Thing 13: Podcasts

Podcasts of lectures and other programs (those that lend themselves to audio recording) held in, or sponsored by, the library would be a useful addition to our services.

Western Kentucky University Libraries has been doing this since 2006 and has one convenient Web page that lists the newest podcasts, along with links to all the podcasts in 7 different series. I noticed that they also link to their library audio tour podcast. I like the way they've included one photograph to enhance the brief description of each podcast.

Here's a reference to an article from the latest issue of Library Hi Tech that we could take a look at, in the process of deciding where to start with podcasts.


TI: Podcasting initiatives in American research libraries
AU: Bierman, James; Valentino, Maura L.
JN: Library Hi Tech
PD: 14 June 2011
VO: 29
NO: 2
PG: 349-358(10)
PB: Emerald Group Publishing Limited
IS: 0737-8831

Core Value: Team Focus [June, 2011]

My activity for this Core Value is different from the suggested one. I think it relates well to Team Focus, though; and it's easier for me to do, since I'm on 9-month contract.

Last year, one of the positive psychology-related e-mail lists I subscribe to sent a summary of some recent research studies on Consistent Contributors (CCs). I found it intriguing and followed up to read more about the research. The studies found that the presence of a Consistent Contributor--"a person who always contributes, regardless of others' choices"--makes the group as a whole more productive. Researcher J. Keith Murnighan ended the summary with this recommendation: "Anytime you join a group, join one with a consistent contributor. And if there isn't one, consider being one--not just for instrumental reasons."

Murnighan and his coauthor conducted four research studies on Consistent Contributors (CCs). In the discussion section of journal article describing these studies, they state:

These four studies tell a simple, powerful story: CCs emerge, even when they might be least expected; the members of their groups contribute more and cooperate more often; and CCs themselves not only do not suffer from their risky cooperative actions, as most theories say they should, but actually seem to benefit from them (in three of four studies). Groups of more 'rational' actors, in contrast, are not as efficient. [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95.6 (2008): 1349-1350.]

I worked with two Consistent Contributors for many years--Virginia Branch and Pat Farthing--and I saw the positive influence they had on our team. We have several Consistent Contributors in the library now, at every level, from student assistants through administrators. I have also heard about Consistent Contributors in other areas of campus, and seen them in action on committees.

There is an important caveat that must be mentioned, however--one that I've learned (the hard way) to keep in mind. We all have many commitments and responsibilities that must be balanced against each other. If I've decided to be a Consistent Contributor on a project or committee--because the task is large or complex, or because a lot is riding on the outcome--I must still be sure that I'm not shortchanging or neglecting my other obligations. I've also learned (I should say, I'm still learning) that I must be careful not to allow my enthusiasm for new projects and initiatives to jeopardize timely and successful completion of existing projects and initiatives.

Flickr

I explored Flickr in March, and made notes on some of the ideas I had. Unfortunately I didn't get my blog post written then, so this post is based on my notes.

• I took the Flickr tour and created my account. I hadn't realized until then that Flickr was a Yahoo product.
• I haven't yet done anything with Flickr to use my account.

The same week I took the Flickr tour, my husband Roger was helping out our granddaughter, Sierra, with a really interesting assignment. It occurred to me that the library might be able to combine this assignment with Flickr to create a different kind of online tour of the library.

Our granddaughter Sierra's school assignment was based on the Flat Stanley Project. The project was inspired by the 1964 book, Flat Stanley, by Jeff Brown. Sierra sent Roger a picture of herself that she had drawn. She wanted him to take her picture, named Flat Sierra, to interesting places in Boone and Todd (where we live). He photographed Flat Sierra in those locations and wrote a story of Flat Sierra's journey to accompany the pictures. Each picture had a caption of a few lines, moving the journey along but also informing Sierra about the place/building shown in the photograph. Roger sent the pictures and captions to Sierra so that she could present it to her classmates.

I was thinking that a tour of Belk Library & Information Commons could be modeled on the Flat Stanley Project and created in Flickr. If I'm understanding Flickr correctly, the tour could be a Collection. There could be sets of Flat Yosef (maybe? or Flat someone else appropriate for the task) photos for different types of tours--one arranged by floor, another arranged by collection, yet another arranged by tasks that people might want to accomplish in the library (get help; study; learn information literacy skills; create a digital project; etc.). 

I also thought that it might be interesting to use a child's drawing and name, linking the Flat Tour with our IMC and our work with children's literature and the IMC. 

