In my new corner of the IT world, I’ve been thinking a lot about knowledge management in an environment where people are chronically overworked, under-staffed, and nobody is formally in charge of knowledge management for the whole group. It seems inevitable that, if you have good people working in this kind of context, and if you’re able to retain people for any length of time, it’s inevitable that you’ll end up with extremely competent people who really know their stuff, but who have often managed to keep their heads even near the surface of the water by “doing the work rather than documenting the work.” And this means that processes get heavily siloed, relying on specific people to do things that only they know how to do, and who can certainly do the thing faster than they can train someone else to do the thing.

It’s a tough spot because digging out of it takes time and effort, which are the two things that folks in this kind of context can’t really spare.

I’m lucky to work with extremely dedicated and competent colleagues, and they even carved time out of my job description to build and tend a client-facing Knowledge Base! My goals for the KB are to a) help folks in our community do what they need to do, but also very much b) help our front line staff provide quick and consistent answers to the questions that flood in every day. And particularly at a service where the frontline staff are generally student workers, getting staff up to speed quickly and simply is crucial. Even if our frontline staff weren’t students, I’d still want this kind of a KB. My own analogy always goes back to the way that we used research guides in the library so that even I, a humanities librarian to the core, could help the STEM who came to the general research desk for help. I certainly didn’t know what a Gini coefficient was, but luckily the ECON librarian had a guide on what to do when someone needed whatever-it-was so I was able to provide help and support even in a context where I simply couldn’t know enough about everything. The reference librarian’s mantra is “I don’t know everything, but I know where to find out about it.”

Over the course of the last 9 months, we’ve gotten our KB up and running (and my little “KB Team” and I have learned so much!). And though that work will NEVER be done, I’m also starting to see other knowledge management opportunities on the horizon.

The biggest thing I’m pondering right now is building out “Workflows” in our ticketing and project management system. These are things that would step through flowcharts of choices, tasks, approvals, etc within the ticketing system, and if we’re able to build them such that they step us through our more complex processes they would in effect be the Knowledge Base of Processes. (And yes, I know it wouldn’t be sufficient documentation for our procedures, but it’d be actionable and more than we have available to us right now.) So, for example, what if our processes like hardware request/deployment, hardware reclaim, software/licensing review, change control, Software renewals, certificate renewals, system maintenance, and project request/review (just to name a few) all had workflows in the system?

For things we do less frequently, workflows would help reduce the time we spend thinking “I wonder how we did this last time.” For things we do all the time, they would be safeguards against forgetting crucial steps, and they would be training aids for new employees. For managers and auditors, they would allow for better reporting and visibility for work (and especially for the often-invisible routine operational work) going on in the department. In this way they would complement the already-visible work of answering support questions and working on formal Projects-With-A-Capital-P.

The trick, of course, is getting the time to actually build these Workflows into the system (and then maintain them). And they’d have to be built such that the processes aren’t so complex that they become an added burden on already over-extended employees.

But there’s got to be a sweet spot where these workflows could both document our processes in fundamentally actionable ways, and also help us work more efficiently while shining a light on the mostly invisible labor that makes up so much of our jobs.

Last week I “promoted” my two student workers to Approvers – so now they can not only draft articles but also approve and publish them. We’re working on a style guide (I’ll share when we have something people might be able to understand), and we’re developing a topic/category structure so that clients who browse rather than search have a hope of finding what they need (or to catch people who search and land on something almost right so that they can find similar things). All of this preparation and foundation is of course with the goal that before too long we’ll be able to open up authoring/editing/approving to lots and lots more people in the department, and they’ll be able to make easy and wise choices about where to put their content and how to present it effectively.

We’re also adopting a lot of the KCS philosophy, which means that basically everyone can submit articles or flag existing articles for editing, and ideally techs will turn to the KB for nearly every question responses (our motto is: Find it, Flag it, Fix it, Add it). Then content experts will be able to approve/publish articles. Basically, just like with library research guides, I want as few bottle necks as possible in the process of producing reasonably standardized self-service tech support articles.

