In academic libraries, there are usually so many levels of priorities. There are the priorities of the university. There are the priorities of the library. Each unit probably has its own priorities, as does each individual. Ideally, these all sync up nicely, where an individual can show how their priorities mesh with library’s and university’s priorities. However, it’s not always easy for the library to support all of those university priorities. That’s often because the library doesn’t have the people-power or financial resources to do everything well. So the library has to choose whether they follow every university priority in a superficial way, or whether they focus on the priorities that they can accomplish well in light of limited resources. Neither is a completely satisfying choice.

At my library, and really at the University a a whole, there is definitely a tug-of-war going on between the original access mission of the University and the growing importance of research. Clearly both are important and both require library support. My colleagues are deeply committed to both roles, but it’s frustrating when you know you can’t do it all as well and completely as you’d like. You can’t develop a vibrant scholarly communications and data management program AND have a comprehensive program of outreach and instruction to the neediest students when the same people are involved in both. And yes, we’re doing all of those things, but not to the extent that we’d like to. Having been at a small place before, we certainly dealt with those limitations too (we still don’t have an institutional repository at Norwich), but the expectations of the academic community were lower because we weren’t a large research institution. And in light of budget cuts, I’m sure many, many academic libraries are feeling similarly frustrated by what they can’t do (or do enough of).

And this tug-of-war is seen in the instruction program as well. We can’t do all of the teaching we’d like given our staffing, so we have to prioritize. But how? With the growing research priority, do we focus more on faculty outreach and graduate-level instruction? With the focus on Freshman retention, do we put more time and effort in teaching first-year students? We have a strong liaison program and a ton of teaching goes on in upper-level undergraduate classes, especially those that are core to majors (like research methods). This is fantastic! I remember when I got to Norwich, very little library instruction was going on outside of the lower-division classes and we worked hard over the years to get information literacy instruction integrated into core courses in the majors. PSU has been there for a long time. Is that less important than reaching Freshman or more? Or is there, as I suspect, no one right answer to that question?

So how do we set priorities? How do we determine how much focus to put on each thing we do? A colleague recently showed me stats on what percentage of the total enrollment is each class (Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, etc.). Do we use that to determine our instructional priorities? Do we say “sophomores make up x% of student enrollment, so we will provide x% of our teaching in 200-level classes?” It’s certainly a concrete way of making decisions, and probably as good as any, but I don’t feel like needs and priorities translate so easily to exact numbers and percentages. We still need to take into account Univerity priorities, student needs, what classes are the most valuable to be involved with, and in what classes can we make the greatest difference. If someone comes up with a formula for figuring this out, they deserve some kind of award.

Another thing we talk a great deal about is using learning objects to augment and/or replace the one-shot. And I’ve started to wonder where is the best place in the curriculum to implement this? Should we replace Freshman-level instruction with online learning modules because most students are not really at an emotional/intellectual space yet where they are capable of serious research or do we focus on face-to-face instruction because they need the high-touch approach? Do we employ learning objects in upper-division classes because the students are more self-motivated once they’re in their majors, or is that the critical time to connect with them because the sort of research they’re doing is higher-level? Do we stop teaching grad students face-to-face because of their much higher motivation level, or is that the perfect reason to focus on them? I don’t know if there have been studies on this, but it would be interesting to figure out at which level does it make the most sense to provide face-to-face instruction and at what level would students benefit most from learning objects. It seems like most suites of learning objects designed to replace face-to-face instruction happen at the Freshman level, but that might just be because there are so many sections of the same few courses and it’s easier to create something that works for many, many, many classes.

None of these issues is unique to my University; in fact, I’d argue that in a world of rising materials costs and shrinking budgets, they’re pretty darn universal. Even at little old Norwich, where the student/librarian ratio was so much smaller, we had to prioritize. It got to a point where I had to start cutting down on the number of history classes I was teaching, because it was taking up such a disproportionate amount of my time (although I really enjoyed it!). So, at your institutions, how have you determined what to prioritize in terms of library instruction? When demand for your services exceeds supply, what do you stop doing? Where have you replaced face-to-face instruction with other lower-touch models and why?

So many of us struggle with determining priorities in teaching. Few of us have a workload that would allow us to do everything we would like to do. We hear stories about embedded librarian programs, librarians who were able to co-grade student papers with a disciplinary faculty member, libraries that have co-taught entire classes, etc. and we think: wow, I’d love to do that. But can we? And then that goes to the broad vs. deep argument. Is it better to teach a small number of students very deeply or reach a large number of students in a more superficial way. Neither option is particularly satisfying. There are so many interesting models for librarians to provide instructional services, but not every one is a right fit for the population or our time. And there are certainly times when we can’t do what would be the best fit for the population because of our time. We can’t ignore that reality.

I’ve been thinking of this a lot lately in light of the fact that we recently hired an instructional designer to ramp up our production of learning objects. Learning objects certainly provide libraries the potential for providing instruction to many more people than we can with one-shots or any physically present instruction, but they’re not always a substitute for face-to-face instruction. Sometimes they provide more and sometimes less. And one of the biggest problems I’ve seen with learning objects is that they are not often embedded in classes or at students’ points of need. I’ll talk about this more in a future post.

And there are also a lot of bad learning objects. I’ve become increasingly convinced that screencasts are not the right fit for teaching people how to use online databases. It’s very difficult while watching a video to work with a database. It’s also difficult to scan for just what content one needs when they are actually using the database. Lori Mestre’s study on learning styles and learning objects confirmed my suspicions when she found that students using a static HTML tutorial were better able to do database searching than a group that watched a Camtasia screencast because they could go back and forth between the tutorial and the database and practice what they were learning while they were learning.

This is why when I saw the University of Arizona’s Guide on the Side software I was instantly smitten. You can read more about the Guide on the Side in my most recent American Libraries column. The idea of having the instructional content right beside a live web page that students can use to search is brilliant! Being able to switch between a window with a tutorial and a window with a database isn’t terrible, but having the tutorial actually within the same window so it’s always in your line of sight, always beside you, makes it even easier for students to practice what they’re learning.

I plan to write more about these issues in future posts; not just about learning objects, but about ways of rethinking what we can do instructionally in light of often-present limitations. It’s something I struggled with here and also at the small private University where I was previously. Few of us haven’t ask these questions. Is the one-shot model a good fit? Is a deeper (embedded?) model better? Should we all be teaching for-credit term-long courses? Does a “train the faculty” or “train the TA” model make more sense? Should we replace more of our teaching with learning objects and, if so, which classes need physical presence and which don’t? And how do we get those learning objects used when students aren’t required to come in for an instruction session? I don’t have the answers, but I’ll be exploring these questions in future posts to this blog.

Yesterday was my one-year anniversary of working at Portland State. I’d wanted to write a post yesterday reflecting on it, but I was driving three hours (to Bend, OR) to give a four-hour preconference. Since the whole experience was accompanied by a migraine that just wouldn’t die, I crawled into bed as soon as the preconference was done. Today I’m still in Bend for the Oregon Library Association Conference and I’m really excited to meet more of my Oregon colleagues. This was good timing because I could really use an opportunity to get out of the institutional bubble and hear some new ideas.

