Episode 566: What Would Be An Ideal Library Curriculum?

And Mark and Jack were to look into the matter of the puppets.

Jack, have you ever made puppets before?

No.

Where should we start?

The library.

Mark knows very well how to use the card catalog. Mark didn't know any names of books he might want or the authors, so he just looked for the subject card puppets. And he was surprised to see how many different books the library had on the subject. One book sounded especially good, so Mark made a note of the call number. This number shows where the book is on the shelves. It seemed to Mark that the call number of a book on the shelf was very much like a house address on a street.

You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock n' roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the studio with Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens, and that thing that Jack found. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it.

And today's show is called What Would Be An Ideal Library Curriculum? What should the library teach? What classes should we offer?

I got that. That's easy. Basic, intermediate, and advanced podcasting.

I think I should have been clearer. I meant what would be ideal for our students?

Young people love podcasts, Marlee. MARLEE GIVENS: Help me out, Fred.

He's right as far as I know. Kids love the podcasts. I don't if I can help. We've never discussed an ideal anything on this show as far as I can remember.

Oh, you mean we've never allowed ourselves to dream?

I can tell by the way you're saying it that you know it goes against our usual measured, rational, dare I say pessimist tone, Fred. But let's try new things. Let's see how we like this.

I don't know, but OK. Our songs today are about being prepared, trying to find the ideal, and meeting learners where they are. Because getting the attention of a student is not an easy thing. So let's start with a song about trying to grab the attention of college kids. This is "Hey Student!" by The Fall right here on Lost in the Stacks.

That was "Hey Student!" "Hey Student!" by The Fall.

You're going to get it through the head.

This is Lost in the Stacks. And today we're posing the question, what would be an ideal library curriculum? We are all instructors in this room delivering one shot sessions in other faculty's classes or teaching our own credit bearing classes or hosting workshops, sometimes even doing one on one good old information literacy.

So if we could design the perfect set of classes for the library to offer as if we were an academic department, like English or math.

Those are some old school academic departments.

Dare to dream there, right? What would we teach.

Well, one way to approach the subject is as an instructional designer. So I would start by asking, what do our students need to know?

Who would we ask though? Because I think it's a different answer whomever you ask. Because if I go to a library orientation class for a professor, they're like, just tell them how to find stuff. And I always feel nervous about finding the right level of sophistication. Because I don't want to go in and essentially say so you type the book that you need into the search box, which is what I feel like I'm doing a lot of times.

Some of that is students take notes about anything and everything no matter what even if they know it. Because the first mind says, this is going to be on the test. CHARLIE BENNETT: Right, right, right. I think it also depends on what kind of experience the professor had when they were learning how to use a library or getting skills from a library.

Nice.

Possibly true. Yeah.

But I don't know. I've never taught a class and asked the professor, what was your experience when you were a student learning things from the library? I've always just asked, what do you want these students in your class to know?

Yeah. And usually that is answered with, they need to be able to find primary sources. Well, no, not primary sources. They need to be able to find peer reviewed sources. I want them to be able to get a book. People still say get a book even though no one does. And I want them to figure out how to do a basic research question. That's usually the three undergrad requirements. That sound right?

Yeah. And how to cite properly. CHARLIE BENNETT: And how to cite. And then for grad students, it's kind of just implicit. They need to be able to do research. They need to be actually able to access journals, technical reports, and follow a trail of citations. Basically web of science.

I have been told when giving instruction to specifically graduate students by the professor that was organizing it, she said this was a group of aerospace graduate students. Not making a generalization here, but so it's a serious curriculum, academically rigorous.

Some of them are rocket scientists.

Literally yes. But the professor, she said, don't assume that they know anything. Start at ground 0. Don't assume that they learned anything as an undergrad. Start at ground 0.

I've heard that a couple of times too and it really, it throws me for a loop.

So sometimes the grad students come to me and usually they say, I've been asked to write a literature review and I've never done that before.

Yeah. That's a pretty new-- that's a pretty standard new experience for grad students. Yeah.

And sometimes the answer is I say, well, OK, I would start with Psycinfo. And they're like, what is that? They've never heard of some of the specialist databases before because when they were undergraduates, all they used was JSTOR or maybe Academic Search Complete.

Yeah, or Google Scholar.

Or Google Scholar, yeah.

