11A: Reflection on Class 11-22-16

For our reference warmup, we were asked to find the poverty rates of India, China, Mexico, and the United States. We discovered that it wasn’t very easy to find nor compare because poverty is measured in different ways depending upon the country. Furthermore, what’s considered a family can vary too. In the United States, it’s immediate family whereas in some of the other countries, it also includes the grandparents. Discovering things like this just makes me hate reference even more.

The professor mentioned how Harper Collins had a fight with librarians saying that each ebook could only be checked out 26 times because that’s the print life of a book. Librarians proved that to be untrue. I find this funny how a company is trying to get as much profit as it can. If print books didn’t last long, we wouldn’t have books from the 1400s or even older still intact. What’s the difference between having an ebook that patrons can check out or a print copy? The company gets paid for the one copy, no matter the format.

We talked for a while about “reference is dead.” One thing that was mentioned is that a lot of reference books in public libraries aren’t being used so they are moving them into circulation. That is what we are going to do at my library. We did it a long time ago, where we moved older years of volume sets, and older editions to circulation. That was fun because I had to unlink all of the records so that their status could be changed to main collection while the one copy stayed in reference. But soon we are going to do it again. For years, my boss has been nagging the other reference librarians to go through the collection and pull books, but only a couple have actually done it, but they didn’t really pull a lot though. I think this will be great because there are a lot of books people want to check out, but can’t because they’re part of the reference collection. They can be checked out for 24 hours, but only some librarians will allow this; others won’t.

Reference isn’t and never will be dead; it’s just changing. A lot of librarians are helping patrons with genealogy and ITS help. Libraries are also creating makerspaces. Furthermore, part of reference is customer service. I don’t have a lot of experience with reference, but I have had a lot of customer service training. The other day a patron wanted information on Disney’s company rivals in South Africa. I could not find a single thing, but once I got information from a librarian, I emailed the patron, who thanked me for following up. Also, there are different roles in a library, just because reference librarians never sit at the desk, doesn’t make them less than a reference librarian. The director of our library doesn’t sit at the desk, and our archivist only sits at the desk 2 hours a week. They are still reference librarians, they just have different job duties that are far more important than sitting at the reference desk which can easily be covered by the other librarians. And at least they are doing something, because there are some reference librarians who don’t do their job at all. They don’t want to help patrons, and the patrons know it. I can’t tell you how many times we get phone calls from patrons complaining that the reference librarian wasn’t very willing to help them or they will call and ask if the librarian they talked to is now gone from the desk and someone different is there. This is very poor customer service.

A couple things that the professor mentioned that astonished me was that librarians have unions (I don’t know why this never occurred to me before) and that Oakland County was one of the wealthiest counties in America before Orange County was. The latter is sad. Michigan used to be so great.

11B: Reflection on Readings

“Put Understanding First” by G. Wiggins and J. McTighe was an interesting read. It’s all about how students in school learn how to do things, but they don’t truly understand it nor are able to apply it. It talks about how students always ask and whine about why they have to learn something because they won’t ever use it in the future. The truth is, they will someday down the road. Except for when it comes to math. I gotta say that I haven’t needed any math skills beyond basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division since I got out of high school. The only time I needed to know more than that was when I took the GRE. So in this respect, it is true sometimes that you won’t always use something you learned in the future. Plus, it’s math. History majors don’t need math. This is a long time running joke among history majors, but it actually does ring true.

The article states that the central mission in education is “learning for understanding” and to accomplish this teachers need to be able to help “students (1) acquire important information and skills, (2) make meaning of that content, and (3) effectively transfer their learning to new situations both within school and beyond it” (page 37). Reading about this makes me think of Common Core Math. When I first looked at the math, I couldn’t understand at all what it was doing, and then someone explained it to me. I now get it, but I don’t know if it’s the best way to teach the students. A lot of students don’t get it, and it has caused way more work for them. Common Core Math is pretty much about rounding up to count things. You have 18 items and need to get to 30. Adding 2 makes the item total 20. To get from 20 to 30, you have to add 10. So the answer is 12. 18+12=30. I get the idea, but the work is a lot more than if just do the simple naked math that we were originally taught. Common Core Math is actually how I add and subtract as an adult; I wasn’t taught to do it that way, I just somehow started doing it that way. But I acquired basic skills in how to add and subtract, and then I later transferred that learning to a new way of counting in the future. This is what “learning for understanding” is all about, to see connections in things and to be able to apply them. I’m also reminded of my integrated math classes in high school, specifically integrated math 3. My integrated math classes actually fit in with this “learning for understanding” mission. I remember in the 3^rd class we were learning about revolutions per minute which dealt with the size of a wheel which determined how fast it moved, and for a long time I couldn’t understand it, until the professor explained it by using real world examples such as some kind of car part and a ferris wheel. After reading this article, I now understand what integrated math was all about, but I still hate it.