I didn’t leave Norwich because I was unhappy (quite the opposite; I loved my colleagues there and miss them still). I didn’t leave for a promotion. I left because I was looking for new challenges. And challenges I’ve had; perhaps more than I’d bargained for. Actually, definitely more than I’d bargained for. There have been days where I’ve come home feeling like a failure. I recently went and looked at my cover letter for the job at PSU to remind myself that I did actually accomplish a lot of important things in my last job, so it’s not just about me. I think a lot of the problems I’ve had this year stemmed from the fact that there was a lot of baggage around decisions made before I got here re: instruction that didn’t actually have any consensus at all. I came in being told that “this is what had been decided just before you got here” and laboring under that assumption until, recently, a colleague was kind enough to take me to lunch and give me the whole history. Now I’m realizing that we really need to reboot our instruction program and start from scratch; not continue to follow a model that has little-to-no buy in. I’m actually really excited about that opportunity. Next week we have a meeting where I’ve asked my colleagues to imagine that we never had an instruction program, we have no time constraints, and there are no expectations from disciplinary faculty regarding instruction. What would we want an instruction program to look like? I’m hoping that once we have identified what we want in the ideal, we can find ways to approach that in reality. I hope this will help get all of us excited about the possibilities for better meeting the needs of our students and faculty in a sustainable way.

In spite of the challenges, I really do like it here. I love that my colleagues are passionate and super-engaged with the profession. The amount we accomplish given severe staffing and budget limitations is awe-inspiring. I appreciate how motivated many of our students are because they are putting themselves through college and want to get as much out of it as possible. I love working with the disciplinary faculty here. While we had “quasi-faculty status” at Norwich, I always felt like support staff in my dealings with disciplinary faculty. Here, I feel like an equal and a partner. I serve on two faculty senate committees — Online Learning and Assessment. I have really enjoyed seeing all of this from a macro level and working together with other faculty members to try and come up with strategies for dealing with important University problems. I’ve made some great relationships which I think will soon lead to some important faculty outreach and assessment of student infolit partnerships.

And I have gotten a lot done. I was in charge of implementing LibGuides this past summer and did the bulk of the work on that, from training staff, to coordinating getting content migrated, to developing best practices, to working with a committee to determine the look and feel. And I think the finished product is lovely. I worked with a task force to develop learning outcomes that describe the breadth of our library instruction program, and then worked to build some buy-in with the instruction librarians. While there is still some controversy over them, I did meet individually with concerned library faculty to ensure that their concerns were taken into account with the final version. Still, it’s a living document, and I’m having everyone record the outcomes they teach to in each class (whether on the list or not) so that we can reconsider the outcomes at our summer instruction retreat in light of the reality of what we teach. I’m now working with our distance learning librarian and our newly-hired instructional designer to develop a two-tiered model for deploying learning objects (one for students to drill down to just the content that meets their information need and the other for faculty to easily embed learning objects — with suggested assessments and lesson plans — in their courses). I think one of the biggest failings of libraries in developing learning objects is that we put a ton of effort into creating them and very little into ensuring that they get used (whether that means embedding them in classes, putting them at users’ points of need, or marketing the heck out of them). I talk about this, and our model, in the most recent Adventures in Library Instruction podcast.

Here, I am the liaison to Anthropology, an academic area in which no librarian had taught a class in years and years. They haven’t had a strong liaison relationship with the library and, when I started, it seems like they really saw the library as “the folks that cut our journals.” When I started my liaison role, my first job was to cut 50% of the journal budget. Yikes. I tried to soften the blow by developing a spreadsheet that provided them with extensive collection data so that they could make well-reasoned decisions. I also developed a list of all of the anthropology journals we had access to in full-text regardless of funding stream and demonstrated to the faculty that we actually had quite a significant collection that is outside of their budget line (though packages). I have really made an effort to build connections with this department and have already taught classes for four of the faculty members in the anthro department and have a session lined up in the research methods class in the Fall. YAY!

And I’m also pretty proud of my role as a manager. This place has not just been tough for me to get thing done in, and I’ve really worked with my direct reports to support them and help them find projects and foci that make them feel effective and give their job coherence. And I’ve also tried to advocate for and support the instruction librarians, from getting LibTech to leave the classroom laptops out and tethered, to getting library faculty software and headsets for creating screencasts, to creating a guide on assessment techniques.

I’m also looking forward to seeing what this place is like with strong vision and leadership. A month before I started, the AUL I was supposed to be reporting to left. A month after I started, the UL (interim, but an awesome interim) announced that she’d taken another job. The interims we’ve had in these positions have been lovely (our interim UL has been so supportive of me and a fierce advocate for the library), but it’s hard to do a lot of leading when you know you’re keeping someone else’s seat warm.

If I could go back in time one year, here is what I would do differently. I’d question everything, not just accepting and implementing decisions that were made before I came here. Early on, I should have had that “what if we never had an instruction program? What would we want it to look like?” conversation with the library faculty. I’d wait a year before pushing any sort of change agenda that came from above. Small change or projects are one thing. But some of the things I was asked to accomplish in my first year (like building a culture of assessment!) really required someone with significant political capital. At Norwich, it was easy to move into my Head of Instruction role and create change because I’d already been there a few years in another role and people trusted and valued me. Here, I came in and very quickly started to work with the library faculty on some pretty disruptive change projects. Knowing this now, I can’t go back and do it differently. I can only find ways to support my colleagues and build a shared vision for the future of library instructional services.

I think I also need to find ways to deal with my own stress and feel good about my work. I need to have more experiences where I connect with other people dealing with similar struggles or people who get me out of my own head. I LOVED doing the Adventures in Library Instruction podcast. I wish I could do it every week. It was a great conversation and I felt so energized by the experience. I love going to conferences (though I hate being away from my family). Online NW helped spark the idea of applying for a grant to do an ethnographic study of the research habits of returning students. There are several talks at OLA that I’m equally excited about. Being on the tenure track and the demands of my job have made me actually connect less with the people who have been in my online professional social network for years. At a time when I need them most, I have the least ability to connect. I think I need to find ways to make time for that, because I can see that burnout is a real concern if I keep going the way I have been. I think I also need to keep reminding myself that, while I’m the head of instruction, all of this isn’t solely on my shoulders. This is a collaborative venture and I can’t do any of it by myself.

So, one year in, I’ve probably learned more about librarianship and myself than in several years at Norwich. It’s been a challenging time for me, but that’s what I was looking for, right? Be careful what you wish for folks!

You know you’re a real blogger when, no matter how absurdly busy the rest of your life is, the thing you can’t do that you miss the most is blogging. It’s been a crazy almost two months and isn’t looking to get any better in the near future. Isn’t it funny when you look back on other times of your life when you thought you were busy and realize how wrong you were? I hope I won’t ever look on this time the same way, because I hnestly can’t imagine feeling more stressed.

