Image by Trace Meek on Flickr

I. What we talk about when we talk about collaboration

On April 7, 2011, I published “Collaborating with Faculty Part 1: A Five-Step Program,” a post that described my strategies for developing collaborative relationships with disciplinary faculty. To briefly summarize my “program,” I identified five steps to collaboration as: (1) Be confident, (2) Make the connection, (3) Reinforce the connection, (4) Build the relationship, and (5) Go collaborate. These steps are admittedly simplified, but they do serve to remind us of the importance of cultivating relationships beyond email updates or visits to department meetings. In this article, Part 2, I’ll share some of the most common and most innovative approaches to librarian-faculty collaboration that I’ve heard about or seen in the literature. As I was researching this post I created a spreadsheet of some of the notable projects I discovered in the literature of the past ten years that may be helpful to others. This is not intended to be comprehensive, and I invite you to review, comment, argue, and/or add to it, as you see fit (I’m drawing primarily from the published literature here, but descriptions of non-published projects are also welcome). It is my wish that these examples will help us reconsider our existing collaborative efforts, and will be useful for hopeful librarian collaborators in reassessing and expanding their own initiatives. Partnering with faculty on projects, instruction, and other initiatives offers a whole array of rewards such as improved services, greater student learning, and the ability to grow as a professional. Plus, working with others on campus allows us to extend our reach and achieve more of our goals than we could do alone.

However, “collaboration” is a broad term that can be difficult to define. In thinking about librarian-faculty partnerships, I find it helpful to consider them on a spectrum of possibility. There are two models I think are useful for this. The first is Pritchard’s (2010) scale to describe various levels of librarian-faculty partnerships on information literacy instruction. Pritchard makes the following distinctions between different types of support that may be offered by librarians for information literacy instruction in coursework:

1. Supplemental, which happens outside the curriculum through workshops and instruction, reflecting no cooperation between librarian and faculty member.
2. Integrated, which involves librarian support for a course without input into the curriculum.
3. Embedded, which implies co-development of course curriculum and/or assignments

While Pritchard’s criteria are specific to teaching, we can extrapolate the same concepts to address collaboration more broadly. To expand these definitions to our discussion of librarian-faculty partnerships, we can identify parallel levels at which individuals may work together, as follows:

1. Communication: In which librarians and faculty members may notify each other of their activities and work with the same students, but without actually consulting one another, such as when a faculty member alerts a librarian to an existing assignment that will send students to the library, or a librarian sends a newsletter to faculty.
2. Cooperation: In which faculty and librarians work together on a project or initiative, with one partner supporting the other’s goals, such as through typical instruction sessions (where the librarian is asked to support an existing curriculum or assignment), or through faculty workshops offered by librarians to educate faculty about library resources.
3. Collaboration: In which librarians and faculty work together in an equal partnership that requires them to align their different perspectives on a project, such as curriculum design and co-teaching or co-writing an article or grant, develop common goals, and reach a new shared understanding.

The second model I find useful was created by Black, Crest, Volland (2001), who came up with a simple flowchart that presents a comparable scale of librarian-faculty partnership. The major difference is that they view partnerships as a progression instead of a spectrum, and assert that each step along the scale leads to the next. In their minds the process begins with relationship-building (librarian and faculty getting to know each other) and faculty development (librarian teaching faculty about library resources), leads to collaborative instructional design (both parties working together to achieve course goals), and results in tailored instruction for classes.

The fact that both of these models provide similar “levels” of partnership reinforces the idea that collaboration can be achieved in a variety of ways. While all levels of partnership have intrinsic value, this post will focus primarily upon initiatives that embody the definitions of cooperation and collaboration as described above.

II. Cooperative partnerships between librarians and faculty

Cooperation requires that the librarian and faculty member work together at some level to identify and achieve a common goal. This often involves a one-way direction of effort, as one partner becomes involved to support the other’s established goals. These partnerships are more in-depth than communication partnerships as there is some combined effort between the two participants, but the two individuals generally work independently of each other. For instance, at my institution I developed a tiered instructional plan to support a series of courses in my liaison department. The plan included a breakdown of the various research assignments that were required of students in the different courses, and described my strategy for building their skills throughout the series. While I consulted the faculty member who taught these courses and ensured that she was on board with my plan, my work did not have an influence on her course content. I created the plan to support her existing curriculum, assignments, and goals.

Cooperative partnerships come in several common formats, including:

• Faculty training
• Technology assistance
• Collection development
• Information Literacy instruction

I describe each of these in more depth in the following sections.

Faculty training

Faculty workshops typically involve librarians planning and executing sessions intended to teach and/or raise awareness among faculty about the resources and services offered at the library. These sessions usually involve one or both of the following goals: (i) encouraging faculty to use the library more, e.g. marketing, and/or (ii) “training the trainer,” with the purpose of empowering faculty to pass on deeper knowledge about the library to their students, e.g. instruction. For an example of faculty workshops in action, Lucas (2011) provides a helpful case study of the faculty in-service approach at D’Youville College in Buffalo, New York. Lucas defines the in-service as “the act of collaboratively introducing new and existing faculty to the library resources and services.” The article lays out the details of what they cover in their in-service sessions.

Faculty workshops may also be targeted to specific audiences such as distance faculty, as noted by Miller et al. (2010). At the University of Maryland University College, librarians have taken a slightly different approach to the in-service model by presenting asynchronous online workshops lasting seven to twelve days that introduce distance faculty to the library. These sessions are cofacilitated by a librarian and the academic director of a given department, but content is created solely by the library. Miller et al.’s article includes detailed descriptions of the workshops that are likely to be useful for anyone considering a similar approach.

Cooperative faculty training occasionally goes beyond the typical workshop. Take, for instance the work of librarians at Jinwen University of Science and Technology (JUST) in Taiwan. They serve as a example of a library that trains faculty to serve as stand-in librarians, or “library specialists,” for a semester at a time. Yu (2009) explains how, to expand the library staff’s limited reach, they advanced a proposal to train one or two faculty representatives from each academic department as volunteer “library specialists.” These faculty members were required to attend special library skills training, as well as to serve two hours of reference a week and function as consultants for subject-specific reference questions. The faculty become stand-in librarians for the purposes of helping students, and acted as consultants to the library on collection development and subject-specific reference. This unique program enabled faculty to become intimately familiar with their library while expanding its ability to serve a growing student body.

Technology assistance

In some cases librarians leverage their tech-savvy to raise their profile on campus beyond the scope of research, for instance by assisting them in creating websites or media. Bailey, Blunt, & Magner (2011) describe how librarians can leverage technology skills, in this case video and multimedia creation, to support faculty goals, instruction, and conference presentations. This reasserts the importance of librarians on campus and may potentially build a foundation for greater partnerships. In addition to video creation, it is common for librarians to work with faculty in groups or one-on-one to assist them with new technologies such as blogs, mobile access, social media, and RSS.

Collection development

Collection development is an area in which librarian-faculty partnerships have long been common, typically at the communication level but sometimes evolving into cooperative relationships with the intention of expanding a particular part of the collection to support relevant coursework. As one example, Ratto & Lynch (2011) describes an effort at the University of Southern New Hampshire to supplement traditional textbook access with a program to provide focused course content for a Marketing course through the use of electronic textbooks. The texts were licensed and cataloged by the library in coordination with the faculty member.

Another example of cooperative relationships in collection development is the designation of specific funds either as “new faculty funds” or as internal grants. Horava (2005) described a program at The University of Ottawa to get new faculty more involved in working with librarians to expand the collection in their research areas through the use of designated funds in the amount of $2,000 per faculty member. The program met with some success in building bridges between librarians and faculty and increasing collection development in current research and teaching areas.

Information Literacy instruction

The most common cooperative efforts between librarians and faculty relate to IL instruction in a wide variety of ways. The traditional “one-shot” instruction session is a classic example of this. There are also an array of variations on the “one-shot,” from a similar “two-shot” to strategies that many refer to as “embedded” librarianship, in which a librarian is present as some level throughout the entire course. Kobzina (2010) describes a scenario at the University of California at Berkeley in which librarians embed in a prominent environmental studies course, with multiple library sessions, access to the online course site, and the ability to respond to course content on an ongoing basis. The only thing separating this effort from collaboration as defined in the introduction to this post is the fact that they don’t contribute to the creation of the course curriculum or assignments.