In the book, “Understanding By Design” by the same authors of the article above, they open up with examples of how students are being taught, but not really learning anything at all that they can actually apply in the real world. One student became valedictorian because he could memorize easily, but didn’t actually understand the material; that his “brain was a way station for material going in one ear and (after the test) out the other.” (page 1). This by no means is a valued way of learning and teaching. I know exactly what the student was talking about because I would study for my Spanish, French, and German vocab tests 10 minutes before the class started, take the test, get an A, and then forget all that I had memorized later that same day or a couple of days after that. Memorization is not absorbing the material and understanding it. So what did I take away from German class? Fluency in the language? Definitely not. I only remember a few vocab words. Pretty much all I can do is count to 10 and I can tell you what parts of speech a word is, but I can’t understand the sentence as a whole. In reality, I learned nothing, but that was my fault for not constantly learning and memorizing the vocab. Another scenario asked how many buses do 1,128 soldiers need if each bus carries 36 soldiers. Students answered with 31 remainder 12. The real answer of course would be 32 buses. I know that I would have done the same answer, because I wouldn’t have understood it to apply it to the real world. In fact, I’m sure I’ve had similar questions and answered them exactly like that.

Reading this book has really caused me to reflect on how I learned in the past. Back in the day, I thrived with school work that required memorization. I was an ace at it. But when it came to hand-on experiments, I floundered. Part of it was because I was (am still?) a perfectionist about stuff and would erase and erase drawings or markings because they weren’t straight even when I used a ruler, and therefore I would be way behind in a craft project. But now? Not only do I see the benefits of hands-on or real world applications (performing an action as a way to learn and understand stays in your memory longer than mere memorization), but I am better at them than I used to be. But I don’t know why.

10B: Reflection on Readings

This week’s readings were about “reference is dead”. Earlier this semester, we read an article about reference dying that was published more than a decade ago. And yet still, librarians are discussing whether or not reference is dead. In my opinion, it’s not dead, it’s just changing and evolving. To be able to help others, one needs to have basic skills and therefore needs to be trained as a reference librarian. I see reference changing as becoming more about customer service, because not everybody comes up to the reference desk to ask a reference question, but may want to use your phone, or help with a stapler or hole puncher not working. One article that we read, “The Changing World of Library Reference” states that those going to library school need to be trained differently, that reference services “needs a customer service revamp with a side of social work and a generous helping of interpersonal communication and psychology.” This is how I see reference changing. It’s all about customer service, but you also need interpersonal communication skills no matter what. I also sometimes feel like a social worker or psychologist when dealing with the public patrons that come in. They either need help filling things out, like job application, resumes, or signing up for insurance (which happened the other day) or they like to tell you their problems. And this is what another article (“Where Reference Fits in the Modern Library”) talks about, that “the library today is still a trusted institution [therefore] the public is coming to us with different expectations.”

I will say this: if reference is truly dead, then it is in regards to print materials. The author of “Where Reference Fits in the Modern Library” article talks about how his library only bought one reference book in the last few years and that was the DSM 5 which today is still a very widely used source. We have 2 copies at my library: one at the reference desk and one in main collection that is ALWAYS checked out. My coworker asked me recently to add the United States Annotated Code law books to our pickup list to see if they are getting looked at at all. They haven’t been. Not one has been looked at in the last 2 months to my knowledge based on my compilation of our monthly pickup stats. My coworker wants to aptly demonstrate that there is absolutely no need for us to spend thousands of dollars each year for this one collection when nobody is looking at it. Patrons used to look at it all the time, and it was heavily used, but it hasn’t been in recent years. I can only assume that it’s because it’s easier to search for the laws online than it is in person.

The author of “Where Reference Fits in the Modern Library” talks about reference is changing because what patrons want is changing: “They want help doing things, rather than finding things.” This is very true. A lot of it involves technology. Most of the reference and circulation transactions that I have to report are under the category of “ITS Help”. The author states that, “Helping patrons to do things is radically different from traditional reference. It requires a different knowledge from library staff, and greater flexibility in time and staffing, so that a librarian can actually work with a patron for 30 minutes.” This ties in nicely and agrees with the other article about how customer service, and social worker skills, etc. are needed to be taught to the librarians. Some of the librarians don’t know how to do something on the computer so then they ask the student circulation workers for help; usually this involves technology like how to use the ITS printers and such. The librarians weren’t trained on them, but the students know how to do it. Or the librarian may ask a student worker to help change the toner in the printer or fill it up with paper because it can be time consuming and take away from what they are doing, which is watching the desk in case someone comes up or the phone rings. A librarian can easily be gone for 30 minutes trying to help someone with Microsoft Word, etc. I’ve been gone for that amount of time numerous times, trying to help patrons. Sometimes I get waved down when I’m out and about running errands. But the time is costly and a problem when I have to watch either the reference or circulation desks.

The author of a blog I read titled “If Reference is Dead, We Need an ID on the Body” has the same opinions as I do. That only a part of reference is dead, and that would be ready reference. She states that “reference has never been about the question, it’s always been about the service.” She goes on to talk about how library usage is increasing and people want service, so reference isn’t necessarily dying, but maybe changing. She ends with a good point: “Using ‘reference is dead’ to cut reference librarians, instead of going through the more extensive exercise of transforming information services into what our communities need now will make us less relevant, not more relevant.”