American Libraries: Technology in Practice

Spare Me the Hype Cycle

Beverly Goldberg — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:53:50 +0000

May 2013

By Meredith Farkas

Focus on what works rather than what’s hot

“Every academic librarian worth her salt is embedded.”

“3D printers are so hot right now.”

“Are you telling me you don’t have QR code scavenger hunts at your library?”

“Your library doesn’t tweet?”

“But surely you have a Pinterest site!”

Although I’ve been in the profession only a decade, I’ve seen plenty of hyped-up ideas cycle through over the years. In 2006, every library had to have a blog. By 2008, every library had to have a Facebook page and a gaming program or collection. Right now, makerspaces are all the rage. And by 2014 it’ll be something else. These things aren’t necessarily bad. In many cases, they’re quite good and useful, and they point libraries in positive directions. However, hype can also blind librarians to what is a right fit for their institutions.

Fit over frenzy

I’ve seen some libraries jump on hot new things quickly, and for some, that’s just fine. But others, as the fervor dies down, end up jumping ship for the next new thing. Those of us whose libraries are not on the cutting edge are fortunate to be able to observe these early adopters because we can learn from their successes and failures. However, I wonder what patrons think of their library’s constant adoption and abandonment of new services and technologies. On the other hand, I see some librarians, made cynical by the hype cycle, who dismiss out of hand anything they perceive as being overpromoted.

It’s easy to get blinded by the hype and either adopt something that isn’t a right fit for your library or not adopt something that is. One recent and rather visible cautionary tale is blogging. If you search the web, you’ll find a vast graveyard of library blogs started between 2004 and 2006, when librarians were being told that blogging was the best way to have human and transparent conversations with their patrons. Many libraries have developed successful blogs because they were a good fit for their community and understood what it took to make a blog successful. Many more, however, abandoned their blogs due to lack of staff time or patron interest.

Librarians need to evaluate trends through a critical lens and examine the environment in which we operate. Who are our patrons? What are their needs? What are the priorities of our community and library board, or provost and president? Our priorities should flow from those needs and priorities.

My university is focused right now on pedagogical innovation and growing our online offerings. Clearly, the library should be poised to support and provide leadership in these areas. When I see a shiny new thing, I ask myself, “How will this further the library’s goals?” If I struggle to find an answer, I know it’s not worth pursuing.

Even when you’re not adopting the next new thing, there is frequently something to be learned from it. Three-dimensional printers may not be a good fit for your library, but they point to the value of providing technologies that support content creation. For your library, that may mean providing video-editing or web-design software. Maybe you don’t have the time to be embedded in online classes, but you can find a low-touch, high-impact way to embed library collections, services, and instruction in online classes.

The hype cycle will continue to churn and we’ll continue to be bombarded with technologies and approaches we’re told we just have to adopt to remain relevant or be good librarians. Focusing on the needs and priorities of those we serve helps to ensure that we are embracing—or not embracing—new tools for the right reasons.

MEREDITH FARKAS is head of instructional services at Portland (Oreg.) State University. She blogs at Information Wants to Be Free and created Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. Contact her at librarysuccess[at]gmail.com.

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Just-for-Me Training

Beverly Goldberg — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 02:44:16 +0000

March/April 2013

By Meredith Farkas

Screencasting for personalized long-term learning

Librarians in all types of libraries provide training and instruction. Whether it’s for staff or patrons, the timing of the training is usually critical. Teach first-year college students about a database when they have no assignment that requires them to use it and it will likely go in one ear and out the other. Teach staff how to use a library technology long before they will use it again and they’ll likely forget how it works.

Even when we get the timing right, infrequent use of a tool on which people were trained will lead to forgetting. At my previous job, I would need to cover the circulation desk maybe three times each year. In spite of having been trained years before, I felt lost if anything more complicated came up than checking books in or out.

Relearning your lessons

Screencasting software, technology that creates a video of activity on the computer screen along with the user’s narration, is sometimes used to solve this problem. The software allows a trainer to create videos that show specific processes within a web system so that users who have gone through a training can refresh their memory with a video later on.

Meg Cordes, library web specialist at the Victoria University of Wellington Library in New Zealand, sees problems with creating one-size-fits-all videos. “These are good teaching tools, don’t get me wrong, but video tutorials may lack task context, be inadvertently jargon heavy or be scanty on details relevant to that individual.”