III. Collaborative partnerships between librarians and faculty

Before taking this discussion further, I’d like to restate my own belief that collaboration, as distinct from communication and cooperation, requires an equal partnership between librarian and faculty member. I make this assertion because collaboration, as I define it, requires both parties to acknowledge, understand, and even embrace the other’s viewpoint, with the result being a shared vision or product that is greater than the sum of its parts. This is not easy. More casual partnerships, in which participants align their goals but don’t blend them, often accomplish great things but don’t achieve the same shift in perception for those participating. I base this perspective on my own collaborative experiences with my institution’s first-year writing program faculty, which has entirely changed my perspective on teaching research to first-year students. By working together to build a shared curriculum for our co-requisite research and writing courses, we all become more fully cognizant of the differences between our two approaches and the natural ways we could bridge them. The effects of our work together have rippled outwards into the way our two units interact and understand each other’s work.

Thus, collaboration takes the initiatives described in the “Cooperation” section above and stretches them further by adding a give-and-take element to the relationship between librarian and faculty member. In collaboration we are forced to consider the other person’s perspective, compromise, and often walk away with a new understanding of the project at hand. Collaborative partnerships result in a product that reflects the contributions of both parties. These efforts may take the following forms:

• Information Literacy instruction
• Professional (writing, research, presentation, grant, etc.) projects

As I did above, I’ll now discuss each of these in more depth with some examples, though there are fewer examples of collaboration as I define it.

Information Literacy instruction

When it comes to teaching, collaboration often involves the librarian and faculty member partnering on curriculum design and development, and often extends into co-teaching. The literature of instructional collaboration is extensive, but Mounce’s (2010) literature review covering articles published in 2000-2009 is helpful in gaining a big picture perspective.

For instance, Gaspar & Wetzel (2009) describe a case study in which they participate in an Institutionalized partnership for specific programs in which librarians and writing professors collaborate on curriculum and assignment development. The beautiful thing about this example is that The George Washington University created a program requiring this collaboration and recognizing its benefits. As a result the program has central administrative support that makes it sustainable for the parties involved.

There are also models of embedded librarianship that meet the same criteria without the co-teaching element. In addition to presenting the useful model of integrated instruction that I described in Part I above, Pritchard describes an embedded experience in a nanoscience course at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Students in the course write an article for a locally published academic journal for which the librarian serves as editor-in-chief, and partners with the faculty member and students to ensure that their research and articles are up to par. This unique example of embedded librarianship involves extensive collaboration with several individuals on campus. Pritchard includes advice for collaborative-minded librarians at the end of her article, much of which echoes my Part 1 Lead Pipe post. She says:

Entering into faculty–librarian partnerships is not a simple matter of introducing oneself to teaching faculty and announcing our plans for embedding IL and AL into their courses. It involves the careful cultivation of collegial relationships, the clear and consistent communication of the specialized knowledge and expertise we bring to the curriculum development process, and a sustained commitment to staying visible, available and involved (389).

Professional projects

Another project area that requires deep collaboration is the librarian-faculty co-written article, conference co-presentation, or co-administered grant project. Cross-disciplinary professional contributions are challenging for any faculty, but the benefits to the collaborators and to the field can be substantial. Fonseca & Viator (2009) recommend that librarian faculty act more like faculty and cultivate multi-disciplinary expertise by entering into collaborative projects (writing, grant proposals) with non-library faculty, and by engaging in active service on campus, particularly in leadership roles. Fonseca & Viator’s highly readable article is a call to action for academic librarians around the nation. While it is common for librarians to serve on campus committees, I wonder how often we actually step up to the chair or president position to assert ourselves as professionals on our campuses. Local leadership by librarians not only allows the individual librarian to increase his skill set but raises the library’s profile on campus by making it clear to faculty that the library is interested and engaged in campus issues at more than an administrative level.

There are a few examples out there of librarians and faculty members co-presenting. As recently as March 2011 the ACRL Conference included a poster session by Ratto (librarian) & Lynch (Marketing professor), entitled “Collaboration unleashes e-book database potential for replacing traditional textbook options.” Their poster describes the cooperative collection development described above.

IV. Final thoughts

The variety of possible ways in which librarians and faculty can partner together, and the spectrum of what those partnerships might look like, far exceeds this post. For instance, though I did not find examples in the literature, I could envision many projects similar to those describe above that involve graduate students as future faculty. MyLead Pipe colleague Hilary Davis described a project at her institution in which her colleague worked with a graduate student association to plan workshops for their members. This program creates the opportunity not only to help graduate students build their research skills, but also to set a foundation for future collaboration when those individuals have moved on to faculty positions.

Overall I have attempted to capture a snapshot here of the wealth of opportunities at hand to remind and inspire us to extend beyond the limits of our buildings, our offices, and our daily interactions. It can be challenging  at times to find the space and the emotional energy to cultivate the relationships required for productive cooperation and collaboration. However, the benefits to students, to faculty, and to our own job satisfaction are guaranteed to make the effort worthwhile.

Notes

For information about the references cited in this post, please view my spreadsheet. You are also welcome to add to it if you know of great collaborative models that might interest our readers.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Brooke Ratto, Ellie Collier, Hilary Davis, and Emily Ford for their feedback that helped to shape this post.

by StefanB on Flickr

Introduction

Like many academic librarians, I spend a lot of time reaching out to and trying to build connections with faculty members in my liaison departments. I love this part of my work, but it can be extremely challenging. I bring a somewhat unusual perspective to this challenge as I happen to be married to a faculty member, which gives me the ability to see things from the faculty side as well as from my own perspective. Interestingly, the book Compatibility Breeds Success by Marvin Snider compares collaborative partnerships to marriages, so there’s a double point of relevance here.¹ According to Snider, these partnerships involve a long-term commitment, accountability for one another’s behavior, a commitment to resolving differences, a strong emotional commitment, and “are likely to have a major impact on each other even after the partnership ends.” Instead of love and family, academic participants share a goal of improved teaching, expanded publishing opportunities, or the like.

Recently I’ve broken down my approach to relationship-building with faculty into identifiable steps in order to be more deliberate about my efforts in the future. Those steps are the subject of this post. This program is a proposed set of goals I’ve built for myself, and which I share with the Lead Pipe readership in the hope that you’ll find it useful. For the record, this “program” is still in beta (so to speak), and I welcome your feedback and thoughts in the comments below. I presented a skeleton of this at ACRL’s Ideapower Unconference in Philadelphia last week.

One dictionary² defines collaboration as “Traitorous cooperation with an enemy,” which is a humorous yet apt starting point for the conversation. It seems to me that many librarians have an uneasy relationship with our faculty for a whole variety of reasons, not least of which are the different letters that follow our names. Fortunately, the anxiety that comes from our different backgrounds and job descriptions is based more in misunderstanding than substance, so we can learn to shed those feelings on the way to a new partnership. Instead, let’s redefine collaboration and set our goal as an equal partnership between one or more non-librarian faculty members and ourselves. Personally, I’m interested in the relationships that push the boundaries of the day-to-day working relationships that many of us already have with other faculty on campus.

I recently attended a presentation at the ACRL National Conference in Philadelphia entitled, Engaging Faculty, Creating Allies. I expected the presentation to inform this post and expand my ideas of what collaboration with faculty could look like. While the presentation was good, I was a little disappointed that the “engagement” of faculty described was largely through workshops or colloquia organized by librarians and to which faculty were invited (and, in some cases, paid to attend). While collaboration can happen at such events, I just don’t see that as putting us on the equal footing that is necessary for deep collaboration.  As Jean S. Caspers describes, we can look at librarian-faculty relationships as occurring along a continuum of  three stages: parallel work is the most basic sort of relationship in which we’re working alongside each other for similar goals; cooperative work involves basic coordination of efforts; and collaborative work is the deepest type of partnership (21).³ Sometimes having parallel goals is enough, but collaborative work is more likely to yield the greatest benefits for student learning or research.