Below I've posted three of Roger's Flat Sierra photographs. Flat Sierra came to the library during her journey. I've added Roger's captions that helped narrate her library tour.

Flat Sierra in the book stacks. Caption: "There are so many books that I am having a hard time picking one out!! But maybe Glenn Ellen (who is a Professor and Librarian) can help me out. I sure hope so."

Flat Sierra inside a Second Floor reading room. Caption: "The Library seems even bigger inside than from the outside! And it is very bright and pretty. I know I would spend lots of time here if I was an Appalachian student."

Flat Sierra outside the library with a statue: "After our visit with Glenn Ellen, Grandpa and I left the Library to go see where he teaches. On the way, I met a student on the Library deck and helped her with her homework. She was very nice and thanked me for all my good ideas!!!"

Prezis

I looked into Prezis in November, but unfortunately did not get my reflections posted in a timely manner. So, here are my thoughts, based on notes I made then.

• I went to the Prezi site and looked at some of the presentations. I found them fascinating and thought that students would enjoy them as an alternative to PowerPoint slides, textual outlines, or screencasts. Students could use Prezis for reviewing material that I present in an instruction sessions and want them to use on their own. [I made notes on a couple of the Prezis that I looked at, but I have misplaced my notes.]
• I also thought that Prezis are so creative, and my thinking is generally so linear, that I would have a hard time "envisioning" my material in Prezi format. I would love to be able to pair up with someone, and explain to that person the material I would like to turn into a Prezi, and have that person design the Prezi. Then, the two of us could collaborate on editing and refining the Prezi.
• I signed up for a student/teacher free account, using the Prezi EDU education license. According to the confirmation I received, I can only create presentations online, but I can download the finished products and present them offline. There will be no watermarks. I can make them private or public. I have up to 500 mb of storage. I will need to use Firefox or Safari when creating presentations. I can download an iPad app for Prezis, so that I can see how my own Prezis or others' look on the iPad.

• Unfortunately, I never got as far as beginning a Prezi of my own. I'm hoping to do so this summer.
• If I were to create a Prezi, either on my own or in partnership with someone else (as mentioned above), here are some topics that I would like to work on. These are things that I use pretty often in my teaching. They would make great in-class teaching aids; they would also work well to assign to students for homework before class, or for review after class but before completing a graded assignment:

1. Criteria for selecting "Best Choice" items from a database search
2. Author/title searching for known items; include modifications that need to be made when moving from the WNCLN Library Catalog to WorldCat
3. Cited reference searching
4. Compositionist Robert Fulkerson's STAR criteria for guiding students in selecting outside sources for research papers. [I really like this set of criteria; I think it offers good guidance from the first-year level through graduate and faculty level.] Fulkerson says that, to be strong, outside evidence supporting an interpretation argument should be Sufficient, Typical, Accurate, and Relevant (STAR). He describes this in the following chapter: 

Fulkerson, Richard. "Making the research paper worth your time." The subject is research: processes and practices. Ed. Wendy Bishop and Pavel Zemliansky. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2001. 12-27.

Core Value: Cooperation [April, 2011]

On April 6, 2011, I attended a meeting of the Technology Services Team (3:15 p.m. in Room 421).

Unfortunately, I didn't get my reflections on this meeting posted in a timely fashion, and I'm writing from memory; so my apologies to TS folks if anything is incorrect.

• The meeting had a relaxed, comfortable, and informal style, both in its structure and in team members' discussion style
• The meeting was brief, but a good many items were discussed, including the checkout system for group study rooms that was in development, and a possibility of increased interaction between the library's electronic classrooms and other labs/tech support on campus.
• As far as enhanced inter-team collaboration as a result of my attending the TS meeting: 

--I came away with a better sense of which colleagues are members of this relatively new team.
--I enjoyed seeing colleagues that I've worked with for many years, in their "regular team meeting" environment. Usually, when I see them, they're helping me puzzle through a software or hardware dilemma, fixing some of my office equipment that has malfunctioned, or simultaneously solving a problem in one of the classrooms and getting me calmed down at the beginning of an instruction session. So, this was a nice change of pace.
--It was also good to see colleagues who came on board more recently, some of whom I didn't realize were part of the TS Team.
--I have been working more closely with Jonathan Priest since this meeting, so I think the meeting helped me begin to get a better sense of his job responsibilities.
--I also had a brief conversation with Paul Orkiszewski after the meeting that, in like manner, helped me better understand the TS Team.

