There is one component of the game that has character cards in alphabetical order. One of my (librarian) friends joked about how unfair it was to expect him to alphabetize. His wife quipped back that he should organize them in call number order by their professions. Then we debated Dewey or LC. He said since it was my game not his, we should do LC. (He’s in publics.) Yay librarian geeks!

But then as more and more ecards and emails arrived in my inbox I started to assume maybe they were legitimate. I still thought it was really odd that Wednesday would be the day everyone would decide to send me well wishes, but eventually, once I started clicking on the ecards, one of them spilled the beans that my family had organized a virtual shower for me. I’ve moved around a lot since undergrad and my family knew that I was sad that so many of my friends from around the country couldn’t join me for my celebration. So the afternoon was spent reading the emails and ecards that had been streaming in all day.

Then I prepped some home-made cinnamon rolls (from scratch!) for our Saturday morning breakfast and headed out to the airport to pick up my partner.

In May I moved from Austin to Minneapolis with my partner. I won’t be starting at Normandale Community College until August, so we decided this would be the year we could finally go to GenCon. (He’s been before, but I haven’t.) We also decided that would make a good honeymoon, so let’s set the wedding for just before then. So this week I am at my parents’ in Pennsylvania helping to prepare.

Today I enjoyed my favorite salt bagels for breakfast while lounging around with my mom and dad. Then we drove the 45 minutes in to town to stop at Costco (we’re bad with crowds, so this was stressful), the mall (my mom was just tickled pink with the makeup tutorial we got at Sephora), and Whole Foods to get various supplies for the party/reception which we’ll have at their house.

We got home and all retreated to our rooms for an hour to rest and recover from all the activity.

The evening was full of  dinner, fruit, drawing arrow signs and the the Sy-Fy network.

When they started making the videos, they weren’t sure who they were for, and it’s become clear, they’re for librarians. This is their first library conference.

An aside – it was really weird hearing him talk since I’m so used to playing the videos when I’m teaching. He sounds just like himself. And it’s disconcerting.

After the initial viral success, they found their market was really educators.

People ask him if they can use his videos. YES. They’re on youtube so you can use them.

They begin with a script.

He’s the face, but wants us to know Sachi does a lot and doesn’t get enough credit.

From the script they move to thumbnails.

Then make images.

Listed software that he uses.

A picture of the setup.

Just months after their first video they were contacted by Google.

Google Docs can do most of the same things a regular doc does, but approaches it from a different mental model.

Discussion of getting over a mental model hump.

Docs live on your computer and if you want to share you email it.

GDocs lives on the web and that’s a different mental model.

Shows the Google Docs video.

It’s more about changing the idea about documents than a step by step explanation of features.

Explanation is a communication skill. ppt, teaching, dinner conversation, it’s all a skill.

What is an explanation? A package of ideas designed to illuminate.

The ultimate goal is to make  people care.

Their videos aren’t click here, etc. But if you can make people care, they’ll be motivated to learn the features. 

Stories are effective.

Example of walking under ladders. Saying don’t do it  is confrontational and controlling (even if it’s a good idea). Saying it’s bad luck changes perspective.

Connected to story is empathy and emotional response.

Forumla – person in pain, they feel this way – this solves the pain – now they feel like this.

Be succinct. 2-3 big points. It seems like comprehensiveness would be good, but diminishing returns.

Their videos are about 3 minutes long, 500 words.

Another big point is connections. Find a connection to something they already know and understand. Compare it. This is like this. This gives them confidence.

Capper point = context.

Need a world around the details to make the details make sense. Forrest first, then trees.

When he started putting this presentation together he realized he didn’t know that much about libraries and their current reality. So he put a poll out to his website and twitter. Thanked people who replied.

What is the current perception of libraries for people who haven’t been involved? Keeping people quiet, card catalogs, quiet place, now that we have search engines maybe libraries not as valuable.

Libraries have evolved. Gateway and a guide to info and media vs. a warehouse for books.

Call to action would be – take another look.

So what connections could we make?

Librarians as an even better search engine. Accessing all the stuff that search engines can’t do.

Moving to empathy – what story do we tell?

A smart guy with preconceived notions of libraries, hasn’t been there in 10 years, but starting to get interested in them again.

He goes in and is surprised by what he sees.

Wraps up these ideas into a story.

Tells the story of Bob who lost his job, has been searching online and feeling overwhelmed. Goes into library, finds helpful librarian.

Questions:

How do you make money, who are your competitors?

Part of their business has been custom videos (like Google).
There will be a subscription site in the future.