First, I was one of the four libraries taking part in RAILS this year. RAILS stands for rubric assessment of information literacy skills and it’s a great IMLS and Syracuse University-funded study to explore the use of information literacy rubrics and develop best practices. The lovely Megan Oakleaf was the PI. For my part, I had to get IRB approval, get 125 student work samples, develop a rubric, get 10 disciplinary and library faculty members (I had 5 of each) to spend a day rating 100 pieces of student work, and to organize the rubrics into a random order through a very specific and time-consuming protocol. I also had to spend an extra day after Assessment Immersion in Nashville working on a joint rubric with the other librarians involved in RAILS, which ended up dragging on through Google Docs over several months. It was an exhausting process, but an amazing learning experience. It was interesting to see how librarians and disciplinary faculty viewed student work — what they valued and didn’t — and what parts of the rubric I’d originally created we ended up changing. It was great to get disciplinary faculty thinking about how to assess information literacy. Most of all, I feel much more comfortable developing rubrics that can effectively rate student level of skill in specific areas. There is a real art to creating rubrics. It’s difficult to get something that doesn’t require a tremendous amount of subjective judgment (which is why we use rubrics in the first place) and to develop something for more than just yourself.

I also got two grants this year, which was a big first for me (getting grants wasn’t a big thing at my previous library). The first was to work toward building a culture of program-level assessment at my library and to report on it at a conference. I made some small progress towards that and will be presenting on building a culture of assessment at LOEX of the West in June. Since travel to LOEX of the West won’t eat up the whole grant, I’ll be spending part of the money on building a library of books on assessment of student learning and program-level assessment for library faculty. If you have any suggestions for great books on information literacy assessment, assessment in higher ed, or activities in which students could demonstrate learning, please share in the comments.

The second grant I received was to do an ethnographic study of the research habits of returning/non-traditional-aged students at PSU. We have money to do it really well — hiring grad students, etc. We’ll also be working with an anthropology class (my liaison area) to recruit students to work on the study as part of their final project. I’ve seen so many ethnographic studies that have looked at the typical undergraduate, but with 40% of PSU’s undergrads (and a large portion of our grad students) being of non-traditional age, it’s critical that we understand their needs as well. I’ll be working with my wonderful colleagues Emily and Molly on this and I couldn’t be more excited. Fortunately, this won’t happen until the start of the next fiscal year (and we have the whole year to spend the funds), so it was only the application that bogged me down.

I’ve also had a couple of things published. My FIRST peer-reviewed article came out in February in Library Hi Tech. It’s called “Participatory technologies, pedagogy 2.0 and information literacy” and you can access it for free in PSU’s IR. Here’s the official citation if you want to grab it from Library Hi Tech’s site:

Meredith Farkas, (2012) “Participatory technologies, pedagogy 2.0 and information literacy”, Library Hi Tech, Vol. 30 Iss: 1, pp.82 – 94. Published version available from publisher website at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=0737-8831

I also published a Tips and Trends white paper on “Research Guide Technologies” in my work on the ACRL Instructional Technologies Committee. The guides this group has developed recently and that are in the pipeline are fantastic resources for librarians looking to get more familiar with instructional technologies.

I’ve got a bunch of conference presentations coming up and I hope I’ll see some of you at them. A 4-hour preconference at the Oregon Library Association Conference about online instruction and training + a panel there on the ACRL Immersion experience. A presentation at the Oregon Virtual Reference Summit. Then LOEX of the West. I’ll be on the LITA Top Tech Trends panel this summer at Annual. And then, I’m going to NEW ZEALAND!!! I’ll be giving a keynote at the LIANZA Conference in September, which I am insanely excited about. Don’t be jealous, though. I’ll be bringing a 3 year old on the trip, so I’d say that pretty much cancels out the awesomeness of being in NZ. While it’s not really how I envisioned going to New Zealand, I’m thrilled to have the opportunity nonetheless. And on the way home, we’re going to spend some time in Hawaii which I’ve never been to either.

And finally, and certainly not least, I bought a house. We found a pretty-darn-close-to-perfect house in a neighborhood which is full of young children, adorable dogs, and neighbors who hang out outside and talk to each other. My son loves the neighborhood though he’s anxious about the change and his new room (getting him to bed has been fun). Given the state of the market in the town in which we were looking, I’m immensely grateful for our luck. We just moved in a week ago, so are still in that garage full of boxes/putting everything in its place/discovering problems with the house/etc. mode.

It’s funny to feel lucky and insanely stressed at the same time. I know it’s good stress, but it is becoming a bit overwhelming and I’ve had moments where I’ve just laid in bed ruminating on all the stuff I need to do instead of sleeping. I don’t mind bringing work home physically, but when I bring it home emotionally — when it prevents me from enjoying moments when I’m not doing work — I know something has to change. I definitely need to find ways to better manage my time (i.e. say no) next year. It’s always hard at a new place, especially on the tenure track. You’re figuring out what is important to do and what you can say no to. I’ll get there. At least I hope so.

I remember when I was in library school, a lot of people talked about librarians who were resistant to change and would try to derail your exciting and innovative projects. Often, this discussion was couched in ageist “us” (young, innovative librarians) vs. “them” (old, set-in-their-ways librarians) terms, but even when it wasn’t, the assumption was there that someone bringing new ideas was right and the people resisting those ideas were wrong. After seven years of pushing change and encountering resistance to various projects in libraries, I can say with some certainty that it’s never so black-and-white.

Why do people resist change? There are lots and lots of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with being a “stick in the mud.” Some are completely reasonable and some are not. But all of them require some action on your part if you want to make change happen. Sometimes, people resist your ideas because they are not well thought-through. Maybe you didn’t consider the impact your idea would have on Interlibrary Loan or some other unit? Maybe you didn’t think about a certain patron stakeholder group. Not doing this sort of thinking beforehand can derail change by making your colleagues lose confidence in you. Do your homework.

Sometimes people resist your ideas because they don’t have all the details. Resistance sometimes comes from anxiety that can be quelled if people receive education and a clear vision of what the changed landscape will look like (and how it will change their work). Just because your vision is clear to you doesn’t mean it’s clear to your colleagues. I’m seeing that a lot right now as I work with my colleagues to build a culture of assessment. You can’t take for granted that what is obvious to you (someone immersed in that subject) will be likewise for your colleagues who are focused on a lot of different things.

It’s quite possible that your idea is not a good one. Your colleagues might have information that you don’t (and vice versa), but sometimes in a group setting, instead of offering constructive advice, people become defensive because they feel like something they know won’t work is being forced on them. Often, getting that constructive advice is key to retooling your approach to one that will be successful.

Sometimes, there are cultural issues within the organization that have nothing to do with you or your idea. Maybe a previous Director created an environment in which no one felt safe to experiment and fail. Maybe people are really cliquish. Maybe one group mistrusts another. It’s critical that you understand those cultural issues and not simply blow them off because culture will have an impact on everything you do. Organizational culture is a powerful force that needs to be understood in order to sell your ideas effectively within that cultural frame.

And, sadly, sometimes, people do things for political reasons or because they don’t like you. Maybe they want to tear you down to impress someone else. Maybe you got a job that their friend was up for. Maybe it’s about building allies for something else they want to do. Whatever the reason, this is often the most destructive form of resistance because people will probably never admit the real reason why they’re resisting you.