So when I had someone ask me recently about educational outcomes and they said, I've looked all over and I can find a bunch of federal and maybe even state level, but I need city level. And I said, well, the ERIC database. This is the way you could do the search. Assuming that the ERIC, the educational literature database, was where they started. And the answer was, oh, thank you. I didn't know about ERIC. So there's being able to parse which arena to search in. There's another thing they need.

He's dreaming a dream.

Dreaming a dream where librarians know exactly what they need to teach for the audience prepared to receive it.

Wow.

I had a thought and then started to listen to what you were saying and so I've kind of detoured a little bit.

Got it.

Is that skills of-- is that set of skills, searching databases, is that all they need in information literacy? Do they need more in information literacy?

I did want to point out the disconnect. So our profession is now defining information literacy as a set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning. And I don't think we quite get there.

I have a shorthand for that. That's the find it, judge it, make it model. Students need to be able to find the information they need. They need to be able to judge it, whether they can use it or not. And then they need to be able to make it themselves later.

And I always get the impression that our colleagues out in other libraries are actually reaching the point of getting critical about the sources and sort of leading their students through critical analysis. And I just, I don't ever get to do that here.

That may be where we're falling down. I mean, I talk about radar sometimes, but we'll talk about that later.

Yeah. Well, this is Lost in the Stacks. We'll be back with more about the ideal library curriculum after a music set.

File this set under LC 239.v363. That sounds like a good neighborhood.

That was "Classroom" by Beach Youth and before that "On The Spines Of Old Cathedrals" by Shrag. Those are songs about meeting learners where they happen to be.

This is Lost in the Stacks and today's show is called What Would Be An Ideal Library Curriculum.

Well, I think we got as far as talking about what would be one part of an ideal library.

The information literacy part.

The information literacy part. That's our favorite thing to talk about too, I think, as librarians. So since we've been on an AI kick on the show lately, I decided to ask ChatGPT what are typical things that are taught in libraries. So it started out with critical thinking and research skills and citation management, things that we've-- database searching, things that we've already mentioned. Academic integrity. So things like copyright and plagiarism. Fred teaches that.

I do.

Digital literacy. So things like productivity software, collaborating online, evaluating online information, research data management, digital scholarship like digital humanities, publishing library orientation and tours. I know that we all do a little bit of that.

Yes.

All right, it gets harder. Data management and analysis. So things like data cleaning, statistical analysis, compliance with funding agencies. GIS, text and data mining, scholarly communication. This is sounding maybe a little more familiar. But I don't know, Fred, are you still finding an opportunity to teach things like open access and author rights?

There's not a lot of demand for someone to come into a class and talk about author rights or really even copyright. Copyright I get some occasional one on one consultation. But for classroom, not often.

Yeah. And then things that I think were-- I mean, research impact metrics, I actually teach a class on that. I had one student in that class this week.

Because it's a drop in workshop.

It's a drop in workshop. Yeah. Data visualization, grant writing, research ethics and integrity, and emerging technologies.

So if we take ChatGPT at its word.

Oh, let's not do that.

This is what it's read the most out in the world. This is not it making stuff up because it thinks libraries should teach this. It's found other people writing this is what we think we should teach. So in a lot of ways, this is probably the librarian profession's image of the ideal library curriculum.

Showing it projected back to our-- reflected back to ourselves.

Because it's all been ingested and then it's been, I won't make any awful metaphors, and it's been returned to us in this list. I wonder if you could get it to say what people think the library should teach and then have it parse that way. Because I don't know that the ideal library--

You're right. This definitely sounds like it comes from what librarians feel like libraries should teach. CHARLIE BENNETT: They should teach. I think the ideal library curriculum comes from a sort of a three act structure basically of dealing with the library. How do you find something in it? How do you use what you find? And how do you make something that can go back into the library? And then everything else falls into that.

Fred just laughed. But the reasons that those are the ways that you evaluate a source or why or how. You could do a class on that. I mean, like a credit hour class on that.

I feel like those are topics that we kind of impose on the people that we're going in to teach with--

Imposed. Explain that a little bit more.

Well, OK, so they'll come to us and they say, I need you just to teach my students about the library. And then I say, well, would you like for me to teach them about peer review and how to evaluate sources? And they're like, sometimes I get a positive response to that, and sometimes I'm like, no, no, no, I'll handle that.

I'll talk about my job. Thank you. You just tell them how to use the library.

