Category: Research

Posted on

IMLS Grant Funding Program to Boost Library Workers’ Online Teaching Skills

A press release on a new IMLS grant we’re doing with the fantastic folks at South Central Regional Library Council

Original story at http://ischool.syr.edu/newsroom/index.aspx?recid=1620

IMLS Grant Funding Program to Boost Library Workers’ Online Teaching Skills

By: Diane Stirling
(315) 443-8975

3logosThe School of Information Studies (iSchool), as a partner with the South Central Regional Library Council of Ithaca and The 3Rs Association, Inc., will be developing a program to strengthen the teaching and learning skills of library workers who provide outreach education using online learning environments.

A grant of $336,665 has just been awarded to support the three-year project by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) via its Laura Bush 21st Century Librarians Program. The monies will enable development of a program to guide transfer of in-person teaching skills and pedagogy to the online environment; help librarian-trainers evaluate and gain experience with various online delivery platforms; and teach library workers how people learn effectively in online education situations.

Project principal investigator is Mary-Carol Lindbloom, executive director of the South Central Regional Library Council. She conceived the skill-building program and invited the iSchool to participate. iSchool Professor R. David Lankes is Syracuse University’s liaison to the project. He will provide input into course development and delivery and oversee graduate assistant and hourly students who will be hired to help implement the program. iSchool faculty members Marilyn Plavovos Arnone and Jill Hurst-Wahl, plus WISE distance-education coordinator Alison Miller, also will help formulate program content.

The group plans to develop “train the trainer” materials for 120 librarians who are responsible for providing continuing education through their libraries. They also will develop an online learning segment, to deliver to 240 librarians from throughout New York State that illustrates best practices to support online learning.

Finding What Works

As more teaching changes from in-person classrooms to online platforms, there is a need for clear guidelines on what works and what doesn’t in terms of the pedagogy, technologies, and devices used in the online environment, according to Professor Lankes. “What’s happening is that people are saying, ‘I’ve taught this in person for 10 years; I’ll teach it online.’ Yet, it’s not like ‘shazam’, and you can teach it online. What we’ve learned at Syracuse since we began doing online education in 1993 is that there is no ‘shazam’ to this; there is a lot to think about when you make the transition to online teaching and learning. There are a lot of good instructors who do very interactive things when everyone’s seated around the table. The question then is, how do you do something like that in the online environment?”

Transferring Skills

Professor Arnone said that librarians are experiencing situations where the outreach and education they do increasingly involves online elements. The program will help develop skills for online teaching and unique aspects of learning via an online environment. The goal is to boost presentation and technology skills which library workers can use to conduct effective online sessions. “This is about being able to teach effectively and transfer what you know into an online environment, and understanding the differences in online learning, since not everyone likes it,” Arnone noted.

Those who teach online need to understand how to gain attention, make content relevant and interesting, and build learners’ confidence, while also setting clear expectations for the experience, she added. In addition to addressing those aspects, workers will learn how to offer “multiple means of representation–opportunities to present information in ways that learners can feel good about–so it’s coming to them in the way that they prefer. Addressing disability issues and accessibility for online learners, and the adjustments that can be made for online learning, also will be incorporated, Professor Arnone said.

Materials and presentations created for the program’s 10 informational modules will be available to the worldwide library community through the project’s LibGuides website, via WebJunction, and as disseminated through library conferences and publications.

Posted on

IMLS Funds Next Phase of ILEAD U: ILEAD USA!

I am thrilled to once again head up the instructor corps for ILEAD U – now ILEAD USA expanding to multiple states.

The ILEAD USA project, sponsored by the Illinois State Library, seeks to help librarians develop new technology skills by meeting a specific community need, all the while being supported by peer learners in a network of collaborating teams. Building on a successful statewide project in Illinois, the 18-month continuing education immersion initiative is designed to expand librarians’ leadership abilities while also helping them build their participatory technology skills to effectively engage their constituents. Twenty-eight five-member teams in Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, and Utah will attend three three-day, in-person sessions over the course of nine months. The sessions will be held simultaneously in each of the five states with plenary sessions broadcast live on streaming video. Between in-person sessions, virtual meetings and activities will allow participants to hone their newly acquired skills; experiment with participatory technology tools; and continue communication with the ILEAD USA network of participants

The Atlas of New Librarianship is the text for the program and new librarianship ideas are turned into reality by the amazing teams.

Kudos to Anne Craig and the amazing team at the Illinois State Library.

Posted on

Salzburg Curriculum Snippets and References

After the seminar in Salzburg, I included references to the curriculum and ideas on transformative social action in some of my presentations. I’ve compiled the snippets and links here:

Full Presentation: “Librarians as Change Agents” Video Webchat, U.S. Embassy in Rome, Rome, Italy.
https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/blog/?p=1303

Full Presentation: “Expect More: Service is Proactive” CARLI Virtual Meeting, Webcast.
https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/blog/?p=1289

Full Presentation: “Publisher of the Community: New Librarianship Unencumbered by Our Stacks” PLS President’s Program at the NYLA 2011 Annual Conference. Saratoga Springs, NY. https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/blog/?p=1282

Posted on

Salzburg Curriculum

This is a video walkthrough with some of my interpretations of the Salzburg curriculum for Librarians and Museum Professionals. More discussion and interpretation to come.