Do you know what is helpful to do to tease out why people are resisting your ideas? Talk to them! Invite these people to participate and have a voice in the change process. Often, if you’re encountering strong resistance, meetings are not the ideal first place to confront these issues. When I was encountering strong resistance to our learning outcomes, I met with a number of librarians individually to talk about their concerns. It gave me a much clearer sense of where the resistance was coming from than in the meeting where I was mostly hearing “I don’t like it and I won’t use it” rhetoric. Talking with people one-on-one both helped me to see what I needed to change to get us closer to consensus and made my colleagues feel like their concerns were being heard (because they were).

Sometimes, though, meetings are a great place to learn about people’s hopes and fears around a certain topic that will need to be addressed. In my case with assessment, the library faculty were asked to discuss their hopes, goals, concerns and potential barriers they see regarding implementing assessment of our teaching. A lot of issues were teased out that I know we will have to address this year if we are going to build a culture of assessment. It was also very helpful to know what they hope to get out of doing assessment.

If you’re fairly new to a library, you may want to talk to a variety of people about the culture to better understand and anticipate resistance. Make sure you hear from lots of different people, because, as most of you already know, there are as many sides to a story as there are people telling it. It was fascinating to see how my perceptions of people here changed as I got to know them versus what I was told by people in my first few weeks.

Of course in the moment when you’re sitting in front of your colleagues in a meeting feeling like you’re getting eaten alive, resistance doesn’t feel like a very good thing. And for many of us, our first reaction is to become defensive; to protect ourselves and our ideas. But when you look at this resistance as something that will make your idea better if you really listen and make sure people feel heard, it can make the process feel a bit less painful (or at least constructive).

Resistance is not, in itself, a bad thing, though it certainly can derail initiatives if not managed well. Resistance can help you hone your idea into something that will be successful. Your idea may require significant tweaking, but if your colleagues didn’t resist your idea as it was, you’d never have known that. It’s far better to encounter resistance and deal with it than to have your colleagues passively accept your ideas even if they don’t think they’re great. The latter is far more likely to derail successful change.

How have you dealt with resistance to change in your work? What mistakes have you made and successes have you had in this area?

There are a lot of popular assumptions people make in this profession that lead us to make classic blunders. These can be assumptions about the change process, assumptions about our colleagues, and assumptions about our patrons. We can go into developing a new service or technology with the best of intentions and fail spectacularly because of the blinders we put on due to these strongly-held assumptions. Sometimes things fail in libraries because they weren’t a good idea or fit, but sometimes the failure is caused by the approach taken to creating change. And those failures truly can be avoided.

As I work delicately and slowly at my library to build a culture of assessment, I’ve been thinking a lot about implementation failures and thought it would be nice to look at some of the classic blunders I’ve seen in both libraries and higher ed over the past seven years related to implementation. Here’s the first.

“Why don’t we try it and see what happens” is always a good way to approach new services

No, offense intended, Andy, but I have to disagree with you here (though I certainly would have agreed strongly with you when I was new to the profession). I am definitely not a risk-averse person in my work. I have experimented many times over the years with new services, service models, and technologies. Some have been successes and some failures, but I’ve always learned from the experiences. One thing I’ve learned is that while in some cases the “try it and see what happens” mantra is a very reasonable way to approach things, other times, it can be a disaster. This Fall, I did a pilot project with some colleagues to provide synchronous online workshops for students using web conferencing software. What we learned was that there wasn’t much need for general research instruction workshops, but grad students in particular were very interested in online instruction on specific topics, such as using Zotero and Mendeley. So, based on that information, we retooled for this term with more discipline-specific sessions and I continued offering my Zotero and Mendeley workshops. In that case, trying it and seeing what happened was a totally reasonable approach because whether we were wildly successful or a total flop, we could handle either eventuality.

Back in 2006, when I was the distance learning librarian at Norwich, I tried an embedded librarian pilot for our online Masters degree programs. Having been one of those students who never asked for help at her library, I wanted to make sure I was available as possible to our students as they started out in their program. I also wanted to try and put a human face on the library, which is even more critical in the online learning environment. The first term, I embedded myself in the first seminar of our two most research-intensive classes (both of which had several sections). I had an “Ask a Librarian” discussion board (that was front and center) in each classroom where I could both answer questions and proactively provide information literacy instruction at key points in the term.

The major issue was that I had to check each WebCT classroom separately to see if there were any messages from students — there was no way to get alerts when new content was posted. It took me 4-7 hours each week to monitor the boards and answer questions. This wouldn’t have been an issue if I’d been deluged with questions, but that was far from the case. Occasionally, a single class would have a lot of questions one week (if their prof asked them to check with me about their research topics), but for the most part, questions were few and far between and some classes never used the discussion board at all. And even when I (and the program administrators) strongly encouraged faculty to encourage their students to ask for help, only some chose to do so. I was basically routing traffic from the reference desk to myself and taking 4-7 hours/week to answer anywhere between 0 and 12 questions. Clearly not a great value proposition. Had I gotten a lot of questions, it would have been worth the time spent, but for so few, it clearly wasn’t.

The big problem was that the faculty and administrators thought this was a great service as did the students who used it. Even though I’d called it a pilot, no one outside of the library saw it that way. They wanted the program to expand, not go away. It was very difficult to pull out of providing this service, but it had to be done. Had I really considered the worst-case scenarios of either wild success or failure, I would have realized that this had the potential to be a HUGE problem. If a potential consequence of not being able to sustain a service means losing credibility with faculty and/or administrators, then it’s not a risk to take lightly. Building credibility with one’s faculty is a painstaking process. It often takes years to build their trust and to get them to see you as someone who can offer something useful to them and their students. You don’t want to risk that. As anyone involved in instruction can attest, it sometimes takes just one bad session to lead a faculty member to never request instruction again.

There are a lot of awesome services we could be providing at PSU, but we are constrained by our extremely small public services staff relative to our student population. In many cases, we have to worry about what it would look like to be the “victims of our success,” because we are already stretched to the point where everything we do is an essential service. I believe strongly that “try it and see what happens” is a great idea after you visualize potential outcomes and realize that none of them will be truly damaging. If we had tons of demand for online instruction, we could have handled it. That we didn’t (except in the Zotero and Mendeley classes) also wasn’t a problem. All we really were risking was our pride. But when the risk is alienating students/faculty/administrators or seriously overworking already stressed librarians, I think there needs to be a serious discussion about how to handle that eventuality and whether it’s worth risking without understanding the service population better.

I’m a huge believer in seeing service development as an iterative process. That part of perpetual beta appeals strongly to me. I believe in trying something, assessing it, and retooling based on those results. I see that as a continuous loop that should continue to happen even when you think the service/technology is mature (since populations and their needs change). However, I also think that in some cases assessment has to start before we ever offer the service. I think perpetual beta, whether in the tech world or in libraries, can sometimes be an excuse for putting out things that are truly half-baked. Putting out something (service, technology, etc.) that risks our reputation, credibility, or relationship with our service population requires more than a “let’s try it and see what happens” attitude.

