I like librarians. I especially like the hard-working folks who teach my students how to use the databases and other library resources at LD3C's library. I like how patient they are with students who have never stepped foot in the library before, students who are most often doing so moments before their big research papers are due. I like how geeked librarians get to look up stuff and to help people. Librarians tend to smile while looking up stuff and helping people. This, in turn, makes me smile.
This week, however, I'm not so thrilled with librarians. My freshmen are learning how to use the library. They have to produce a research paper with a few sources, both primary and secondary. They also have to show that they can locate more than one hard copy source. That means that the source is not digital.
Why am I doing this? Am I a Luddite who eschews these modern newfangled library resources that magically recreate full-text PDF versions of what can otherwise be found in the things we commonly call magazines, newspapers, journals, or (heaven forfend!) books? Nay, my friends. I am all down with the modern interwebs, d-bases and shit.
So are my students, though, and that's the issue. Sure, learning to use the library's databases is different from mere Googling, but the principle is the same. I want students to know how to find hard-copy resources. I want them to be able to locate material that cannot be found digitally. (It's still out there.) I do not want them to be uncomfortable searching the stacks. I do not want them to miss out on information that hasn't yet been pixelated. I want them to research.
What did one reference librarian do last Thursday and another today, while explaining the library's resources to the research neophytes? Each librarian repeatedly urged my students to ask me if PDF copies counted as "hard copies" and repeatedly urged me to accept them as such.
This makes my blood boil, especially since I (very politely, and after the students had left) explained my position to Thursday's librarian. He was a bit confused. "Don't you want students to find what they need?" Yes, I answered. "Don't you think it's easier for them to find it through the databases?" Maybe, I said. There are books in the stacks, I reminded him, and periodicals galore. "But students are more comfortable on the computers," he said.
My point exactly.
Monday's librarian did the exact same thing as Thursday's librarian, even though I made my position to him clear before he gave his little tour-and-talk.
I dislike being angry at librarians.
Greta, how I do appreciate your feelings on this matter! I work extensively with databases, but when it comes to write, I spend about $50-100 to print out all my material, spread it out on my desk(s) before me, and write from page to computer document. Then I bind these things together with a print out of my final article/manuscript, and move on to the next project.
ReplyDeleteBut.
We are a dying breed. The students you teach will live in a world that will not print things out. For our students to be successful in this world, they need to learn to find, catalog, organize, and use proficiently the PDFs and database versions of our 1980 books and periodicals.
Why teach them to find periodicals when they are not going to be printed much longer and are already available online?
It's a new world out there.
You miss my point. There is a wealth of information out there that is not available online or in PDF form or in any other pixelated form. This includes material that has not yet been digitized--books, recordings on vinyl and tape, microfilm and microfiche, movies, older bound copies of magazines and newspapers and journals and even some newer copies.
ReplyDeleteThere is a vast amount of information out there that is not available electronically. While the world is digitizing, it will be many years before the virtual utopia of information has been realized.
I began grad school at the dawn of the mass digital age. I learned to locate hard copies of things in the library. Much of the research I had to do was painstaking and I am glad that most students today do not have to wade through stacks of indexes the way I did; however, I know how to research.
After Library Talk Time was over today, I made my students pick a topic, find a book about that topic in the library's holdings (via computer), had them find the book in the stacks, and told them to look around at books on surrounding shelves. They were amazed at what they found, at all of the related material easily located because they found one single book about their original topic. Many of them sat on the floor and began to read the books and share information.
All of them told me that they'd never been in the college's stacks before and that it never would have occurred to them to look there--and all of them were amazed by the information the stacks contained.
Perhaps a good way around this is to require your students to use one critical, single author _book_ that has been published in the last ten years. That way it will _have_ to be in hard copy and students will realize for themselves that some things have to be located in the stacks? It might also help you explain things to the librarians easier: you can tell them that you want students to be familiar with _all_ types of sources. So instead of seeming overly attached to a form of technology that may seem outdated, you seem attached to multiple forms of data. It’s something that has always worked for me..….I suppose that the students can always use kindle but that would require them to spend money on their research--which they tend to hate. So this might be an easy way to get your desired result without seeming like a draconian Luddite? ;)………..But I mean that as a joke. I TOTALLY support what you are doing. Like I kind of hinted above, I hold the same ideal. I just cast my research assignments in the same way that I suggested above. And I have been happy with the results.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you use MLA style, but MLA actually sanctions citing PDFs as hard copy publications. Because there's really no difference for the sake of citation.