We’ve come up with a set of initial priorities for content:

• High-traffic, client-facing, self-service content, especially:
  • Whatever will be needed for new students/faculty/staff for Fall Term (connecting to the wifi, getting MS Office on your computer, etc)
  • How to get your computer connected to our cloud back-up system, the VPN, cloud storage drives, and other core systems that basically everyone has to do all the time
  • Mac/Windows OS update information
• Whatever we find ourselves typing frequently into responses to incoming questions to the Helpdesk (since KB articles can be attached to responses to tickets)

I’ve also talked to a few people who are interested in adding content, and we’re all trying to work out how to decide where to put all the different kinds of content people need to get out there for clients. For now, here’s how I’m thinking about the distinctions between what goes in the KB vs what goes on the WordPress-based campus/department website:

• In the KB
  • “Live” content – things that will be constantly updated
  • Content that needs to be restricted by audience in any way (we’re defaulting to fully public KB articles, but there are plenty of audience restrictions available as needed – WordPress audience restrictions are also available to us but are less granular)
  • Content that people will want to easily embed in answers to questions/tickets
  • Content that we want to have easily linkable from the pages where we have clients open tickets
  • Content that we think people will find primarily via search, especially Google search. The KB seems to be able to boost search results based on titles, article summaries, tags, and initial paragraphs of text, so we have a lot of options for catching people who are searching for guides.
• In the campus website
  • More high-level, stable descriptions of services/policies with pointers to the KB for specifics
  • The “why” instead of the “how”
  • Things that need more stability (things presented at conferences, etc) where there’s some expectations that redirects and archiving could be possible compared to the more ephemeral/evolutionary nature of a KB article that will be updated regularly

We’ve also worked out naming conventions for KB articles based on how we think clients will discover content and how techs can find articles to attach to ticket responses. And we’re feeling our way toward conventions/styles that we think will be as sustainable and consistent across all authors while still allowing for as much flexibility as possible so that content experts don’t feel hamstrung by too many rules or too few styling options.

Then there’s a scope question for the KB: how comprehensive do we plan to be with our content in this system? We do NOT want to recreate either Google or vendor-supplied support sites. We want to augment those things by either pointing our clients to vendor-supplied support sites or adding local context to Google result list. And coming from an information-management background, I’m very interested in developing a curated set of publicly visible support articles. But exactly what fits into this “curated” set? How aggressively will we weed the “just in case” or “previously useful” articles? How will we strike a balance between answering as many questions as we can for people who search through our content vs restricting our search result lists (or category browsing lists) to only the most current and relevant topics? We’re still feeling our way to the proper balance for these things, for sure.

I’m also thinking through the cultural pieces of launching this new thing.

• Some parts of campus are pretty used to going elsewhere for information, so when should we move their content into this new place? Which new content will help drive eyes to the new space vs which content will languish in the new space because people will keep looking for it elsewhere?
• What about the techs who have created information in previous information repositories? How can we honor the work that they’ve done while also transitioning to a new location that has affordances that privilege different rhetorical strategies? I certainly don’t want to make anyone feel like their hard work in a different system is somehow bad or wrong just because information seeking and/or information presentation options have changed.

So, 6 weeks into my new job, and a month into this project, we have a pretty solid foundation and are turning our attention to adding as much content as we can. Things seem to be going well! But there are miles to go before we have anything like a mature knowledge base.

I’m a few weeks into this new job now, and while new jobs are just basically always hard (I’d grown very very used to knowing everything about my job, and now I know a whole lot less about my job), I’ve been relishing all the times where the skills and habits of information literacy translate into this new context. That’s always been my favorite thing about taking on new liaison areas or even new topics and methodologies within established liaison areas, and now it’s my whole life. And spoiler alert, “all the times where the skills and habits of information literacy translate into this new context” are basically all of the times.