The next classic blunder I’ll be tackling: the assumption that resistance to change is bad and something one needs to defeat.

I have been wanting to write a post on work-life balance for a while, especially after spending a week at ACRL Assessment Immersion with a bunch of people who are deeply committed to their work and all define balance in their lives differently. Some of the people there are so active in the profession, so plugged-in, publish a ton, travel a ton, and get to meet lots of awesome librarians. Others are dedicated to work during their 40 hrs/wk there and are deeply focused on family and community. Most of us probably fall somewhere in between. And yet we are ALL amazing professionals.

I’ve noticed a tendency in our profession (and probably others) to see being immersed in the profession and spending lots of time outside of our 40 hrs/wk on professional stuff as unhealthy. And at the same time, there’s a tendency to see people who view their work as a librarian as a 9 to 5 job as not committed. To me, the only mistake you can make here is buying into what other people think and not defining balance as what works for you. It’s not about quantity, people, it’s about quality.

Colleen has written a great post about not wanting to feel like her job is her identity and become so immersed in her work that it makes her unhealthy. While I have to say that her “I am a librarian” vs. “I serve as a librarian” distinction doesn’t mean much to me (especially because I do feel like being a librarian is an important part of my identity), I applaud her efforts to find a healthy balance in her life:

Being a librarian for all my waking hours is no longer a model that works for me. … So now I am working on a certain separation of powers, if you will. When I am librarianating, I focus entirely on that, to make sure I am being the best librarian I can be. But I am also now a woman who needs 8 hours of sleep, to make sure that I am also a Rested and Healthy Colleen. I am a student, and when I do that I am Studious Colleen. I’m working on improving my Downtime Colleen self by taking at least one day a week and dedicating it to anything not school- or work-related.

There are a lot of guidelines out there for finding work/life balance, but in my opinion, besides a few (get up from your desk periodically, get enough sleep, don’t ignore the needs of your loved ones, etc.), work/life balance is very subjective. For some people, work/life balance means clocking out at 4 or 5pm and not ever checking work email from home. For others, doing work on some evenings and weekends is the norm. For others, working evenings and weekends is a frequent occurrence. Is any of this a problem? Only if it’s a problem for you.

We all have a pretty set finite amount of time each day to do what we need and want to do (those lucky people who physiologically need less sleep get a bit more than those lazy bums like me who only function well on 8-9 hrs.). Let’s think of that time as a bucket and all the things you need or want to do are glasses of water. Most people probably have a lot more water in their glasses than can fit into their bucket so we have to pick and choose how much from each glass we want to empty into the bucket. Even people who have the exact same types of glasses of water (kids, exercise, tenure, etc.) will pour different amounts in the bucket based on what is most important to them.

Before I had my son, I filled my bucket very differently. Librarianship was a huge portion of my bucket. I wrote long blog posts quite frequently, networked online a ton, traveled often to speak at conferences, and did all sorts of professional projects (Five Weeks to a Social Library, a book, the Library Success Wiki, etc.). People often commented that they were amazed by how much I did professionally and my stock response was “that’s because I have no life.” That wasn’t true. I still did fun things with my husband and friends, went on great vacations, and did a lot of reading. I never felt like anything in particular was missing or that it was unhealthy for me to spend so much time on my work. I found what I did immensely fulfilling.

I had a child full-well knowing that things would change. I knew I would have less time to spend on being professionally active and I was ok with that. The first year and a half after having my son, I did feel out of balance. Between meeting his many needs and barely sleeping for that entire first year, it was hard to find the time or energy for anything else. I also felt guilty every moment I spent outside of my 8-4:30 workday on librarianship. I should be devoting that time to my son. A lot of moms fall into that trap and feel like bad parents when they prioritize activities that don’t revolve around their child. And, at the same time, I missed being professionally active. I missed writing terribly. Over time I realized that as long as the time I did spend with my son was of quality (doing fun things and giving him my undivided attention rather than just sitting around watching TV), it was actually more important that he have a mom who feels fulfilled and happy than one who is with him every waking moment. For some parents, being fulfilled means being with their child all the time, and for some, being fulfilled means being with their child much less than I am. Again, there’s no one definition of balance. What matters is that you and your family feel good about what you’re doing. I’m lucky to have a very supportive husband who would be ok with me taking more time for work, but at 2 1/2, my son is a hell of a lot of fun, and I don’t want to miss much. I am in awe of parents of young children who travel a lot — I’ve realized I’m not built for it, emotionally. That’s why, when I speak in New Zealand at LIANZA next Fall, I’m going to have a 3 1/2 year old (and my husband) in tow. It won’t be the New Zealand trip I’d always dreamed of, but it’s the best option for my heart and we’re going to make it an awesome trip.

For me, I don’t mind doing work at home, whether it’s answering email, working on a document for a committee I’m on, or developing a presentation or an article. What I don’t like is when work issues bleed into the time I’ve dedicated to other activities. Like when I wake up in the middle of the night and obsess about a project, or I come home in a bad mood because of a meeting that went badly. I want to be fully present in whatever I’m doing, so when work prevents me from being “in the moment” with my family (or sleeping through the night), I feel the lack of balance. To me, if anything is objectively bad for people, it’s that. I don’t find that happens very often to me these days, but when I was a child and family psychotherapist, I obsessed about the poor kids I worked with constantly. The problem wasn’t so much about working crazy hours (though I did do most of my paperwork on weekends); it was that I could never be mentally away from work when I was away from work. My mind was going 24/7 and it made me physically and emotionally exhausted.

I don’t think that people seeking a perfect balance are ever going to find it. For one, that balance is constantly shifting based on what’s happening with those different cups of water you’ve poured into your bucket. If my son or husband gets sick, if I’m working under a writing deadline, or even if I’m reading a book that I just… can’t… put… down, I am going to need to shift things around. But also, few people ever have few enough cups that they can pour everything into their bucket. For me, balance is about accepting that I’ll never be able to do as much of everything I want to do as I’d like and being fully present in whatever I am doing. It’s about focusing on what I feel (not other people’s yardsticks and “should’s”) and my family’s needs. As long as I’m doing all that, I feel a balance in my messy and imperfect life.

How do you define balance in your life? Have your notions about balance changed over time or through professional and personal life changes? Do you feel like you have a work-self and a non-work-self and is it preferable to make that distinction?

I am a huge fan of research log and research process reflection assignments. Because research is a means to an end (the paper) and because people are often doing it in a rush, there is little reflection on process. What worked? What didn’t? What can I take from this experience for the next time I have to do something similar? Because this reflection is not usually written into the curriculum, students don’t learn enough from their mistakes or even the good things they did. Having a research log helps students become better researchers in the future and, most importantly, helps them to develop a “system” that works for them.

I definitely remember the many years that I did not have a system for research and writing. Most reference librarians have probably encountered a frantic student who realizes just before his/her paper is due that s/he can’t track down some of the sources they need to cite. Yeah, that was me (though I would have been too embarrassed to come to the reference desk). I probably never followed the same path twice and wasted a lot of time doing things over again because I wasn’t organized. Looking back, I wish a nice librarian had provided an session for me on developing a system for finding, organizing, reading and synthesizing information, because I wasted a lot of time and sweat needlessly.