ReplyDeleteSo when I teach my students to cite in MLA style, I inform them of this, with a lot of long explanations about what a PDF is compared to an article from a website, etc.
What's so discouraging is that the more time that goes by, the less my students understand the concept of a "hard copy". I have to explain this again and again. No, if you found your book on the internet, unless it is a pdf, or an actual picture of the pages, you must cite it as an internet source.
It's dispiriting to see librarians refusing to acknowledge that books are still important. They should know better. And that where MLA is concerned, no competent researcher cites ebsco-host, etc. I've yet to see a book published by MLA that does, anyway, thought that may be coming.
I wonder if the problems with the librarians are a result of the fact that a huge number of librarians are now getting their degrees completely online, and that these librarians may only have a passing familiarity with books themselves. I have had to unteach my own students after they have gotten very bad advice from librarians, so much so that I no longer send them to librarians for advice on research at all, because what they present is so inconsistent with the demands of my own discipline.
It's sad, but it's true.
I make my students use slide rulers, cause I hear computers only use 1's and 0's. I think there is a little too much emphasis on format and style here.
ReplyDeleteWhen the day comes that every singe random-ass book* written only in French (except for the gratuitous Latin bits), published 150 years ago, and directly relating to our research is online, then we will admit that not learning how to work with print sources is alright. Until that day, however, we will remain grateful to the people who taught us how to use finding aids, card catalogs, and other such arcane things to navigate Deadtreeland.
ReplyDelete*We're not even going to mention the Eastern European/Asian journals that publish articles in languages we read. You haven't lived until you've tried to figure out a table of contents written in Japanese.
Greta, I think I get your point.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think the day will come when information only available on physical form will be rare (and possibly hunted by some future form of geocachers:
"Look Greg, This book hasn't been scanned yet!"
"Wow, Frank, another one to add to your collection."
"Yeah, this makes 4, I'll have more than anyone else in the club now!")
However, in the present, there are many kinds of media available. Whether or not a PDF can be cited as a print source according to MLA is not the point. The point is that finding hardcopy information is a slightly different skill than finding digits. Only knowing how to find digital information removes some of the worlds stored knowledge from your grasp. True, the amount out of reach shrinks with each book Google scans, but in the here and now, physical media still exist and are valuable.
And Greta, mourn with me for a moment. I, too, have found much useful information by gazing at the neighbors of the book I went looking for. And yet, our library is moving books to an automated retrieval system. The stacks are not yet gone, but are shrinking, and future plans involve limited or no human-accessible bookstacks. The robots use 1/7th the floorspace us humans do, which gives more floorspace for the 6-player Xbox systems that always have students queued up for their turn.
I, for one, do NOT welcome our new robot librarian overlords.
I am with you Greta. While I acknowledge that many PDFs are actually print sources, e.g. downloads from JSTOR, many are not. Having the students open a book from the stacks will benefit them greatly.
ReplyDeleteI assign a paper now and then and I always require them to use print sources. Many of them do not and instead consult www.iamcrackpot.net for the ideas in their paper.
One skill that is essential in my mind is discerning the quality of a source, whether it is online or not.
There is a scene in the Fellowship of the Ring in which Gandalf pours over ancient scrolls to discover the secrets of the ring. I whispered to my wife, "That's grad school."
ReplyDeleteLibrarians, please forgive my ignorance. What does a librarian learn from a library science degree program? Our school treats them as faculty but I don't understand why they aren't support staff. I'm being serious here. I don't get it. Enlighten me.
I hate you blogger. I wrote a long comment and you ate it.
ReplyDeleteThe gist: by the time I was 12 I could use microfilm, microfiche, those funny Early American Imprint card you look at through a magnifying camera, bound periodicals and current periodicals. I learned the joys of Special Collections and historical society archives in grad school, and nothing thrills like old stuff. I miss open stacks and front tables at academic bookstores. Most of the world is not yet digitized, and waiting for new minds to find it. I'm with Greta.
ReplyDeleteLibrarians are the product of the library and information science degree they graduated from. The "old" librarians are now retiring, and are being replaced by new librarians who are all about the whiz and bang of digital information sources. It was like high school English in the 1980s - the matronly teachers who got their degrees in the 1950s flogged us over the head with rules of grammar and punctuation, while the freshly minted teachers shrugged their shoulders and said "close enough" when we handed in our crap.
ReplyDeleteI have a biased view, I have not even set foot in our science library in years. My field posts all our research as PDFs on servers. And I still love hardcopy books, but I get a $3k allowance per year, can you say amazon.com!