I’m still scrambling hard to learn all the things I need to know about campus IT infrastructure and about departmental workings — there are days when I wonder if I’ll ever know enough to be less dependent on patient and helpful colleagues. On the other hand, it seems like my experience with the underlying concepts of information seeking, information retrieval, and the reference interview are pretty useful in a variety of contexts. I also get to build a new knowledge base and help my new colleagues restructure parts of their ticketing system to help make it so techs can more easily see what they need to see when they need to see it.

The upshot is, I’ve decided not to shelve this blog. I’m still me, and I’m still interested in the same concepts. But if you’re mostly here for ideas about teaching primary source discovery to undergraduate researchers, that’ll be in pretty short supply. Granted, that’s been in short supply for a while now as personal and professional priorities edged out blogging most of the time in the last few years. But to the extent that I’m able to form coherent thoughts that I want to share down the road, it’s unlikely to be about traditional reference and instruction. It may be (and probably will be) applicable or analogous in some way, but it’d take some translation.

On the other hand, if you’re interested in guides and/or knowledge bases, that’s what’ll be on my mind for the next while at least. What do you put into them? What don’t you put into them? How do you manage discovery vs known item retrieval? Are we going to shoot for exhaustivity or a more limited collection? How are library research guides similar and different? Right now it feels like the week we subscribed to Libguides for the first time and had to decide how to structure things there: boundless possibilities and a ton of work in front of us.

Last spring I made a few videos using our institution’s lecture capture system, Panopto. (Insert shudder here about the panopticon…) Pros: I was able to get up and running with no-frills videos quickly, and I really appreciate any help I can get with accessibility features like captions. Cons: editing is extremely limited, and I just couldn’t get it to do some of the things I needed.

So over the summer I watched some YouTube videos about making videos (very meta), and then I faced down almost a week of script-writer’s block, and then I spent a week writing a whole bunch of scripts. And I made myself a slide template so that my videos would have a consistent look to them, which I’m hoping will help me mix and match them for the various courses I’ll be supporting. And now I’m deep in the weeds of video production.

Here’s the process I’ve developed so far:

1. Write a script (trying to get things down to 5 minutes or less means I can’t risk too many tangents, and making videos that people may need to watch more than once means I can’t risk too many stumbles, so scripts are where it’s at for me right now)
2. Create slides in PowerPoint using my template
3. Export the slides as large-ish JPEG images
4. In QuickTime, record a “movie” of me going through the script. (I don’t use my face through the whole finished video, but if there’s any part of this where I want the video and audio synced up, it’s when my mouth is moving, so it’s easiest for me to just record this all and then overlay it with other stuff later where all I need is my voice.)
5. In QuickTime again, record any screen captures I’ll need of me navigating through things or whatever.
6. Sometimes I need screen captures of me drawing or annotating PDFs or whatever, and I do those on my iPad.
7. In iMovie, edit the places where I stumbled or whatever, and then drop in the Slide images and screen captures (usually sped up to x2 or x4 speeds) where appropriate.
8. Sometimes I need to do more voice-over work in iMovie.
9. Export my movie to my computer
10. Import my movie to Panopto
11. Use Panopto to generate auto-captions and then go through and edit the captions as needed.

If the video isn’t super specific to a single course, I’ve added two more steps:

1. Download the caption file from Panopto
2. Upload the movie and the caption file to YouTube

Now I have two places where students can find my videos:

• Panopto: easy to feed into their Moodle courses, etc, and familiar on campus for course-related viewing
• YouTube: easier to stumble across or use for less formal work

And through all of this, one of the big things I’ve learned is that it is absolutely possible to be super corny and super boring all at the same time! Weeeee!

My main other take-away is that need to figure out a teleprompter situation. Right now I’m not very happy with the fact that my eyes are always just slightly down from camera even though I’ve pushed my script up as high as I can on my computer screen. Recommendations for good set-ups are welcome!

I’ve been teaching for 15 years — longer if you count the years I spent as a dance teacher. There are parts of this gig that I can do in my sleep. There are moves I’ve learned to make in the classroom as naturally as breathing. Sure, I’m always learning and tweaking and generally feel like I’m not actually teaching as well as I’d like to be, but I’ve developed a style, a pace, a repertoire.

