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Why you should join our team at MPOW

Saturday, January 23, 2010

We have an opening at our library for Head of Access Services.  It’s a completely-revised position description designed to attract a strong “MLS pathway” candidate who wants to get in on the ground floor as we do amazing things.

I would have liked to have made it an MLS position, but for what we can pay, that wasn’t realistic. (The new position was created following a retirement of a library worker who had previously managed a university bookstore; we have a strong pinch-hitter holding down the fort right now.)  However, the benefits at Holy Names are excellent, and the Holy Names community is caring, socially-progressive, and open to good ideas. I realized a couple of weeks ago that I go to work every day looking forward to what I have to do and who I will be interacting with. That’s the kind of benefit you can’t get in every job.

If you are in library school,  getting ready to matriculate, or saving up to go to school, this could be a great opportunity. I actually had a former student in mind when I designed this position–a go-getter who was technologically fluent, good with people, well-organized, and a good multi-tasker. He has gone on to do great things at his library.

Our library serves a small but growing student body (around 1000) and we are not resource-wealthy. Like everyone else at Holy Names, we wear too many hats, do too much with too little, and scrimp in a way that would be inconceivable in larger, better-endowed institutions. That’s either a turn-off for you or an interesting challenge.  (If you can’t manage student-worker hours — and therefore money and the library’s ability to keep its doors open — to a nickel-scraping fare-thee-well, stop reading now.)

The development of library services at MPOW have lagged behind its peer institutions. We only started circulating last summer, we have a huge cataloging backlog, and our website is, hrrrrrm, ghastly, in part due to it being forced into an awkward university template and in part because we just don’t have the resources to do more than put a few links on it. (We’ve done much better with our Libguides, thanks in large part to a tech-savvy temporary part-time reference librarian who has been grinding them out like crazy.)

We did 4 interlibrary loans last year (by paper, and we charged for them, too). Our users still have to plod through our databases one by one, and that won’t change anytime soon.  We don’t do e-reserves. The library itself is a mid-century facility that desperately needs a makeover, has very poor inaccessibility, and is hot in the summer and cold in the winter, punctuated by loud roars every time someone flushes one of our mid-century toilets. (Yes, on our docket is a conversation with campus services about low-flow toilets.)

You either see all this as a turn-off or an opportunity.  I see the latter. While the library is resource-poor, and will probably never be wealthy, many of the library’s challenges and opportunities are only indirectly related to money. We also have some amazing surprises, such as the roomful of RFID equipment, acquired in 2005, that was awaiting rollout (the entire collection is tagged, the maintenance contracts are up-to-date, etc.). We also belong to a great consortium, SCELC, that allows us to license excellent resources at decent pricing. Plus we are in on the ground floor with Navigator, which will move us from paper to pushbutton ILLs in a rather extraordinary fashion sometime this year.

The position you’d work in has some absolute requirements: must be able to manage (recruit, train, and supervise) student workers, who in turn are expected to both staff the front desk and do tasks in support of our various services. Must be good with technology and office productivity software (particularly spreadsheets). Must be comfortable managing budgets and forecasting requirements. Must be good at problem-solving. Must be able to work with other campus departments.

The requirement about LC and MARC is really about knowing just enough to get by for purposes of interlibrary loan and our library management software (hosted Symphony).  I realize MARC is a fusty old standard, but at this point we still need to know it. We get to design a workflow for Navigator from the ground up, and you are a big part of that. Remember that interlibrary loan is in part about managing materials coming in and going out — details, details. You also get some unsexy responsibilities in managing print reserves, which are a big part of our dwindling print circulation, so at least it’s appreciated.

We would be very supportive of your library school schedule, in exchange for your willingness to work some nights and occasional weekends — a necessity, to ensure the library always has at least two staff on duty. We promise not to slam you with The Big Rollout the night before your final paper is due. We also would encourage you to get your hands dirty in just about any area of the library that needs attention, assuming your primary responsibilities are under control, from faculty liaisons to instruction to ERM. Feel free to volunteer to represent the library at various activities. You are also in charge of exhibits. Feel the power!

We’re a collegial, hardworking group, and I think we’re having fun (and I don’t mean “fun” in a teeth-gritting way). We’re all nuttily busy, but again — that would need to be your style, too.

We don’t have to fill this position tomorrow. We’re waiting for the right candidate. Is it you?

