She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not

February 8, 2012

The Professional Retention and Recruitment Committee of the Medical Library Association (my professional association) posted on MLA’s “Linked In” site the questions: Do you think you make a difference at your organization? Do you still feel valuable as a librarian? I wrote a response there, but wanted to put it here on my blog, too. As I state, it’s a bigger question; one that can be directed to a lot of other professions and institutions than librarians and libraries.

—–

This is an awfully timely discussion as I just went to a workshop on Monday on embedded, personal and liaison librarians. The audience consisted of librarians from many types and sizes of institutions; state and private colleges, junior colleges, companies, medical schools. It was repeated by practically every soul there (perhaps indicative of the theme of the program) that neither students nor faculty really know what the library and librarians can do for them. Working in an academic health sciences library, I can include clinicians and staff of the hospital to that list, too. It was hardly a new cry, “Nobody knows our value!” but it got me to thinking – and especially, questioning – what’s behind this phenomenon.

It covers the gamut, from young students straight out of high school to those working on a PhD. It applies to all faculty, whether they finished their degree and began teaching 3 years ago or 30. It crosses every discipline, from medicine to history. Faculty do not refer their students to the library (read, they don’t know what we can do) and students don’t come to the library (read, they don’t know what we can do).

So… I started to think about this in a historical context. When the heck did the shift happen? When did people stop knowing what’s available through their library? If you have faculty who don’t know this, 30 years into their profession, have they always not known? Have they never taught their students the value of the library? If that’s the case, how have we gotten on this long? If they did once teach them the value of the library, when did they stop? And why? When you think that we’ve been promoting information literacy in schools (K-12 + college) since the 70s, as that term, and library instruction, as that term, since the late 1800s, when did it get lost? OR what have we been doing to miss the mark in this charge we’ve been given (I’m willing to take some of the credit/blame as a profession)?

Today’s students, doctors, nurses, patients, we all say, do a lousy job at effectively finding and accessing the best quality information. They do not know how to do this. Why not? If it is our mission, as a profession, to teach them how, where and why have we failed?

These are the questions that I’ve been asking myself since Monday. Truthfully, before Monday, but they’ve been at the forefront of my thinking and it’s interesting to see the discussion here, too. Maybe I’m not the only one thinking it.

SO… I did a very quick look through the literature for the history of academic libraries and found a nice review of the literature published in “Library Philosophy and Practice” in 2005. I highlighted a bunch of interesting thoughts on my copy. I had a career before libraries that was based on “big thinking” like this – the meaning of life and such – so this type of questioning is always appealing. But digression aside, here are a few pieces that I think are most relevant to the topic and discussion and questions:

  • “Their (academic libraries, though I think we can include medical libraries, too) history is one of evolution and change that parallels the history of their parent institutions.”
  • There exists “a historic desire by librarians to be accepted equally by faculty” (insert clinicians, med students, etc.), but “the acceptance of librarians by the community has not improved very much” over time.
  • And finally, “libraries tend to reflect rather than create intellectual trends.”

No doubt, there are people who have and always will value libraries and librarians. They love us and the work we do, but more and more, I’m becoming convinced that this is much more a reflection of those individuals rather than the library and/or librarians. These people tend to be people who are willing to ask for help. They are often both intelligent and creative. They value reading (yes, reading – it will ALWAYS be tied to the idea of libraries and librarians) and they like asking questions. They are, in a sense, our people. They like us and we like them. They ARE us and we are them. But sadly (or perhaps, it’s a good thing in the larger picture of the universe) they (we) are the minority.

I think there is something to be said for and recognized in the quotes from this historical perspective (meaning, the above-referenced article). Our own history does reflect our parent institutions. It reflects our society. Education, learning, health care, medical research – these are all things that have ebbed and flowed in their importance throughout history. If you think about it, we may give a lot of lip service to these things as a society, but are they truly the heart of what we’re about in medical education and health care? I wonder. There’s a bottom line – in education, in research, and in health care – and I think we all know what that bottom line is. It is clearly reflected in many of the decisions that are made today, and ultimately the value that we place upon things in our society.

I’ve no idea on how to counter this in a large sense. Like others, the personal thanks that I regularly receive from a portion of students and researchers do make me feel better about the work I do. They make me feel like I make some small difference. But like others in this string of comments, too, I wish they happened more and reflected more a different set of values displayed by our institutions, hospitals and society at large. Something other than the literal bottom line.

 

[Weiner, S.G. (2005) The History of Academic Libraries in the United States: A Review of the Literature. Library Philosophy and Practice 7(2). Available online.]