And right now it feels like everything I know how to do in the classroom is varying degrees of useless. I’m back to square 1. Or maybe square 2.

Here’s some of what I’m learning and thinking about right now.

• Accessibility is hard
  The vast majority of my video production time goes to captioning, and for other online things I’m working really hard to make them fully accessible. In the face-to-face classroom these issues exist too, of course, but up till now most of my time was spent learning how to make accessible face-to-face encounters work out well for everyone. Now that’s all out the window and I’m spending hours upon hours editing and syncing up captions and click-through tables of contents and alt-text. Super important work, but extremely time-consuming.
• Panopto (my campus’ main lecture capture tool) is both easy and hard
  I like that I can relatively quickly capture video of me talking while demonstrating or using a slide deck. I also really like that it produces videos in an interface that our students are becoming pretty used to, so I can more easily assume that they’ll know what to do when they land on a Panopto video page. And I like that as the faculty and I are all re-learning our jobs, it produces analytics that can help me figure out which approaches worked in which situations. (And yes, I always set it up for anonymous access – I don’t want or need individual student information.) So I’m planning to have all of my course-integrated videos served up via Panopto into Moodle. But I don’t like that I can’t do some of the video-clip combing that I want to do for a few modules, and editing the captions is an absolute bear (not only does it take forever for each change to save, but if your caption is timed to start within about a second of a cut the caption won’t show on the public side! Ack!! So much fiddly editing even beyond fixing “in utero” back to “in Zotero”). I also don’t like that I can’t figure out how to do good revisions in Panopto — if I have to change a small thing I have to re-record the video. And of course, then there’s the ominous name “Panopto”…
• So then there’s more video production to learn
  Today I’ve been learning iMovie. And how to record my screen on my iPad in a way that allows me to draw things and then import those videos of me drawing things into my screencast. And how to record new snippets of audio to replace audio that I messed up in the original recording. And how to write timed closed caption files to upload to Panopto and YouTube whenever I upload a video.
• Plus I now have a YouTube channel
  I was thinking about how to live in a world where help-seeking will look really different compared to the extremely in-person-based methods we generally use at my institution. I can’t rely on people happening to see me when they come to print their papers. I can’t rely on people wanting to email me rather than talking to me on the sidewalk. So in the spirit of “be where they are” I’m trying to be more in their Google results… hence my brand new YouTube channel. I’m planning to put all the videos I make (that aren’t super specific to a particular assignment or class) up on YouTube so that if students Google something research related they’re more likely to find me and then be reminded of the things I taught them in our library session. Right now, it’s home to a playlist I made for a French course on getting started with Zotero. (If you watch it, please look past my stumbles…)
• Moodle Integration
  I worked with our Moodle person on campus to get the LibGuides LTI working, so now we can get appropriate guides sucked right into Moodle. I still wish that there was something easier than custom metadata that would allow this kind of interaction, but right now the fiddly custom metadata route is the price we’re paying for more seamless integration into what has become students’ primary classroom. Such is life.
• More chat reference widgets
  I made a chat widget to integrate into several of our core database platforms, and our eResources person is working on getting those loaded.
• Custom vs Generic
  One big thing I’m wrestling with right now is when to do highly customized instruction (which is our norm) and when to provide generic videos paired with assignments, guides, and/or Q&A sessions. Students here really respond to the personalized, custom, course-integrated work we generally do, and this funnels them into our liaison appointments quite nicely. But I simply can’t do that in the current environment 100% of the time. 6 short Zotero videos took me most of a week’s work… So which things need to be exactly how customized? For example, I have an upper level course in one department where I know students get very few opportunities for library instruction before their senior thesis, so even though they need a pretty generic thing from me, I decided it was important to have that thing delivered all in my own voice rather than in equally good (or better) videos made by my colleague. I want them to know that I’m their librarian. But then for a first year seminar I kind of want to find videos from my colleagues as much as possible so that they come away having learned that there’s a whole team of librarians at this library, all of whom are awesome and available to help students throughout their college careers.