That said, it’s time to discuss the five-step program. It begins with a little self-reflection.

Step 1: Be confident

In a 1977 article, H. William Axford commented on the librarian movement for faculty status, and the nervousness of some librarians about the shift. “Part of the problem,” he wrote then, “can be attributed to the nature of library education which simply does not engender in students the attitudes necessary to feel at home within the traditional values of the academy, particularly its canons of scholarship.”⁵ Not to pin the whole problem on library school, but the truth is that librarians are not initiated into our field in the same way that faculty are: by reading scholarship, identifying our own specific area(s) of specialization, presenting at conferences, and building a network of colleagues whose interests overlap our own. This is in part because library school students may go on to work at a whole variety of different organizations. And some of this happens in library school for more motivated students, but the vast majority probably do not have this set of experiences. The result is graduates who have been schooled as professionals but not as scholars. It’s a different way of looking at the world, and a different way of looking at a career. So our challenge is to adopt the scholar’s worldview once we’re actively in the field. It’s ours for the taking.

In fact, a recent study of faculty attitudes found that faculty have a very favorable view of various aspects of collaboration with librarians (rated overall as a 3.98 out of 5).⁶ An earlier study fleshed out some of the differences in how librarians and faculty see each other, pointing to an awareness problem that has led to faculty being ignorant of the scope of librarians’ work.⁷ Considering both of these studies together, it is clear that faculty are not deliberately disregarding librarian expertise, nor are they averse to collaborative opportunities. The door is open.

Step 2: Make the connection

How do we make these connections with faculty? It starts just by reaching out. We can make connections at the reference desk or on a committee, but they’re more likely to happen when we get out of our comfort zones. Getting involved in new faculty candidate interviews. Coffee dates. Going to after-hours socials, plays, exhibits, speakers, and more. Attending campus events and breaking away from the same, comfortable group to meet new people. One librarian at The University of Saskatchewan decided to methodically arrange in-person meetings with a subset of her liaison department and later surveyed them to see whether her personal attention had an effect. It did, with 92% of faculty reporting that their use of the library had increased after the meeting.⁸

As an example, I started my current position and was assigned as a liaison to several departments. For one of those departments I lacked any notable background in the field and wasn’t sure what to expect. Still, with my new librarian enthusiasm, I contacted the department chair and got myself invited to a faculty meeting. They gave me five minutes, and while they were cordial, my reception was less than enthusiastic. I left that meeting feeling that I had failed in making the connection I’d hoped for. Still I regrouped, and decided to focus my energy and time on the department’s faculty liaison to the library (let’s call her Jane). I proposed that Jane and I meet for coffee, and the two of us spent an hour awkwardly sipping hot drinks and trying to find common ground to discuss. It was a challenging conversation, but it was a start.

From the very beginning, building collaborative relationships requires boldness. There’s no hiding behind a mask of introvertedness. The hard part, typically, is making conversation with strangers. Fortunately for us, this is a learnable skill, not an inborn characteristic. Since I was a child, I’ve watched my mother conduct long, effortless conversations with just about anybody who comes near her. Over the years, I’ve discovered that what comes naturally to her—making connections with people—is not just a personality trait, but an attainable skill. The key is: ask them about themselves. Sounds obvious, right? It is, sort of.

And just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that you meet someone and then launch into twenty questions and interrogate them. The best conversations are a give-and-take between two people sharing information about themselves or their viewpoints. But of all the great things I’ve learned from my mother over the course of my lifetime, possibly the most valuable and useful on a daily basis is: people love to talk about themselves. Not in an egotistical way, but in a very straightforward and human way. We all have our unique passions, and we all love to share them. If you can steer the conversation to some of a person’s interests, hobbies, family life, or other passions, you can usually have an effortless conversation for hours. This simple strategy is something we can all adopt in our everyday lives to make friends, network with colleagues, and yes, build collaborative relationships with faculty.

Be bold, be friendly, and be inquisitive: that’s all it really takes. Don’t forget to be yourself, too, and share your own responses to questions they ask. Be a whole person, just as they are. Not everyone on campus will embrace spontaneous conversation with a librarian, but most of them will. And even if someone clearly doesn’t want to connect with you, don’t take it personally. It’s their loss.

Step 3: Reinforce the connection

At this point, the most important thing is to connect with them on their level, not yours. Don’t immediately set up a blog or LibGuide or start bundling RSS feeds unless you know they’re tech-savvy enough to appreciate it. One of the biggest downfalls I see when librarians connect with faculty is an expectation that those faculty will be as technophoric as we are. Don’t count on it. Choose a platform that they’ll use and find comfortable, regardless of how much you love Twitter. If you’re just dying to put your love of technology to work, you can harness RSS feeds or email alerts to track the topics the faculty you know have mentioned as interests. Newly released books or articles make great conversation topics, and you can drop a line when you see their work get published.

It’s also important to be multi-dimensional and not sound like a library salesperson trying to make the sale. If you went from friendly and personal in the initial meeting and now bury them in library paraphernalia, you’re going to lose the personal nature of the connection that is so critical to relationship-building. I’m not suggesting sending them photos of your kids unless they’ve asked for them, but in whatever communication you send, mention something you discussed during that first meeting. Even if it’s work-related, it reinforces the sense that you were listening (which you were, right?). Be personal and professional. Remind them that you are, indeed, a whole person.

Step 4: Build the relationship

Jane and I started meeting for lunch every semester, and I made a point of sending an invitation by email every time unless I heard from her first. As we got to know each other better our conversations got easier and we learned about each other’s jobs and families. We spent most of our time talking about the research classes she taught, and the ways that I might help, but we also talked about a whole array of other topics. Our exchanges became friendlier, more comfortable, and much more fun for both of us.

At this stage, you’re getting to know them as a person as well as a professional, too. Continue to ask questions: how are they doing? How are classes? How is their research? How is whatever they might have mentioned from their personal life? Even more importantly, listen to the answers and learn as much as you can. Take notes afterwards, for future reference, especially if you have a less-than-stellar memory. It may sound mercenary, but taking the time to remember details about someone means you care, and that’s a good thing. Hyun-Duck Chung from North Carolina State University is a great example of a librarian who embraced a business librarianship role fully by putting herself in a position to learn about her liaison department from the inside out.¹⁰ Chung notes, “Genuine excitement about a common goal can help ignite the relationship-building process, but cultivating it requires sustained engagement with individuals over time, and being open to learning from each other” (165).

Step 5: Go Collaborate

Once you can see the potential for collaboration, go ahead and talk to the individual. Be sure to describe the project you have in mind as well as the benefits to both of you. Ruth McCorkle concisely describes “four main components of research kinship: a willingness to share ideas and the ability to critique and respond to others’ ideas; the recognition of one another’s talents; the joint sharing of an idea and crafting of a hypothesis; and, the commitment of time and resources in a shared venture” (539).¹¹ Be willing to give and take, consider other directions, or change the project completely in response to their feedback and ideas. A professional collaboration is a negotiation, and you’ll have to be flexible to make it a success.

Jane and I talked about an idea I had to tier instruction for a series of courses she taught that required research papers. The same cohort of students moved through all these classes together, so I thought it would be worthwhile to introduce research skills to them gradually, building each semester on what they had learned last time. She liked the idea, so I reviewed all her syllabi and put together a proposal. She liked the proposal, made a few suggestions that I incorporated, and then we put it into action. I was happy to move from typical one-shots to a deeper way of working with her students, and Jane was delighted to see the improvements in her students’ work at the end of the series.

So the collaboration is on! After that, you just have to maintain your end of the deal: meet your deadlines, do your share of the work, and most crucial of all, keep in touch. Communicate regularly to maintain the relationship. And if something changes in your relationship and you find that you have to work with someone new, don’t be discouraged. Just start the process over again and give yourself time to get back to the same level.

Sound easy?

Further Reading

Notes

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Flickr user litherland for use of this image!