Posted on

Salzburg Curriculum for Library and Museum Studies

On October 19th, 2011 a group of innovators from over 20 countries gathered in Salzburg, Austria to discuss “Libraries and Museums in an Era of Participatory Culture.” Through plenary panels and intensive break out group, the seminar fellows developed a series of challenges and recommendations.

One of those groups was charged with developing recommendations and challenges around skills needed by librarians and museum professionals in today’s connected and participatory world. This group ended up developing a joint library/museum curriculum.

While there will be a full report out of the session, I have already been talking about the curriculum and thought it would be useful to share it and discuss it here (with the permission of the participants). Over the next few days I will comment and expand on the curriculum from my perspective, but this post is intended to simply “get it out there” with little personal commentary so others can refer to it and add their own perspectives.

It is my hope that this post, the session report, and following commentaries will form the basis of a much more complete piece (article, book, or something else).

The following curriculum is meant to be comprehensive, and apply equally to librarians and museum professionals. It is also intended to inform formal methods of education (masters programs) as well as continuing education.

FRAMING:

The mission of librarians and museum professionals is to foster conversations that improve society through knowledge exchange & social action
Lifelong learning in & out of formal educational settings
These topics are equally applicable to librarians and museum professionals
These topics must be contextualized
The following values permeate these topics:

  • Openness & transparency
  • Self reflection
  • Collaboration
  • Service
  • Empathy & Respect
  • Continuous Learning/Striving for Excellence (which requires lifelong learning)
  • Creativity and imagination

CURRICULAR TOPICS:

  • Transformative Social Engagement
  • activism
  • social responsibility
  • critical social analysis
  • public programming – fitting to larger agenda
  • advocacy (organizing communities to action-political, policy)
  • sustainability of societal mission
  • conflict management
  • understanding community needs
  • Technology
    • crowdsourcing / outreach
    • ability to engage and evolve with technology
    • ability to impart tech to community across generation
    • creating and maintaining on effective virtual presence
  • Management for Participation (Professional Competencies)
    • institutional sustainability (funding, relevancy)
    • advocacy for institution
    • economics
    • ethics & values
    • sharing: benefits & barriers
    • collaborate within interdisciplinary teams
    • collaborate
    • assessment /analytics / impact
  • Asset management
    • preserve / safeguard
    • collect
    • organize
  • Cultural Skills
    • communication
    • intercultural: the ability to analyze and function in micro and macro cultures including age and gender
    • languages / terminology
    • support for multiple type of literacies
  • Knowledge / Learning / Innovation
    • constructed
    • improvisation or innovation
    • interpretation
    • dissemination
    • information seeking
    Posted on

    A rose by any other name…

    I have included a discussion about what we call the folks who use libraries (members) in several presentations and it’s all over my book. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what we call ourselves. Over the past month across two continents and four different venues this question has come up.

    Before I get too far down this road, I realize that I am treading a well-worn path with plenty of wreckage along the way. I am not playing coy here for a push for a new name. I am honestly struggling with this personally, and I’m looking for help.

    So here is where it all started. I was talking with our board of advisors for the iSchool and reviewing the LIS program. We have a great board made up of business folks, technologists, librarians, and educators. I was making the case that librarianship was a skill set that extended well beyond libraries and asked how the school could open up opportunities in the business sector.

    The answer? Don’t call them librarians. They bought that librarians would be great in institutions facing big data problems, helping out analysts and research scientists in communicating and conversations, the whole bit. The problem was that when you threw in the name “librarians” all they could think about was the building, and really the public library they visited as a kid (to be fair this was not a universal comment, as I said there were plenty of librarians in the room).

    We even started talking about the possibility of the profession splitting into folks who work in the building called a library and folks with the skills that worked outside of it. I want to reiterate that this was a very positive conversation, and not riddled with the stereotypes, except to say many thought the name itself got in the way because of the widely held stereotypes.

    I threw out that it was time to retake the name and associate it with the real progressive work librarians were doing today. Then one member of the board asked “so which is more important, the name ‘librarian’ or what librarians could accomplish in these other settings.” That got me thinking.

    I went directly from this meeting to a summit in Salzburg. There I met amazing librarians and museum professionals from 24 different countries. We were talking about libraries and museums in the era of participatory culture. I was part of the discussion around the skills needed for librarians and museum folks (more on that later). After my presentation, during a panel discussion, someone asked, you guessed it, should we still call these folks librarians?