So yeah, nothing earth shattering here, but that’s where my brain’s been for the last while, ricocheting wildly between big things and little things – solvable things and unsolvable things. And now I’m going to go back to story-boarding a couple of videos for core concepts that I teach ALL THE TIME, and that take 5 minutes or less in a classroom, but will probably take me several hours to put into video form… Wish me luck!

Non-Text-Based Source Discovery

1. Start with an interesting primary source related to the assignment at hand.
   1. Working in small groups, discuss what kinds of things you can learn from this primary source. What themes would it help you explore. What do you notice that you’d want to investigate further… generally, do a bit of primary source analysis on the spot.
   2. Come together and collect these themes and “topics” and questions, and this source might be one of your sources for that paper — if you were doing a research paper this might be the topic of your paper or your research question.
2. Now look at the record for that primary source (maybe in an archives catalog, or a digital collection, or whatever). 
   1. What are the words that are available to you in that record? If we use Control-F on the page, what could we find? 
   2. These are the words that we’ll probably have to use in a search box to find items like this one.
3. I explain that a general strategy for finding primary sources is to find a “bucket of stuff” to comb through. You, the human, will be able to see what the primary sources are “about” but the computer only knows what the primary sources “are.” So the goal is to use words that are very concrete, like the ones we saw in that one record, to gather together a subset of the sources in a collection. And then we as humans look at what we’ve gathered and select 1 or 2 or whatever that we can see are “on our topics.”
4. Students practice
   1. Sometimes I’ll have a worksheet where they can take notes about the search terms they come across as they open up item records so that later they can remember what search terms to experiment with.
   2. Keep track of what worked well and what was a challenge for group discussion
5. The group discusses what they found, what was hard, etc.
6. I impress upon them that this is not a task that can be rushed — it will take them a lot longer than they probably think it should. Plan accordingly!

Text-Based Primary Source Discovery

This is the one that will probably need the most change, but here’s what I’ve done so far.

1. Sources are not categorized by what they’re “about.” That kind of meaning making is the work that you will do in your analysis. They’re also not categorized by the kind of person who created them. In most search systems, we can’t search for poems about colonial oppression or novels by Black women. (quick demo — zero results)
2. Instead, you have three main strategies. In order:
   1. Use secondary/tertiary sources to identify primary sources. Find articles etc about your topic and see what they used for primary texts. Then find those texts or texts by the same authors.
   2. Use Instrumental Reading (more on this below) to find words and names that are associated by your topic and used by the people who are creating the kinds of sources you’re interested in. Then use those words/names in your searching. (Pro tip: this also works with scholarly source searching — not just primary source searching.)
   3. Use your own creativity and empathic powers to put yourselves in the shoes of the authors who might have created the works you’re interested in. What words would they have used?

Instrumental Reading

Instrumental Reading is a way to gain access to the language of the authors I care about for my topic, and then I can use that language to come up with fancy boolean searches.

1. Hand out a page or two of a reading (include the bibliography if there is one in addition to the body pages). For best results, use a reading that they used in class already
   1. Explain that now we’re going to learn a different method of reading the text — not to understand its argument but to understand how to find other things like this thing or in conversation with this thing.
   2. This is all predicated on the idea that social groups develop shared language, and our job if we want to find what they’re saying is to know their language.
2. Students work in groups of 2 or 3 to mark up the pages they’ve been given. Circle/note
   1. words associated with the various topics in the paper
   2. names of people/institutions
   3. disciplines mentioned (especially important in interdisciplinary classes)
   4. citations referenced or alluded to
3. As a group, we develop a shared list of the words they’ve come up with, often on the blackboard or a shared doc or something.
4. For the rest of class, I use words from this shared list for sample searches or to talk about why we might choose one database over another, or how to follow up on citations.

Here’s an example of a reading that I marked up for an intro course to Linguistics.