A few weeks ago John Dupuis, of Confessions of a Science Librarian fame, posted his Stealth Librarianship Manifesto. He begins:

This particular edition of the manifesto applies to academic libraries. The principles of stealth librarianship apply to all branches of the profession, each in particular ways. Other manifestos could exist for, say, public or corporate librarians.

However the core is the same: to thrive and survive in a challenging environment, we must subtly and not-so-subtly insinuate ourselves into the lives of our patrons. We must concentrate on becoming part of their world, part of their landscape.

And he ends by calling upon others to add their manifesto points. We at In the Library with the Lead Pipe saw this as an opportunity to respond to his list and create our own.

Read on for our differing takes.

Emily

Scholarly Communication Librarian (Assistant Professor), Oregon Health & Science University
Reference & Instruction Librarian, Portland State University

There are many things that I appreciated about Dupuis’s manifesto. What particularly resonated with me is his take on publishing and professional literature.

We must stop reading the formal library literature. That’s what librar* blogs are for. We must familiarize ourselves with the literature and scholarly communications ecosystems of our patron communities.

We must stop writing the formal library literature. That’s what librar* blogs are for. We must make our case for the usefulness of what we do in the literature of our patron communities.

What Dupuis fails to mention here is that many academic librarians MUST publish in traditional, peer-reviewed library publications while striving to attain tenure. I am not personally in a tenure-track position, so I have the liberty of not fretting over where I publish. What I have found is that the online discourse via blogs is plentiful and satisfying for me to keep up with what’s happening in libraries.  Blogging here at In the Library with the Lead Pipe offers me the opportunity to write and think critically in an open peer-review and open publishing format; it is a rich experience that creates and advocates for open discourse among professionals. I’m not so sure what “stealth” has to do when it comes to creating open discourse. Dupuis is contradicting himself.

But Dupuis’s push toward understanding “scholarly communication ecosystems” resonates with me. Working as a Scholarly Communication Librarian, I see the work that needs to be done within academic communities in this regard. I see the education that needs to happen with faculty to understand even what is a “scholarly communication ecosystem.” To me that ecosystem is one stymied by the tenure system and traditional publishing paradigms. But without familiarizing ourselves regarding that discipline-specific system, how are we to educate our patrons regarding changes? Regarding open peer-review? Regarding peer-reviewed open access journals? Regarding using new measures like the Eigenfactor over Impact factors? And how are we going to make the case for changes in transparency and fairness of pricing from journal vendors if we don’t understand how a discipline-specific ecosystem works? Dupuis’s call for discipline-level understanding of scholarly communications is crucial for academic librarians.

Despite my agreement with Dupuis’s manifesto points regarding scholarly communication, there are some points that I contend. My Lead Pipe colleagues have done a much better job addressing those contentions so I’ll end my piece with an offering of my manifesto bullet points for my praxis of librarianship.

• I will not be stealth. I will proudly and loudly be a librarian.
• I will not teach library instruction sessions that do not incorporate critical thinking. (Down with database demos!)
• I will not bend over backwards for my subject faculty, but I will engage with them and educate them about my profession, and in turn, learn about theirs.
• I will be open to new ideas.
• I will think critically about ideas and opportunities presented to myself and to my institution.
• I will acknowledge what I don’t know.
• I will continue to learn what I don’t know.

Kim

Librarian/Assistant Professor at Boise State University

I don’t think “A stealth librarianship manifesto” is about stealth at all. At least, not at its core.

What Dupuis’s post really is about is much simpler and more nefarious: it’s about language. It’s about the way human beings — and in this case, scientists — perceive words based less on what they really mean and based more on their own various preconceived or culturally embedded ideas about them. Like “library.” What non-librarian doesn’t picture a quiet room full of overflowing bookshelves upon hearing the word “library”? There’s your problem, friends.

Don’t believe me? Take another look at the manifesto. Ignore all those sharp and provocative bullets and skip to the bottom section of the post that begins, “A couple of final points.” Here’s where we get to the meat of the issue:

And yes, I did really start thinking about this at Science Online 2011, with some ideas here and here. I also started germinating some of these thoughts after seeing how the library sessions at Science Online 2010 worked out, see here and here, noting how the session on Reference Managers was better attended and didn’t have “library” in the title. And looking further back, it’s a fairly common theme for my blogging, for example here and here.

That’s a lot of casually tossed out “here”s: six, in fact. All that thinking and germinating, yet we readers don’t even get an abbreviated link title? Let’s pull out our magnifying glass and take a closer look at what’s going on here, one sentence at a time. I’m adding link titles to the original text in brackets. First up:

And yes, I did really start thinking about this at Science Online 2011, with some ideas here [“ScienceOnline 2011 Debrief Part 1: ebooks, blogs and stealthy librarians”] and here [“ScienceOnline 2011 Debrief Part 3: Some session ideas for #scio12”].

These two links point to past blog posts by Dupuis, both in response to the Science Online 2011 conference. “Debrief Part 1” is your basic conference debrief post, in which he comments on the fact that “science types” at this conference don’t attend sessions that have the word “library” in the title. Apparently Science Online 2011 included a very successful library session on “data discoverability” that was well-attended thanks to its avoidance of the “L-Word.” Meanwhile, “Debrief Part 3” describes Dupuis’s ideas for a future conference session he might organize to convince those science types that libraries really are great collaborators in educating students and advancing open science. Of course they need convincing since they don’t already know that libraries actually care about these issues instead of just being busy dusting off our old books. Why don’t they know that yet? Because we’re libraries.

Onward:

I also started germinating some of these thoughts after seeing how the library sessions at Science Online 2010 worked out, see here [“Science Online 2010: Scientists and librarians”] and here [“Reclaiming ground”], noting how the session on Reference Managers was better attended and didn’t have “library” in the title.

These two links point to another blog, Book of Trogool, a Scientopia science blog written by what I’m guessing are three academic librarians (they don’t seem to have filled out their bios quite yet, alas). In “Science Online 2010: Scientists and librarians,” Dorothea Salo comes right out and starts battering away at the stereotype that forms the root of our language problem. “How,” she asks, “can science libraries persist when scientists haven’t the least notion that libraries or librarians are relevant to their work?” Salo then launches into her own sort of anti-manifesto listing all the activities that aren’t going to solve the problem, a cascade of angst that clearly inspired Dupuis to create his (more positive) manifesto.

“Reclaiming ground” addresses the same problem through the lens of Steve Koch, an Experimental Biophysicist at the University of New Mexico. Commenting on his past negative experiences at his undergraduate and graduate libraries, Koch describes how, as a faculty member, he has been happy to avoid his library. Essentially his advice comes down to two points: “educate current faculty” about what libraries really do, and be nicer to current students so they like us better.

Koch is getting at something behind the rhetorical theory I’m advancing, something at the very root of the library stereotype itself: libraries have a bad rap. Libraries have the reputation of being rulemongers, fine-collecting penny-pinchers, cranky about helping students, and all-around holier-than-thou. We know this is how (some) people see us, but is all of this negativity that weighs down the word “library” deserved? Koch’s experience would say “yes,” but I would contend that as a field librarianship largely attracts a different personality type these days that is less focused on institutional policy and more focused on customer service. Don’t you agree? (You can read more on librarian personality types here, though I’ll acknowledge that it doesn’t exactly back me up on this). So in that case, we’re back to the main part of the problem being the associations that go along with the “L-Word,” and not the libraries themselves.

And looking further back, it’s a fairly common theme for my blogging, for example here [“Science in the 21st Century conference recap”] and here [“From the Archives: My theory of conferences”].

As indicated, these two links go back to previous posts by Dupuis that reflect both the originating concern of the manifesto and more context on one of  its statements. In “Science in the 21st Century,” Depuis muses on another conference experience in which it was clear that science faculty did not have the library on their “radar.” This ties in cleanly with the other links described above. The second post, “From the Archives,” provides some background to his manifesto statement, “We must stop going to librarian conferences and instead attend conferences where our patrons will be present.” As one outreach (sorry, “stealth”) tactic, going to disciplinary conferences makes perfect sense. However, it’s not going to solve the problem.

