The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Marie Kondo, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up Berkeley, Ten Speed Press, 2014.

What gives you joy? That is what you should do, and what you should have. It determines what you should buy. Keeping tidy is easy: eliminate that which does not give you joy (an excellent argument for divorce, as well). Books are among the most difficult items to let go, because they 1) retain function and 2) contain information, giving them long shelf-life. They retain ‘value’, and the potential for joy, very well. But do you love this individual volume enough to keep it forever?

Among more than fifty paperbacks that didn’t make it are Tolkien, Steinbeck, Conrad, Kipling, Freud, Herman Hesse, D.H. Lawrence, and Henry James: cheap classics, most of which can be had from Project Gutenberg if ever wanted again. That leaves only 1200 or so to disappear en route to Kondo’s ideal collection size of between thirty and one hundred volumes.

Yeah, books are hard to let go.

[cross-posted at www.whateverettreads.blogspot.com/]

Prioritzing Assignments

Sometimes librarians, especially if doing the job well, will have more work than time to do it. Here, we mean on-demand work, the research and reference services that are seen as “our jobs”, never mind the long-term projects and daily tasks that actually take most of our time. Those tasks can, and should, be set aside when a patron asks for help.

The problem, of course, is that providing good service creates demand for the service. It’s a nice problem.

Still, when request pile up, we need a way to get started, or the avalanche can become overwhelming. This could be as simple as starting with the question on top of the stack, and when finished with that, starting with the question now on top of the stack. That should, eventually, get to everyone. But it may also miss a tight deadline or leave easy questions unanswered for far too long.

There is a better way.

First, take a moment to consider what makes one request more important to you than another. How do you choose which of two questions to answer first?

I find three factors go into my decisions: the assignment deadline, the requestor’s perceived status, and the anticipated requirements or difficulty of the question. The last of these includes determining what, ultimately, the client needs: is it a fact, a quote, an article or case retrieval, editing assistance, help using a research tool... how complex is the project, and how long will it take to complete?

The deadline is obvious. If a brief is due before close of business, it cannot be left to work on tomorrow. Each project has a different deadline, and those can provide an organizing method. This shouldn't be the only consideration, though. Just because an answer is due sooner doesn't make that the first question you should answer.

Status is a galling factor, since we're supposed to live in an egalitarian society. The fact is, though, librarians are support staff; our clients are the talent, and we're here to make them look good. And some of those clients are more important among their peers than others. We may not agree with it, but we must recognize it and at least consider it when making decisions.

Of course, the time it will take to complete should probably be the main concern. Giving ourselves time to complete a task before it is due can be a real challenge.

Each of these factors is on a sliding scale, from “ignore” to “URGENT”, and the weight given each factor varies, as well. For instance, if a new associate and a senior partner make otherwise identical requests, pleasing the partner is probably a priority. If the partner’s request is difficult while the associate’s will only take a moment, on the other hand, perhaps it is better to deliver the easy win before settling into the more demanding work.

None of this split-second internal calculation is possible, though, without communication. Begin with the reference interview, even if that means responding to an email (it's always preferable to simply respond to an email question with the answer, if possible -- it's just not always possible). This interaction lets the client know you’re on top of the question, provides you detail on what is needed, and lets you set delivery expectations. Managing expectations from the start, by knowing what else is in the queue and where this request falls on that list, helps avoid angry calls later and makes sure all responses are delivered in an appropriate, timely fashion.

Library User Instruction: Course Goals

The textbooks, with their emphasis on integrating activity, writing, and critical thinking into the course, begin to get at what I want to instill in future teachers. And since I have discovered a second listed course in the catalog also focused on information literacy, I can move away from that theme to look at the subject of teaching more broadly. My goals, really, are pretty simple.

First are things I want them to learn. I want them to come to see teaching as an integral aspect of librarianship, regardless of one’s specific role in the library. Reference is teaching. Instruction, obviously, is teaching. But so is cataloging. So is work on the OPAC. Every task in the library is intended to help users fill information needs -- to help them learn something.

Next, I want them to think about what makes instruction effective, considering educational theory, methods, and how these relate to their own teaching. Praxis, the reflective analysis of our own performance, is essential to improving, and a habit best learned early.

The remaining key ideas are about presentation and content, and teachers who plan around these ideas are likely to find success. The concept of learning outcomes is most important: what should the learner be able to do after the lesson? The answer here is essential: it is the entire purpose of the instruction. It guides both choice of material and of presentation methods. If you can’t answer it, just cancel the class. Three ideas that can help determine learning outcomes for a class are 1) what should they remember in ten years? 2) “less is more” --  we can only remember so much new material at once, and 3) that we all learn better when personally interested in the material.

Exposure to this set of ideas would have been a nice start for me, yet none of my education classes bothered to make those simple points.

Then there is what I want them to do, in service of instilling the ideas above. I want them to explore issues that teaching librarians encounter in the workplace, so they will know what sort of problems and controversies they might encounter. I want them to see librarians teaching in various situations and contexts -- not just the one-shot university bibliographic instruction session, but also computer training courses at the public library, historical tours at governmental libraries, reference interactions at special libraries, toddler story-times, and more. Finally, they will practice preparing and delivering material, including lesson planning, course design, and marketing. I want them to walk out of my class feeling ready to walk into their own classrooms.

