lot more given that a reason our director was making us watch it was as a prelude to upcoming work on strategic planning. I was not impressed by the content, and at times I found it a little condescending. Some of the (supposedly) revolutionary ideas they presented were things we have been doing already for years. Even when the boss managed to get through on the phone line to ask a question, asking the "now what?" (after we have done all that) question, we did not get a clear answer. The article by Walton (see citation below), which was the basis of the seminar, was not that much better.

One of my colleagues, who is a recent hire, commented that much of the presentation and article was a "fear" presentation, namely one of those gloom and doom presentations where they speculate about the fall of the library. And there is enough in the article to show that a lot of administrators, including Walton, contrary to his claims, who would not miss the library as we know it were it close tomorrow. Walton may claim he is in touch with libraries, but he is a consortium administrator. He has not been in the trenches for a while. So when he asks a question such as "is a great academic library based primarily in a great collection?" then answers that access is more important than ownership and does not address materials other than to reduce books and print, I have to wonder. Because where I currently work, there is nothing more embarrassing than having a student ask if we have books on X topic only to have to turn them away because we either do not have them (a very likely scenario for certain topics) or we have it as an e-book, in which case they look at you as if you just insulted their parentage (this happens fairly often too, and it will likely keep on happening as we increase electronic holdings in favor of print. Not a choice I really agree with, but I don't make that decision). Walton seems to agree with the assessment from other administrators that "books, except entertainment reading, were eventually going away" (page 90 in the article).And this is just one example. There is a lot in this presentation that seems alarmist and at times a bit overgeneralizing.

For the McCombs segment of the presentation, I just wanted to go down her list and say, "we do that, we do that, we do that other thing, that thing over there did not work," so on. I found it to be nothing more than restatements of the obvious. Allow to use some examples (quotations are from her presentation):
 

• "Created the 24/7 experience." This has been suggested in our campus a few times. It is just not going to happen. Unless there is a major hiring spree of extra staff to keep the library open, security to keep it safe, additional measures to lock down parts of the building, and so on, not happening. Those things cost money for one (something that McCombs did not mention anywhere in the presentation), and while some members of our administration like the idea (mostly because they do not have to stay late hours), in reality, they are not about to cough up funds or resources to make it happen. We don't do this literally, but we get close given our hours, plus the many resources on our website that are online 24/7.
  
• "Develop specific and unique connections with student life." This is one of the reasons my position was created: Outreach Librarian. I am constantly seeking ways to develop those specific and unique connections with student life. From maintaining relationships with campus groups and students to implementing, administering, and maintaining most of the library's 2.0 initiatives, I can say we do that already. Tell me what's next, don't just tell me something I know already. Yes, we do that.
  
• "Seen as innovative technology leaders." It must be nice when your campus (SMU in her case) has the resources to build an information commons or a student multimedia center. We barely managed to convert a conference room into a small practice presentation room for students to use. With significant effort and push by our instruction librarian, we finally got a hands-on teaching classroom for library instruction, a room that we do have to share with at least two other campus organizations (instructional design and interactive television) as part of the Faustian deal. And we had to fight for those things pretty much every step of the way, and let's not even add that the library has no control over a substantial amount of its space. We are working on this, but not easy.
  
• "Strong faculty support." With a few exceptions, this is pretty much non-existent. And it is not for a lack of effort on our part. Our director has put a lot of thought and effort into implementing a librarian liaison program for academic departments. Our librarians strive to work with faculty to meet their needs in various ways, and very often, we are met with derision, indifference (which seems to be the attitude of choice), and/or insults (I have been called incompetent a few times by them, for instance). When I hear that "strong faculty support" is some panacea, I just want to know how do you overcome their overall disrespectful attitudes for openers. Don't just tell me you need to have "strong faculty support." Give me specific steps to build it, or how to work around things when it is lacking. Not everyone works in the same utopian campus where faculty all fawn over the library. Lacking, but to be honest, not our fault.
  