How long do videos take?

The longest part is the script. Storyboard a day or so. Shooting = 4-6 hours. If they had to do it in 3 days, they probably could. But usually have several going at once.

How do you explain things that don’t work well?

The idea of making someone care, build interest. Screencasts are good at showing process.

Have you been commissioned by any libraries to explain to their boards?

We have not worked with libraries. (Let’s go ALA, get on this.)

What audio software do you use?

Garageband. They have a room covered in quilts where they record.

What was your inspiration for Common Craft and what’s your background?

Neither have an education in education.

Sachi has an MBA and a degree in microbiology. Missed what his was.

He worked as a consultant helping people understand online communities. He felt like the technologists were doing all the explaining and they weren’t very good at it.

Question about making a video for plagiarism.

Lee mentioned their online reputation video. Also said plagiarism is on their to do list back home.

Have you ever abandoned a video because it was too hard to explain?

They were going to do one on the financial crisis, but it was changing too often.

Question about subscription service, will there still be free versions?

They’ve moved away from using YouTube. They will continue to have the watermarked versions for free on their website.

(didn’t see slides online, but he has a toolkit available)

The person doing the introduction said she was impressed by the Rochester presentation last year and the woman saying there was a 5% budget cut across the college, but not the library because they were so impressed with what they were doing.

Presenter – Andrew Asher – Lead Research Anthropologist for the ERIAL Project.

What do students really do when they are assigned a research project for class?

Mixed method approach with 9 data collection techniques. Largest ethnnographic study in a library to date. Library anthropology is a young field – 2004 at Rochester was first.

Ethnography is the art and science of describing a group, culture, or social process.

Slide with cycle/visual representation of ethnographic process. They developed a toolkit on their website.

Discussion of specific methods.

Elicitation methods – mapping diary. Gave students campus and library map. Had them mark where they went and put times and notes on back. Noticed on commuter campuses students spent hours traveling. Can target them with podcasts. On campuses where students live on campus, used library a ton, and not just for research related purposes, also to use the vending machine, printing, hanging out, etc.

Photo survey. Pictures are used as a prompt to get students to talk about their daily process.

Cognitive maps. Had them switch pens every 2 minutes, to track when they drew things. Students often couldn’t render the library space accurately. Told them some things about how they might redesign the space. The things that were absent were often as telling as the things present. Almost no students drew in the librarians (this was a library that doesn’t staff the ref desk). Did usually identify the places they could get help (the desks). Computer areas and group study spaces were the most identified. Good way to recruit students for other studies.

Retrospective research method – drawing out the steps from when they got an assignment til the end.

Interviews are the bread and butter of qualitative research.

Showed a video clip.

Highlights issues with evaluating resources. The go to place is Google. Had a hard time understanding what to do with information they found and how to interpret it.

JStor was getting the most use.  Why was it so popular? What was it doing that was working for students? And how can we use that in instruction? It searches full text and covers many topics.

Observational interviews. Research process interviews.

Example of a student struggling to find a video – minor gap in her knowledge, inadequate help at 3 different service points, and failure of signage.

Service Implications:

• simple: additional directional signage, adding maps into catalog.
• more complex: common basic service requirements for all service points, increased training for student employees

Audience question on IRBs. Presenter offered to share verbiage that had worked for him. Much depends on whether your IRB is familiar with this type of research.

Do you think your student persisted just because she was on camera? A: Not as much as you’d think. Students would give up very easily. One link wouldn’t work and they would move on. After the first few minutes, students pretty typically fall into patterns he’s pretty sure they’d follow if he wasn’t there.

Some self selection bias – people who are willing to spend 45 minutes with a researcher may or may not be different from the general public.

I asked if students asked researcher questions as they struggled or got angry at being watched fail.

Some did, and you just have to say, “Do it how you’d do it if I weren’t here.”

Mostly students were confident and didn’t ask. Only one got really angry. In some cases after the interview, we’d explain how things worked.

Question about using students to videotape. Privacy issues. Also, steep learning curve for how to do this type of questioning. Needs a lot of practice.

The fact that students call it a search engine instead of a database tells you about how they perceive information to be organized.

Second section of talk: How to organize this type of research.

Timing – it will take longer than you think. Good rule of thumb, however long you think it will take – double it.

Need to think through scope and number of activities. Plan time for the time it takes to schedule interviews and data analysis meetings.

Try to clear out your schedule for intensive data collection.

Presented a sample timeline for a small (20-30 interview) study.

Not very expensive to do these studies.