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'm a product of the educational institution I am at, but the quality of information that my students are likely to find hard copy in our library is vastly lower than they are likely to find digitally.
ReplyDeleteI'm with you, Greta. Keep trying, and hold to your standards.
ReplyDeleteAs a young Scout, I read a story in 'Boys Life' magazine in which people in the future were described. They had no hair because it wasn't needed for warmth, extremely thin arms because manual strength wasn't needed any longer, and thin legs because they rode everywhere. Sadly, humans may one day end up that way.
People who complain about your insistence on hard copies probably also use the argument, "Why learn multiplication tables when we have calculators?" Sure, and why walk when you can use a Segway? In a survival course, why learn to make fire when there are matches?
Personally, I am leery of anything that requires a power source, which is why I don't have an e-book.
On another note, I keep seeing an error pop up on the site. To go over a document carefully is to pore over a document. To pour over it will probably ruin the paper and make the ink run.
"I am leery of anything that requires a power source"
ReplyDeleteThanks for that grandpa, I'll pull the horse and buggy up front for you...
I like hard books, but when e-book prices drop below the hard book cost, I'm out. I've been reading off computer screens for 30 years, won't be that hard of a transition.
"But students are more comfortable on the computers," he said.
ReplyDeleteUggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggh.
If there's source material in the library not available online, WHY would the librarian of all people be resistant to helping people find it? And WHY would a librarian sandbag the professor who's responsible for course instruction?
Uggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggh!
Feel free to hang on as long as you want, but universities are selling off their physical books and subscribing to scanned versions instead. In 10 years, I believe only the big universities will have physical libraries.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWhoops--error corrected:
ReplyDeleteI teach the databases; since I have the students in a computer lab, and we have so little time anyway, I get more bang for my minutes with them by showing them the databases. Plus, like Natalie, I find our print collection thin. I suppose I really should give our online card catalogue more attention, and I will next time as a result of this exchange.
But then, I'm teaching a sophomore-level business/tech writing course, so I'm really trying to get them immersed in recent research, especially in professional journals, and what we have online is far more robust than in our stacks.
If I were teaching a different course or if my research project had a different spin, I'd certainly have them browsing for books. I got piles of my research in grad school in stacks, using the proximity/serendipity method. I miss that, as well, and I miss our good academic bookstore here, which withered.
What portion of the world's knowledge is cited in physical periodical indices, but still not cited on the internet or in any significant electronic database?
ReplyDeleteI ask because I usually assume that if a work isn't even being *referred to* on the internet, it's probably not too useful for any research I'm doing. But if there's a vast wealth of untapped knowledge out there, I'd like to know about it.
PLZ PURFESSOR???//
I'm with Greta about challenging students and growling about the librarians who hassled her.
ReplyDeleteAlso, though I enjoy designing websites with Easter eggs and Java script goodies; have taught online; and play daily with the apps on my Palm, one of my all-time favorite things to do is to wander in the stacks of a university library and sink to the floor, lost in a book. Fie on the robolibrary!
Finally, a few words in defense of academic librarians. They qualify as faculty because they have two graduate degrees -- an M.S. in Library Science (or equivalent) and an M.A. in an academic specialty such as sociology. Also, their position requires them to teach students and to stay current in both library science and their chosen specialty.
About those degrees: the M.S. must be from a program accredited by the American Library Association. The M.A. also must be from an accredited university. Earning it demonstrates that the librarian actually has conducted scholarship at the graduate level.
Stella suggested that "a huge number of librarians are now getting their degrees completely online, and . . . these librarians may only have a passing familiarity with books themselves." According to the ALA website*, only the following programs offer accredited, 100% online Library Science degrees:
1. Clarion University of Pennsylvania
2. Florida State University
3. San Jose State University
4. University of Alabama
5. University of Maryland
6. Wayne State University
I didn't find any figures comparing the number of recent graduates of these six programs with the recent grads of the other 75+ programs in North America.
*http://www.ala.org/ala/educationcareers/education/accreditedprograms/directory/index.cfm
@Eskarina, you're absolutely right that librarians have a ton of education in them. I've dealt with library science, and it's a lot more complicated than just shelving books or recommending some Orwell. It's actual maths and science, and cross-references with complicated computer algorithms.
ReplyDeleteThe most recent research is going to be online; fewer things are getting printed; and this problem is only going to intensify in the next 10 years. It's like struggling against a rip tide.