• "Close relationship with central technology support services." Considering that we cannot even get our campus IT people to even make a phone call when they are doing some upgrade to the network or computer systems, I don't think this one is coming any time soon either. I could go on and rant about the many ways IT treats the library as an after thought or a bother, but I have more I need to write about. Lacking, but again, not our fault (communication and common courtesy are a two-way street. This is another thing that I often do not hear from many of these bright-eyed speakers).
  
• "Special Collections involved with faculty for both programming and research support." Our Archivist has been hard at work at this, considering that she has pretty much had to build Special Collections and Archives from the ground up. I think this recent success of hers illustrates very well how our archives department is involved. Yes, we do that.
  
• "Connections with the administrative community." To an extent, this is part of my job as well since I do a lot of the PR work for the library, so I strive to keep the administrative community informed. Our director spends a lot of time working with administrators as well. Yes, we do that.  
• "Do not shy away from the big assignments." Oh really? Our librarians work on various campus committees, and we have done work in things as big as accreditation. A few of the librarians, including myself, were on various committees dealing with the accreditation process. Yes, we do that. 
• "Volunteer." Yes. We do that too. 
• "Create networks of advocacy." Again, part of my job for one, especially in dealing with students. Something our instruction librarian does with her students. Something the archivist does with potential clients, faculty, and campus. So does our director. Yes, we do that. 
• "Be available to represent the university in any number of forums." To the extent this is possible, yes, we do that. 
• "DO NOT WHINE." I may vent, but I do not whine. I, along with colleagues, put my money where my mouth is. I just wish others would do the same. Expressing frustration over a lack that, more often than not, you have no control over, is not whining. Give me your resources, your information commons, and your very supportive faculty, and I will build you castles. I can only work with what I have. Yes, we do (or not do) this too. 

Even Mendoza, who represented a community college, did not tell me much new, and she added to the alarmist tone. Her presentation in terms of suggestions was pretty much fairly similar to McCombs.

So again, I am not sure what to make of this. Maybe I am just not the audience for this presentation since I happen to be pretty well read when it comes to the LIS literature as well as being familiar with the various reports cited like ECAR and OCLC. In this day and age, are there really libraries out there that need to be told this kind of thing? In a way, this was not too different than the times when my school district, back in the days when I was a school teacher, decided to have some teacher in-service day and inflict some "motivational" speaker (who very often had not been in a classroom for ages or not at all) to come tell us how to run our classrooms. So much for change. 

Anyhow, my two cents for what little they may be worth.

Oh, almost forgot, the citation for Walton's article:

Walton, Robert, "'Big' Challenges (and Opportunities) for Academic Libraries." Texas Library Journal (Fall 2009): 88-90.

Update note (10/29/09): Here is a link to the Jim Neal "New Directions" (link to YouTube video) speech that is mentioned in the webinar. Unless you are really curious, don't bother. It's an almost hour and half soporific presentation by an administrator from a large campus (read very well funded) telling the rest of us (who are nowhere near as well funded) what to do. I inflicted it on myself, and I could certainly write a whole post just replying to it, but to be honest, I am a bit tired of this whole affair. Some of us have to actually work for a living.  

I am posting this here because it seems Blogger is having another one of its "I am not working" days. I need to seriously consider moving my main blog someplace else. Unfortunately, here is not really an option since they restrict comments to registered users, something I dislike. Anyhow, here is the post.

This is not the first time I have made light of campuses and their donors, and some of the choices donors make when it comes to feeding their vanity. Let's be honest and call a spade a spade. Most wealthy donors are not doing it for the common good, but as a tax write-off. So, going in with our eyes open, should we be surprised when we see certain stories out there? From donors forking out bucks to name bathrooms to corporate branding on campus, getting people to be somewhat generous with educational institutions is an art and a pain. To some, it can be a necessary evil. Anyhow, the latest fuss about getting donors to name courses in order to save the classes made me wonder. Sounds like the type of thing to write an extended post, but I am lacking the time. So for now, I am just tossing some items here so I can ponder for later. But at the end of the day, let's be honest again. Is it really that far fetched to have donors name a class after them? I can see the possibilities already.