We get hung up sometimes on that word imposition that you use. We get hung up on imposing that, especially the getting back to information literacy. We like to say, well, I'm a librarian. I can tell you what a trustworthy, a good source is. And our proxies for that are like, oh, it was published in such and such or it was peer reviewed. But really those measurements of whether something is trustworthy or not are just as problematic as getting a [INAUDIBLE].

I mean, you've got 45 minutes to cover all this stuff and you're really just trying to help them get one article to put on their bibliography.

So we're looking at it as like we're just going to do this service. We're not going to be the English department or the math department. We're going to give you a service. CHARLIE BENNETT: So I think I hear one aspect of the ideal library curriculum, which is that it's more than 45 minutes and that we're allowed to explore a lot of the topics that mostly we get asked to introduce in a informal language.

Yeah. You're listening to Lost in the Stacks. We will talk more about the ideal library curriculum on the left side of the hour.

OK. I've got it. All right. I'm Snowden Becker. I'm an archivist who's worked with everything from film and home movies to bricks and pieces of bedsprings. And you're listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta.

MARLEE GIVENS: Today's show is called What Would Be An Ideal Library Curriculum? We are, as I put it earlier, allowing ourselves to dream today. But the reality is many libraries are working with limited resources to provide a library curriculum, ideal or not. At the Association for College and Research Libraries Conference earlier this year, three librarians discussed the human cost of library instruction given the dubious quality of studies showing how effective it is. As they put it.

One shot library instruction, whether for first year students or other audiences, is a labor intensive undertaking warranting strong evidence in favor of its impact to justify its expense. The existing body of research suggests that the effort returns little meaningful impact for the cost of the investment.

And while I am wary of saying the word cost on the noncommercial radio station.

FCC rules.

I don't want us to forget that so much of what we want to do instruction wise is costly, whether it's providing bespoke guest lectures that require research and development or creating new instruction in emerging technologies, which requires hiring additional experts or developing our existing faculty. Will we stretch ourselves so thin that one day we snap? And while we think about that, we'll listen to some music. You can file this set under HQ799.5.S36.

That was "Willing To Learn" by Tower Of Power, a song about preparing yourself to learn.

This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show is called What Would Be An Ideal Library Curriculum? As academic librarians, what should we be teaching?

Well, I think we should be optimistic. So let's think big. Our institutions have asked us to contribute increasingly to student success. So how do we meet this challenge? What makes our students successful?

So this is optimistically big picture. Well, I think we have to teach the use of the library and the recovery and use of information as a process that you can reflect upon and create new forms of rather than a step by step instruction that needs to be delivered once to freshmen or new grad students.

I think in that model, we're focusing less on what we think the students should know and more on what the faculty that we're presumably working for here in the library, what they want.

Yeah. The reduction of the library to a process that you have to go through to get what you need as opposed to the source and the workspace and arena of thinking that goes around finding, storing, creating, and disseminating academic knowledge. That's the thing we're fighting. And it does not help, as we were saying off air, it does not help that most everybody just thinks, well, libraries have books, right? Where are the books? How do I find a book? Which is no longer relevant.

Well, what I want to ask is why do you need a book? Because I think that most students, the only answer to that is because my professor told me to get a book.

There's one other answer, which is for sentimental reasons.

I don't know about today's students if that's what they're thinking. CHARLIE BENNETT: Well, that's what the older folks want a book. That's the parents of our students when they say, how do I find a book? It's a sentimental attachment to their form of learning.

When a student needs some sort of information that a professor did not directly tell them go and get an article or go and find a book, when they come to the library just on their own information seeking mission, the library becomes more like another content source that is available in their galaxy of content sources. That's just one amongst a constellation.

Almost just another website you can end up on when you're doing your searches. Yeah. So a lot of times when people think about learning how the internet works or how things are stored and then delivered on the internet, what they're thinking about is computer science or computer engineering. What's the process? How do you store it? How do you keep things cool enough? How do you write the code?

I don't know. You could look at it as the library is part of that information tsunami. It's part of that storm. It's just another wave in that storm.

Optimism, Fred.

Oh yeah, sorry, we agreed on optimism.

We'll have another show later called "You're all Doomed".

Marlee, I'm throwing it to you.

OK, OK. Well getting back to being optimistic, and if we really are-- part of the optimism is we are going to bring in these students to learn what we want to teach them. How far do we go? Do we actually build it as a curriculum that they earn credit for? Do we assess them on their skills?