Cordes trains public and technical services librarians on how to use their library’s web content management system and web analytics tools. She has found that librarians who don’t use the content management system frequently often have difficulties remembering how to use it, even after training.

Instead of creating screencasts of how to use each system herself, Cordes decided to have each staff member create his or her own screencast during the training. She had library staff use Jing, a free screencasting tool, to record their actions on the screen and provide their own narration. This allowed each individual to explain how to use the system in ways that were personally meaningful, which resulted in a video that reflected his or her unique needs and communication style.

According to Cordes, staffers who recorded Jing screencasts “reported that having control over their own instructions was empowering. They trusted the videos they created because they could hear themselves give explanations they remembered.” The fact that staff members have to teach themselves how to use the technology via a video may, in itself, lead to better learning. Being able to teach something you just learned demonstrates a higher level of understanding.

The video exercise was also a good assessment tool for Cordes to determine how well each library staff member understood the lesson. “Someone repeating what you’ve just taught them shows whether you’ve taught them well and lets you set them right during the recording process,” she said.

Jing, while user friendly, might still be overwhelming for someone lacking tech savvy. Explaining a new tool by using yet another new tool may create too much cognitive load for some individuals. In smaller groups, Cordes can provide support to individual users while they create their videos. In large groups, this is not feasible.

Creating screencast videos to reinforce learning can also add significantly to training time, but it’s likely worth it. Having an individualized video that users can fall back on weeks, months, or even years afterward will help to ensure long-lasting learning for all, no matter how often they use the tool on which they were trained.

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E-Discovery with QR Codes

Beverly Goldberg — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:47:57 +0000

January/February 2013

By Meredith Farkas

Connecting physical and digital content

The fully electronic collection is pretty far from being a reality at most libraries. Given the current limitations of ebooks and the large print collections that libraries continue to manage and grow, most libraries exist in a hybrid space where much is digital, but also, much is still in print. For patrons, this can be confusing, as most libraries still don’t have a single system for searching all of it. Libraries have a lot of great stuff, but surfacing it for our users can be a challenge.

In addition to better online discovery tools, libraries need ways to connect what is in the physical library to digital holdings. QR codes are one possible solution. These are square barcodes that any camera-enabled mobile phone can read with a free downloaded application. There are plenty of free websites where librarians can create QR codes that will take patrons to a specific URL, send a text, load a video, and much more. What excites me about QR codes is their ability to connect the physical world with the digital, building a bridge between our various content types.

With the conversion of subscriptions to print serials and reference works to buying digital publications, it can often be difficult for patrons to know where to look for a specific volume. While our catalogs tell users about the physical and digital holdings, our print collections rarely provide clues about their digital complements. At George Fox University in Portland, Oregon, librarian Robin Ashford has put QR codes at the ends of some print journal runs that link patrons to the electronic record for the journal. Similarly, at the University of Huddersfield in the UK, librarians have put QR codes next to the current issues of their journals to lead patrons to the online version.

Many libraries have developed pathfinders and research guides on specific subject areas, but these treasure troves of information are often underutilized by those who could most benefit. At the Half Hollow Hills Community Library, serving Dix Hills and Melville, New York, posters with QR codes that link to pathfinders are placed in the stacks near books on the relevant subject. In academic libraries, I could imagine putting fliers or posters that link patrons to specific research guides in departmental offices, lounges, and labs. Getting this content out of the library and at users’ points of need could provide tremendous value.

While QR codes are simple to implement and provide a great service for those who use them, they suffer from some major limitations. Many people don’t know what they are, and most phones in the United States don’t come standard with a QR code reader. In light of this, librarians can also generate shortened URLs (using tools like Bitly, TinyURL, and goo.gl) that people can easily enter into a smartphone or tablet.

I see QR codes as a stop-gap solution toward better tools for connecting the physical and digital worlds. A technology like near-field communications (think RFID) could take a patron’s phone to an online tutorial on how to use the microfilm scanner as soon as he or she approaches the machine. With mobile visual search, a patron could take a picture of a journal and have the electronic version pulled up automatically. These technologies are still not quite ready for prime time in libraries, but near-field communications especially holds promise for easily connecting our users to our collections, instructional content, and more.