Core Value: Communication [March, 2011]

To learn more about this core value, I attended the Effective Communication Workshop, conducted for the library on March 1, 2011, by Micah Fairchild, Associate Director of Human Resources--Organizational Development and Workforce.

I will highlight some of the things that, after reflecting on the workshop, I found most useful:

•  Micah asked how many of us in attendance were managers. Several raised their hands. Then he  commented that we are all managers—of ourselves and our own communication; and that we need to ensure that our communication is clear and that it sends our message in a way that aligns with the four Key Principles he went on to describe.

• Micah gave an example of the importance of “managing” our communication by asking us if we’d ever said, to someone else at work, something like: “So-and-so is driving me crazy.” He said that the result of this comment might be the creation of a “negative bond” with the listener, who agreed; and then that “negative bond” might be spread to other people.  Or, the result might be that if the listener disagreed, our comment could be repeated by the listener to others and/or to the person we were talking about, reflecting badly on us. Either way, it's best that we "manage" our communication by avoiding this kind of comment altogether. When I thought about this example that Micah gave, I found myself recalling times in the past when I did what he was describing, and was sorry that I had done so. The workshop made me resolve to be more self-aware and avoid the potential of hurting others with this kind of comment.

• I also liked Micah’s descriptions of the four key principles of communication (esteem, empathy, sharing, and involvement) and the characteristics of the four styles of communication (passive, passive-aggressive, aggressive, and assertive). 

•  Micah provided some "tips and tricks" for effective communication

1. Assess who you are speaking to: a peer, a library user, a student, a supervisor, a family member
2. If possible, plan for the communication beforehand
3. Check your nonverbal communication and try to avoid simple errors in this arena
4. If the communication involves conflict, focus on the problem, not the person
5. Listen and be honest with yourself

Core Value: Accountability [January, 2011]

My work-related goal for this year:

Use Things software for my to-do lists on most days (4 or more) each week. Track how many weeks I meet this target.

Things is a Mac program for managing projects; Next Actions and other to-do items related to your projects; errand lists; phone-call lists; Areas of Responsibility within your life; etc. It's based on David Allen's Getting Things Done work/life management system. I started using Things over a year ago, but haven't been as consistent as I want to. I find that, when I get really busy, I start to-do lists, or jot down things I need to do, all sorts of places--note pads, legal pads, notebooks, Sticky Notes on my computer monitor, the little pad I keep in my purse, my Backpack home page, etc. I then have to decide whether to keep a list going (wherever I started it up) or transfer that list, or those to-do items, to Things. Before I know it, I have multiple lists, as well as errant to-do's scattered all around.

Things does a beautiful job of keeping all your lists in one place. It lets you move to-do items from one list to another, helps you track whether you did something, allows you to schedule a to-do, and more. As best I can tell, it's capable of anything I would ever want to do with to-do lists. Probably the best feature is that you can put work-related, personal, and household projects and to-do lists all together in the same place. I just need to use Things more consistently than I have been. I have a copy for my desktop Mac and an app for my iPad; and I can sync one with the other.

This goal fits the Core Value of Accountability, as described in the library's Strategic Plan, in that the Core Value asks us to "demonstrate commitment to accomplish work in a(n) ... efficient ... manner" and to "efficiently monitor progress on projects."

Now that I've put my goal on this blog, and publicly stated that I'm going to do it, I know I'll be shamed into doing it much more likely to reach my target this year.

Facebook

1. Facebook account:
I already had an account.

3. Things the library could do with Facebook:
I'm deviating a little bit from the directions here. My suggestions are broad areas, rather than specific things to do. 

They relate to two themes: 
(1) for faculty librarians, using Facebook to address the other two spheres of our responsibilities, outside of our library-related work: scholarship and service. Because we're required to make contributions in these areas, promoting what we do in our scholarship and service also promotes the Library as our home department.


(2) for all librarians, letting people get to know us as "a whole person"--our interests, our concerns, our activities. 

Teachers are encouraged to include, in their classroom sessions, information or anecdotes about themselves, to personalize their teaching and to relate themselves to students on a more genuine level. Librarians should do this, also, to create opportunities for more social connections with our users and with our librarian colleagues (those inside and outside the library).


Facebook's social nature is a perfect way to enhance the social nature of the library, whether as a physical space or a virtual space. If users and colleagues know more about all of us, and have more ways to connect with each one of us, that can lead to more connections and interactions with the library.