I want to do all of this in an active-learning environment based on activity and discussion with minimal lecture time, that demonstrates the theories they are studying. These activities should provide realistic scenarios and address components of larger, long-term course assignments.

The assignments, then, are carrying a lot of the instructional value for my class. They require the students to develop practical instruction skills and reflect on their own teaching experiences. The most important of these is to develop an information literacy course, from the ground up, based on The Information Literacy User’s Guide. The assignment is a nod to the inherited emphasis on bibliographic instruction; the exercise is, of course, generalizable. Digesting a text, developing learning goals and instructional plans to deliver the material, evaluating results, and creating an audience are all necessary skills for teachers, no matter their subjects.

Exploring contemporary issues, controversies, and practices in the field, however, requires some sort of research. Previously, this was just an academic research paper, like any other class. That’s pretty boring, though, and of limited real-world use. Next time, we will use a better professional-development assignment: students will prepare a paper (as if) for presentation at the ALA / ACRL conference, following all guidelines for submission. They will then deliver the presentation to the class as a “rehearsal”, and provide one another with performance critiques.

Another part of this exploration is finding, presenting, and discussing relevant research articles for the class -- which also provides more time in front of the class for each student. Another practical exercise, developing a presentation targeting a specific research tool for presentation to a specific course audience (like presenting the JSTOR database to an upper-level humanities class), puts them in front of people yet again.

The final two assignments are intended to further expose the students to practical librarianship responsibilities and expectations. First, they will visit and evaluate at least two different types of library instruction. In most cases, this means visiting a campus bib-info session, then finding a public, government, or special library at which to observe  a different kind of teaching. This leads to a comparative paper, and one hopes, a better understanding of the differences between different types of library. Finally, they undertake a job market analysis in which they look at current openings. Here, the expectation is that seeing what is required for application and what is expected in various positions will allow a head start on finding work after graduation, and that preparing a teaching statement for class will make completing those applications a bit easier.

Finally, I intend to bring in help in making these points. In-class guests provide unique insight, and the students appreciate the opportunity to ask questions of successful professionals. I expect to have at least four: the library’s subject liaison to our school, to both demonstrate an upper-level in-class library session and to discuss what a liaison does; the library’s instruction coordinator, to discuss how the instruction program works, the hiring process, and expectations for new hires; a public or special librarian, to reinforce that teaching doesn’t just happen at university libraries, and a representative from the campus teaching center, to share about the additional opportunities to develop teaching skills they offer.

Review: Nicole Engard, More Library Mashups

Nicole Engard (editor), More Library Mashups. Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2015.

This is Engard’s second volume of examples and illustrations of how libraries are using open data sources to provide better information tools and services. Mashups, or combinations of distinct products into something new (like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups), look for ways to use free tools to aggregate, distribute, and increase access to information. Examples in the book range from an automatic weather search triggering a tweet about library closure status to integrating book cover images into the card catalogue, creating computer availability maps, or using drupal to create a library calendar.

The projects aren’t terribly technical. They are meant to show what can be done with available tools, and to inspire further investigation and development by readers. The authors vary, of course, but most chapters are clear and easy to follow. More than any single project, though, these ideas are valuable for developing new ways of thinking about what our users need and how we can help them get and use that.

The Card Catalog

Another version of this column first appeared in the ALLUNY Newsletter: http://www.aallnet.org/chapter/alluny/2014-02summer.pdf

“The catalog doesn’t exist any more.”

I was shocked to hear the librarian, at a public special library, say this, since I was asking how to access location information for print material in their collections.

Of course, she didn’t mean that the library no longer maintains an organized record of holdings—do away with that and the library stops being a library. What she meant was that there is no longer a physical record. The catalog is online now. And this was the problem: accessing collection information required computer access, and computer access was restricted—making it impossible for me to simply find and copy the article I needed. Lesson? There should always be at least one terminal dedicated exclusively to unencumbered catalog access.

It wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, hulking cabinets containing cards that described the collection held prominent reign over libraries, and our searches were limited to the title, author, and subject fields. I had a part in the change, too. My first library job, at the public library branch down the street, was transcribing catalog records from those cards for inclusion in a system-wide union catalog on CD-ROM. And I love both the convenience and utility of a good OPAC, which can provide much faster, more targeted results—from my couch—than the old drawers of cards ever did. Still, removing those old cabinets made the library feel a little less magical.

So when I learned that Syracuse University was making the sixty-drawer Gaylord Brothers catalog cabinets from their Science and Technology Library available a few years ago, I jumped at the chance to get one. It has lived in my living room ever since, storing small house-hold items and reminding me of the hard work underlying the magic of what we do, as well as the magic that hard work makes possible.