So it's ideal though, right? This is the ideal library curriculum. It has to be something that you do assess their ability to reflect upon the process as participants but then also as critiquers and eventual redesigners of the process of the library, which is just-- somebody once described Steely Dan as this parade that sort of comes out of the distance and it's full of things and clowns and guitars and all that and it kind of passes you and you see the whole thing happen.

I wouldn't want to speculate on what's in a physics curriculum. I would have no clue. But also I want to say that I followed your metaphor as it applies to libraries. I didn't follow it as it applies to Steely Dan. But that's beside the point.

It's just from a review I read one time. It's what came to mind. But if I hadn't said it, I would have been stuck with that thought in my head the whole time.

But I get it as this parade of things that's just reacting to what's around it. And I do feel like libraries are very reactive. What we're doing is accommodating the current academic landscape. And oh gosh, we're supposed to be optimistic.

No, we're supposed to be pessimistic. Go with it.

I'm veering again. Since I have been an academic librarian starting in 2012, I was in the corporate world before then, academic libraries have-- the discussion, I should say, around academic libraries has always been, what are we? Why are we here? What are we for? In a way that I'm not sure that other professions, at least that I'm aware of, discuss their own existence.

Are we a parade of clowns?

I mean, there are certainly some clowns in there. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's built into other fields, the what's our purpose and what are we. That's part of, I mean, that's what science is. Are the principles that we base our hypotheses on, are they correct? Oh, we have information. They're not correct. Let's change them and move forward. I mean, obviously I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

Getting back to-- I know we've only got like a minute left.

Kill it Fred, take it down.

Getting back to your comment about teaching for credit. We've talked about should the library be an academic department on the level of the School of Chemistry or whatever other examples we had. Teaching these skills, library skills, as a four credit class does seem kind of overkill to me. Does it not to you? Or were you posing that as something that maybe we should consider.

One time, Fred, I took strength conditioning as a four credit course, which meant I lifted weights for grades. So nothing is overkill. This is Lost in the Stacks. And if I may be so bold on that note, it's time for a music set.

File this set under B823.C74.

I passed that course. I could lift 50 pounds.

That was "Tired Of Doing It Right" by Glen Iris. CHARLIE BENNETT: I am sold on them. I am good to go.

Atlanta's own.

And before that, "The Ideal" by Bing Selfish. Songs about trying to live up to the ideal and maybe not quite getting there.

Today's show is called What Would Be An Ideal Library Curriculum? And ideals by design or are impossible to meet, but they are targets to strive for. I'm constantly adjusting my targets and I don't always check to see where I am in relation to past goals. But let's do it anyway. Back in our January WTF show. CHARLIE BENNETT: What's The Future? Yeah. We set some goals for 2023. And I think it's time for a six month check in. CHARLIE BENNETT: This is terrible.

Oh man, I had to go back and look at the transcripts.

And I saw that my resolution was to pick up the guitar more. I'd been kind of slacking on that. And I continued to slack on that. If anything, I might have picked it up less.

I hope you plug in tonight, man.

I know. It's awful.

Charlie?

It was I was doing push ups and sit ups every morning. And I have continued doing that. And in fact--

Well done.

I checked to see how many I could do this morning. And it's still a low number, but it's higher than it was.

That's all that counts. CHARLIE BENNETT: And what was yours? I am happy to report that I have, in fact, made one meatball recipe per month.

Still just the best resolution ever.

Yep.

Well, I guess two out of three ain't bad. CHARLIE BENNETT: It's never too bad. That's a great batting average. I guess we'll just roll the credits.

CHARLIE BENNETT: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library. Written and produced by me, Charlie Bennett, with Fred Rascoe and Marlee Givens.

Legal counsel and a Steely Dan parade were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. CHARLIE BENNETT: Thank you, Philip.

I would attend that parade. I don't really like parades. Special thanks to librarians and archivists everywhere who are giving it their all in the classroom to everybody who's thinking about that next class. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.

Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us and tell us what you think of Steely Dan.

Yeah. Next week's show, we'll pull back the curtain on journal editing and publisher shenanigans.

Oh no.

Time for our last song today. Librarians are always looking for ways to keep their instruction fresh and relevant. So let's close with a song about reinventing ourselves in order to do the best with the skills we have. This is "Skills Like This" by Guided By Voices. Have a great weekend, everybody.