• From The New York Times, "Colleges Ask Donors to Help Meet Demand for Aid." It does not seem unreasonable to me, but giving some money so some kids can graduate is just not as glamorous as naming the new sciences building or putting in a few million bucks for some phallic bell tower or very elegant garden. You can't put a plaque on a student. Now, a tattoo, that may be an idea.
  
• And from The Wall Street Journal, it seems that there is "New Unrest on Campus as Donors Rebel." Because often charity comes with strings attached, or in cases like this, very strong chains and contracts. And donors tend to get pissy if you sell off that fancy art collection they gave four generations ago because you need to keep the electricity on. 
• And more recently, the City College of San Francisco was floating the idea of naming courses for donors in order to save those courses from extinction. Here and here are some accounts on the matter. Is it really that much a stretch to name a course or two after some donor? Jack Welsh is putting his name to an MBA program. If it works for him, why not for other classes? Maybe we need to come up with a list of candidates then hit them up for some money.
  

Just a thought or two.

The whole fiasco with Elsevier and their fake journals (and unlike the more polite people, I have no problem calling a spade a spade, and these were basically fake journals sponsored by a big pharmaceutical passing themselves off as serious journals) has been discussed in various librarian blogs. This is why I am just scraping some of my thoughts here and leaving it out of the main blog.

Here are some links for those who may be interested:

• Barbara Fister, writing for ACRLog, on "This Journal Brought to You By. . ." 
• Jessamyn West notes "in case you needed another reason to raise an eyebrow at Elsevier" at librarian.net. 
• And by the way, the Annoyed Librarian had a very nice reply to this whole mess as well. You do have to grant some of AL's points: in this case, Elsevier basically pulled a fast one.
  

The one thing I thought about when I read about the issue is that this just makes our work teaching information literacy that much more harder. As information literacy or instruction librarians, we spent a lot of time teaching our students how to evaluate resources. We spend even more time telling them to rely on "peer reviewed" publications. And now we get that we can't even trust the "peer reviewing" since it is not so much scholars doing it as some big pharma corporation. Let's consider the ethics of the matter, which is about the only thing we can really consider. I mean, we can be angry at Elsevier, but in the end, Elsevier is like any other big corporation, and they did the move that would make them money, ethics be damned. But the larger problem does go back to corporations like Elsevier who take research (often done with federal money, i.e. paid by your taxes) and repackages it and sells it to the libraries. Until those doing the research actually take some control and come up with some better ways to disseminate their information in an ethical way, the corporations will keep doing this, and we as librarians will just have to be that much more wary of information sources. And to be honest, why the heck the federal government (in the U.S. at least) not make it a requirement to make any federally funded research be published for free (put it in PubMed or something like that), since we paid the tab, is simply beyond me.It can be done; there is just a serious lack of spine to do it, but then again, that is politics for you. And let's not even start on why the U.S. government often outsources their information to vendors (can you say Lexis, for example?).

But it is also going to take the scholars to finally get a clue as well. Until academia decides to have the intestinal fortitude to come up with other ways to evaluate for tenure besides how many articles you get in an Elsevier journal (or other big corporate-owned journal), and until scholars basically stop serving on those editorial boards, and instead help create better models of distribution where the information is not held by some conglomerate more interested in the bottom line than some ethics, things will not change. Now, I am not an expert by any stretch; others from advocates for open access to repository librarians to those librarian bloggers with bigger reputations have been saying it. I am just a librarian with a thought or two and a dislike for the way things are currently done. And at the end of the day, I am the librarian in the front lines who has to teach the students how to evaluate sources, and now I have to start making another distinction: that is a real scholarly journal, and that other one is paid for by Merck (or insert your big pharma company here). This publisher seems to have some integrity, and this other one is pretty much open to the highest bidder. Because we often make a big fuss when a student plagiarizes or tries to pass other's work as their own. But when a company like Elsevier basically commits an act of academic dishonesty (or just plain dishonesty), they don't exactly get raked over the coals as they deserve. Then again, we should know better as information professionals to question the sources of information. And we should be noting and be aware that a lot of that information we depend on in academia is coming from a corporate source, the type of source not necessarily interested in things like ethics or integrity. We have to remember that their interest is the bottom line and the investors. If it so happens they provide information products academia can use so much the better. But make no mistake, they are not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. This means we should be on our guard and constantly asking questions and demanding accountability. 