At this point in our history, libraries need to think about how the various pieces of our fragmented collections fit together. Using QR codes or other technologies to bridge the divide between physical and digital holdings will help patrons navigate this often-perplexing information landscape.

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The DIY Patron

Beverly Goldberg — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 12:02:23 +0000

November / December 2012

By Meredith Farkas

Rethinking how we help those who don’t ask

Like many librarians, I was a frequent user of libraries as a child. Yet I have always avoided asking for help. I wrote an entire undergraduate thesis without talking to a librarian. If I didn’t understand something, I’d find a way to figure it out myself.

For years, my experiences fueled my desire to make the reference desk more approachable. There’s considerable research on library anxiety, and many people see libraries as a place with lots of rules they don’t understand. I still believe in the value of making the library more user-friendly, but I don’t think approachability is the only reason why people aren’t using reference services.

Like me, many people simply want to figure things out for themselves. And when there’s something about the library they don’t understand, they won’t go to the reference desk. They’ll go elsewhere.

Last year, Bohyun Kim, digital access librarian at Florida International University in Miami, wrote a thought-provoking guest post at ACRLog (bit.ly/rq0oHS) arguing that the emphasis librarians still place on mediated models of service is misguided and may be moving us toward irrelevance.¹ While I believe that reference and instructional services should still be at the heart of what we do, the idea of rethinking our services in light of the DIY mindset spoke to me.

Kim is right: Many library services are based upon a model that no longer exists. In an environment of information abundance, librarians are no longer gatekeepers of valuable bits of information and databases that cost us dearly for each search. Yet our reference services are based on an environment of information scarcity.

This is not a call to decrease our focus on instruction but to look at how we can support DIYers at their points of need in using library systems that are frequently not user-friendly. So many libraries have created tutorials, but most simply put learning objects on a “Tutorials” page and call it a day. When patrons are having difficulty searching a database, how many think “I wonder if the library has a tutorial on this”?

We need to think about how we can empower these DIY patrons by embedding help into their research workflows. When they have a problem with their information seeking, help should be available seamlessly—whether that means providing a how-to tutorial within (or beside a link to) a complicated database or making maps available in areas of the library where patrons often get lost. This requires understanding our users’ information-seeking behaviors—through methods such as web analytics, ethnographic research, and usability testing—and thinking about embedding help beyond the library’s walls and website.

Libraries also need to rethink how we create online instructional content, which is often designed based on how we teach. A patron looking for information on how to determine whether an article is scholarly doesn’t want to go through a long tutorial about peer review to find the answer. At Portland (Oreg.) State University library, we’re developing a system that will help users quickly find the small piece of instructional content they need to solve their problem. It will be like having a reference interview without the student having to ask anyone for help.

If we want to appeal to the growing population of DIYers, we must enable them to use our resources without coming to the reference desk or a workshop. In-person services are valuable, but we can’t make their use a prerequisite for being a successful information seeker.

MEREDITH FARKAS is head of instructional services at Portland (Oreg.) State University. She is also part-time faculty at San José State University School of Library and Information Science. She blogs at Information Wants to Be Free and created Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. Contact her at librarysuccess[at]gmail.com.

1. Note: Bohyun Kim, along with Jason Clark of Montana State University) and Tod Colgrove of the University of Nevada in Reno, provided a positive and inspiring vision of services to the DIY patron in their panel presentation “‘I Can Do It All by Myself’: Exploring New Roles for Libraries and Mediating Technologies in Addressing the Do-It-Yourself Mindset of Library Patrons” at the 2012 ALA Annual Conference. Their slides are available at slidesha.re/MFfnHt.

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Let’s #makeithappen

Beverly Goldberg — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 18:12:15 +0000

September/October 2012

By Meredith Farkas

What is stopping you from creating change?

Have you ever seen something in your work that you wanted to change but did nothing about it? What stopped you? Maybe you didn’t do it because you were too busy, but maybe you also felt that creating change was too daunting and you didn’t feel capable of making it happen.