If only we could surgically trim the eons of expectation and stereotype from the definition of “library” in the brains of our patrons and leave them with a refined, sharper sense of what a library means in 2011. But how? Is it just a matter of, as Dupuis suggests, dropping the use of the “L-Word” in our work with those outside our field? What if we were to all consciously redefine our buildings and our jobs and our conference presentation titles to reflect the new work most of us do already? What if instead of saying I’m a “Librarian” I could introduce myself as a “Research Consultant” or “Information Expert” or — who knows? I can already picture the very different response that would evoke from faculty in other disciplines, as well as students.

On the institutional level it’s already happening at campuses around the country, where libraries are being replaced with “Information Commons” and “Knowledge Centers” and a whole array of other non-L-word names. Perhaps it’s just time for us — as individuals and organizations — to completely redefine ourselves. That way, we can throw overboard the negative baggage our beloved libraries have been hauling around for all these years.

Ellie

Reference Librarian (Assistant Professor), Austin Community College

I think I may be anti-manifesto in general. Or rather, perpetually and knee-jerkingly defender of whatever is under attack. I want to make it clear that I did read where Dupuis states himself that the manifesto is “a series of provocative statements not a realistic plan of action” and I appreciate the overall sentiment. But since this is a reaction piece, I have to admit, there is much I disagree with.

A number of the statements start with “we must stop” and then follow with what we should be doing instead. I agree with most of the ‘start doing’ items, but I don’t see these as either/or choices. There may be some aspect of “what are you able to give up to add in these new important things,” but I don’t think most of the items should actually be fully stopped by all librarians. I also see many of them as comparing apples to oranges. The things gained from librarian/librarian interactions are what we then use in our librarian/constituent interactions. They serve different purposes and they’re not interchangeable. For example, we can learn from our constituents what programs or services most interest them, but we can’t learn survey methodology from them. And what about all the times their personal interests conflict with our mission? We are in a profession where we have to sometimes ask, do we give them what they want, or what they need? A friend posted a quote on Facebook from a student after an information literacy session, “you should just talk not ask so many questions.” It is our deeper interactions with fellow librarians through conferences, workshops and our literature that enrich our teaching pedagogy. Twitter and Facebook can supplement that, and can build wonderful connections, but they can’t substitute.

Much of the manifesto seemed to be based on an assumption of a large staff of librarian subject specialists, which is often the case at large research institutions, but may not be. If I’m in charge of all the purchasing for my small college, or only do instruction, or cataloging which single conference has my patrons? Which scholarly publishing ecosystem do I need to learn? I would argue it’s the librarian conferences where we bring together these jack-of-all-trades elements.

I do agree with the focus on faculty in academic institutions. Study after study shows that faculty are among the first people students contact for help and libraries and librarians are at the end. We can certainly do more to work with faculty to help students.

I also agree with a main sentiment, well phrased by Bonnie in the comments to the manifesto, “Our goal is to be where our patrons are (virtually and physically), using the language that they use, speaking to them on their terms…”

My manifesto addition is:

• We must do away with “musts.”

Every situation is unique and we each need to evaluate our own community and resources. Hopefully our decisions are informed by best practices (from the library community) and user studies, but ultimately there is no one right answer.

For example, there was a time I would have agreed with Emily’s statement “down with database demos.” But I will do an instruction session with no critical thinking component because at my institution the English as a second language professor wants to bring her developmental reading students in to show them how to find books in the library catalog and to introduce them to the expectations of an academic library. I will let them know they’re allowed to bring in drinks as long as they have a lid and that they can print 15 pages a day. We will search for books in the catalog and learn how to use an LC call number to find a book on the shelf. Then we’ll walk over to the shelves together and over half the class will check out a book, leaving with something that will help them improve their reading skills and feeling more confident about their ability to do so in the future or at least more confident in approaching the friendly lady at that big desk. They come in looking like deer in headlights and leave smiling. And that has every bit as much value as working on critical thinking skills with students who are at that developmental and affective stage.

Eric

Library Digital Services Manager – St. Edward’s University – Austin, Texas

Last week, I participated in Texas Library Association’s Legislative Day, a full day of visits with state legislators to talk about issues in libraries.  We visited the offices of every single state representative in the House and the Senate. This year there’s a lot to talk about when it comes to libraries and the draft 2012-2013 biennium budget.

Long story short, state library programs including TexShare (how we can afford databases like Academic Search Complete), Interlibrary Loan, the K-12 database program, and a variety of others are completely obliterated.  We’re not talking about steep cuts – we’re talking about zero’ing out entire program budgets.

The conversations we had with state legislators and their aides made it clear why programs that are so obviously vital to us are on the chopping block: legislators have no idea what libraries are or what we do. Academic, public, school or otherwise.

To illustrate how unclear legislators are about what a librarian is, take one of our talking points about school librarians:

School libraries and certified school librarians are critical in supporting education and digital literacy. School librarians are teachers and should be recognized as teaching staff… School librarians are frontline teachers who instruct students everyday on curriculum requirements, such as how to research, locate, evaluate, cite, and use information effectively and ethically… Certified school librarians must hold a master’s degree, pass a graduate level exam on library media functions and supporting school curricula, and have two full years of classroom teaching experience.

Time and time again, we ran into legislators who believed librarians were part of the non-instructional staff in K-12 schools, adding to the administrative bloat public schools carry.

It’s no wonder libraries and librarians have taken a beating in the draft budget. Our representatives don’t understand what we do. And here we are, at the eleventh hour, trying to plead for our interests and those of our patrons, with people who are far more interested in other state matters.

The outlook is bleak for Texas libraries. We did the best we could at legislative day, but it all seemed like it was too little, too late. As Dupuis would have put it, we are not part of a legislator’s landscape. We’re barely a part of our user’s landscape.

So – what can we do to find our way into the lives of our representatives?  The best suggestion came from Edna Butts, general counsel and senior policy advisor for state senator Kirk Watson.  She said that it was great that we showed up in such numbers to support libraries, but the important voices would be those of our users.  (I then pointed out the overflowing packet of letters from elementary school students supporting their library in Senator Watson’s information packet.)

To this end, I would add the following to the manifesto:

• We must be better at articulating our own value, especially in non-library settings (the faculty meeting, the town hall, the Capitol)
• We must inspire others to fight for us by aligning ourselves with our users, not each other

This speaks to the spirit of the manifesto in that we must be “on the same side” or “of the same group” with our users.  We can’t be the “other” if we want people to stand up for what we do.  We must develop an environment where a threat to the library feels very much like a threat to its users.

Run a “What My Library Means to Me” project. Make your library their library. Do it stealth. Do it in the open, purposefully. The most important part is to do it, and share your results with a senator, a provost, a principal, a superintendent or a mayor.

Note: A big thank you to Gloria Meraz, Director of Communications for the Texas Library Association, and all TLA staff and volunteers who put together legislative day this year.  The message Gloria composed for us to share was lucid, urgent, and timely. It gave us words for what we know to be important for our state. Thank you!

Brett

Director, Collingswood Public Library, and PhD student at Rutgers University

Is anyone trying to stealthily infiltrate the librarian community? I’m pretty sure the answer is no. Why? In part, because far too many librarians think we should ignore what we’re good at (whatever that is, right?) in order to pretend we’re something else entirely.

• Nursing isn’t what you turn to when you fail at getting into medical school.
• Social work isn’t what you turn to when you fail at getting into a psychology program.
• Education isn’t what you turn to when you drop out of a PhD program.
• Librarianship isn’t what you turn to when you want to stealthily sneak onto the faculty.

These are professions and academic disciplines with a history all their own, each with a fascinating, useful, unique body of knowledge. If we can keep this idea in mind, maybe it will help us muster enough self-esteem to start reading (and talking about) our professional literature and to continue the work of making our professional organizations truly relevant.

We have a lot of work to do, a lot of questions to answer, but that work can be made easier by paying attention to the librarians who have thought about these questions already and who have contributed their ideas and their research to our professional literature. Our work can also be made easier by working with others in the profession and by bringing in people from related professions to help us along.