Now that I have a system, research and writing is much simpler. But being the geek that I am, I’m always interested in improving and refining my process. I’m very interested in how people conduct research online and do their writing these days, especially people who are tech-savvy and information literate. I thought maybe if I shared my own strategies, it might inspire other bloggers to share theirs. Research and writing are often such solitary processes so we don’t often get to see how others approach similar challenges. I want to lift the veil on my own approach. I don’t know if this will be interesting to anyone else, but I’d love to encourage others to share their own tools and strategies so we can learn from each other.

Update: I should add that when I’m not working on a specific writing project, I use delicious and Instapaper to collect items of interest I find. delicious I use for collecting things that may be useful in the future and Instapaper I use for collecting articles and blog posts that I definitely want to read in-depth when I have time (and I often save those things to delicious as well). I have frequently mined my collections in delicious for writing projects later on.

When I get an idea for research/writing project, I start with simple mindmapping. I don’t use anything fancy for that part of the process (though there are plenty of cool online mindmapping tools) — just a piece of paper or a word processing program (whatever I’m in the mood for using at that moment). I brainstorm everything about that topic that I might potentially be interested in. I then turn that mindmap into a research question/topic statement and an outline. That gives me a strong sense of what sort of research I might be looking for. I tend to cast a wide net in my research — information science-related databases, databases in related disciplines (psychology, education, computer science, business, etc.), multidisciplinary databases, Google Scholar, blogs, organizational websites, etc. Anything that looks good I grab the PDF of and throw it into a folder in Dropbox so I can access it from anywhere. If a PDF isn’t available, I print the page as a PDF (thanks PDF Creator). If it’s not an article but a cool example, I’ll make note of it (and its URL) in a separate Word file that I save in the same folder.

Usually, whatever I find has expanded my perspective on the topic, so I tend to go back and modify my outline then. I then see if I’ve found useful material on all areas I’d brainstormed. If not, I might expand the search. Sometimes I discover that certain topics simply aren’t fruitful areas of inquiry and I remove them from my outline.

So now I usually have a tremendous number of PDFs in a folder in Dropbox. I then take my iPad and load all of them up in iAnnotate. There are a lot of annotation tools for iPad and I’ve tried a few of them, but I was most pleased with iAnnotate. Your mileage may vary. (There was an awesome guide to PDF annotation tools for iPad published recently, but I can’t seem to track it down now.) iAnnotate works beautifully with downloading from and uploading to Dropbox, so it’s a perfect fit for me. When I wrote my book, Social Software in Libraries, I printed out just about everything I read. I’ve never been able to do deep reading on a computer so I ended up with an obscene amount of paper that I kept for many years and finally gave up on the fantasy that I’d ever use them again. When I got an iPad, I was hoping to find something that would allow me to read an article, highlight text, and take notes on the document itself. iAnnotate fits the bill and puts all of my reading at arm’s reach. I can read at lunch, before meetings, while waiting at the doctor’s office, in bed, etc. It has definitely boosted my productivity.

A semi-related aside: Last weekend, my son was watching the movie, Babe, and I was reading articles for a book chapter I’m currently writing. My son climbed up into my lap and and I cuddled with him while reading scholarly articles on M-learning. I stopped and thought “man, if this isn’t the picture of the tenure-track mother I don’t know what is!” Sigh…

I first quickly skim through each article and decide if it’s worth reading and annotating. If not, I remove it from iAnnotate and from Dropbox. If it is, I read and mark it up. When I’m done with all of them, I upload back to Dropbox so the annotated versions of the articles can be read anywhere.

Next stop, Mendeley. For those who don’t already know about it, Mendeley is a desktop citation management tool, similar to Zotero in functionality (I like Zotero a lot too, but found Mendeley a better fit for me). Additionally, it’s an excellent social network for scholars and can also function as a tool for discovering additional research. I usually search Mendeley for my topic(s) as well because it’s searching a library of things that other scholars thought worth adding to their own Mendeley library (similar logic to searching del.icio.us in addition to Google). Now that I’ve got the definitive list of what articles I plan to use and they’re marked up in my Dropbox folder, I import all of the files from that folder into Mendeley. There are obviously many points at which you could pull stuff into Mendeley. You could do it directly from the database/website you’re getting the article from. I just like to do it at this point because I get the annotated PDFs into Mendeley and only the ones I might need to cite.

Mendeley usually does a decent job identifying the bibliographic information from the PDF, but invariably, I have to do a little work on it. One thing I love about Mendeley is its PDF reader within the program itself (which actually has annotation features too). I pull up each PDF and check it against the citation info Mendeley created (they are displayed side-by-side). I then fix any errors in the citation. If I’m using books or websites, I add them to Mendeley as well at this point (using the Mendeley web importer for website and that with WorldCat Local for books). I then create a bibliography of all of these resources in MS Word. Using this file, I now copy and paste anything I highlighted from each article into the document under the citation for that article. I also add useful notes from books as well. I print this out and use it to flesh out my original outline. The document helps me to easily remember where I got ideas from rather than looking at 20, 30 or 60 different sources. My outline now has authors names next to each topic, reminding me of what I should look at when I’m at that point in my writing. I print the outline as well.

As I write my lit review, I use the outline, the document with all of the highlighted content, the document with the cool examples, and the articles themselves. I use both my iPad and my computer at this point. I write on my computer (in MS Word — I know there are cool writing apps that prevent you from being distracted, but I do fine with Word), but I access the articles from my iPad using the Mendeley app. The Mendeley app is great for accessing your citations and the articles themselves on the go (note: it also works on an iPhone). I use Mendeley’s Word plugin to insert citations and format the bibliography.

And that’s basically it! As far as tools, Mendeley and iAnnotate have really improved my writing and research experience, but more important than that is the fact that I have a system. I’ve discovered a way of organizing my thoughts, finding and organizing sources, and bringing the two together that works for me. We’re all different. We all have quirks that influence our strategies. My major quirk is that I write better in bed than anywhere else. Sitting up at a desk and doing a lot of writing is incredibly difficult for me, so you won’t often find me doing substantial work on an article in my office at work. I have a friend who writes best when we writes in longhand. For him, perhaps, something like LiveScribe, a handwriting app for iPad, and/or a PDF annotation tool that is focused on handwritten annotations would work well.

So I’m curious; what’s your process? What tools help you do research and write? What research or writing quirks so you have and how has that influenced the system you’ve chosen? While I have a system, it is constantly evolving (I only switched from Zotero to Mendeley this past summer) and I’m always looking for better ways to do things. Aren’t we all?

For the past six and a half years, I have been teaching Freshman about peer-review and how to find peer-reviewed articles through the library (or Google Scholar). I’ve developed all sorts of activities in different disciplines to get students thinking about audience, writing style, and the format of the articles they find. And every year, I become more and more convinced that having first-year students use peer-reviewed literature in their research is a terrible idea that takes the focus away from what is important for them to learn.