And those are my two cents, for what they may be worth.
  

Apparently the topic of tenure for academic librarians has been making the rounds in the librarian blogs. I am in the camp of those who do not like the idea of tenure for academic librarians (or any other hybrid idea), and I have my reasons for that, which I would prefer to outline at some later time. Part of it, to give an indication, is that I think it interferes with the extensive work we already have to do as librarians. That one of my colleagues is floating this idea around is not exactly something that pleases me, but let's keep that out of this blog. Anyhow, I have seen a few things that caught my eye related to the topic, so I am making some notes. I may or not develop this into a more substantial post or not.

• While this one is not directly about tenure, it did catch my eye. In the long term, when you think about it, asking for tenure does involve some salesmanship on the part of academic librarians, so maybe the post is relevant. Anyhow, here is Steven Bell (who is tenured and does believe in tenure for librarians) on "Academic Librarians are not Salespeople--But They Should Be."
• The Annoyed Librarian had a series of posts on this, mostly replying to others. If you go to her (I am assuming it is a "her").
  
• "Who gets faculty status?"
• "Academic Librarians: 'Please Love Us.'" Which addresses a bit on the tenure, but also the seemingly constant insecurity a lot of academic librarians seem to have because the academic faculty seem to either not think of them much or just plain disregard them. 
• More on academic librarians taking themselves too seriously in "Thanks for your support." 

It seems like you can't watch the news, especially in academia, without someone making some negative statement about the humanities. It's the usual drivel of "what do the humanities contribute that is practical?" Well besides teaching you how to be a decent human being, probably the best value lies in the fact that learning language is within the humanities, and without mastering language, you can forget about the sciences, economics, so on. As I have a humanities degree (I am an English school teacher by training and now academic librarian), I have been looking over the issue now and then. Here are some of the items I have seen on this as of late:

• Bruce Watson of Walletpop asking "The Liberal Arts Education: A recipe for poverty?" Here is a great reason why you should study the humanities: to help you sell your ideas, among other reasons. 
• Patricia Cohen wrote a big piece in the NYT on "In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth." 
• Of course, very often, the business model is seen as the salvation (even though it was business people who, in large measure, are to blame for the current economic clusterfuck). Peter Katopes writes that "The 'Business Model' is the Wrong Model" for Inside Higher Ed. 
• And then you have the less than enlightened Georgia legislators who want to get rid of courses on subjects like queer theory. Sure, they claim it is due to the economy, but we all know it is really about seizing a moment to move their close minded agenda. This story was picked up by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some of the, well, less than enlightened (I am really trying to stay polite here) comments, are worth a read if for no other reason than to see ignorance at work. 

This is not going to get easier over time as the economy worsens, and people really latch on to the idea that going to college should be a form of vocational training. Things are bound to get interesting.

Update note (3/7/09):

• The Irascible Professor features an essay by Sanford Pinsker arguing that "We need the liberal arts now more than ever."  A couple of good lines from the essay: 

1. "Students will not only have to learn how to recognize when somebody is speaking rot (the last election should have provided plenty of practice) but also how to have nimble, adaptable minds.  At its best, a liberal education prepares a student to be a lifetime learner. "
2. "A trained mind and a willingness to pursue ideas wherever they might lead us is essential to a democracy."

• Inside Higher Ed. has a news piece on the Georgia affair I mentioned above, as well as a couple other stories of places that may be using the economic crisis to stir controversy over certain courses. 