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O’Dewey’s: A Fairy Tale

January 23, 2012

Librarian Barista and More

Once upon a time, in a medium-sized college town, an institution stood for generations. O’Dewey’s was founded by Sean O’Dewey in 1887 and for more than a century, passed from O’Dewey to O’Dewey, all the way to its current proprietor, Mary O’Dewey, who assumed the helm in 1992 when her father, Patrick, decided it was time that his daughter, the second-oldest of four children, take over the family business. Mary was the first of the female O’Dewey’s to ever run the business. It had caused a bit of eyebrow raising when Patrick announced he was bypassing Martin, his eldest, in favor of Mary, but over the years as the children were tutored in the ways of business, it was Mary who’d shown both the most interest and the most promise. Her father, without reservation, deemed her a worthy heir.

Now O’Dewey’s had a reputation, good and fair and well-earned over its many years standing proud in the corner closest to the campus quad. It was a place where students and faculty alike gathered. It was open long hours, always ready to welcome one in need of either a quiet place to sit (it had a room off of the main gathering space designated as such) or others looking for like souls to commiserate a tough exam, a difficult professor, or a paper due the next morning. Year after year, class after class, students spent countless hours at O’Dewey’s. It was the place to go on campus. It was a central happening spot.

Of course, the main fixture at O’Deweys was the bar that stood in the middle of the main room. It was in the shape of a square, a large square, thus offering four sides where people could pull up a stool and sit. You could order drinks and chat with Mary or Patrick or Sean or Ian, ask them questions, seek their advice. They knew a little bit about everything and if they didn’t know the answer, they surely knew who did. Each and every O’Dewey, with the exception of Seamus who appeared so inept at social skills he was relegated to the kitchen and charged with making sandwiches and soup and never speaking with customers, was a natural behind the bar. Each could tap a keg as equally as s/he could tap into some uncanny source of information. It was a combination that endeared them to the college community for what seemed like forever.

Still, even an institution as beloved and ingrained into the community as O’Dewey’s was not exempt from changes that inevitably come to society as time and progress march on. Since taking over the pub in the 90s, Mary worked hard to address the influx of technology that affected even an old watering hole. She installed booths, upgraded the electrical system to add more outlets, provided free wireless access, even started to serve micro-roasted coffee alongside the micro-brews. Lots of things changed at O’Dewey’s during her decades in charge, everything but the central tenet of the place – O’Dewey’s was the college community’s pub. They could serve all the foamy lattes they wished, provide the fastest connections available, but O’Dewey’s was, after all, O’Dewey’s Pub. That is what it was Sean started 100+ years ago and it’s what everyone – EVERYONE – assumed it to be. Always. A pub.

Mary and her family held onto this idea as strongly as the community. They held onto it as Starbuck’s opened on the same block. They believed it as the frat houses and dorms grew fancier and more hi-tech, placating students’ every desire for HD television and universal connectivity. They remained convinced that O’Dewey’s was the place to go – the only place to go – for the best beer and the best advice. They were in possession of both. Better than anyone else could ever be.

Despite competition from other bars and other entertainment sources, O’Dewey’s did well for a good, long while. It never seemed to fail that whenever they were experiencing a bit of a downturn in customers or activity, some alumni event would occur, some big game would be won, or some winter storm would hit that pushed people to the oldest, dearest, and closest spot to come together. And in their gathering, they remembered how much they loved the feelings the old pub prompted. People would laugh and tell stories, they’d order beer and listen to music, they’d say things like, “This is really how it should be.”

But soon enough, homecoming was over, the storm subsided, the season ended and life on campus resumed. Students, faculty and staff went about their very busy lives, going from place to place to place, whatever was most convenient for whatever they needed at the moment. That’s what mattered most. Convenience. And the changing times brought with them a whole host of things that made the niceties of O’Dewey’s, while still nice and still important, more convenient to get elsewhere. Cafes and coffee shops sprung up all over campus. Wireless access was everywhere. Kegs could be delivered to dorms for parties. Who needed a pub anymore?

Mary tried her best to both counter and ride the new trend. She tried starting book groups and posting an online community calendar where people could sign up to use the pub for organizing or study groups. She tried catering to parties on campus. She tried special events and giveaways. Some things worked and others failed miserably, but all in all, the pattern was that with each new thing O’Dewey’s tried, they’d see a small spike in their customers, but nothing that lasted. Mary and her siblings seemed at a loss as to what to do. What more could they offer? What else could they do? They were O’Dewey’s Pub. They were an institution. Why didn’t people see their value anymore?