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Top Trends for the Edgy Librarian Conference

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Tomorrow I’m keynoting virtually for the Edgy Librarian conference. I have come back from ALA with my head full of interesting things–augmented reality, mobility, the cloud, and web-scale library management will be high on my list–but what I’m trying to do now is…

1. cluster these thoughts into actual trends (a neat new tool is not a trend, it’s generally a stimulus or outcome of a trend) and also…

2. Identify WANING trends

And get this all together my first day back at work after Midwinter and before I pick up SAndy and the cats from the airport tonight. (I’m not back yet, either, because I didn’t make my SLC-OAK connection due to mechanical problems… though I recommend the Comfort Inn, should you ever find yourself in that situation…)

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Sunday at Midwinter 2010

Monday, January 18, 2010

Top Technology Trends was very well done (I had the sense someone had actually tested the technologies in advance, or at least evaluated previous sessions) and featured a suite of smart, articulate, forward-looking librarians. Recurrent themes among their trends included localization, mobile apps, user experience, augmented reality, and more.

Had a sit-down with OCLC folks to get a little better acquainted with OCLC’s member services.  I knew some of the details of their cataloging/processing, ILL, and other services, I had not realized that we can ingest up to 3,000 items into ContentDM for free.  In other words, I came to ALA and found not one but two free tools for electronic theses (I wrote about ebrary yesterday).  If you saw our thesis cataloging backlog, you’d see why this excites me.  Every time I open an unmarked door, I find more of the stuff.

Springshare and Serial Solutions are collaborating on a Libguides serials A-toZ list.This isn’t impressive until you’ve tried to do such a thing for YPOW.

My goodies so far include a mug, a thermos (won in a drawing after I answered a survey about microfilm), a tiny green teddy bear, and a small stuffed monkey.

Seeing the LibraryThing gang at OCLC’s blog salon reminded me that they developed a free Local Book iPhone app. Me Like!

Forgot to mention that ITG (Integrated Technology Group) was on my “visit list” for Saturday. We’re launching our RFID roll-out with a Chips and Dips celebration this spring.  The library is all tagged, the software and hardware (acquired in 2005) are up to date—it’s a project that just needed to be hauled the last mile.  ITG has been absolutely wonderful to work with.

I stopped by the Naxos vendor to say that their products had very high marks from our music faculty but I had noticed that usage was down. He immediately offered several suggestions, including encouraging faculty to create and share playlists.

Apropos of OCLC, for MPOW I am thinking less in terms of “the book budget” and “our collections,” and more in terms of services and—to use a phrase I heard Friday morning—request fulfillment. In my head, if not my budget spreadsheet (yet), the cost of purchasing a book is no longer separate from the cost of cataloging, processing, and housing that book, and the cost of “leasing” that book through interlibrary loan is simply an alternative method for fulfilling a request.

After a whirlwind spin through the OCLC Blog Salon, I had fabulous grilled calamari at Legal Seafood’s “test kitchen” restaurant with two friends.

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Boston: It Could Someday Be San Francisco

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Ok, that was me trying to being funny about what is really one of the few cities to rival my glorious hometown. I always enjoy Boston, and the 40-ish weather, while worrisome from a climate-change perspective, certainly makes it easy to get around.

But I spent most of today doing vendor stuff (wrapping up the night in a fun Southie pub with hearty food and yummy draft beer–Dale’s Pale Ale on tap!) and I feel I should do a little round-up before it all evaporates, considering that I have repeatedly referred to my present abode as the Parker Roll Hotel.

First, when I interviewed at Peanut U, a faculty member asked me about electronic theses and dissertations. I gave a rather vague answer, but the reality is quite concrete (in many senses of the word): our facility is literally groaning from the weight of uncataloged materials, theses eminent among them. We have been advised not to add more weight to our top floor, and I don’t have the shinola to pay for all that original cataloging, which we would need to outsource. So it intrigued me to hear that our ebrary collection could be configured to upload our own PDFs, effectively creating a mini-ETD-repository. I am asking myself and others why we wouldn’t do that, at least as a pilot project.

Creating topic collections of web resources seems to be a hot thing these days. Oh wait–I managed a project that did that, extremely well in fact, before it was kiboshed by the Powers That Were. Never mind; vendors to the rescue (ebrary, Springshare, Credo, and so on).