Use screen capture software (e.g. camtasia) rather than video cameras for computer recording.

Check equipment for interoperability and proprietary formats.

Involve people with varying backgrounds, especially useful to interpret data. (e.g. IT, faculty).

Try to keep team to manageable size (6-7 people)

Defining Research Questions

What questions do you want answered? What is  your hypothesis? What could you do if you had this information? What services can you implement?

Borrow methods from other studies, no need to reinvent the wheel. But also feel free to use your own methods if necessary.

$10-$15 is the range for paying to get students to participate.

Encourages us to not just view IRB as a hurdle. Helps you focus purpose, method, risks and use of data.

Much harder to work with people under 18. Ask age up front!

Transcription is more difficult and tedious than people think. Hiring a professional or experienced one is best.

Coding. He uses a modified version of grounded theory.

Analysis meetings. Spent a lot of time co-viewing videos and pointing out what they thought was interesting. Brainstorming and suggesting new hypotheses.

Mental Mapping.

Master list of proposed service changes. Generated lists over the course of the project (approx. 6 months)

Ranked the changes for importance and feasibility with a simple 1-3 scale.

Links to erialproject.org – includes more information about results. Feel free to email him. They have a book coming out, Summer 2011 – College Libraries and Student Culture.

twitter @aasher, #AnthroLib

slides (pdf)

Megan is always fun to watch. She knows and cares about her stuff. Most of the places where my notes below go scarce had detailed slides that I knew she’d have available online, so I stopped typing.

She talked about the evidence based librarianship cycle and several other similar cycles that all share the same idea of reflecting on info to make decisions.

The slide had an example question.

Good questions should have PICO: population, intervention, comparison, outcome.  or SPICE: setting, perspective, intervention, comparison, evaluation.

After formulating your question, go look for evidence. Use library databases – education abstract and full text, ABI, etc. Articles may not be tilted to librarianship, but still usable. e.g. – huge amount of info about serving homebound. Also, ISI web of knowledge, web of science.

Databases are not the only place to start. Lots of good info available from Google. For her: 60% from databases, 10-15% from open web, rest from calling people “do you know anyone who’s doing this?”

There’s a lot of variation in keywords across varying platforms. We give things cute titles that have little to do with the content of the article, especially school libraries. Academics have cute title then a colon. Regular librarianship doesn’t use as many structured abstracts. Authors often cut and paste some of the introduction as opposed to laying out question and findings.

We don’t tend to index enough of our stuff. TLA, ACRL, ALA, all not indexed. The work that we do in librarianship is not published, so it’s harder to find out about it.

Lists some top journals for finding evidence. Informal evidence also good.

Importance of documentation – write it down. More convincing to take to decision makers.

LIS faculty have research agendas – notice where there are gaps in the literature.

Chastising people sitting on their data. If you’ve collected evidence – please write it up or present it.

Evidence – what makes for good or bad? phrase = critical apppraisal.

Is it a valid and reliable study? valid – getting at what it’s trying to get at, reliable – consistant

They don’t know if they know – stop asking them (students). Look at their work. The best thing is the artifact of their learning.  (Studies show the more we know the less we think we know and the less we know the more we think we know.)

True random control studies are hard in academia – you have to withhold education from someone. Use the type of study that makes the most sense for answering your question.

Studies show f2f and online instruction are basically equal.

Academic librarians are assessing and analysing, but self reporting that they’re not then using it to make changes.

Thought exercise – think about a piece of evidence or data you know to be true about your library and how you could use it in a way you aren’t currently.

Megan talks to lots of top administrators who say, “I love libraries, but tell me what to  say when the science department wants a new lab to do research to maybe cure cancer, facilities want a parking lot so students can get to campus – what do I say to them?” Lots of libraries are saying, “I don’t know”

Take the action. If you have data you can use it.

Evaluate impact. It’s ok to use assessment data to stop doing something. In order to do something new you have to stop something.

Some places stop doing overdue fines – measured how much time they spend vs. results.

Apply at 4 levels -

One level is course integrated instruction – e.g. one shot, usually reactive to assignment.

Many librarians try to teach the entirety of an MLS degree in 50 minutes.

There are many theories of learning styles – kolb, gardner, cognitive styles, modalities, cultural diversity, affective styles, physiological states

There is a tremendous amount of evidence of how people learn – librarians ignore it – we’re ignoring it right now by lecturing.

Idea of scaffolding - looked at 1st semester, 1st year students – 95% were required to use articles and websites. slide shows rest.