But my wife and I came to Central New York so she could pursue a Ph.D. Well, she caught it, and has now taken a faculty position at the University of Maryland. We moved to the DC area this summer. Our new space is much smaller and the catalog would not fit, so it has found a new home. I will miss its magical bulk, even though everything it once contained is now available online.

Deselection, again

Originally published in ALLUNY Newsletter (39.1),
http://www.aallnet.org/chapter/alluny/2014-01spring.pdf

In my last column, I wrote about the law library as a social space.  Before that was even published, I got word that not only would we not be getting comfortable chairs, we would be moving the library to a much smaller space.  This is a drastic, but reasonable, change for our firm.

A law firm library is unlike other law libraries.  We collect for a specific purpose—to support the practices of our attorneys—rather than in a comprehensive way.  History does matter, but not much: for what isn’t available through our database subscriptions, we rely on others, with more archival missions, to collect.  And finally, we are subject to the profit motive.  This isn’t to suggest that the library is a profit center, but we must be mindful that our space costs money, our books cost money, multiple copies of books costs even more money, and our databases allow for billing back usage costs to clients.

My job as a private law firm librarian is to provide timely access to accurate information in the most convenient, cost-effective way possible.  With multiple offices across several states, that means databases.  They are updated immediately, allow multiple concurrent users, and don’t require multiple copies for each office.

So the management committee has determined that our space can be better utilized as additional offices and conference rooms.  Our new space would be approximately one-third the current arrangement, and this would allow far fewer materials to be shelved.  I needed to begin culling my collection immediately.

Some of the decisions were easy.  Most of the deselected items hadn’t circulated for at least five years, and many hadn’t been updated in that time.  Large sets, like the NYCRR, which 1) cost a lot to maintain, 2) take lots of space, 3) are available for free online, and 4) can never be truly current, were among the first to go—along with shelves and shelves of New York case reporters that were housed in the basement.  Old hornbooks, outdated treatises, and back issues of periodicals were next.  The US Code and FCR, both available from the GPO website, freed another full run of shelves.  Digests, the NY Juror 2d, and a second set of McKinney’s Consolidated Laws also disappeared.  All told, the books we discarded left a stack of circulation cards nearly six inches high.

What did we keep?  Practice materials, mostly. Treatises, formbooks, and specialized case reporters from CCH. Historical material that is otherwise not online, like our Session Laws, Attorney General opinions, and Comptroller opinions collections. Local laws. Titles directly related to our current practice areas, or with particular enduring value. And some not available from our database provider because they’re published by the other vendor.

I am a librarian by trade, and an archivist by nature.  Tossing thousands of dollars into a dumpster is not my idea of fun, but I am better positioned to make these choices than anyone else in the firm.  I  know what materials we have online; I know what materials my attorneys actually use (as opposed to what they SAY they use); I know that keeping dated materials on the shelf so the shelf looks full will tempt one of them to use it without checking its currency, leaving him open to malpractice.  Clearing these shelves is an extinction event: the books are gone, and there is no bringing them back. Our library is now, of necessity, a lean, mean, internet using system, and our attorneys will need to adjust. On a more positive note, though, all that free shelf space has allowed me to start a DVD lending collection—so even in a reduced space, more people have reason to visit the new library.

The Library as Social Space

This post was originally published in the ALLUNY Newsletter 38.3,
http://www.aallnet.org/chapter/alluny/2013-03winter.pdf

The public library has a special place in popular culture as a safe, if somewhat un-cool, place for young people to meet and ‘do homework’.  It is public and supervised, but offers discretion and privacy; a place where we could sneak away without getting into trouble and spend time with someone special, even if all we could do was sit quietly at the same table.  This isn’t accidental, it’s just a fortuitous unintended consequence of the library’s mission to serve the community.

Law libraries don’t have quite the same cultural cachet, but we still have a mandate to serve our user communities, be they a Court, university, or firm.  So long as we have open stacks, we will have users in the space—which means that we have a social space.  This creates a wonderful opportunity.

Law school libraries are the most obvious example of this, because they are almost always full of students.  They come for the books, sometimes, but they often come for the quiet space between the books—law students spend a lot of time reading and writing.  Yet they also come because the library has group study rooms and here, the library becomes a social space.  The groups could meet anywhere.  They choose the library.

Court libraries doesn’t have such an obvious social component, but they are often the largest contiguous space in their buildings, which makes them good places to host parties and events.  They also provide space for impromptu meetings and conversations that would otherwise take place in hallways.

Firms lucky enough to have a physical library, likewise, will see its space used for informal meetings, for events, and for work that requires more space than an office desk.  Additionally, as print collections shrink, we will have more space to utilize in a social fashion.  This could mean adding a conference table to support large projects, individual study carrels for using the print resources, or even a couch and lounge space for more comfortable work.  Any of these might drive additional traffic into a more socially-welcoming environment.

None of this matters, though, unless we take advantage of the opportunity this social environment creates: people can meet in a conference room.  Why should they meet in the library instead?  The library as social space brings in potential users and creates goodwill; their presence allows us to unobtrusively promote our resources and services, and the chance to make new friends—friends who, in turn, can promote the library to others.  And it can all start with a comfortable place to sit.