I have been seeing a good number of items online on FB, social networks, and social networking literacy. A lot has to do with how to handle the public and private aspects of these online tools and knowing where to draw the line. Personally, the issue of how much to present of myself online is something I always think about. These is a sampling of some things I have seen recently:

• Alex Golub writes on "The Flaws of Facebook" for Inside Higher Ed. While mostly geared to campus faculty, the article has a thing or two to say to academic librarians as well.
  
• The Irascible Professor has a guest post by Felice Prager on "Social Networking for Dummies." This one is more tongue-in-cheek, but it is worth a read.
  
• From the AllFacebook blog, "10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know." FB is notorious for making it difficult for users to set privacy parameters, often making it hard to find just where exactly one goes to set particular privacy limits. This list should help. 
• danah boyd announced that she finally finished her dissertation. The topic: "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Network Publics" (warning, big PDF file). This is certainly worth a look for librarians. Do read her post, which gives some highlights and provides the abstract, then feel free to look over the document itself. 
• Fred Stutzman points to an article out of portal:Libraries and the Academy on "Academic Libraries, Facebook, MySpace and Student Outreach." I am not linking to the article itself, since it is on Project Muse and likely requires subscription, but for academic librarians, they need to be reading it. It is on my pile of articles to read soon. In the same post, he also points to another article on virtual reference.
  
• David Spark, writing for Mashable, has an article on "12 Great Tales of Defriending." I include it on this list because sometimes, when it comes to social networks, you have the face the possibility of having to purge your friends' list for a variety of reasons. The article has a humourous tone, but it does consider serious issues. 
• Kate Sheehan, writing for ALA TechSource blog, has a piece on "Making Friends" that deals with friending on social networks. 
• Scientific American magazine has an article asking "Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?"  The article was published in August 2008, and the author is Daniel J. Solove. 

To some who say that librarians may be obsolete some day, as long as there is a need to teach a little social networking literacy and common sense to the younger generations, we'll still have some work.

There is a lot of doomsaying going on about getting an advanced degree and being able to get a job. This is especially applicable to humanities degrees, but it could be applicable to even the MLS degree given the abysmal job market (which ALA pretty much choose to ignore in favor of promoting people going to library school job or no job).

Here are two sample articles, which I may use to expand into some kind of essay/post later:

• From AlterNet, "Is a GED More Valuable Than a PhD?" From the article, this is pretty much common knowledge, or it should be common knowledge by now: "The demand for humanities PhDs has long been tight -- for four decades, the number of jobs requiring them hasn’t kept pace with the number of people earning them. But by all indications, recent university hiring freezes and evaporating grant money have reduced the world’s most elite degree to junk-bond status." 
• Inside Higher Ed featured a piece on the "Relative Advantages of Associate Degrees and Certificates."
  

I will tell folks this much: when I hear someone planning to go to graduate school for a humanities degree, I pretty much cringe. Unless they are willing to work outside of academia, and likely work outside their subject, their odds of getting a good job in their subject are next to none. In other words, pursue if it is your passion, and you know and accept you need to get a job that will actually pay the bills. And even then, you may be better off not doing it. I know things need to change, but I am not sure how at this point. Something to ponder.

While I do have a healthy respect for some of the elders in the library profession, once in a while I have to wonder if they have been out of the trenches a bit too long. Steven Bell, who is an acknowledged advocate of minimal library instruction for information literacy, has a new piece out on faculty involvement. It all seems pretty good until he gets to this part:

But I can imagine some information literacy and instruction librarians asking themselves “if faculty do ever fully integrate this into their courses and teach it without me - what will I do for a living?” The possibility of librarians being made obsolete by faculty following the examples described above, I think, is highly unlikely. But even if the majority of faculty did, I think that academic librarians would still be needed to support the development and design of instructional activity and digital-learning materials. Our new opportunity would be back-end support - making sure faculty were up-to-date on the e-resources and well equipped with the tools to integrate them into their courses. This could be a whole new growth area for librarian educators. That’s where I’ve advocated the growing importance of instructional design and technology in the work of librarians. I don’t know exactly where academic librarians will be in the future, but if it wasn’t at the front of the classroom that would be fine with me - as long as we play a role in what happens there.