Mary decided they needed better marketing. Quite obviously, people didn’t know everything that a pub had to offer them today. O’Dewey’s was NOT just about beer. Sure, they still served beer, but they had so much else to offer, too. If they could only get people to realize that “pub” meant more than “bar” things would be good again. They hired a small advertising firm to put together a campaign for them. A designer came up with a new logo showing a beer glass encircled by a globe, indicating a community and connectivity. They ran ads in the school paper and paid for spots during televised sporting events. They made t-shirts. They did anything and everything they could to remind people of the importance of O’Dewey’s, not just to the current students and faculty, but to students and faculty of the past, and students and faculty to come. Who could imagine the town, this campus without O’Dewey’s? It would simply never be the same.

One day, in the middle of putting out the new cork coasters with the new logo on the new touch-screen tables, Mary’s daughter Erin asked, “Mom, what do you think makes a pub a pub?” She scoffed a bit and said, “Well beer, of course, Erin.”

“Yes. I’d agree.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I was wondering if maybe, just maybe, we’ve gotten away from that. I’m wondering if we’ve become something else.”

“What are you saying? We’re not a pub?”

“No. We’re still a pub, but we’re also a lot more. People who come here regularly know that, but anybody else seeing ‘O’Dewey’s Pub’ thinks … pub. Why would anyone think to come to a pub for a book group?”

“So you’re suggesting we stop doing that? You think that we should simply go back to serving beer? Being a bar and nothing else?”

“That’s one option. The other is to change ourselves.”

“But we’ve done that. We’ve been doing that for years now. What more can we possibly change?”

“How about our name?”

“WHAT?! Not call ourselves O’Dewey’s?!”

“No. Not call ourselves a pub. Or at least call ourselves a pub and… something. Something else. Something that makes someone looking for a beer or a coffee or a group study spot or a sandwich or a free connection to the web or anything else we provide… well, it makes them know that we have those things. Pubs are about drinking and gathering. We are still that – we’ll always be that – but we need to let go of it as the only thing that we are.”

Mary looked at her daughter suspiciously, fearing that the next generation of O’Dewey’s marked the end of all she’d ever worked for, everything that her family meant. An O’Dewey was a bartender. She didn’t have any idea what her daughter was, nor could she believe she’d raised her. She shook her head, waved her off, and went back to updating ODeweys.com. “Crazy kid,” she thought. She’ll grow out of it.

 

Epilogue

In 2012, when she finished her degree, Erin O’Dewey opened “Erin’s Corner”. It quickly became one of the busiest gathering places near campus.

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Wise Words on Creativity, Formal Education, and Life-long Learning

December 21, 2011

I posed a question to MEDLIB-l yesterday, a listserv for medical librarians. The previous day I had both read a story and heard an interview on public radio about MITx, the new online learning option launched by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stanford has a similar offering, as do other top-tier universities, I imagine. The premise is to allow anyone to sit in on current courses taught, via an online classroom; to take part in the same lectures, assignments, and tests as the matriculating students. Unlike open course ware (also offered by MIT and others), MITx provides the simultaneous learning platform, a learning community, for anyone to engage in and with. A person completing all of the work for the course on time may also request, for a small fee, a certificate of completion, thus giving some level of credit for the learning achieved.

The question I posed to my colleagues centered on whether or not people thought this model will serve as one for continuing education in the future. Specifically, I asked:

This story in the Chronicle and the one on WGBH radio (Boston) last night are both about MIT’s new online certification program. Stanford also started a similar model this past semester with a few classes – one of databases that I’ve followed, though admit that I’ve not done all of the homework.

I find these to be pretty progressive in thinking about education and wonder if it’s the way many of us will seek continuing education in the future. There is a lot of discussion on lists, at meetings and at conferences, on blogs, etc. about skills needed for the future, remaining relevant, and saving the profession. Do such offerings pique the interests of working professionals? Could you and/or would you find the time to commit yourself to the workload they require? They are free in terms of dollars spent, but certainly not in time and effort.

I was asking myself these questions last night as I heard the story on the way home (and had seen the Chronicle piece earlier in the day). I’m wondering what others think.

You may or may not be aware of the struggles the library profession, in particular medical librarians, are facing regarding their relevance and importance in the world of healthcare and medical research today. For years, searching for, securing and providing information was possible only through the gateway of the library. The internet, over time, has removed these barriers to information, making everything from journal articles to bibliographic databases available to users on their desktops, smartphones and iPads.