I have also sat at the reference desk for six and a half years helping first-year students find their required three peer-reviewed articles (sometimes more, sometimes less, but usually 3) for their papers that I know they probably won’t understand. Expecting a first-year student to be able to grasp literary criticism and science articles written for other PhD’s seems crazy to me. And the articles are usually so specific (like “Machines and Animals: Pervasive Motifs in ‘The Grapes of Wrath’” or “Chemical Recycling of Carbon Dioxide to Methanol and Dimethyl Ether: From Greenhouse Gas to Renewable, Environmentally Carbon Neutral Fuels and Synthetic Hydrocarbons”) that it’s rare to find a good fit for the students’ more basic topics in the scholarly literature. It becomes more about finding an article that is at least somewhat related to their topic than finding good evidence for their argument.

I don’t remember a professor in college ever requiring me to use peer-reviewed articles in my papers. I actually don’t remember there ever being specific requirements about sources in research papers. It was mainly about our writing and finding good sources that supported our argument. Maybe Wesleyan University is just a weird place (actually I know it is), but I think this strategy was right on the money, because it helped us to focus more on finding content that we both understood and that was useful to our research rather than focusing on finding a specific kind of research which we may not even have understood well once we got to reading it. Of course, I was in college back when the Web was new and no one in their right mind thought to use it as a research tool. Still, I think one can require students to use solid evidence for their argument without necessarily requiring students to use peer-reviewed literature.

I understand perfectly that faculty want their first-year students to find quality resources and they want their students to have an understanding of scholarly communication. But is the best way to do that forcing them to find scholarly articles for a research paper? That requires so many different skills that many of these students don’t have yet:

1. The ability to turn a topic into a search strategy
2. The ability to search in library databases
3. The ability to look at a citation and determine whether it is a scholarly journal or not (or maybe they’ve just checked a box in a database which means that they never need to learn this important skill)
4. The ability to read an abstract and determine whether the article is relevant to their topic
5. The ability to read a scholarly journal article and synthesize information from it
6. The ability to integrate evidence from the scholarly literature into their paper
7. The ability to write effectively

And making students do all that when usually they are only getting 1, 2, and 3 from the librarian and probably 7 from the instructor sends students a terrible message in their first year. Research is painful. Scholarly articles are impossible to read. YOU CAN’T DO THIS! The first year should be about showing students that they can do it. It should be about getting them excited about participating in research and contributing to the scholarly conversation. And that doesn’t mean making things easy, but it also doesn’t mean stacking the deck so much against students that they are soured on research. I remember Freshman year being a huge smack-down for me (a know-it-all 18-year-old who was academically a big fish in a small pond during high school), but while I remember realizing how little I knew, I also felt very engaged with the research I was doing. I was reading things deeply, trying to make novel arguments, and was thinking about issues from multiple points of view. Research was about expanding my horizons and I just wonder if that’s the effect the sort of research assignments I tend to see first year students doing today has on them.

Another thing that the focus on requiring students to only find peer-reviewed sources does is that it distances them from research and information literacy. Information literacy should be seen as a life-long process of information seeking. Information literacy is about finding reviews of cell phones to choose the best one for you. It’s about researching an illness you were just diagnosed with. But when the focus is on telling students that the only quality stuff comes from the peer-reviewed literature, we are distancing what students learn in school about information literacy from what they will do in the real world. Information literacy instruction should be relevant to students’ lives and help them develop transferable skills, but in so many cases, the assignment the students have forces us to focus on getting them through a single class, rather than on giving them skills they can use later on.

What should first-year students focus on in terms of writing and research? Well, I think it’s great to have them do a lot of writing, and a lot of it should be focused on different types of writing, not just research papers. They need to develop their ability to make an argument without focusing on integrating evidence. And students can learn how to integrate evidence even without doing any searching. Instructors can provide sources that allow students to write an argumentative paper where the focus is on synthesizing what they’ve read and integrating evidence into their paper. And it’s easier for faculty to assess how they did if they’ve actually read the articles. I think they also should learn about scholarly communication, but not through an assignment that requires them to find, read and use peer-reviewed journal articles. I love what Kate Gronemyer and Anne-Marie Deitering described in their article “Beyond Peer-Reviewed Articles: Using Blogs to Enrich Students’ Understanding of Scholarly Work”, where they had students in first-year writing classes read blogs by scholars in specific disciplines to understand scholarly communication. By using something familiar to students (blogs) they can focus on learning about scholarly communication rather than focus on learning how to read peer-reviewed articles. It also can get them to see themselves as researchers who can contribute to the conversation. It makes it all so much more accessible. I also love the idea of giving all students in a class peer-reviewed articles from different disciplines and have them analyze them together. It can not only help them to understand and dissect peer-reviewed literature, but it can also show them the differences in scholarly communication in different disciplines. Students need to learn how to read, analyze, evaluate and synthesize information from the scholarly literature, and I don’t think those learning goals are met by most research paper assignments. I think some focus on understanding the different types of journal literature and the audiences for each would also be valuable, but their understanding of that can be assessed by activities where they have to find different types kinds of sources or where they have the sources already (or even just citations) and have to figure out what they are. I’d want students to develop the component skills necessary to make them successful at writing a research paper before they are actually asked to do so.

And probably most librarians know all this already. Unfortunately, we’re rarely the ones developing assignments. And while some of us have good relationships with our faculty where we can make suggestions, many, even the most diligent liaisons, don’t. I really appreciate the point-of-view of our newish head of the Center for Online Learning at PSU who sees librarians as having a critical role in assignment design, and feels that faculty should always consult with their subject librarian when they are developing research-related assignments. I love this idea, but know that we couldn’t be further from most faculty members’ minds when they are developing assignments (probably a few days before the start of classes). We’re lucky at PSU in that our year-long Freshman Inquiry program is focused on the development of core skills already, so I don’t know if this problem is as big as it was at Norwich, but after seeing a gaggle of first-year students in another discipline this week coming to the reference desk needing peer-reviewed articles on their topic (and not knowing really what that even meant), I know it’s a problem at least in some quarters.

How have you dealt with this issue at your institution? Have you been able to get through to disciplinary faculty? What strategies have you used to develop these valuable skills in students in spite of the existence of bad research assignments?

This summer, I was engaged with quite a few projects (several of which I was in charge of), but was able to make time to focus on scholarship just about every Friday. Part of that, in my opinion, is this blog. This is how I engage with the profession, share my ideas, and have professional conversations with others. My writing here is certainly different than it is in the article I just turned in to a peer reviewed journal on the impact of the changing information environment and participatory technologies on pedagogy and information literacy, but it’s no less important (to me at least). And thank goodness I got that article submitted before the Fall quarter started, because I’ve been buried at work.

It’s a good kind of buried though. This is my first Fall at PSU and I’m trying to immerse myself as much as possible in our instruction program so that I can get a feel for what needs to be worked on. To that end, I’ve been trying to teach a diverse array of classes by offering to cover classes for some of my colleagues. And it’s been fun! The students at PSU are, for the most part, very motivated, probably because so many are non-traditional students and/or are paying for college themselves. I actually had a bunch of students in a class I taught last week request my PowerPoint slides (and another student was furiously writing down everything I said). It’s been fun. I’m also working on a whole bunch of projects designed to bring a culture of assessment to the library’s instruction program. I’m attending Assessment Immersion next month which has like 4 pre-assignments and a giant pile of readings. And I’m on search committees for three positions, one of which is our University Librarian, which I couldn’t be more excited about. This position is so important to our library and I’m glad to have the opportunity to help the University to select a great leader for us.

