On 22/08/2011 16:43, B.G. Sloan wrote:
<snip>
> Interesting article in Inside Higher Ed: "What Students Don't Know".
> The concluding paragraph reads:
>
> "Librarians and teaching faculty certainly have an obligation to encourage good, thorough research...but they also have a responsibility to serve students -- and that means understanding the limitations of library idealism in practice, and acting pragmatically when necessary."
>
> See:http://bit.ly/nnUWHk
</snip>
What a great project! This is the sort of research and attitude
librarians need, asking openly and honestly: how do others view me and
my profession, and what do others really want from the library and
librarians? The answers may not make a lot of people happy, but its is
absolutely vital to acknowledge them. One of the conclusions should be:
when people say they can't work with our systems (as is very clear from
this and similar research) catalogers *cannot* conclude that the problem
lies with the *users* who need to be trained, thereby offloading the
entire problem onto public services since *they* are the ones
responsible for the bibliographic instruction/information literacy
workshops, and if there are problems, the problems lie with inadequate
workshops and *not* with our inadequate, antiquated systems. That
mindset must be discarded completely.
If people take this kind of research seriously--and there have been
several such projects lately, each coming to similar
conclusions--librarians must reconsider what people actually want. For
instance, are the FRBR user tasks what people genuinely and truly need?
I have to mention this again because it is ostensibly what library
cataloging is aiming for. If it turns out that the FRBR user tasks are
alien to a majority of our patrons, wouldn't it be reasonable to
conclude that people want something else that has more meaning for them?
As I read these kinds of reports reflecting the reality of what public
service librarians deal with, the kinds of problems students and
professors come up against every day, I am reminded of my own pet peeve:
this modern focus on production of the "research paper" which almost no
student understands and, let's face it, is almost impossible to do
correctly when you are only given a few days or weeks to do it,
especially when they put everything off to the last possible moment--and
later. Doing research and writing a paper on what you have discovered
demands *time*: time for dealing with the problems of finding relevant
information, arranging it in a way coherent for yourself, thinking and
considering, reconsidering, finding more information and arranging it,
re-reconsidering, finally making some conclusions and writing them up,
and students rarely have that kind of time. Every one I have met starts
with writing the paper! (As is mentioned in the article) That is totally
backwards, but fully understandable when seen from their point of view.
Naturally, once students are out of school, they almost never have to do
it again.
Still, it is important, and perhaps more important than ever, that
people become as independent as possible in their information needs.
Otherwise, there is a real danger of everyone succumbing to "The Filter
Bubble" (the current popular term), where people get information
designed to make them happy, to further convince them of their own
correctness, and not to make them reconsider matters, or to face
different kinds of problems that they may find irritating or offensive.
The article quoted an outreach librarian: "This study has changed,
profoundly, how I see my role at the university and my understanding of
who our students are, says Lynda Duke, an academic outreach librarian
at Illinois Wesleyan. Its been life-changing, truly. This is the kind
of research that gives me great hope for the future of librarians, no
matter what words may be used to describe them in the future. If
librarians can rise to that challenge, they will know that they are
providing something necessary for society.
--
James Weinheimerweinheimer.jim.l_at_gmail.com
First Thus:http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
Cooperative Cataloging Rules:http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
Received on Tue Aug 23 2011 - 04:40:08 EDT