I don’t work in an academic library, but I have in the past. In addition, as a part-time graduate student, I currently rely on academic libraries in order to get my work done. Here’s my manifesto for academic libraries:

1. Figure out what the students and faculty need in order to do their work.
2. Give it to them.
3. Measure the results.
4. Repeat.

This is just an educated guess on my part, but I’m pretty sure that figuring out what students and faculty want and giving it to them means putting every available resource into improving the library’s website. And by website, I don’t mean just the pages in www.library.yourinstitution.edu, I mean every resource and service students and faculty access through the library website or could conceivably access through the library website. Do you want to do something stealthily that I, as a student, would find really useful? Learn information architecture, learn to program, or figure out how to negotiate contracts with the content vendors that allow programmers and information architects to present information in a usable way. I don’t need to see you at my conferences or on my turf or collaborating with faculty members or in my “patron community” and I’d really rather you weren’t “in the social networking spaces where (we) live”: I just want the library website to work.

As far as I’m concerned, any effort to go stealth is wasted. The problem isn’t with our public relations. The problem is with our product.

Leigh Anne

Senior Staff Librarian, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

Did someone say “public library manifesto”?  Where to begin?

Dupuis is correct when he states that a manifesto for public library workers might look very different. Many of the problems with which he takes issue are not relevant to public library workers because of the nature of our institutions. Most public library workers, for example, do not gain any sort of professional favor for presenting at conferences or serving on committees. Participation in these activities does not net us better wages, promotions, or tenure, and is not work that is routinely valued in the public library sphere, unless one currently occupies a management position or has self-identified as “management material.” In fact, it is all too frequently seen as busywork that takes reference librarians away from the day-to-day operations of the library.

Whether or not this is an acceptable state of affairs is for wiser, more experienced heads than mine to determine. However, given the current state of public librarianship, here are the revisions I would make to Dupuis’s manifesto. May they initiate a spirited conversation about the professional work of the public librarian, and the best way to support it.

• Public library workers must be selective about which conferences they attend and which professional associations they join, supporting only those that specifically support our particular needs and concerns.
• That being said, public library workers must make an honest attempt to reform unsatisfactory professional associations before giving up on them.
• Public library workers must have an elevator speech for their job/institution and be willing not only to deliver it at the drop of a hat, but to tailor it on the fly based on the particular needs and interests of the audience.
• Whenever possible, public library workers must collaborate with academic and special library workers to create interdisciplinary services for the community they collectively serve.
• Public library workers must blog, using their real names, and with full support from their institutions. Our unique voices and experiences are still, sadly, underrepresented.
• Public library workers must re-imagine what professional literature could be, and actively seek out opportunities to write for publications, print and digital, that our patrons are reading.
• Public library workers must make an honest effort to explore leadership and management opportunities before rejecting them as unsuitable.
• By the same token, public library workers must firmly reject any such roles and opportunities they have tried and found wanting/inappropriate, for whatever reason.

While there are a great deal of factors over which we have no control, I reject out of hand any theory of public librarianship that smacks of self-pity or victim mentality.There is so much that we are already doing quite well. We routinely partner with non-library organizations in our communities to host programs, especially for children and seniors. We actively court teen clientele and try to understand their unique perspective. We use social media wisely, for the most part, and our reputation for defending the freedom to read is legendary. I refuse to believe we cannot apply the same spirit and fire to the cultivation and development of our collective professional identity.

Or, to put it another way, time to take the logs out of our own eyes before tackling the specks that trouble our patrons. At the very least, we should be conscious of those thoughts and behaviors that prevent us from constructing a solid professional identity, and initiate conversations on these matters, no matter how difficult that might seem in the context of our institutions as currently constructed.

Full disclosure, dear colleagues: I am writing my portion of this post on my own time, at an ungodly hour on the night before it is due. I do this not because I am a martyr, or because I hope someone influential will see the essay and be impressed by my dedication to our profession. I do it because I refuse to accept the tired old dichotomy that shunts scholars into one arena and practitioners into another. It is not enough to serve the public. We must have a theoretical-rhetorical model that serves our own best interests, and makes it easier to explain our value to a culture that delights in questioning it. We must have a body of professional literature that is meaningful and vibrant. And, above all, we must have library workers who actively and consciously explore their gifts and abilities, then select appropriate vehicles for expressing those abilities.

Public library workers of the world, unite and write! You have nothing to lose but your stereotypes.

by Flickr user foreversouls

Working in an academic environment, the majority of my student interactions are based around a specific assignment. Every semester there is at least one assignment that comes across my reference desk that makes me throw my hands up in exasperation (such as: a scavenger hunt that was written before we moved much of our content online or the requirement that the student must have at least one print source, library databases and ebooks do not count). Of course I put on a good face. I’ve been well trained. I don’t make disparaging remarks about the teacher or the assignment. I commiserate if appropriate. And most importantly, I am usually (though not always) able to fill both the underlying information need and the assignment’s specific requirements.

In researching this piece I found that much has been written about librarian/faculty relationships. I found articles on working with faculty to build assignments and even whole courses from the ground up. I found articles on the importance of collaboration and establishing positive relationships. I will not be reiterating those well made arguments.

Instead, I will be asking (and answering): what do you do after that student walks in, assignment in hand that you know just isn’t fair to them? I’m writing not as a veteran, but as a new recruit, someone who, until a few months ago, never even considered the possibility of talking to faculty about their assignments. I had heard of librarians providing assistance in designing library related assignments, but never offering unsolicited feedback.

I remember both the assignment that opened my eyes to this possibility and the one that was my personal tipping point. The eye opening experience occurred at my moonlighting gig at a four year institution. We kept getting students who had the same (admirable) weekly assignment: find and read a newspaper article covering the event they were studying that week. The article (or possibly other primary source document) had to have been written during the time of the event and from the perspective of the people involved. We had been doing fine helping them find historical and foreign papers as needed, until they came to the Ottoman Empire. And it didn’t stop there. The class was a survey of world history. They continued to have topics that simply might not have ever been documented by the people involved, unlikely in newspaper article form, certainly not in English, and may not have ever been translated into English if it did manage to get written down and preserved. African events were also particularly difficult. One of the other reference librarians called the teacher to explain that for many of these events it was going to be exceedingly difficult if not impossible for students to find the required articles. In the end, the faculty member agreed to allow the students to use international English language papers if necessary.

This was a revelation to me. The moxie! The nerve! The courage! Who was she to tell a faculty member there was a problem with her assignment? Course assignments are the purview of the instructor. How did she have the self-assurance to consider it her place? How did she have the skill to affect change and the finesse to do so without offending? And yet when the librarians told me the assignment had been modified they said it as though this were an everyday occurrence, that they discuss assignments with faculty all the time and the faculty are usually responsive. This wasn’t covered in library school and it isn’t common practice at my day job, so I was struck in particular that the librarians did not think this was anything special. To me it seemed incredibly liberating to take action rather than be silently frustrated. The seed was planted.

My personal tipping point happened when a student came in to me at my community college job and needed to have at least one print article. I started with my usual, “the library databases have the same articles and still totally count,” but she interrupted me. No, actually, her teacher had specifically said that those do not count. She had to physically touch the original source. At my college we have almost completely transitioned to online versions for our articles. Luckily it turned out she just needed one print source, it didn’t have to be a journal article, so I was able to help her find a suitable encyclopedia article.

I had encountered the “must have a print source” requirement before, but this was the first time I had a student tell me that the teacher had explicitly said the library databases did not count. My first thought was to assume the requirement was an attempt to force the students into the library. Personally, I was more impressed that the student had already found a number of scholarly articles in our databases. But then I wondered whether this was another case of lumping everything “online” into one category of “to be avoided” and perhaps not realizing that it is the same article regardless of format.

I sent out requests to my librarian friends and asked “How do you talk to teachers about their assignments?” Read on to find out. I’ve amalgamated their responses and organized them around some of the typical problems I’ve encountered to provide you with readily adaptable scripts which you are welcome to use. (Note: You will see some repeated sentiments as many of the arguments can and do overlap.)