Wiley-Blackwell deserved a tour, as we ponder e-backfiles for MPOW. (We can convert to e-backfiles, or let the building slide down the hill and obstruct traffic. You decide! Besides, the thick layers of dust on our print journals give us the guidance we need.) Plus I spoke with an unbelievably perky trainer/advocate/educator about demos. My dear friend Millie, who knows everything about collections and then some, advised me in my first week to ask vendors to do demos to engage faculty in our e-resources.

I stopped by the APA booth to ask who to speak with to suggest that the APA publication manual be issued as an eBook. I had wondered about this, particularly after the cluster-fornication that was called the 6th edition, but it became evident why APA hadn’t done this yet. First I was told that they would pass along my suggestion. No, I said, tell me who to speak with. Much conversation ensued. I was finally handed a Post-It with the name of Julia Frank-McNeil written in pencil. I am sincerely hoping Julia is part of the solution, because if she isn’t–to quote my funny mother, who always likes this line–she is therefore part of the precipitate.  Paging Julia Frank-McNeil!

Then I stopped by Learning Express. Me: I’m you’re customer. Them: no you aren’t. Me: yes I AM. Them: sonofagun, so you are! We license some very nice video tutorials through them.

I visited Web of Knowledge right before the closing bell rang, and we’ll catch up Monday. Sunday is a committee-ish, LITA-ish, vendor-ish day. I may start Sunday with an Alexander Press breakfast.We’ll see.

The convention prize for Best Use of Airspace goes to my buddies at Equinox Software, who have a fake evergreen soaring toward the sky. People commented that they could find Equinox from anywhere on the floor.  Open source continues to flourish, and why not? Choice and power and engagement are powerful things.

I also attended the GLBTRT Bylaws meeting. This is one of those committees where two dedicated people are doing the heavy lifting, and though some of us will catch up next month with a little effort, I thank them.

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Return of the Native

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Today we took residence of our really-good-deal San Francisco rental. This places me back in my home town for the first time since August, 1979, when I took off for New York City to begin my junior year in college, following two years in which I saved up money by working as a records clerk at San Francisco’s “Juvy.”

I don’t know whether we will be in San Francisco in five years. Or four, or two. We will definitely be in California, because I’m never leaving. But the housing market may eventually nudge us into the East Bay, particularly if we end up buying again in the area. (A wise woman–Sandy, actually–said of our relocation back to the Bay Area, “This will not be our last move.” With that, we redoubled efforts to Toss Stuff.)

So the question becomes, how much fun can we have in San Francisco in our first year back in the Golden State? How can we squeeze every bit of joy from the experience?

We are going to plan a year (to immediately answer that question) where every week we do something special.

Some weeks it may be something as simple as rediscovering the Alemany farmers’ market. Yes, the Ferry Market is lovely and fun, but the Alemany market is sincere and full of good value.

Other weeks it may be doing those touristy things not yet crossed off our lists: Alcatraz. Angel Island. Or even some we’ve done before, like having tea in the Japanese Tea Garden and walking over those teensy bridges.

Then there are city walking tours. I love these (Sandy, not so much); it’s my favorite tourism activity (well, next to eating).

How many years has it been since I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge? Have we ever chased a kite on Crissy Field? And the film festival awaits us.

Or the special event of the week may be as simple as driving to Ocean Beach and sitting in the car with hot tea, watching the waves crashing. Or spending a day riding every streetcar line from start to finish. Or visiting the Rhododendron Dell. Or joy-riding up and down Taraval Street–oh wait, we just did that!

Our new home is on the line for the 6 Parnassus, which opens up a world of possibilities… in fact, taking the 6 for a grand tour might be an excellent way to begin.

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Reflections on strategic plans that are neither strategic nor plans

Friday, December 25, 2009

It’s Christmas morning and I have some quality blogging time for the first time since returning to California late October and starting my new job. I pick up Sandy in four hours, and between now and then, I will drink hot chocolate, go for a nice walk, and write about strategic plans.

I have been giving a lot of thought to some issues Steven Bell raised in his comment to my last post about the challenges of directing small, private, tuition-driven university libraries.  One of the first things I did in my new job at Peanut U (as I think of it, and I mean that fondly, being a bit of a peanut myself) was read through previous “strategic plans” and related documents; I continue to consume as many internal documents as possible, not just library-related. (When people ask me what books I’ve read lately, I get a little vague.)  I did this for my own library but also for other libraries that fall in our range (easy enough to find these docs, given how comfortable we “lesser libraries” are with Google).

