Monday

11am–Attended executive board meeting for our local librarian association (LAUC-I)

Afternoon–Weeded the never ending email inbox. Completed or scheduled tasks.

5-7pm–Staffed our 24/7 chat reference service.

Tuesday

9-10am–Answered Ask Email questions and chat follow up questions

Rest of day–Weeded more email. Worked on presentation for a small conference on Friday. And a whole bunch of other things I can’t remember.

Wednesday

Spent all day working on the presentation, except for a 1:30pm research consultation on Mother Teresa.

Left work at 10:30pm. (In college I always ended up doing my papers at the last minute–fortunately, they turned out well. Here we go again! Unfortunately, I concentrate better under time pressure.)

Thursday

6:30am–Arrived at work before the sun. Kept working on presentation.

10am–Did a dry run of presentation for colleagues, who had lots of good questions and  suggestions. Thank you colleagues!

11:30am-1:30pm–Attended a meeting of UCI’s Academic Senate Committee on Educational Policy (I’m the library representative)

Afternoon–Finished polishing presentation & slides. Printed handouts. Collected stuff for Friday’s trip to Claremont, CA for SCIL Works 2012.

Hope to leave work by 6 or 6:30pm.

As an undergraduate, I attended a small liberal arts school that emphasized critical thinking, writing and communication. When I first came to work at this large research university, I experienced culture shock as I realized that more emphasis appeared to be placed on faculty and graduate research than on undergraduate instruction. This puzzled me because large public universities educate most of our undergraduates. How can we fulfill our educational mandate effectively if undergraduates are not prioritized?

I was at the ACRL 2011 National Conference this past weekend. One of the programs I attended was an invited paper titled, “The Librarian as Situated Educator” by Char Booth. She made two points that I found important.

1.    We as librarians are experiencing a collective identity crisis. We need to identify and clearly demonstrate who we are to ourselves and others.

2.    Instruction is not just a “what”. It is also a “how” and a “why”.

I agree with Booth that our central role as librarians is that of educators. I also believe, given the comments I heard asking why we should care about undergraduates, that we need to explain the “why” of instruction not only to faculty but also to our colleagues.

A recurring theme from the programs that I attended at ACRL was that we as librarians have unique skills that enable us to fill in critical gaps in student education. As Karen Nicholson stated at a panel on Embedded Librarianship, librarians do not need to stop being librarians; they need to learn to use their skills more effectively.

So, why should we care about undergraduates and why should most public service librarians be involved in undergraduate instruction?

1.    The University of California and other state institutions have a mandate to educate their citizens. This means undergraduates (most people will not go on to graduate school).

2.    It may be an oft repeated theme, but today’s undergraduates are our future leaders. We need leaders who can think and communicate well.

3.    A quality undergraduate education also supports the health of graduate programs. We need graduate students and faculty who can think, research and teach.

4.    Unfortunately, students are not learning sufficient writing, research and information literacy skills in K-12.  Detrimental factors include the emphasis on teaching to high-stakes tests, a reduction in the amount and length of writing required, and the elimination of teacher-librarian positions.  University librarians need to help fill in the gaps.

5.    Many professors feel they don’t have the time to teach critical thinking and research or do not realize that their students lack these skills.

6.    Librarians are naturally suited to filling this role.

7.    Building relationships and collaborating with faculty to enhance undergraduate education helps prove the library’s value to campus administration.

I confess that when I first started out as a librarian I believed that it was the faculty’s job to teach critical thinking and writing. I now realize that I have an important role to play in this area. It’s time to stop focusing so narrowly on the library and to reach out and help faculty develop a more comprehensive and sophisticated level of information and academic literacy in our students.

References of interest (I didn’t have time to do as much searching as I would have liked):

Booth, C. (March 2011). The Librarian as Situated Educator: Instructional Literacy and Participation in Communities of Practice. Invited paper, ACRL 2011 National Conference, Philadelphia, PA.

Burrow, G., Lockerby, R., Getty, N. & Uyeki, E. C. (March 2011). Engaging Faculty, Creating Allies: A Declaration of Interdependenc. Panel, ACRL 2011 National Conference, Philadelphia, PA.

Colgoni, A., Godfrey, K., & Nicholson, K. (March 2011). Building Relationships through Embedded Librarianship. Panel. ACRL 2011 National Conference, Philadelphia, PA.

McCarthey, S. J. (2008). The Impact of No Child Left Behind on Teachers’ Writing Instruction. Written Communication, 25 (4), 462-505. doi: 10.1177/0741088308322554.

Murphy, S. (2008). Some Consequences of Writing Assessment. In A. Havnes and L. McDowell (Eds.), Balancing Dilemmas in Assessment and Learning in Contemporary Education. New York: Routledge.

8:30-10:30 am — Shaping Reference discussion. The reference departments got together and talked about where we want our reference services to go. What are we doing? Is it working? What can we do better? And this is assuming no growth–we have to make do with what we have.