The Scavenger Hunt

Scavenger hunt assignments are frustrating for everyone. Looking up trivia is not the same as conducting research and without a meaningful application of the process of using the library anything they learn through the scavenger hunt is less likely to stick.

“Resentment toward rather than appreciation of library research is the likely result of these assignments. Library assignments are more meaningful if students use the information they find for an authentic task related to the topics covered in the course.”¹

Outdated scavenger hunt assignments are even worse. Here’s one way to approach a faculty member with an outdated scavenger hunt assignment:

We had some of your students in the library today working on your scavenger hunt assignment that familiarizes them with library resources. We are excited that you are giving out an assignment like that, but some of the activities in the assignment are a little dated, since the scavenger hunt seems to be from 2004. Some of the paper handouts referred to in the assignment are now online. One of my librarians, [name], said she’d be very happy to get with you to help you update the assignment so it would be a bit more useful for your students. You might also want to look at the Info Game on the library web page. It’s something you could use as well. Library Services tries to get away from the scavenger hunt concept and I think [name] could help you come up with some excellent alternatives. She’s one of our most imaginative young librarians! You can reach [name] at [email] and [phone number]. We are very happy that you are using the library with your students!

In the interest of full disclosure, that email did not get us a reply. Being more comfortable with email myself, it tends to be my default communication method, but most likely a phone call or office visit is the better approach. However, I think the script is still worth sharing. The general tone and sentiment shows appreciation that the faculty member uses the library and lets her know that some of the questions are no longer applicable. It also offers assistance in the updating process. And as one of my respondents told me, “It doesn’t always work.”

“No Online Sources”

This is a nuanced declaration and a number of the headings below touch on some of the different aspects. Setting aside online library resources for a moment: a flat ban on anything found online not only eliminates a large number of incredibly useful sources (census data, CDC info, LOC historical documents, etc.), but it also discourages using and developing critical thinking skills.

In college, we try to focus students on *critically thinking* about authority and appropriateness. We’ve found that limiting students to print resources hurts their ability to find the resources they need, and they are not able to support their research project as well as they could if they were able to use the best sources regardless of format.

Of course there is always the question of what exactly the faculty meant by “no online sources.”

“The Internet” vs. Web Based Academic Resources

Often the student, the faculty, or both don’t differentiate between the free web and resources that the library has purchased, but are available electronically. The argument above about the value of allowing use of the free web notwithstanding, it may be necessary to clarify the instructor’s definition of what constitutes an “online source” and to ask that faculty member to assure his or her students that the library’s electronic resources are allowed.

I was helping one of your students recently who needed a print resource for an assignment and I thought there might have been a misunderstanding over the definition of what constitutes an “online source.” My understanding of the definition you’re using is that you exclude sources found in library subscription databases, not simply those found on web sites through Google or another search engine.

I’d like to assure you that the online articles and ebooks found through library databases are content that the library has purchased and are indeed the exact same content found in the print versions. As you may know, libraries are increasingly receiving journal subscriptions only electronically and discontinuing expensive print subscriptions. Among the many reasons for the current trend towards receiving these articles digitally is that it provides a better value for our students – one purchase makes all of the content available at all of our campuses and extension sites, rather than having to purchase separate print subscriptions for each of them. We are also able to provide access to a vast number of resources that we wouldn’t have physical space to store.

Because of this, students will often find the full text of the article in the database but we will not have a current print subscription of the same periodical title. In addition, as students are learning to evaluate information and sources, they may be confused as to why a scholarly source in a subscription database does not meet the assignment requirements. Finally, there is no easy way to lead students to print-only articles because our databases serve as indexes and many of them contain or link to full-text online.

With all of this in mind, I wondered if you would be willing to expand your definition of an acceptable source to include sources found in library subscription databases.

“I want to be sure they’re using the library” or “I just want them to have the experience”

As more and more resources go online and as libraries push to create virtual branches and online portals, physically coming in to the library becomes less and less necessary to complete a research paper. While my knee jerk reaction is frustration towards holding on to nostalgic perceptions of library as place, in reality, these are exactly the faculty that I should most appreciate. They value libraries and want to pass that on to their students. They’re on our side! Unfortunately, requiring a print source doesn’t necessarily achieve the intended goal. Instead, it often just means grabbing a source, any source, as long as it’s print, after the paper has already been mostly written.

We hear from many professors who are thankfully concerned that their students learn how to use a college library. If you want to be sure that your students use library resources, we have had a lot of success with students creating annotated bibliographies explaining why they chose each source, or alternately writing down the steps they took to find an article online through the library website and what qualities make the article appropriate for their paper for at least 1 of their sources. That way students are forced to think about process and quality of resources.

or

I am guessing that one reason for requiring print is to encourage students to visit the library in person. I completely understand that you want your students to learn how to use the library and critically think about authority and appropriateness. We do too! However, in many cases we’ve found that requiring a print resource can actually be counterproductive in this regard. Students wind up not being forced to use the critical thinking skills we’re requiring of them. They may use something that doesn’t work very well just to fill the requirement and they aren’t forced to consider authority, appropriateness of content, etc. Also, because most libraries are moving or have already moved to all online journals we’re concerned our students know what to expect now and in the future. We want them to leave here knowing how to use a library, including the subscription databases, and to have a clear understanding of the difference between articles found online through the library and those out on the open web.

or

It’s so important that students learn how to find authoritative journal articles. We want our students to be prepared for (grad school/work/4-year) and most (four year universities/schools with grad programs/corporations) have moved to all online journals. They may even be getting rid of their print archives and replacing them with online archives! We’re concerned our students know what to expect now and in the future. We want them to leave here knowing how to use a library.

This is also the place to offer an in library instruction session or a specialized assignment to accomplish the goal of getting the students in to the library.

We could also create a brief assignment which would require students to visit the library to find out about the resources and services available.

Sometimes the information just doesn’t exist.

I’ve already mentioned the newspaper articles from the time of an event, from the country where the event took place, when it took place in the distant past and in a country with a different language. Another example would be peer reviewed journal articles on an extremely recent event.

In this situation you can ask the teacher whether they have specific resources in mind. It is always possible that they know of a source that you don’t. Of course it is also possible that the library no longer has access to something the faculty member was accustomed to using in the past, or that a new faculty member simply isn’t familiar with your library’s particular collection yet and is making assumptions based on his or her former institution. This opens the door to discussing collection development and acquiring new resources to help support the curriculum. If neither of those are the case you can fall back on explaining types of information sources and why that information just isn’t readily available. One of the first things I ask students to do when beginning their research is to ask themselves who would have collected the information they’re looking for and how would they have then made it available. This is particularly helpful when trying to find statistics. But it is also helpful here in explaining why we’re not necessarily going to be able to find a newspaper article, in English, from the 1700′s in Turkey talking about a specific war from a specific side.

In the case of the peer reviewed journal article we can explain the peer review process, that it takes time, and that for this topic, perhaps newspaper articles from large papers or government publications could be considered authoritative. I want to leave you with a perspective that particularly struck me:

“The berating of faculty for not being intuitively information literate, or for not taking the time to become information literate is a puzzling attitude – particularly given librarians’ professed mandate to guide users and provide instruction in the use of information resources. … The images of troublesome, arrogant faculty, who have little understanding of librarians’ roles, point to a problem at the core of the relationship issue; that until librarians embrace faculty as clients themselves, deserving of the same level of respect and support afforded undergraduate and graduate students, IL librarians may continue to fight an uphill battle to bring faculty members onside. Why do librarians, for example, assume that faculty should necessarily understand what they have not been taught, or necessarily understand how to use information systems that are not user-friendly? Do librarians ask this of other users?”²

The further reading section contains a number of links to pages that various libraries have created to provide tips for instructors who want to create library related assignments. Some of the wording could be a tad friendlier in places, but the content is good. There are also links to a best practices discussion and a model program.

I hope that librarians who have been frustrated by what they felt was an unfair assignment feel both empowered to contact faculty and prepared with some tools to use. I hope that librarians who have been there and done that will share their stories of what to do and what to avoid in the comments.