• Discuss or promote our scholarship
Library faculty could do this from our personal Facebook account, from some other Facebook forum, or both.

• Discuss or promote our community involvement or other non-library-specific service
Post about groups in the local community that we're involved with, in an informal or a formal service capacity. Use Facebook to let people know about professional service work we're doing that might surprise them, because it's different from our usual library roles that are familiar and widely known. 

• Promote libraries, reading, and information literacy by posting about things you've read, enjoyed, or found interesting
Post not just in the usual way we might think of as librarians, but in ways that let people get to know us better and see the whole person. The social aspects are in the forefront of these posts. Then, adding a URL to the library catalog, or an Open WorldCat URL, etc., would indirectly/subversively promote libraries. 

Core value: User/Quality Focus [December 2010]

1. Something I intend to do, to increase my user/quality focus:

This is actually something I've been working on for awhile, and intend to continue. The topics I'm writing on, for two scholarly article manuscripts, fit the characteristics of user/quality focus as defined in the library's Strategic Plan. One manuscript is related to instruction, and it describes a "pedagogical exploration" that I undertook in order to finds ways to increase the relevance, for students, of my instruction sessions (especially one-shot sessions). Another manuscript describes my Lumbee bibliography work--from my 1994 book-length bibliography to the current bibliography Web site. It, too, relates to user/quality focus, because the Web site makes the bibliography references more widely available to users. The work I'm doing (with help from several library colleagues and student assistants) to make the Web site database-driven and to add all the items from my 1994 book to the database (and, thus, to the Web site) will also improve the site for the user.

2. Suggestions for things the library can do to enhance this core value:

• Institutionalize the SACS standards that the library is responsible for meeting.
All of the standards we're responsible for meeting affect our users. To be found in compliance with them, we must assess our work in relation to each one (thus, determine what our current level of quality is). If we institutionalize the standards, that means we discuss our efforts in relation to each standard regularly and at many levels (from individual librarians, to committees, to teams, to library faculty meetings, to library-wide meetings). We also use the data from our assessments that relate to each standard, to plan and to make decisions at many levels. If we institutionalize the SACS standards, we will automatically be maintaining and enhancing our user/quality focus. If we institutionalize the standards, we will also find it easier to be sure we're keeping in compliance with them. Anything that's done regularly or habitually is easier to do, as opposed to not really getting geared up for it it until we start planning for the next SACS reaffirmation of accreditation.

• Ask, "What's best for users?"
In our meetings and discussions, we sometimes talk about what's the easier or faster or simpler way to accomplish a task or goal. Or--we talk about what committee, task force, or person that task or goal should be assigned to. Those are necessary discussions, and we can't accomplish things without having them. I'm not arguing that we can't arrive at a way of doing something that's easy, fast, or simple as well as best for users; or that what team/group/person undertakes a task doesn't relate to what's best for users. But, if we want to enhance our user/quality focus, one way to do so might be to keep the question, "What's best for users?" at the forefront. If we answer that question first, and keep our answers to it ahead of other considerations, I believe we'll ensure that we're making the best decision for users.

3. Link to a useful resource related to User/Quality Focus
For some time now, I've been very interested in Positive Psychology. An offshoot of this field is Positive Organizational Scholarship, which extends Positive Psychology to the workplace. Jane Dutton, at the University of Michigan, has done extensive research and writing in this area. Her writings on positive (or high quality) connections at work certainly offer promise for enhancing our user/quality focus. If we have high quality connections with each other at work, the energy created by those connections will improve our decision-making, our work, and our services for users. It will also energize us in our connections with users as we deliver services to them. In her book, Energize your Workplace, Dutton says,

...The energy and vitality of individuals and organizations alike depends on the quality of the connections among people in the organization, and between organizational members and people outside the firm with whom they do business. . . . [high-quality connections are] marked by mutual positive regard, trust, and active engagement on both sides. In a high-quality connection, people feel more engaged, more open, more competent. They feel more alive. High-quality connections can have a profound impact on both individuals and entire organizations.

. . . HIgh-quality connections do not require personal knowledge or extensive interaction. Any point of contact with another person can potentially be a high-quality connection. One conversation, one e-mail exchange, one moment of connecting in a meeting can infuse both participants with a greater sense of vitality, giving them a bounce in their steps and a greater capacity to act. [Kindle locations 109-16]

Here's a link to Jane Dutton's page at the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship at the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business. See item 2, "The power of positive (high quality) connections."