Wow, the end of the term is coming down on me like a freight train, with all the associated weight and metaphors. I’m finishing up my last few projects for the awesome Graduate Student Association, and feeling really guilty that I took on more than I could realistically handle this past year. Looking back, I see so many things I could have done to make the Treasurer position easier for next year’s officers – documentation, cleaning the office – but, the work got done, it probably made John Mickey’s life just a little bit easier, and I’ll definitely be available next year to help with the transition. It’s been such a privilege working with the Executive Committee over the last year and getting to know Steve Kreider, who was our great champion at the Office of Campus Activities and is sorely missed.
Other things on my plate:
Wrapping up Mr. Shumaker’s Marketing course, LSC 772. This course came highly recommended from several folks in the program, and I have no regrets about taking it, although it really was a struggle at times. I’ve been working on a project revamping external print marketing materials for the Standards Coordination Office at NIST, which has reminded me that I am NOT a graphic designer.
I think I’ve been frustrated in this class because it’s made me a lot more attuned to just how BAD a lot of library marketing is. It’s like we do things to keep up with one another, or follow trends. Why do we have staff people devoted to social media if we can’t actually prove that this increases the quality of service to our customers, or drives new customer visits? (Related: how do libraries have Flickr and Pinterest accounts, but not Instagram?) This is all time that would be better spent doing serious website overhauls and investing in real email marketing tools and campaigns.
SLA student chapter end of year report: Wow, we did a lot of stuff this term! It’s been a great year for our chapter and I’m really proud of the great programs we put on. Working with Kelly Knight and Sam Russell has been one of the highlights of my time at CUA – I wish I’d gotten involved sooner in student leadership. I’m satisfied that other people have the institutional knowledge to apply for funding from GSA – was really happy to have publicized the GSA Lectures Fund to a wider audience and see this being used to support great events like the Stone Lecture.
Emerging Leaders: Well, this gets back to my frustration with LSC 772: I’ve seen some really poorly designed (not to mention, redundant) surveys come out of ALA divisions over the last few months, and now, I have my very own to write up! The ALSC team has been working on valuation of children’s library services, and many in our 80+ strong response pool don’t seem to understand what an “outcome” actually is, and what’s at stake when we don’t have them to demonstrate our value. Some of these responses are pretty unbelievable. In response to a question of how libraries measure outcomes:
We’re short-staffed so I don’t do any outcomes measurement. Candidly, too, I’m not crazy about it because while it’s something people like to hear about, I find it invasive to gather such data.
Where to begin? Also: more than one person thought that “thank you cards to donors” were an “outcome” of library services. I don’t even know what to say to that.
Honestly, I’m bored of assessing children’s library services: this article really sums up my issue with this whole line of inquiry. In typical Anita Kinney fashion, I have not yet read the primary source linked to in that article, but, if your study can be summarized as:
A recently released survey from the National Summer Learning Association (NSLA) confirms that teachers spend a significant amount of time re-teaching material due to summer learning loss. The survey, which was based on answers from 500 teachers, found that 66 percent teachers have to spend three to four weeks re-teaching students course material at the beginning of the year, while 24 percent of teachers spend at least five to six weeks re-teaching material from the previous school year.
is NOT OK. Check out NSLA’s front page:
All young people experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities during the summer. Research spanning 100 years shows that students typically score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the beginning of the summer (White, 1906; Heyns, 1978; Entwisle & Alexander 1992; Cooper, 1996; Downey et al, 2004).
Really dudes? We’re trotting out research that’s eleven years old? Where is the new research? Here’s what’s needed: a push to build relationships between school and public librarians, and stuff at a really high level that provides a legal framework for thinking about things like student privacy. Guidance for how to navigate publicly available test data. Information on research design: how to work with aggregate data sets. How to anonymize student data. Toolkits to help librarians organize in their communities and engage with local school boards to get test data released. If we’re not nimble enough to play real hardball here and map “summer slide” to actual test data, we need to focus internally on building that kind of capacity instead of relying on platitudes about “qualitative assessment.” Fun fact: no one cares. Show me a library that’s proved that they increase the test score du jour, and I’ll show you a library that’s gonna get hella grants.
Database management class: well, taking an online course in this was a complete disaster but fortunately our faculty is awesome and Bill Kules has basically been giving me one-on-one SQL tutoring, but damn, I’ve been distracted by other stuff, like LSC 772 and:
Contract work: I still have my contract with the Marine Mammal Commission and I’m really digging it. I’ve been working with a legacy version of InMagic, which has been used for at least 10 years to manage the collection and tag our books and PDFs with subject terms to make them searchable. Not a bad option for managing a library, maybe similar to something like ResourceMate, which if I recall correctly was what was used at the Franciscan Monastery library. Anyway, the rub is getting our InMagic data to play with Zotero, which the good scientists want to use to manage their citations. This is what I’ll be playing around with after I wrap up class: http://www.scribd.com/doc/45190252/Data-Migration-Excel-or-CSV-to-MARC#scribd
I’ve done some onsite work for the National Science Foundation and it’s been really fantastic to see a different side of digital collection development.
Public health presentation at ALA: this is on my mind in a big way. I’m meeting with folks about this next week in Ocean City, and the following week in Baltimore. Time flies.
Other crazy idea: something clicked for me on Tuesday that could be very, very cool.
So, that’s where I’m at. Have just discovered that there’s another week of homework left to do in our database class, was hoping we’d be done the 2nd but it is all good.