So many talented people dissuade themselves from creating change because of feelings of inadequacy and fears of failure. Structures can also inhibit change. Maybe you’re new to your job or professional organization and you feel as though you need to put in your time before you can suggest or create change. Unfortunately, the longer you are part of an organization, the less likely you are to notice the things that are amiss.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have joined the profession when I did—at a time when the “pay your dues” mentality was being replaced by “makeithappen-ism.” The fact that I, as a new librarian, could build a major professional presence because of my blog is a testament to the notions that barriers are coming down and that there are many different ways to contribute to the profession. The Twitter hashtag #makeithappen, coined by librarian J. P. Porcaro, is a rallying cry for librarians new to the profession to let go of whatever is keeping them from taking professional risks and creating change. Groups like Library Society of the World on FriendFeedand ALA ThinkTank on Facebook are bringing passionate and tech-savvy librarians together for mutual support. There are now so many formal and informal channels for finding professional partners-in-crime, discussing ideas, and supporting change. If you want to make something happen, the biggest thing holding you back may be you.

In my January/February 2012 column, I wrote about libraries building fab labs, where patrons can use 3D printers to actually fabricate solid objects. I’m sure the first person who had the idea of libraries facilitating this kind of activity had to overcome significant skepticism and downright resistance. It takes commitment and confidence in your own vision to successfully shepherd an idea that represents a radical change in the role of libraries. As this example indicates, radical change is possible and can create an infectious vision that positively impacts many, many other libraries.

I’d been out of library school only one year when I saw something I wanted to change. Most of the early online professional development opportunities were offered by established organizations using costly enterprise products. I felt strongly that online professional development programs could be built primarily with sweat equity and without organizational sponsorship, making them free or affordable for those who don’t have access to professional development funding.

I worked with four other amazing young librarians to create Five Weeks to a Social Library (sociallibraries.com/course), a free synchronous and asynchronous online learning program designed to teach librarians about social media through experiential and reflective as well as individual and group learning activities. The project required a great deal of work, but it successfully demonstrated that professional development programs can be done on the cheap and made accessible to all. It’s a model for online learning that has been replicated in a number of settings.

I don’t fear for the future of libraries, because I feel confident that passionate, energetic librarians will soon be “making it happen” from directors’ chairs. While I’ve moved into a management position, I’m still committed to keeping the spirit of #makeithappen alive in my professional life. This is the energy that will keep libraries meeting—and exceeding—the changing expectations of their patrons. This is the energy that will keep libraries vital and relevant well into the future.

MEREDITH FARKAS is head of instructional services at Portland (Ore.) State University. She is also part-time faculty at San José State University School of Library and Information Science. She blogs at Information Wants to Be Free and created Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. Contact her at librarysuccess[at]gmail.com.

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Tools for Optimal Flow

Beverly Goldberg — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 18:56:21 +0000

July/August 2012

By Meredith Farkas

Technology-enabled research workflows

It’s amazing how quickly things change in the world of technology. When I wrote a book in 2005, I printed out all my research sources so I could highlight and take notes on them. I kept track of things I found on the web using a social bookmarking tool that only helped me find the resource later, not cite it in my manuscript. I cited everything manually, with the source in one hand and an MLA guide in the other. Yes, citation tools like EndNote and RefWorks existed, but they didn’t make it easy to import resources from library databases or the web, and they certainly weren’t free. When I moved across the country last year, I got rid of my research from that book, tossing out an entire large file drawer’s worth of paper. Ouch!

In the ensuing years, many fantastic tools have been released that make the work of collecting and using research so much simpler than I could have imagined in 2005. Tablets have made the experience of annotating research online far more pleasant. These days, instead of printing out my research, I corral all of it into a folder in Dropbox, a cloud storage service, and then upload it into iAnnotate on my iPad, where I highlight and take notes directly on the PDF. While there are many great annotation tools for personal computers, the portability of tablets makes the experience similar to that of working with paper.

Using Zotero and Mendeley, I haven’t had to create a citation from scratch in years. Zotero is a free and open source citation management tool that allows researchers to easily grab citation information at the click of a button from any website that provides the information in a structured format (think research databases and Amazon, for example). Mendeley is a citation management and social networking tool whose strength lies in grabbing PDFs from folders on your desktop and puzzling out the citation by searching the PDF text and various databases. Mendeley has a great PDF annotation tool within its interface, which allows you to keep your citations, documents, and notes in one place. Both tools offer Microsoft Word and OpenOffice plugins, which make it easy to insert citations in your chosen format directly into your paper.

