Thing 22: Reflective Practice

This final unit of Rudaí 23 encouraged us to look outward to our profession and forward to its future. For the majority of us, our parent libraries are not financially independent. Their and our professional survival depends on convincing funders that library services and resources provide value for money, and do so better than an open market would. The exercises in this unit served as an introduction to what we need to do to continue pursuing our careers.

Part of me thinks Thing 19, on podcasts, should have paired a complementary Thing 20 on videos. The other part of me, tracking hours ticking down to the final deadline for reflection, is relieved that this wasn’t so. I’d like to see a study of activities concurrent with listening to podcasts. Is this medium primarily for the harried working adult, fitting in conveniently delivered acoustic education, entertainment, or news around some relatively mindless but necessary activity? Or is there some significant percentage of the audience that devotes their time and attention exclusively to a podcast itself, the way people used to gather around a sole household radio or television? Regardless of the answers, I regret not being able to create a first podcast of my very own. I waited as long as I could, but a lingering cough and sore throat convinced me to pursue the less constructivist option.

Advocacy and engagement, the topic of Thing 20, are vital to what we do. And it’s not just the new that needs to be promoted. Library users forget about—or never develop awareness of—existing services or resources, so attention-drawing or appealing reminders of what we continue to provide should be part of our outreach strategy. Thinking about marketing is what led me to muse over a Thing on videos. We must use multiple channels to deliver our external messages. Our approaches to internal advocacy, on the other hand, will vary with our unique situations. In my current workplace, sometimes the most effective way to provide a new service is to do so undercover, in a way that blends in with already assigned duties. Once faculty start praising something new, it becomes politically awkward for a library administrator to insist that it’s a bad idea.

While the content of Thing 21 was largely familiar, I found writing up some of my involvement in professional associations to be gratifying. In some years, I feel I grow more through external service than through assigned and permitted activities at my job. We are so isolated here, and so underfunded for travel, that it’s a real treat to have the occasional chance to get out and meet colleagues whose jobs are similar to ours—and yet so different.

And a reflection on the MOOC overall, as all good Things must come to an end…

I found Rudaí 23 to be a rewarding experience. While my particular path through the MOOC included times of frustration, and some deliberate decisions to pare down and postpone specific activities, I’ve already had the opportunity to apply some of the skills I learned. This spring semester, I returned to my concept for a “quick and dirty” video about library seating (Thing 4), and developed it into a quick video tour of the library. I tried showing the video as part of my instruction session within a large introductory class, and it seemed to be well received. Thing 17 reminded me that I need to improve the dissemination of my work. This summer would be a good time to (re-)create and upload the text of more of my book reviews into our institutional repository.

I’ve met some new colleagues through Twitter and look forward to continuing to follow them. And perhaps in the future, there will be another version of the course to work through, or similarly organized free programs on other topics. I thank the WRSLAI staff who organized and presented Rudaí 23, and thank all my fellow learners for sharing your discoveries and creations.

Thing 19: Podcasts

At last! I thought. I’ll finally get around to hearing a "DisVisibility" podcast (and finish a Thing as well).

Not immediately. I opened up the podcast app on my phone, and couldn’t find a listing for the series at first. @DisVisibility is actually the Twitter handle of the Disability Visibility Project, the activist site “dedicated to recording, amplifying & sharing disability media & culture” and the source of the podcast. Trying a search for “disability” brought up the Disability Visibility podcast itself. It’s always good to have reference skills.

Episodes to date range from 21 minutes (immigration and disability) to 36 minutes (two of this length, one on the ADA, the other on the BBC America science fiction drama Orphan Black). Transcripts are posted for each episode (enabling hearing-impaired people to access the content). I picked what at first glance could have been a light-hearted topic: “Disabled Comedians,” episode 21.

Of course, the nature of disability is that there are always external challenges people need to overcome. Danielle Perez and Maysoon Zayid, the guests interviewed, made it clear that many facilities for comics aren’t accessible, which hinders both their ability to build a following through live performance and their ability to get booked for gigs. In addition, the conversation, perhaps inevitably, touched on advocacy--very fitting for this section of the MOOC. Zayid remarked on using comedy to change negative perceptions of Arabs and Muslims after the September 11 attacks in the U.S. Perez, a Latina bilateral amputee who uses a wheelchair, noted that when she can make people laugh, she can shift their perspectives on who can be a successful comedian.

I won’t say I’m completely smitten by podcasts, but their portability is definitely a selling point. My phone contains a collection of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! episodes, which come in handy during long bus rides. 

Note: Like some other participants, I did not find a way to enter a rating for the podcast.

Thing 21: Professional Groups

I’ve belonged to SLA, the Special Libraries Association, since library school. While the organization itself has been through some turbulent times—two rebranding periods and the fiscal blow of paying off the former CEO’s golden parachute—membership has been consistently beneficial to my continuing professional development.

When I began my career, over 25 years ago, ALA (American Library Association) service required a commitment to attend two conferences annually. I couldn’t obtain adequate travel funding, since I worked as a medical librarian. MLA, the Medical Library Association, offered service opportunities contingent on completing several years of prior regional service. SLA, however, was progressive enough to offer virtual service opportunities to early career professionals.

I’ve served on and even chaired SLA committees for years, primarily for the Biomedical and Life Sciences Division (DBIO), and also for Physics-Astronomy–Mathematics. Because of my history of involvement with DBIO, I’ve been nominated to its executive board three times.