We can argue all day whether or not the information found by the user is as good in quality as that found by the professional, i.e. the librarian, but more and more this is a mute point. The information sought and found is often “good enough” for the purpose(s) and the thought of going to a library and/or asking the assistance of a librarian for such never enters one’s mind. This being the case, justified anxiety rises amongst the members of my profession; concern over not only our jobs today, but the very existence of the profession in the future. Hand-wringing and Chicken Little aside, the issue is real and calls for a thorough review of the skills librarians have, the skills they are being taught in graduate school, and the gaps between these skills and the ones needed to work in today’s medical and/or academic environment.

I received many thoughtful replies from colleagues. Some pointed out the difference in formal continuing education, i.e. recognized by a professional organization, and taking courses such as these. There were concerns expressed about the time commitment and whether or not employers would either support or recognize these type of learning activities. Some expressed the need to take such classes, but perhaps in a different time-frame. Others asked about the teachers and graders – who does this? In general, everyone who replied felt that another option for learning new skills is welcomed. The need is there, thus the more ways to fill it is appreciated.

One colleague struck a particular chord for both me and another librarian on the list. To paraphrase, he stated that the biggest concern should be learning what you need to learn to do what you need to do; beyond the graduate degree requirement for the librarian, few people look for credentials or extra credits. I liked this a lot. Learning what you need to learn to do what you need to do.

Going through Twitter this morning, I came across a tweet by one of my favorites to follow, Brain Pickings (@brainpicker). She pointed to a story by my very favorite author, Annie Dillard, that appeared in a 1974 issue of Sports Illustrated. Her tweet is filled with good advice. Heed it and read the piece:

More interesting, though, was that this particular tweet was preceded in my Twitter stream by one from Mother Jones referencing an article on Maria Popova herself. Maria Popova’s Beautiful Mind: The creator of Brain Pickings on how to think outside the corporate box, by Hanna Levintova. Of course, as it had so fortuitously landed where it did in my Twitter account, I followed the link and read the interview. It is a wonderful interview that reveals a few telling clues about what makes a person working with information truly successful today. More importantly for me, it had a section that spoke directly to the question I’d asked of my colleagues – thoughts on how we grow and learn and stay relevant in today’s world:

MJ: Have you always been so committed to information-consumption?

MP: Well, it’s an interesting thing. I didn’t really—at least intellectually and creatively—have a particularly compelling experience in college. But during my junior year, they made the TED talks public. So I started listening to them. They were producing one per day, and I was listening to one per day, every day, at the gym. And then I discovered PopTech and other kind of intellectual-ish, online portals for curiosity. Very quickly, I just got so much more out of those than from so-called “Ivy League” education that I knew it was on me to keep myself stimulated, and to keep learning, more than anything. And, because I paid my way through college, I was working at Penn, two to four jobs at a time to pay for school.

MJ: And in the middle of all this, you also found time to start Brain Pickings?!

MP: [Laughs.] It was crazy, crazy times. Well, one of my jobs was at a start-up ad agency. They were trying to do things differently, work with socially conscious clients, and to really be a more creative take on advertising than the industry itself. But I noticed that what the guys at the office were circulating for inspiration still came from within the ad industry. I thought that was really counterintuitive—to only borrow inspiration from within your own industry. So I started Brain Pickings as just a Friday, email newsletter, going out to my colleagues there, with five links, to five really different things that had nothing to do with advertising—from a vintage train map of Europe, to a Japanese short film from 1920, to the latest technology. Eventually I saw that these guys were forwarding these emails to friends of theirs that were in really different disciplines, not just creative ones—but writers, lawyers, students, whatever. So, I decided on top of all the jobs and school, to take a night class and teach myself web design and coding, just enough to get by. That’s how it started. And in the process, I was still digging into the things I was featuring, and in that process, you learn so much more than you do in a lecture. The whole life-long learner thing—this just became my way of doing that.

[emphasis mine]

More and more today, I believe that this really is the key to being successful in our field, and I define success not as accolades and a sense of grand importance on behalf of our institutions  (though those are sometimes, often, important), but as a sense of fulfillment; a sense of joy in the work we do. I believe that I am successful when, like Popova, I find myself stimulated and engaged and feeling most like the work I do through a fairly substantial portion of my life is … interesting.

Who amongst us longs for the career where we are nothing more than frustrated, day in and day out, by things well beyond our control? The internet is here to stay and with it, the searching habits, the access to information, and the “good enough” principle that keeps things moving at the speed that we, evidently, are convinced we must move. To rail against these things is a waste of energy. It seems to me, the people who enjoy life most are the ones who put their energies towards more constructive behavior, like learning what you need to learn to do what you need to do. The other is, to put it in my more common vernacular, “A waste of time, dude!”

 

 

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