Mendeley has also proven to be a great discovery tool, allowing users to search its crowdsourced database of hundreds of millions of resources that its users have collected. I’ve now added Mendeley to my search routine and always find things I didn’t see anywhere else. Unlike databases that find things based on relevance, I can see in Mendeley how many other scholars have added the work to their own library, which is a tacit recommendation.

Can’t choose between Mendeley and Zotero? You don’t have to. I have Mendeley set up to pull any citations I add to my Zotero library, which means I can capitalize on the power of Zotero to pull content from the web and still use the Mendeley interface, which I prefer.

Everyone has a different research workflow, and fortunately, many amazing tools are now available to enable the diversity of approaches. From Evernote to Diigo to Instapaper, many free or inexpensive tools now allow you to manage, annotate, and use sources in ways that fit your needs. Because keeping organized is so critical to the success of any research project, taking the time to find the tools and techniques that work for you may save a lot of time in the long run.

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The Guide on the Side

Beverly Goldberg — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:32:33 +0000

May/June 2012

By Meredith Farkas

Incorporating active learning into online instruction

Many librarians have embraced the use of active learning in their teaching. Moving away from lectures and toward activities that get students using the skills they’re learning can lead to more meaningful learning experiences. It’s one thing to tell someone how to do something, but to have them actually do it themselves, with expert guidance, makes it much more likely that they’ll be able to do it later on their own.

Replicating that same “guide on the side” model online, however, has proven difficult. Librarians, like most instructors, have largely gone back to a lecture model of delivering instruction. Certainly it’s a great deal more difficult to develop active learning exercises, or even interactivity, in online instruction, but many of the tools and techniques that have been embraced by librarians for developing online tutorials and other learning objects do not allow students to practice what they’re learning while they’re learning. While some software for creating screencasts—video tutorials that film activity on one’s desktop—include the ability to create quizzes or interactive components, users can’t easily work with a library resource and watch a screencast at the same time.

In 2000, the reference desk staff at the University of Arizona was looking for an effective way to build web-based tutorials to embed in a class that had resulted in a lot of traffic at the reference desk. Not convinced of the efficacy of traditional tutorials to instruct students on using databases, the librarians “began using a more step-by-step approach where students were guided to perform specific searches and locate specific articles,” Instructional Services Librarian Leslie Sult told me. The students were then assessed on their ability to conduct searches in the specific resources assigned. Later, Sult, Mike Hagedon, and Justin Spargur of the library’s scholarly publishing and data management team, turned this early active learning tutorial model into Guide on the Side software.

Guide on the Side is an interface that allows librarians at all levels of technological skill to easily develop a tutorial that resides in an online box beside a live web page students can use. Students can read the instructions provided by the librarian while actively using a database, without needing to switch between screens. This allows students to use a database while still receiving expert guidance, much like they could in the classroom.

A great example of Guide on the Side is this tutorial University of Arizona librarians created for JSTOR (http://bit.ly/zA9DCf). The tutorial not only provides help locating and using the database, but it also gets patrons actively using the database and answering questions about it. Having the tutorial right beside the student is reassuring and convenient, giving him or her experience using the database with help easily accessible.

The moment I saw a Guide on the Side, I was convinced this was a model we should adopt at my own university for database instruction. It’s so much simpler than the multimedia tutorials many librarians have been developing, yet it may be a much better way to actually teach students how to use library resources. The team at the University of Arizona plans to provide the code for Guide on the Side through GitHub (github.com) in early summer so that other institutions can benefit from their innovation.

This project is also an excellent example of what is possible when teaching librarians and technology librarians and staff collaborate to find solutions to common instructional problems. “Many University of Arizona instructional librarians have contributed to helping shape the design and pedagogical approach over the years,” Sult said. “The effort and input of members of the team is a major factor in the campus success of the current iteration.”

MEREDITH FARKAS is head of instructional services at Portland (Oreg.) State University. She is also part-time faculty at San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science. She blogs at Information Wants to Be Free and created Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. Contact her at librarysuccess[at]gmail.com.

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Click Here to Engage

Beverly Goldberg — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:05:44 +0000

March/April 2012

By Meredith Farkas

Classroom response systems ease discussion and assessment

Librarians who teach are always looking for ways to get patrons more actively engaged in instruction sessions. Research has shown that active learning can have positive effects on student learning and certainly helps to get students to reflect on the application of what they’re learning. In large lecture classes, most active learning exercises simply aren’t feasible, making it difficult to avoid the “sage on the stage” model of teaching. In addition to active learning, librarians also frequently seek simple ways to assess learning so they can improve their teaching.