Just some librarians may ask themselves? You just pretty much said that our new role will be in the back-end support. You know, with the IT people and the others in the backrooms who never see real people? Is that really an area of growth, or are we looking at yet another way to de-professionalize and get rid of a few more librarians in the process? I do ask because, for example, here we have what is called an instructional designer who does, well, instructional technology and design. The person is not a librarian by degree or trade, but she would certainly be the sort of person that Professor Bell seems to have in mind. And why is it that being in the front of a classroom seems to be such a bad thing? Some of the best work we do is working with students and in front of their classes. And while educating faculty on things like e-resources is important, we do have a role as well in helping educate students and in the larger educational mission of the university. And statements like the one above can certainly be used to eliminate, or at the very least, keep librarians from the educational roles we should be engaging. Maybe the back-end is good enough for some people. It is not good enough for me, and I am sure it is not good enough for a few of my colleagues. Our instruction librarian would be a good example. Spent the last two years or so building an information literacy program from the ground up with extensive involvement with faculty in what was then known as the Freshman Seminar program. University decides to scrap the program, for some fairly dubious reasons, and we are back to zero pretty much. And while we could document our successes in reaching students, the university pretty much saw us as "the back-end" support anyhow. I am sure she would have a thing or two to say about taking librarians out of the front of the classroom to let the faculty do it, so to speak. I have seen the faculty do it, and it is not always as ideal as the selected examples Professor Bell cites in his post. At the end of the day, that is much of the problem with the library literature: you only see the positives, which at times are exceptions rather than representations of the rule. But hey, we can all just go work in the back-end.

Marc Fisher, of the Washington Post's Raw Fisher blog, asks "What if they built new libraries and couldn't afford to let folks use them?" in his post about D.C. Libraries' new 25 million dollar construction. Mr. Fisher is looking at how the DC libraries can afford to build a big new building, but they have to cut back hours and staff due to, you guessed it, lack of funds. Mr Fisher explains this apparent contradiction: "Welcome to the wonderful world of government spending, where capital budgets exist in a separate universe from operating dollars, meaning that you can build a building and then find yourself barely capable of using that building."

I was going to leave a small comment on his blog, but it is one of those blogs that require registration to comment, something I personally find annoying. And please, don't bother pointing out the irony of the fact Vox does the same registration b.s. for commenting. I did not make the rules on that one, and it does annoy me. Anyhow I am digressing.

What I was going to say is that Mr. Fisher may want to take a look at academia. My current workplace is a pretty good example of the same apparent contradiction he describes. My library is getting a very nice garden and water monument in front of the building. However, we lack funds for basics like buying books. And while we are hiring, we are only doing so because of accreditation issues. If it was up to us, we would not be hiring since the state system did put a hiring freeze in place. So, how come we are getting a million dollar or so aesthetic piece in front of our building when we can barely keep the inside? Welcome to the wonderful of world of university (and nonprofit) wealthy donors. In essence, the university got some anonymous donor. By the way, it seems most of the time these people do want to remain anonymous. Maybe a little shame they may be asked about their vanity? I mean, we could certainly use money for books, scholarships, etc. instead of a big fountain or a big phallic clock tower (yep, we got one of those too). So, that is how it works. And that is not just here. This is the second college I have worked at where some anonymous donor wanted to give money for a big phallic tower clock. Yes, they are pretty much phallic time pieces because they are designed to stand out straight and proud and to be seen from miles away. In academia, the hope often is that, if we sweet talk one of those donors to give money for something vain, like a fountain, they may be moved later to give money for something practical like books. To be honest, I would love to see some study done where we can find out if that glimmer of hope works or not. In the end, the situation in academia, especially in small colleges like mine, is a reflection of states basically abdicating their role to properly fund public higher education. We have to find the money any way we can. I am not saying it's right, but that's the way it is.