SLA service has offered leadership opportunities difficult to obtain at my current workplace, and provided chances to manage projects from conception to completion (with delivery on schedule!). This year, I will be able to present at the conference for the first time, in a round of information literacy instruction lightning talks. I find attending SLA conferences rewarding, as they generally focus on new and evolving developments in librarianship. Through my service and conference attendance, I’ve been able to build a professional network of fellow academic science librarians, who are few and scattered in my large, sparsely populated rural state.

I plan to continue my affiliation with SLA unless something extreme happens in my professional or personal life. Maintaining my intermediate level of activity strikes the right balance between involvement and over commitment.

Thing 20: Advocacy and Engagement

Of the many options for this Thing, I selected Exercise 7:

In 200 words or less, describe a new area of librarianship that you are passionate about. How would you go about promoting it within the library that you work in and/or the wider library profession?

“Passionate” may be too strong a word, but I’m interested in developing bibliometric and scholarly impact services at my library. This would move us into the 21st century.

I plan to start small, analyzing works of campus researchers who use a specialized animal facility. I’d send those faculty a graphic displaying the results, list other possible analyses, and ask if they would be interested in additional work. I could also distribute the product to the rest of their colleagues, and perhaps even to other departments.

If I successfully gather expressions of interest, I’ll be able to inform my supervisor that I’m increasing my extended reference and consultation statistics (which she urged me to do during my last annual review). For political reasons, however, I will be careful not to describe my work, internally or externally, as a new service. Otherwise I’ll be reprimanded for overstepping my bounds.

My efforts could benefit all parties. Faculty would get material useful for their tenure and promotion applications, my supervisor would receive reports with the increased numbers she wants, and I’d know that I’m performing work that is relevant, practical, and perhaps even publishable.

Thing 18: Reflective Practice

I’m not sure that “critical thinker” is the best title for this unit. Given the variety of issues and resources addressed, perhaps “critical communicator” would be a better description.

Personal information management, the topic of Thing 14, is in a sense how we keep in touch with our past and future selves. Of the resources featured, Feedly was the most useful, but I wouldn't place it in the same category as most of the tools listed. It does, however, serve as a means of monitoring communications transmitted in the form of authors' blog posts.

Thing 15, evaluating information, focused on how we could contribute to the global resource of Wikipedia—an effort to communicate with others from points separated widely in space and time—by locating and citing authoritative sources. Some popular culture trivia buffs are frequent users of my library's reference service, and Wikipedia is our go-to resource for meeting their information needs.

Our digital footprint, addressed in Thing 16, is essentially how we leave signs about ourselves (whether knowingly and deliberately, or not) for others to read. This type of communication is potentially fraught with serious consequences. In an era when hackers routinely get their hands on corporate customer data and the evolution of computer security mimics the evolution of a prey species trying to keep a step ahead of predators, even following every recommended precaution in Brian Hickey's post is at best a strategy of harm reduction.

And of course, sharing our professional output, Thing 17, is a process of intentionally describing, explaining, and disseminating our intellectual and creative work. This is a weakness of mine, although not due to lack of output! My book reviews for Library Journal are regarded as non-scholarly work (it's a trade journal, and they are edited, not peer reviewed). A well-known Library Thinker disparaged the entirety of my oeuvre (last year, to my face) as "only" book reviews. But the few I have posted to my institutional repository are downloaded occasionally. I need to make the time to edit and post more.

I found this unit particularly thought-provoking and challenging. We all vary our professional messages, depending on our immediate circumstances. But I notice a disparity between my intentional communications at work and those I deliver in the context of other professional activities.

When I volunteer for a professional association, I’m expected to take initiative in communicating. Part of why I’ve been asked to serve in various capacities is because my colleagues from other institutions can count on me to alert them to potential problems, to propose solutions, and to provide historical context for current issues. As for continuing education, in this and in other online programs, both instructors and fellow participants state that I offer something new or useful to the learning community. My experience at work, however, is very different. It’s important to avoid creating surprises there and to move cautiously, slowly, and discreetly. Taking the lead in communication is risky.

Perhaps this difference between my two professional selves contributes to my delay in crafting and organizing professional communications. I’m tempted to use administrative speak and sum up the applications of this unit by saying “I could do better.” The question is: how?

Thing 17: Sharing Your Work

Fortunately, I had a presentation on hand for this Thing, a workshop on ORCID I’d led earlier this year. But I hadn’t planned on posting it anywhere. (Me? The “old” librarian who doesn’t have the fresh-from-library-school training so valued in my department? Someone would be interested in my work?) Consequently, it needed some touch-ups for accessibility.

I find Adobe annoying, since PDF document elements (blocks of text, images, links) often don’t mark up in proper reading order and fixing that requires much clicking and dragging. The ordering process in PowerPoint offers an easier approach. Of course there’s more to making a slide show accessible, including entering alternative text for images, verifying working links, and adding both descriptive and explanatory metadata to the file properties. Most of this is quick and simple, and so is uploading to SlideShare (a task for this Thing).

It’s trendy to create presentations displaying only images, intended to evoke emotion, and save the content for oral presentation. (In theory, text files are available afterwards via links or by contacting the lead author.) Does alternative text, however, succeed at evoking the desired emotional response from someone using a screen reader?

There’s debate in the library community about which Creative Commons license is best. Some people argue that CC0 is the ideal, a license we should apply whenever possible (although there are some questions as to whether a CC0 license is interpreted as public domain in all countries). Others insist that they don’t want their work exploited for commercial means, and so they apply Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) licenses. Another contingent opts for the more controlling Share Alike (SA) license, which dictates which license subsequent users may apply to modified works. I like the argument that a simple Attribution (CC BY) makes your work as available and hence accessible as possible. So here’s my presentation on SlideShare: reuse, revise, and improve it. Don’t forget to give me credit, and let me know what you’ve done – I’m interested in seeing your work.