Instructors are increasingly turning to classroom response systems as a way to get students actively engaged in class and collect useful feedback or assessment data. Classroom response technologies allow faculty to poll classes and get anonymous aggregate responses. Polling can be useful as formative assessment to tailor instruction to where students currently are, or as summative assessment to get a sense of how well the class learning outcomes were achieved. Librarians use classroom polling tools as icebreakers, for pre- and post-tests, and to get feedback on their teaching.

The most common classroom response system is the clicker, a small remote control–like device that sends student responses wirelessly to the instructor’s receiver and then displays them on a slide. Clickers are a popular option for collecting student feedback, but they require a financial outlay that many libraries can’t afford or may not want to make without knowing if clickers are a good fit. Fortunately, there are tools that allow libraries to create classroom response activities for free, capitalizing on technologies the students already have with them.

Poll Everywhere is free online polling software that allows students to use text messaging or a web form to answer questions during class. The answers, in aggregate, are updated in real time on a PowerPoint slide or the website itself. Poll Everywhere can provide valuable feedback for the instructor and opportunities for students to be active and share their thoughts during the session. Since there is also a web-based interface for responses, Poll Everywhere can be used in schools where cellphones are banned.

The librarians at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, experimented with Poll Everywhere and found that not only did it open up valuable opportunities for classroom discussion but that students were excited by the novelty. Emerging Technologies Librarian and Information Tyrannosaur blogger Andy Burkhardt said of the trial, “It gives people a sense of control and people appreciate when they are asked for their opinion. It’s not simply someone telling them what to think.”

However, polling doesn’t enable students to provide individualized feedback or ask questions. Some faculty members have used Twitter as a classroom backchannel for student comments or questions, but it’s less than ideal since many students don’t want to mix their personal Twitter accounts with schoolwork, and don’t want to broadcast their classroom responses to the world.

Wiffiti is another free technology for capturing the classroom backchannel. Wiffiti creates a digital pinboard to which people can add comments anonymously via a web form, text message, or via Twitter with a hashtag. All of the messages show up on the board, which can be embedded on a website or digital display. Wiffiti can be used for collecting student feedback about the lecture throughout the class, or individual screens can be used for getting answers to specific discussion questions. It could even be used for students to provide answers to problem-based classroom activities. Anonymous response systems like Wiffiti can give students who feel uncomfortable asking questions and taking part in classroom discussions the confidence to share their ideas and questions without speaking publicly.

Of course, classroom response systems aren’t the only option for incorporating active learning into instruction, but they can be useful tools for meeting certain pedagogical goals. Sounds pretty engaging!

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Providing the Tools

Beverly Goldberg — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:05:16 +0000

January/February 2012

By Meredith Farkas

Bringing digital creation technologies to libraries

In the 1990s, libraries were pioneers in providing access to the internet in their communities. Even today, libraries are the only place some community members can get online. Over the past few years, libraries have begun positioning themselves as the go-to place for digital creation technologies, providing hardware and software that most people wouldn’t have at home. By providing these creative tools to their patrons, libraries fill a valuable niche in the community, a niche consistent with their historical commitment to bridging gaps in technology access.

In many places, DIY and its tech-focused outgrowth, maker culture, are strongly embedded in the fabric of the community. Some libraries have sought to support these movements by circulating tools to patrons, but few are now enabling fabrication work to happen in the library itself. Recently, Fayetteville (N.Y.) Free Library began developing a FabLab where patrons will have access to a 3-D printer that creates computer-designed plastic pieces, along with a router and laser cutter; the equipment will allow patrons to bring their product-design ideas to reality.

Libraries can also help patrons by purchasing hardware and software that are not quite so bleeding edge. There are many people with an interest in digital media who simply can’t afford the high-end tools that would allow them to create a quality product. Professional video and audio recording hardware, mixing boards, and video editing software like Final Cut Pro would enable them to create movies, podcasts, music, book trailers, and so much more. Tools like Adobe InDesign and Photoshop allow patrons to create professional-looking print publications that are a far cry from the handmade and photocopied zines that were so popular in the 1990s. Skokie (Ill.) Public Library has built a digital media lab where anyone can come in and experiment with these creative technologies.