But one result of being buried (even in a good way) is that I don’t have enough time for blogging and traditional scholarship. I have about a gazillion books and articles on the next topic I want to research, but no time to read them. I’ve got about a dozen ideas for blog posts that are practically burning a hole in my brain, but no time to get my thoughts down on the screen. It’s a funny thing, because scholarship is so central to whether I get tenure (and thus stay in my job), and yet it’s the first thing that goes when I (and so many other tenure-track librarians) get busy. But what else does one drop? I can’t not serve on the search committees I’m on (well I guess I could, but that also would not be good for my tenure portfolio). I can’t stop working towards a final draft of our library instruction learning outcomes which have an administrative deadline. I can’t choose not to work at the reference desk or teach classes. I can’t drop the other things that have regular meetings and strict deadlines. So I drop the one thing in my work for which there are no specific goal-posts or deadlines (other than that final one when I turn in my tenure packet and cross my fingers).

I don’t know about the tenure track at other institutions, but the requirements for achieving tenure here are extremely vague, which can be quite nerve-wracking in that you don’t know what each committee members’ expectations might be. On the other hand, I doubt most people would want some strict pronouncement like “you must have five peer-reviewed articles accepted and give 10 presentations” because that straightjackets you to a single measure of success and doesn’t allow for alternative visions of professional and scholarly contribution. But that vagueness contributes to the issue, because I have no idea how many peer-reviewed articles I should have written, presentations I should have given, and service I should have done before the end of my first year. But I do know concretely what the expectations are for everything else I need to do.

Over the past five years or so, the requirements for librarians to get tenure at my institution have increased. One colleague told me that back in the day, if you got one peer-reviewed article published, you’d be fine. That is far from the reality now. We’ve been having conversations at the library about how to support people on the tenure track, because right now, the only benefit in terms of time that we have are 5 research days per year. Not exactly enough for the kind of scholarly productivity we’re expected to have. I was advised by our former UL to work on my research every Friday (since meetings are not usually scheduled then), but I’m now finding that isn’t possible much of the time and we’ve been told that it’s problematic for reference desk scheduling. But the rest of my week is packed with teaching and meetings. In other departments, tenure-track faculty have 1/3 less of a courseload than tenured faculty, so they have an additional 33% of their time to devote to research. It’s not so easy to make such accommodations for librarians, but I think if the library both wants to be seen as faculty “like everyone else” and wants to produce the scholarship at (or even near) the level of other departments, something has to change.

Last week at a faculty meeting we discussed making time for scholarship and it became clear that this was both a very important conversation that needs to continue and one in which clear-cut guidelines for support are not likely to appear. While everyone wants to support scholarship, the visions of what that looks like are myriad. There are people who feel like we should have clear expectations (like 20% of your time should be devoted to research), but some people feel like that’s 20% of a 40-hour work week and others feel that’s 20% of a 60-hour work week. Others feel like tenure-track librarians should have fewer reference shifts and should be asked to do reference shifts on Fridays less often. Still others seem to feel that yes, we should take time during the week for research, but that it’s up to the individual to carve out that time themselves. And the tenure-track librarians, in the middle of this, keep on keeping on with the anxious feeling of being pulled in a thousand directions. It’s certainly in the best interests of the tenured librarians for the tenure track librarians to achieve tenure and continue the strong relationships they’ve built with their liaison areas (not to mention it means fewer search committees), but does that mean they should provide explicit support to those seeking tenure?

In a service-centered profession, it can feel wrong and callous to be selfish, but it’s exactly what you need to be if you’re going to get tenure and continue providing service to your patrons. Somehow I have to find a way to choose my scholarship over things that will benefit my patrons, but honestly, I don’t know what to give up. I know I’ve taken on a lot this year, certainly too much, and that I’m going to be pretty well-buried until June, but I’m so used to making choices that are best for the library rather than making those that are best for me. At Norwich, I could do that, because my work was 100% about the library. But now, I have to think about my own career, and when tenure decisions are so strongly based on one’s research, I may sometimes need to put research above doing things that will further my goal of building a culture of assessment at the library. That is so antithetical to my vision of librarianship but clearly I need to find a balance where I can still be true to my values and get tenure.

And while thinking about all of this (actually, right in the middle of writing this, since I never get a post done in one straight shot anymore), I saw this great post in Scientific American entitled The three things I learned at the Purdue Conference for Pre-Tenure Women: on being a radical scholar. In it, the author talks about having a plan for what you want to have achieved by the time you get tenure:

This point was largely inspired by a breakout session led by Dr. Mary Dankoski. In it, Dr. Dankoski asked us if we were the type of academic who lived by Plan A: did what we were asked to do and hoped we would have a rewarding fulfilling career while also meeting the promotion and tenure expectations, or Plan B: were proactive, developed a plan and negotiated responsibilities to be sure we will have vitality, find real meaning in our work, and meet promotion expectations.

You can probably guess which type most of us were, and which type Dankoski encouraged us to become. The Plan A academic says yes to most things because she is directionless and is trying to meet expectations, whereas the Plan B academic uses her personal values and interests to define and express her scholarly worth.

Related to Turner’s point about bringing your whole self to the job, Dankoski asked what we cared most about in order to create a career plan around it. She created a great handout to force us to write a Career Development Plan. The first step was to write on the following prompt:

“It is 5 years from today. If you were wildly successful in your work and personal life, what will you have achieved?”
…

So, have a goal and make it a big one. Make a plan, ground it in your personal values. Dream big, form actionable steps towards those dreams, and put some thought into how your dreams and the mission of your institution intersect. Any time you can convince your employer that your dreams are good for them will make it easier to make them happen.

YES!!! While this doesn’t necessarily help with the “making time for scholarship” thing, nor the “institutional/collegial support for scholarship” thing, having a plan does help us to chart a course for what we want our scholarship and service to look like. For many years, I’ve been taking on things based on what I’ve been asked to do. I don’t say yes to every writing opportunity/presentation request/committee, but I’ve sort of fallen into some of my “research areas” because those are what I’ve been asked to write/talk about. I don’t have a clear vision of what I want to influence and achieve in the next 5 years. And I should. And having a clear plan will not only let me know what I should and should not say “yes” to; it will also help me to determine what I need to get done each year to reach my goal.

One thing I didn’t mention in this post is the equally (if not more) stressful issue of balancing being on the tenure track with family. That would have swelled this post to an epic size, so it’s probably best left for the future. But it is discussed at length in that blog post from Scientific American and it’s worth a read if you’re struggling with this too.

As you can see, I don’t have a lot of answers to all these issues; not for myself nor for the tenure system in libraries. So I’m very interested to hear about other people’s experiences. Do/did you have a clear plan for achieving tenure? How do/did you make time for scholarship? How does/did your institution support tenure-track librarians?