Ideas included merging service points, making the reference desk more visible, streamlining digital reference (we provide reference services in a lot of different ways–they don’t always sync well), embedded librarians/marketing (librarian contact info on syllabi, course management system, etc), going where the students are…

Very interesting discussion. There will be a followup sometime re: whether and how we want to implement any of these ideas.

10:30 — prep for Librarian Association at the University of California, Irvine (LAUC-I) Executive Board meeting. As ALC chair, I am on it.

11-12 pm — LAUC-I Exec Bd

12-1 pm — Catch up with email. Send reminder of Law Librarian panel for tomorrow. Schedule video conferencing equipment since some staff will be at the medical library (in a different town).  Send email to committee telling them that we have more $$  for refreshments for the program (yay!) Eat lunch. Prep for next meeting.

1-2 p–Collections Coordinating Committee (CCC) meeting. I am member at large this year. Discussed pilot for new weeding procedures, graphs to show collections fund expenditures, etc. Ended early (meeting was scheduled to go until 4 pm).

2 pm — More catch up in office.

3 pm–Cover desk shift for colleague who is out sick. Answer two questions (where is the stapler?)

4 pm–Following up on idea from this morning’s discussion, I look up the class schedules for my departments and plot them in Google Calendar. I wanted to see if there were blank spots that might work well for office hours. Since my departments are language departments, half the day is filled up with intro language classes taught by grad students. The other half of the day is classes for upper level undergrads and grad students. Hmm…Office hours would have to be either at the crack of dawn or very late afternoon. Will have to think about it.

5:45 pm — All done at work and off to yoga!

I didn’t keep a minute by minute account of my day, so it’s not quite as detailed as some of the posts I’ve seen others write.

10:15 am–arrived at office after a morning appointment. Opened AIM (used for internal communications), email, Oracle calendar & Firefox. Reviewed emails.

10:30–sent confirmation emails & requests for a short summary to librarians presenting at our August 4 All-Reference Training session. Put in IT workticket to add a program to the classroom computers so a presenter can show us ArcGIS Online.

11:00–Talked with colleague about renewal decision for institutional membership in LAMP (Latin American Microfilm Project). Determined what information was needed to make final decision.

11:30–Reviewed RSS feeds & emails. Miscellaneous tasks.

1 pm–Met with the Academic Librarianship Committee I am chairing this year. Discussed a panel we hosted on getting involved in professional associations for our staff who are in library school. Coordinated final tasks for Thursday’s lunch-time program introducing our new law librarian. Made plans to solicit librarians to serve as mentors to prospective & current library school students and early career librarians.

1:15–wow. that was a short meeting. Did some odds and ends in office. Can’t remember what I did after that.

2:30-3:30–time for a very late lunch.

3:30–Revised annual plan draft

3:45–Reviewed LAMP holdings lists and the VDX ILL request reports to get more info for decision-making. Love new ILL reports! We have been trying to get those for ages. Can now see what our departments are requesting. Highlighted requests by department using different colors so I can sort them out later.

5–Looked at list of participants for Library Day in the Life and added some to Google Reader. Started writing my post.

5:30–post done. Time to wrap up for the day and go to yoga class. More tomorrow!

One of the leaders of this project is Bobbi Newman, otherwise known as Librarian by Day. She explains how to participate here.

I’ll be blogging my days for a full week since my daily activities vary.

The tag for this year’s conference: #ala10. Use for Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Use ALA mobile to get conference info on the run courtesy of Boopsie .

You can also get help from an ALA ambassador by texting 66746. Type in ALA followed by your question.

It’s great to see more flexible options for getting information at ALA. I’m also excited by the prospect of attempting to follow conference events & discussions using twitter. I haven’t done it before so there will be a bit of a learning curve

My thinking combines both idealism and pragmatism–hence the title “The Pragmatic Philosopher”.  I like the traditional idea of the library as place and the librarian as a teacher and information expert. At the same time, am also excited about the promise of new technologies, changing paradigms, and innovations in scholarly communication.

I am, however, also a pragmatist. I look for the reality of the situation and seek achievable solutions to the problems that we inevitably encounter as we attempt to serve the needs of our users, respond to difficult budget situations, and determine who and what we want to be.

Please join me as I ponder the present and future of librarianship.

This blog contains my thoughts about timely library-related issues and trends, as well as subjects I am researching. It will focus on an examination of the current evolution of librarianship–what is essential, what is peripheral, and what is to come.

My thinking combines both idealism and pragmatism–hence the title “The Pragmatic Philosopher”.  I like the traditional idea of the library as place and the librarian as a teacher and information expert. At the same time, am also excited about the promise of new technologies, changing paradigms, and innovations in scholarly communication.

I am, however, also a pragmatist. I look for the reality of the situation and seek achievable solutions to the problems that we inevitably run into as we attempt to serve the need of our users, respond to difficult budget situations, and determine who and what we want to be.

Please join me as I ponder the present and future of librarianship.