Primary source searching is hard. It has always been hard. First there was the problem of extremely limited access (unless you had travel funding and archives access). Then, after the digitization boom, there’s the new problem of helping students understand that they can’t search for topics or ideas; they have to search for concrete things from the source description or from the text already in the source. “Postcard” will likely be in the metadata about a postcard, but “depicting domesticity in the 18th century” is just not part of the metadata as a general rule. I tell students that they have to search for people, places, or things, not topics. And even then it won’t be comprehensive. And there’s literally no way to search for “paintings by women” or “novels by Black people.” That’s just not how the systems are set up, I say, over and over and over. You have to literally type in the letters-in-a-row that the original authors typed, or you have to know the name of the creator, I explain, over and over and over. If you want to find out how x group is referenced in newspapers, you have to OR together all the names and words that might have been associated with that group, I instruct, over and over and over.

And therein lies the rub. I am no longer willing to inflict on my students the trauma – the violence – of ORing together all the epithets that have been used in newspapers and legislation and editorial cartoons and broadsides to refer to minority groups. It’s one thing to be presented with these terms once you’ve gained access to a historical document. It’s quite another to have to use your imagination, creativity, and research skills to come up with these terms. And then after all that you have to actively recreate these epithets by typing these terms into a search box?? All neatly strung together with your fancy boolean operators?? No. Doing that myself is painful. Requiring students to do that in order to gain access to the historical record is horrible.

Going through and improving the metadata in our digital collections is going to be hard, expensive, and time consuming. The historic record is quite large, after all. But we and our vendors must do this work. It’s our ethical, moral, and social responsibility, and the technology exists to make it possible. We’ve been applying subject metadata to secondary and tertiary sources for years — for decades. And especially now that curricula have shifted toward teaching from primary sources more and more, we can’t hide behind the convenient excuse that “this is just the price you pay for studying history.” No. This is not a price we should have to pay. This is certainly not the price that my Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ, Latinx, and other historically marginalized students should have to pay in order to study history and culture.

People I know and love are living in veritable war zones. Places I care about are destroyed. My sense of who to trust with my personal safety and with the good of my community has crumbled. And all of this, I know, brings me only one step closer to understanding the world in which my black and brown neighbors have lived for generations.

What makes me reel is the sheer overwhelming scale of the problem. Because no, the current upheaval is not just about the cop who murdered George Floyd last week, or the three cops who stood by and watched it happen. It is certainly not about a “bad apple” cop. After all, this “bad apple” was recruited, nurtured, and protected by a system much larger than he is. It is not even solely about George Floyd, horrific as his murder was. Sadly, we have ample proof that this kind of killing can happen without much more than a ripple across society.

No, the heartbreak and the rage and the fear are because these kinds of killings can happen, and have so often happened, without much more than a ripple across society. And it has got to stop. Black lives matter. And once black lives finally matter — to all of us and to our social systems — then, finally, all lives will matter. And having lives matter is really the bare minimum, don’t you think?

We have to do better.

I have to do better.

Some days are tougher, of course. Anxiety will hit, or my computer will stop allowing me to use one of the two virtual conferencing tools that I rely on, or stuff will feel overwhelming. But for the most part the rhythm of my days are keeping me going, and are well sprinkled with things that bring me joy.

Weekday rhythms

Early morning: Sip tea, watch last night’s Daily Show and Colbert Show, watch yesterday’s video from my pastor, make a couple masks.

Morning: Get a heating pad (for my feet) and a blanket (for my lap), gather a pot of tea and some fruit or nuts, and settle in for work in my “office.” Typically my cat joins me to sleep in the bed I’ve put on a chair next to me.

Lunch: Take a walk while chatting with my sister-in-law on the phone. Eat lunch. Make another pot of tea for the afternoon.

Afternoon: Settle in with my heating pad, blanket, and napping cat for the afternoon. Sometime around 3:30 or 4 the cat will come fully awake and want to be a part of everything, especially everything involving a keyboard that he can sit on. Or a webcam. Webcams are cat magnets.