Does that tell you that you can just teach books in the first year? No. Most needed multiple types of sources.

When you look at the evidence you have to make adjustments.

EBP at the Program Level
EBP with an Institutional Perspective

Value of Academic Libraries Report
student enrollment, retention and graduation rates
nice summary on the slides

Low hanging fruit – we have these detailed reports from business databases – are we putting those in the hands of students going on job interviews? Why not? (partner with career center to reach students)

Many micro studies, we need things that are more ambitious

Report also lays out research agenda.

We should be making our decisions based on evidence. It can be hard.

How am I making decisions now? Some reasons why libraries aren’t evidence based.

Biases common to libraries (see slide)

Points out that the cycle looks like the IL/research cycle. It’s what we’re asking students to do – maybe we need to be doing it too.

Last slide links to bibliography.

-

Questions from audience

How do you find out whether the library used the evidence?

They write an article or present.

Next up my co-presenter for tomorrow shows up and we go over our slides and arrangements for getting there tomorrow. Get an email from the organizer of our session with some more logistics and her phone number.

Get a call from a colleague about a book that could go in either of our fund areas. Sounds like we might both get a few copies.

A coworker stops in with a question about our new email software and I help her out.

I make the changes to the presentation that we talked about during our prep (just adding a slide and looking up a statistic comparison). Then I download from gdocs to ppt because we won’t have internet. I tweak the presentation and save again to ppt, pptx, odp, and pdf. I look up an ECAR comparison so I’ll have it handy. I print my speaker notes for the handful of pages I want to remember specific points for. I put the gdoc up on this site. I make a note to reread my article on the project so my favorite main points will be fresh in my mind. I pack up my business cards to take tomorrow.

Lunch!

Place an order for a faculty request and another to replace two damaged dvds. That turns into a mystery since I had been told the dvds don’t play, but it seems they do (at least on a computer). Apparently a patron had declared them lost, stripped all the ACC barcodes and stickers, then returned them to the book drop. I hand them off to our Senior Library Assistant to check them in our dvd player. He reports back that they seem to play fine. They’re good titles, so I decide to keep them for our campus and order new for the campus that asked me to get them replacements.

Read some book review emails.

Pose for a staff picture.

Ref Desk!

Questions include: textbooks, history 1301 book report, helping with the photocopier, directing students to the reserves area, helping someone copy/paste from word to blackboard – this one was particularly interesting because the teacher had explicitly stated margins and font size, but then asked them to copy/paste into a textbox when uploading the file would have been an option. Help someone with their unofficial transcript – the system doesn’t include the student’s name in the output screen, but it does show their student ID, so I suggested they copy their student ID card into the blank space on the transcript and circle the matching ID numbers.

Highlight moment – I hand a student a copy the History 1301 book report book spreadsheet. “Did you do this yourself?” “I had help.” “Did anyone ask you to do this?” “No.” “Did you get a high five?” “No.”  Then he gives me a high five.

Work on completing the changes to the report I started yesterday. Read my listserv emails. Finalized the changes to the report and sent it off for feedback. Back in the office. Review the staff photos and do some cropping and retouching and send out the changes for voting.

Sent out emails about: procedures for creating our profiles for receiving selection carts from our book vendor, where on the website the report I’ve been working on should be posted, what to do with some damaged books I was asked about, and my lunch choice for the tutoring conference I’m presenting at.

Spend the last little bit of the day working on purchasing in one of my fund areas.

Tomorrow I probably won’t post since I’ll be in San Antonio presenting.

On the desk questions include: textbooks, where are the printers, can I print, need a book for history 1301 book report, need info on Julius Caesar – both the person and the play, and fetched books to send to other campuses. Sometimes if the textbook they want is for English, we can help them find the short story they need to read either in one of our other collections or online.

And background tasks include: email, editing the draft of yesterday’s minutes after questions from someone who had to leave early, printing out copies of the annotated History 1301 reading list that shows which ones we have copies of at my campus, schedule a meeting with my co-presenter to go over our talk, fill out my time sheet and travel reimbursement forms, worked on scheduling a book repair training for circulation staff, saw that the college transfer book display was low again and added some more books.

Lunch!

Back in the office I: Create the new poll for voting for the topic for our next discussion forum and email reference librarians. Updated staff development calendar of events. Work on feedback form of what we like and don’t like about our campus library for new library planning team.

Back on ref. with more of the types of questions above.

In between questions I: Make the changes that the dean requested to my report on our tech survey. Research CC licenses for the report. Finalize that training I’ve been working on coordinating.