I'm with Greta. While I appreciate some of the qualities of PDFed articles and Google books (portability, compactness, paper savings, wider access to and preservation of -- we hope -- rare or obscure books), there are plenty of worthwhile sources that aren't available electronically. In addition, we're only beginning to get the kinds of technology needed to read and annotate long things comfortably on a screen that is as lightweight and portable as even a hardback book (trying to read a long PDF on a netbook, or any computer screen that can't show a full page at a time, is awful; it sounds like appliances along the lines of the Kindle, Nook, and iPad, which I haven't had a chance to play with at any length, are getting closer, but are still several generations away from full usability).
ReplyDeleteAlso, as long as ebooks and articles are electronic versions of print formats (as opposed to being written in digital-native formats such as hyptertext), I suspect that students need to learn to read such texts well in their original form before they can get the most out of an electronic version. Long-format writing (these days, I'm afraid a full-length journal article, as well as a book, qualifies) needs to be understood as a whole, not just a series of strung-together bits of "information," and it's easier to get a sense of the whole if you can flip back and forth through actual pages, get a sense of the relative thickness/length of various sections, etc., etc.
Or maybe I'm just nostalgic. While I didn't run into the Early American Imprint cards until grad school, my experience was much like Frog & Toad's, and the highlight of my first year at college was doing research using 100-year-old bound periodicals that had once served as leisure reading for my predecessors. I appreciate google books, but I still want to visit archives and libraries to see actual books (including the annotations and inscriptions in those books; a single scanned copy preserves only so much). 100 years from now, even the annoying undergraduate highlighting in some of our commonest library books might provide information about how students in a particular time and place approached both classic and contemporary texts.
I'll even confess to hoping that someday I'll be able to hold in my hands a book I wrote myself -- maybe even a book with an attractively-designed cover? (maybe I'd better hurry up). But I'd be perfectly happy if that volume were decently-produced via Print on Demand technology, and were also available in electronic format; in fact, I'm pretty sure that those approaches represent the future of academic publishing.
And I'm also beginning to think about teaching my students to write in the shorter formats appropriate to the web. Ideally, I'd like them to both read and write well in a variety of formats, both born-print and born-digital, and to realize that, in whatever format, they're not just obtaining or communicating information, they're building arguments that are more than the sum of the parts they comprise.
Oh! Cassandra! I am so glad my two books were published when books were still a thing: they have beautiful covers and are so well designed. I mourn for the day when book design, too, is a thing of the past -- think of all the gorgeous LP covers we no longer have.
ReplyDeleteAlso? Fingers and post-its. I like to flip a codex around, stick notes in it, hold one place with a finger while I check another. I like to dog-ear pages and underline, dammit. Books smell good. And screens make my eyes hurt. Plus if you drop a Kindle into the bath tub you're screwed, and one of the things I love about my copy of Lolita is its frilly, curled-up pages from many bathtime accidents.
Books, please don't go, I love you so.
@F&T: Agreed, on all counts. I have some much-loved wavy-bottomed volumes myself (a complete collection of Dorothy Sayers' mysteries, for one).
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I wouldn't have minded having scans of the two moldy (literally) late-19th-century volumes, printed on cheap, crumbling paper, that I was examining this morning. At least scanning is a solution to the acid-paper problem (as long as somebody/something can still read the scanned files 100+ years from now, that is). Of course, those volumes were neither well-designed nor well-produced in the first place, and haven't been treated terribly well since (in my defense, they were moldy when I bought them).
@F&T and Cassandra: Agreed, plus you can take a book to the beach. What does sand do to those electronic gadgets?
ReplyDeleteAlso, cookbooks! The splatters and notes remind me of feasts of yore, and show that THIS recipe was so worth the effort that I've done it again and again.
Tactile pleasure isn't the point. On-demand printing stations are showing up at copy centers that will let you take any digits you have and turn them into bound copy. Book scanning machines are available in libraries now, and you can convert that hardcopy into digits to load on your iwhatever. These technologies will improve, and soon you may freely convert whatever you get your hands on into either format. And, in no time at all, a computer in the kitchen won't be appliance size!
ReplyDeleteBut the format you wish to use the information in is not the point. The point is what format the information is findable in. Today, in 2011, there is information only available in hardcopy (or even microfiche!), and there is information only available digitally. A scholar should be versed in ways to find all sorts of both information. In a generation or less, we'll talk fondly of bookstacks like I've heard people talk fondly of punch-card coding. (Well, they mostly cursed punch cards).
But, for a few more years, knowledge of both formats remains important, regardless of which form you transfer it to for your pleasure.