Evening: Every evening I read one more chapter of a book to the kids from a few families I know (including my nephews). It’s been very amusing to watch a bunch of young kids learn the ins and outs of video conferencing. At this point they mostly handle muting and un-muting themselves quite well, and they do a lot of reacting to the chapter in the chat, which they found themselves. Amazing!

Dinner: Connect with my parents through video chat and have dinner “together” while watching a streaming show of some kind.

Pre-bed: I might go to bed at this point, or I might stay up for a while to make some more masks. It all depends on how tired I am.

I’m a person who lives by rhythm and ritual, and I’ve also always loved the sense of wrapping my house around me like a cozy blanket in the winter. So I’m probably ideally situated for these work-from-home times. But my mind also kind of slips off any attempt to plan how things will go a month from now, or two months, or during Fall term… or next year. I know a lot’s uncertain so living in the moment is probably a pretty good strategy, but sometimes I also wonder if I should work a little harder at making even preliminary plans for farther ahead. Maybe I’ll let too much sneak up on me and have to scramble too hard once that hazy future becomes very real deadlines and calendar invites…. Or maybe it’s ok that I lull myself with the ebb and flow of each day.

Time will tell.

I’m currently in my 6th week of working primarily from home and my 4th week working entirely from home. Writing that sentence was an odd experience, actually. It’s the first time I’ve actually quantified my own pandemic self-isolation in that way, and I’m honestly having a hard time coming to terms with those concrete lengths of time. It feels like it’s been a long time, sure, but 6 weeks is far, far longer than I would have guessed. I guess Time has little of the same meaning now that it had in the Before Times.

There are all kinds of things I could write about how I’ve settled into my new work space and work habits here in my kitchen’s dining nook (not least of which is the extra care I have to give to ergonomics). And maybe I will write about some of those things some other time.

One thing that’s struck me, though, is how completely similar my work as a Reference Librarian During Pandemic Times is to my work as a Reference Librarian. I work with heavily text-based departments, and in fact a whole lot of what the researchers in my areas rely on has not been digitized. I’m not as physical-object-based as some others in our library, but I had kind of wondered what it would be like to support these departments without direct access to our physical materials.

And granted, the vast majority of my work in the Before Times involved in-person conversations, and a goodly proportion of those conversations took place in the stacks. And I’ve never enjoyed having to say that something is inaccessible, which now happens more often than it did before. So yes, my work is definitely different.

But what remains exactly the same is that one of the absolute core principles of my work is to help researchers define and scope their information needs within the practicalities of whatever circumstances they’re in. It’s not just, “What research question is manageable within a 10-page paper;” It’s also, “What research question is manageable given the evidence that’s accessible using available time and resources.” I talk about this pretty explicitly with upper level students, but it’s always an undercurrent in conversations with researchers of all levels.

Usually the things that aren’t available to us are physical things that are out of reach because the researcher doesn’t have money or time to travel to a particular archive or special collection. Or materials are inaccessible because they were never publicly available, or they’re classified, or they’re locked down because of privacy reasons… So much of the world’s information is impossible or impractical for use.

The difference is that now the impossible/impractical category has extended to include most of the world’s physical library collections. There’s a ton that’s been digitized, and between libraries working to license more and more of that content and vendors opening up temporary access there really is a lot out there. But of course it’s not everything. It will never be everything.

So then we’re back to the conversations that are actually familiar even while feeling strange — those reference interview questions that are intended to help you and the researcher figure out what the goals of the information need are, and whether those goals could be accomplished with materials that are accessible. And if not, what are some accessible materials that are sufficiently interesting and similar that if we adjust the goals slightly the researcher could have meaningful work to accomplish.

So yeah. Reference interviews can take longer these days, both because we can’t do them face to face and because there are proportionately more that require pretty creative thinking on both sides. But it’s still the good ol’ Reference Interview, and we’re good at that. And that’s comforting in a world that feels pretty chaotic and uncertain.