One of my conclusions — and it may be a no-brainer to many of you, but I cheerfully admit I haven’t thought about it quite this way before — is that particularly for smaller libraries, funding (good or bad) is often labeled a cause, when it is at least partially (and sometimes overwhelmingly) an outcome of leadership. I specifically target smaller libraries because larger libraries with bad leadership may have the momentum of size, reputation, and legacy services to carry them along, sometimes even for decades, whereas smaller institutions live closer to the bone.

Over and over, my head in hand (when it was not sinking to my desk), I read “plans” that instead of projecting a vision of where the library should be, let alone explain what the library currently does quite well, began with stating that the libraries do not have enough staff or funding, and then proceeded in page after stultifying page (written in ghastly Biblish) to compare the library to “peers” that are better-funded.

This is not to criticize peer comparisons, which can be extremely useful. I had an unexpectedly wonderful moment two weeks ago when in the middle of a presentation about the library’s short-range strategy I displayed a photo of Dominican‘s lovely popular-reading room.  This image completely bowled over the room in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

It’s one thing to show a photo of Georgia Tech’s gorgeous East Commons (which I did). I know it wasn’t a straight shot to creating that commons, not by far, but from the perspective of Peanut U, it might as well have been handed to them on a silver platter. Ho-hum.

But showing what a peer library did–a peer library known to have been, as several put it, “dumpy”–was a spectacular success. It took five minutes to get to the next slide, and not for anything I was saying. I have an expression, “I made money today,” that means I had some kind of strategic “win.” I came back from that presentation and those were the first words out of my mouth.

Note that the change-making image from Dominican wasn’t a comparison of what money can do. That photo was a comparison of what leadership can do. These so-called “strategic plans” that fail to project either a strategy or a plan are extremely frustrating to read, as a professional who wants all libraries to be wonderful, but they do end up being useful for understanding where leadership has failed in the past. It is  diagnostic that these “plans” rarely compare services or outcomes, but instead fixate on comparing raw resources — without clearly demonstrating what they would do if their resources were increased. Most of these plans don’t even pause at the beginning to explain how the library fits within the university’s mission and goals.

And I repeat, for emphasis, that these plans rarely explain what the library currently does quite well, perhaps even uniquely among peer institutions, beyond the occasional reference to “key indicators”–including those things that aren’t necessarily funding-related.

In one of the conversations I had with a peer director last week, we agreed that even with very spartan funding, we can focus on providing the best possible customer service. Improving the sheer quality of service by student workers is one of our spring goals at Peanut U; we are spending the break developing training materials, and I plan to personally meet with every student worker to share our library’s customer service philosophy and our expectations for their role in delivering customer service (aka the “Fear of God” talk, delivered pleasantly, of course).  They are very good kids (Peanut U seems to spray its students with Niceness when they matriculate), and having worked with 18-year-olds who were responsible for ensuring airplanes were fit to fly, I am confident this group of student workers is perfectly capable of learning just enough LC to get by, where the remote-access instructions are for the library portal, and what the phone number for the circ desk is.

To train our student workforce  to a fare-thee-well is part of our strategic vision, simple as it might seem (just as changing the database pages so they now open to basic search, instead of advanced search, took a modicum of effort and is also part of our strategy to improve customer service). There’s a slide for it in my talk. But customer service rarely comes up in the dead-on-arrival non-plans I have been reading.

It takes a village to improve a university library’s funding. As a department within a larger institution, the university library has to continually make a case for its relevance and value within the context of what are, quite frankly, worthy competitors.  Right now it’s evident, from our key indicators, that many at Peanut U have adjusted to the idea that the library has minimal relevance to their personal success.  I need to change this perception, and this will happen more slowly than I like and with more setbacks than I want, and of course, in a framework of very limited resources. But if I fail at this endeavor, asking for more funding won’t work, and why should it?

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Navigating above Cloud-Level

Friday, December 25, 2009

(Note, I am alone Christmas Eve, but Sandy joins me tomorrow–so excuse the holiday post!)

Though I hate the slog of air travel per se, I do love flight, and my favorite moment is when the plane lifts above cloud level, with the sky above us and the cloud stretched out underneath in an infinite soft white duvet. In that moment, everything is possible, and my heart is as light as the misty tufts  drifting below.

One of my current professional challenges is to help change what a university community knows about library services. I’m rewriting the library narrative for My Place of Work. It’s exhilarating and scary and a freakish amount of effort.