Further reading:

• Share Your Teaching Tool Kit: Best Practices in Library Instruction Topic: Teaching to a Bad Assignment (Notes from ACRL IS Discussion)
• Mosley, Pixey Anne. “Creating a library assignment workshop for university faculty.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 24.1 (Jan. 1998): 33-41.
• Effective assignments using library and internet sources (From the University of California Berkeley)
• Creating Effective Research Assignments (From the University of Maryland)
• Designing Effective Library Assignments (From the University of North Carolina Wilmington)
• Integrating Library and Information Literacy into your Assignment (From St. Cloud State University)

Thanks to Liane Luckman and Meghan Sitar for sharing their strategies and to Andrew Shuping and Emily Ford for reviewing and editing.

1. From the University of California at Berkeley’s Effective Assignments Using Library and Internet Resources
2. From Julien, Heidi and Lisa M. Given. “Faculty-Librarian Relationships in the Information Literacy Context: A Content Analysis of Librarians’ Expressed Attitudes and Experiences.” <u>The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science</u> 27.3 (2002/2003): 75-87.

The impetus for this blog post was an email that has been making the rounds, originating from Dr. Richard Price of Oxford University, that reads as follows:

I recently finished my Ph.D on the philosophy of perception from Oxford. With a team of people from Stanford and Cambridge, I’ve just launched a website, www.academia.edu, which does two things:

- It shows academics around the world structured in a ‘tree’ format, displayed according to their departmental and institutional affiliations.
- It enables academics to see news on the latest research in their area – the latest people, papers and talks.

We are hoping that Academia.edu will eventually list every academic in the world — Faculty Members, Post-Docs, Graduate Students, and Independent Researchers. Academics can add their departments, and themselves, to the tree by clicking on the boxes.

The message concludes with the names of a few notables who have joined (or been added) to the site, and a request to assist Dr. Price and friends in their efforts by further circulating the announcement.

Call me a sucker, but I got that message and immediately joined up, forwarded it to my colleagues, and started envisioning the possibilities. What intrigues me is Academia.edu’s combination of a professional networking site with a digital repository. Could this take the place of our nascent institutional repository or save my fellow librarians from having to put together an institutional bibliography each year?

A screen shot of Academia.edu's homepage.

The networking-repository hybrid model was new to me, though I learned later that Academia.edu is not the first to do this. Nor is it the only virtual platform where researchers can create a profile and search for others with similar research interests. A lot of people in academia already use Facebook and LinkedIn to connect with their colleagues and friends, but Academia.edu and its competitors are different because they were specifically created to serve the needs of academics, in terms of research, professional networking, listing citations, and file sharing. Try some of those activities on Facebook, and you’ll soon agree that it falls far short of an academic’s networking needs.

Here’s an overview of the major academic networking sites and their features (if you know of others I overlooked, please comment below). All allow you to create a profile and search for other academics by research interest, so I’ve omitted those features in the table.

In addition to the characteristics above, these are the qualities that make each site unique.

• Academia.edu: Networking for academics in all fields. Offers unique visual format with organization by institution. Features Facebook Connect.
• BibApp: Must be hosted on your server for campus-specific organization of faculty experts and research. Functions more like a catalog of faculty than a networking site, but could be used either way.
• Epernicus: Networking targeted for scientists. Features “BenchQs,” which is like Yahoo! Answers for science.
• Graduate Junction: Networking for graduate students that professes to be less intimidating than professional sites. Offers a conference diary & job listings.
• Labmeeting: Networking for scientists in the biomedical and related sciences. Offers features to assist in organizing and sharing information in lab settings. Also includes strong privacy protection.
• Pronetos: Networking for academics in all fields. Organization by discipline, and offers discussion forums for each discipline.

I’m going to use the remainder of this post to critically review these academic networking sites, looking at the benefits, limitations, and possible future outlook.

The Good

There are two major benefits offered by participation in most of the sites I’m looked at, especially Academia.edu and Pronetos:

1. The ability to locate other scholars with similar research interests.
2. The power to upload papers, articles, and even books to contribute to a worldwide digital repository.

As far as #1, the networking aspect goes, it would be natural to ask why any of these sites are an improvement over the ubiquitous Facebook. Who needs another social network, for goodness sake? Vivek Murthy, one of the founders of Epernicus, addressed the question in a post on the Epernicus blog: “Mikhail and I started Epernicus because we realized that the social networks to which we belonged weren’t able to serve our needs as scientists. The profiles didn’t capture what was important to scientists. And equally as important, we couldn’t use these networks to help us find expertise in real world scientific networks.” If they had a question or issue unique to their research that no one they knew personally could address, they wanted a way to find others out there who might know more. This is not what Facebook was built for.

In theory, the opportunity to share research interests and connect with other scholars sounds idyllic. Finally, the chance to find out who’s walking the same path and reading the same articles. It’s like eHarmony for the brain instead of the heart. If there is a need and a demand for such a thing, it could really take off.

Personally, I get more excited about #2, the digital repository side of this project. The sites that actually host files, especially Academia.edu and Pronetos, are contributing to the open access movement in ways they may not even realize. Although those of us in libraries already know that faculty usually don’t want to take the additional time to post their papers to our repositories, these two sites could be different because (a) they’re easier to use than any library repository I’ve ever seen, (b) they’re prettier, and (c) they make it clear that the papers uploaded will be shared with others instead of stored in a dusty server room, never to be heard from again.

The Bad

First, any social networking site, whether personal or professional, is only as good as its membership. With that in mind, I would say that all of these sites have a long way to go in soliciting members. Academia.edu appears to be the largest, at about 20,000, but this is still a small percentage of academics worldwide. GraduateJunction may have the greatest potential in this arena due to its specific target audience (graduate students) and the fact that it boasts more “useful” (job and conference) features than the other sites in this review.

Second, although I initially found it entertaining to search for others with similar research interests to mine, once I found a few I realized that I just didn’t know what to do with them. I could add them as contacts and review their publications. What then? If I were extremely motivated perhaps I would email them and say a few words in our unique research interest language (“speaking geek,” I think they call it). But how often would such contact lead to something constructive? The more I searched, the more skeptical I became.

Third, academic networking sites are facing big challenges in finding an effective way to ensure that only legitimate academics participate. The UK Times Higher Education expressed concern about Academia.edu because “anyone can pass themselves off as an academic…and scholars could be misled into putting their details on it because it occupies the generic top-level domain ‘.edu,’ which is normally reserved for universities.” On the other hand, some sites are so careful to screen members that they seem almost impossible to join. Despite repeated attempts, I was unable to join Labmeeting or Pronetos due to their screening standards. Pronetos sent me an activation message that somehow disappeared into cyberspace (and no, it wasn’t in my spam folder), while Labmeeting did not recognize my university email address as being from a legitimate academic domain (my university president would take issue with that!).

The Ugly

All in all, social networks of any variety are a curious tradeoff. How much time are you willing to put into them in order to expand your web of connections? In writing this blog post, I spent 8-10 hours crawling around on the various sites mentioned here, creating profiles, exploring group and research interests, checking to see if I knew anyone (or wanted to know anyone) on any of the sites. I found many of the sites appealing at first, and enjoyed some of my wanderings. But now that I’ve had some exposure to these platforms, returning to Facebook feels kind of like going home. True, I can’t search for other scholars based on my research interests. But considering how many other avenues I have to find them — from publications to blogs to conferences — do I really need a new one?

As Jeffrey R. Young noted in “New Social Network Hopes to Catalog All Researchers and Their Interests,”an article in the September 16 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, “It’s too soon to tell whether any of these sites will catch on, and it seems that the services will only become valuable if a critical mass of researchers join in. The final winner may be Facebook itself.” So, are these new-kid-on-the-block academic networking sites worth your time? Based upon my admittedly limited experience on these sites, probably not. But if you have some free time, go for it. Create your profile and see who else is out there. You might get lucky.

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Many thanks to Brett Bonfield and Ellie Dworak for taking the time to offer feedback on the draft of this post, and to Brett for his coding kindnesses.