A growing number of libraries design such spaces and services specifically for teens. The YOUmedia lab at the Chicago Public Library, often cited as a model for the creation of digital library labs, provides teens with digital video and audio production equipment and classes to learn how to use them. Some libraries even lend equipment like video cameras so patrons can record elsewhere and come back to the library to edit and create a final product. Providing services like these makes it clear to young people that libraries are about so much more than books.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is providing funds to support libraries in developing spaces for digital creation and learning for teens. Where I live, the Multnomah County (Oreg.) Library and Oregon Museum of Science and Industry received a grant to develop a Community Maker Center. Other libraries and museums will be building spaces and providing technologies that enable creative digital media production and expertise-building for young people.

Slides in the attic?

Many people have media at home in formats they perhaps can’t even view or listen to anymore. At the Lexington (Ky.) Public Library, patrons can convert old VHS tapes to DVD and audiocassettes to CD. The library also offers access to a slide scanner where people can digitize their old slides. Most people aren’t going to buy hardware they’ll soon have no use for, so providing access to such tools can give old family photos and movies new life.

This is an exciting time to reenvision what a library should provide to its community and think strategically about what services your patrons will find particularly valuable. Offering access to digital-media technologies that enable patrons to develop creative products provides a valuable service to a large and diverse constituency who, in most cases, could not access it anywhere else.

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Information Literacy 2.0

Beverly Goldberg — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:09:34 +0000

November / December 2011

By Meredith Farkas

Critical inquiry in the age of social media

Ideas about information literacy have always adapted to changes in the information environment. The birth of the web made it necessary for librarians to shift more towards teaching search strategies and evaluation of sources. The tool-focused “bibliographic instruction” approach was later replaced by the skill-focused “information literacy” approach. Now, with the growth of Web 2.0 technologies, we need to start shifting towards providing instruction that will enable our patrons to be successful information seekers in the Web 2.0 environment, where the process of evaluation is quite a bit more nuanced.

Critical inquiry skills are among the most important in a world in which the half-life of information is rapidly shrinking. These days, what you know is almost less important than what you can find out. And finding out today requires a set of skills that are very different from what most libraries focus on. In addition to academic sources, a huge wealth of content is being produced by people every day in knowledgebases like Wikipedia, review sites like Trip Advisor, and in blogs. Some of this content is legitimate and valuable—but some of it isn’t.

Keeping up and being able to find the latest information is an important skill that requires not only good search skills, but also good networking skills. In our own profession, it’s impossible to be well-informed about every aspect of librarianship. I focus my own professional development on areas most relevant to my current position, but there are times when I need expertise I simply don’t possess. This is where the axiom “I store my knowledge in my friends” comes into play. Because I have successfully built a professional network, I have a large group of friends with diverse knowledge whom I can rely on when I find my own knowledge is insufficient for a particular task. While networking is an important aspect of information literacy, it is rarely taught as part of information literacy instruction.

Years ago, it was often difficult to find enough information on a research topic, a product you wanted to buy, or a hotel at which you were considering making a reservation. Now we are in an age of such information abundance that the problem is not finding information, but determining which information is worth relying upon. An August 19 New York Times article, “In a Race to Out-Rave, 5-Star Web Reviews Go for $5,” discussed the growth of commercial services that are paid to create glowing reviews. After discovering that most people couldn’t tell the difference between real and fake reviews, researchers at Cornell started to work on a computer algorithm that could. While we may not always be able to distinguish real from fake, we should at least learn the clues that will help make that determination.

Academia is not immune to problems with quality and accuracy, challenging the assumption that articles that make it through the peer-review process can be trusted. The proliferation of peer-reviewed journals and pressure to publish from the tenure system have led to the publication of studies whose conclusions cannot be relied upon or are downright fraudulent. A September 15 Guardian (UK) article, “Publish or Perish: Peer Review and the Corruption of Science,” railed against a system that leads to the publication of worthless scientific studies with poor research design that come to conclusions hardly supported by the results. Given this, we all need to look beyond the headlines and evaluate research design before trusting conclusions.

Information literacy instruction should be focused on helping people develop skills that will benefit them in answering questions and informing decision-making throughout their lives, not just for their next paper. Therefore, it’s critical that we develop instruction that supports critical inquiry in this extremely complex information environment.

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