I feel the responsibility of doing this, not simply for MPOW, but for our profession. Every student, every faculty member, every staff person who experiences our library carries that narrative into the rest of their life. They become the people who sit on library boards, vote on library bonds, and decide what other university libraries should be.

I am alert to opportunities to revise our narrative. One opportunity became apparent went I heard about OCLC‘s Navigator. To boil this down into non-jargony terms for my non-librarian readers, basically, Navigator makes interlibrary loan a pushbutton experience. (Behind scenes, library elves have myriad tasks to complete, but from the user’s point of view, it’s designed to be as easy as clicking a link.)  I felt an “ahah” when I saw Navigator in action. I knew immediately we needed to do this (and the pricing is right, too).

There is more to Navigator than interlibrary loan–including a cloud-based library management system (LMS) that makes absolute sense for a library our size. That’s down the road, and we are currently using another LMS, but you can bet I have my eye on Navigator’s LMS. No disrespect to current products, but it’s the difference between Dialog blue-sheets and Google.

(For library wonks, I also see Navigator tying into two other things that are key: service to distance-ed/adult students through affiliate libraries that serve as pickup locations; and even more ambitiously, being able to use Navigator to retrieve items from centralized storage facilities. This latter point will allow us to relocate low-use items from our facilities while retaining excellent service to our users.)

However, moving back to the interlibrary loan function, to be able to move to Navigator, the library had to be a full member of OCLC, which it was not. This membership also enables other things we need to be able to do, such as streamline cataloging, purchase cataloging records when we buy books, and so forth. And in a bigger sense, it is important for our library to become part of something as significant as an international database of library records. It is saying that we are bigger than the walls that surround our books.

Well, the upshot is that today, after a lot of hard work from a rep who frankly had many other bigger libraries to deal with, we received the quote to upgrade to OCLC full membership. We would be crazy NOT to do this, and I had already surgically relocated the appropriate organ from one section of our budget to another to make this happen. I signed the paperwork and tried to fax it… the library’s fax machine hates me… all fax machines hate me… so I popped the form into an envelope and mailed it to the Big O.

I feel very complete at the moment. I realize someone running a big ol’ fancy-schmancy ARL may think, big whoop, her teensy library joined OCLC; where is our digital-repository-electronic-thesis-fully-automated-commons? The answer is that we are farther down Maslow’s Hierarchy, and for us, this is a big achievement.  Not only that, but we’re not just joining OCLC for the records. Our instrument panel tells us we’re headed into the clouds.

With that, I’m going to open a beer and watch It’s a Wonderful Life. My best to all of you, library wonks and otherwise!

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Home to the City!

Sunday, December 20, 2009

I have a numinous, well-crafted post that will have to wait as this month’s temp apartment hasn’t had wifi in three days. Then again it doesn’t have heat to speak of. I can blog a little on the iPhone but I have yet to find the toasty-toes app.

(The wordpress iPhone app doesn’t make it easy to comment on my own posts, so i’m waving hi to sue Kendall!)

But who cares about this place… because thanks to a down housing market, we were able to rent a place in SF. Woohoo! I will move in this jan and sandy and the cats will follow, along with Our Stuff. I cannot wait to cook again! Not to mention my inaugural homebrew!

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We’re Here! Have a home for us?

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Very good news: Sandy has been called as the pastor for a church in San Francisco.  They are happy and we are happy… more news on that front later!

Obviously we are meant to be in the Bay Area. Now we just need a place to live…

Sandy is back in Florida finishing up the household-move stuff and getting the house ready to rent (good timing–the legislature is coming in and our home is prime territory for a rental to this crowd) so I am scouring Craigslist, driving to prospective homes, digging around in Google, etc.

We are going to rent (and rent out our house in Florida). We can either live in the City (as San Francisco is known in these parts) or in the East Bay. If we do the former, we need to be close enough to the major freeways that I can get to Oakland reasonably easily. If we live in the East Bay, we need to be within a short drive of a BART station with good parking, as Sandy’s new church is very close to MUNI and she’d like the option to not have to drive every day. (Public transit to my library is really not an option.)

We want a comfy place in between dinky and plush… enough space so we are not in each other’s stuff all the time, nice enough to have parishioners and friends over without feeling apologetic. We don’t need an enormous amount of square footage, but we are used to having our own home offices (the gold star in that department was my separate garden office in our rental in Palo Alto, though I did miss the cats, who gazed at me longingly all day from the living room).  We obviously need parking; we don’t really want either of us to come home from a long meeting and then circle and circle the block. We are also post-laundromat. Laundry in the building, fine.

Right now is a very good time to be renting, but at that, apartments/homes aren’t falling off trees.  We can always rent a sketchy 2-bedroom third-floor walk-up with no parking, dirty cream-colored carpeting,  an electric range, and a laundromat down the street… those are plentiful and affordable. But I’d like to do better. There is very brisk competition for the nicer homes, particularly those homes that are on the rental market primarily because the owners want to relocate and don’t want (or need) to sell right now.

I feel very whiny when I see these nice homes… like a kid asking for a puppy… “We’re really nice people, and our cats are well-behaved, and we would take really really REALLY good care of your home! Pick US!!” I find myself writing back to these owners to tell them why we are such a good choice.  I am good with roses and bedding flowers! We would cherish your lovely gas range! Our cats have long passed the “vomit at will” stage! We are homeowners who would love and care for your home the way we want our home cared for!  “That’s a particularly nice dishwasher, Mrs. Cleaver!”

I have yet to be rejected (we started our search Sunday afternoon, while Sandy was in town) but I know the first time we’re not picked for Our Dream Rental I’m going to feel crushed, and will have a sleepless night of personal reassessment. (Is it my hair, which is getting wild and shaggy? Maybe my coat is too casual? Am I projecting weirdness or personal disorganization? Did I appear insincere, or too interested in the owner’s dog?)

Anyway, if you know of a place–for example, a 2-bedroom-“plus” apartment, with a gas range and laundry on site, or a house someone wants to rent for a year or two while the market gets better–well, for heaven’s sake Pick MEEEEEE and drop me a note! (The fact that I am staying in a sketchy one-month rental without heat–yes, you read that right, the “heat” is one cheesy space heater–and with questionable electricity and a strange funky odor that is either old food or a corpse moldering in the room below mine makes me a Highly Motivated Tenant who would sign a lease Right Now.)

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Must-read Project Information Literacy Report

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

If you can make time for reading just one professional report over the holidays, please make it Project Information Literacy’s (PIL’s) latest research report, “Lessons Learned: How College Students Find Information in the Digital Age” released on Tuesday, Dec. 1 (42 pages, PDF, 3 MB).

(Note that I didn’t narrow “you” to those of us working in academic settings.)

This report upends most conventional wisdom. First, it shows that students’ information-seeking behavior is at odds with how many libraries provide services; second, that students actually have pragmatic, if overly-formulaic, approaches to research; third, the instructors are the first and most important human relationship these students develop in their research processes; fourth, that students value and use the scholarly resources we provide; and finally (something OCLC has reported in another context), that librarians are at the bottom of all resources students use for their research efforts.

To begin with, students don’t start the research process with Google. They start with course readings — a very pragmatic choice, if you think about it. Which means that faculty members are the very first information-connection for students.

But this finding collides with something we already know from other studies (and from observation, if we’re being honest with ourselves), which is that students rarely if ever consult librarians.

Students do use the scholarly databases we provide, and understand that these resources provide quality information. But when they need help, they don’t turn to the library; often, they turn to faculty. Librarians ranked only above “blogs” among a list of 15 possible information sources used for coursework. (Virtual reference services didn’t fare better.)

I see this as a problem in part about understanding and adapting to student workflow.  Librarians design too many services around a workflow where the student receives an assignment, perceives an information need, and comes to the library for assistance; as well as the just-in-case “first-year” instruction where students are bathed in instruction that is divorced from actual research tasks they need to conduct. But obviously, students aren’t following that workflow, and though they do seem to pick up that databases are valuable, frog-marching them into those inevitable biblio-classes isn’t growing the library luv for them–at least not luv as we envision it (which is part of the problem).

So the question is, why don’t we adapt our practices so that we are working with the “proxies” for library services — the faculty themselves, who create the assignments, interact first and most with students, and are the referrals for the tools we offer?

Actually, at MPOW, we are doing that already, in part. We have a faculty development program where a skilled librarian works directly with faculty, one-on-one and in groups. This program (sometimes called the MacBook program, since as part of it every faculty in this program received a MacBook) is designed to help faculty integrate technology into their curriculum, but it clearly holds promise as an avenue to stronger liaison activities.

Read that report, and heed it. If you’re evaluating “first year” programs by how many students sat through a lecture on Boolean logic, you might want to ponder what the actual outcomes were.

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