    What started to develop at this meeting was a line of reasoning that goes like this: If as librarians we need to shape ourselves around our communities, and if part of what we need to shape is the language and terms we use, then shouldn’t we be flexible about the titles we use? If the community wants to call us librarians, then fine. If they want to call us “awesome epic cool people” then so be it. AASL wrestled with this in going back to the title school librarian from school media specialist. At the time I thought (and tweeted) “how boring.” A school librarian pointed out that the name just caused confusion, and a name doesn’t gain respect or attention, performance does. In essence call me what you want, it is my action that will show me as a librarian.

    Fast forward to this past week when I presented at the New York Library Association. After I did my thing about what our mission was, up it popped again – does it make sense to call ourselves librarians. Here I talked a little about my developing “let the community decide” logic. But I added “no matter what the community calls us, we are still librarians.” In essence, I was thinking the term librarian may be more important in identifying ourselves to ourselves than to the community. So, I was thinking, let the world call us what they want, but know still you are a librarian with a common mission, values, and skills. This has worked with folks like accountants, that used to be people who worked in counting houses. Now they have the title of office manager, CFO, and so on, but they are still accountants with a common preparation and professional culture.

    So here I am…librarian or not? Do I work to rename our degree to make librarians more marketable outside of libraries (keeping ALA accreditation)? Do I still push to retake the term librarian? Does it even matter? Help!

    Posted on

    ILEAD U Closing

    Here is a video of my closing comments at the ILEADU session in Springfield Illinois (just under 14 minutes). To my international friends, if I messed up details, just let me know so I can post it here.

    Posted on

    The Atlas of New Librarianship to be Published by MIT Press and ACRL

    I’ve made a few allusions to my next book in my presentations, and even posted a picture of the draft here. Now that it is official I’d like to be a bit more specific.

    The Atlas of New Librarianship will be published in Spring 2011 by MIT Press and is co-published by ACRL. The Atlas is a thorough discussion of librarianship developed around the concept of “participatory librarianship.” The central concepts of participatory librarianship have not changed – that conversation and knowledge are core to all that librarians do. However, while you will read a great deal about participation, you will not see many specific references to “participatory librarianship.” This is intentional.

    While modifiers and titles are useful in gaining attention, the ultimate success of any idea is the loss of a modifier. “Virtual reference” becomes simply “reference” when the ideas put forth are widely incorporated throughout practice. “Digital libraries” are quickly becoming simply “libraries” as they become integrated into the larger organizations and collections of a library. So too must participatory librarianship, if it is to be successful, become part of the overall concept of librarianship.

    The library field is searching for solid footing in an increasingly fragmented information environment. As technology changes, budgets shrink, and use demographics fluctuate what can help guide librarians to continued relevancy and success? The answer must go beyond Web 2.0, or technological landmarks and provide a fundamental and durable foundation for the field. What is the role of a librarian in a space with no collections – or walls? How do we prepare the next generation of librarians? The Atlas seeks to answer these questions.

    The Atlas represents a new understanding of librarianship based on work with organizations such as the American Library Association, OCLC, The U.S. Department of Justice Law Libraries, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the State Library of Illinois. It is founded on the basic concept that knowledge is created through conversation; libraries being in the knowledge business are therefore in the conversation business. This concept, grounded in theory, leads to a new mission for librarians:

    The mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities.

    This implications, foundations, and application of this mission is discussed and detailed in the Atlas.

    Perhaps the easiest way to explain the Atlas is by showing how it can be applied, as I have done in some recent presentations:

    Excerpt from Charleston Conference 2009:

    Excerpt from Pennsylvania District Library Keynote:

    In addition to a full-color 10″x10″ print version of the book, we are creating an online companion site to foster ongoing conversations around the foundations of librarianship. More details on that to come.

    A special thanks to all of those instrumental in writing this including Buffy Hamilton, Megan Oakleaf, Scott Nicholson, Jill Hurst-Wahl, Michael Luther, Todd Marshall, Angela Usha Ramnarine-Rieks, Heather Margaret Highfield, Jessica R. O’Toole, and Xiaoou Cheng and so many many more. Also thanks to all my early reviewers who gave me great feedback.

    Posted on

    UIS staff and faculty help to coordinate state-wide ILEAD U initiative

    I don’t think I ever put up information on a new IMLS initiative I’m working on with the State Library of Illinois. The following is a nice press release on the project from another project partner, UIS:

    Staff and faculty members from the University of Illinois Springfield’s Brookens Library and the Center for Online Learning, Research and Service (COLRS) are teaming up with staff members from the Illinois State Library and other libraries throughout the state for a prestigious new institute that will be one of the most significant Illinois library initiatives of 2010. The institute, called ILEAD (Illinois Libraries Explore, Apply and Discover) U: the 21st Century Technology Tools Institute for Illinois Library Staff, will be comprised of three in-person sessions from February 23 to 25, June 15 to 17 and October 26 to 28 on the UIS campus. The sessions will be supplemented by online instruction between meeting dates.

    ILEAD U, funded by a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program Grant awarded to the Illinois State Library by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, will encourage both the experimentation with and building of participatory Web services and programs. Library educator R. David Lankes of Syracuse University will lead the instructors for the project.

    As part of the institute, the UIS participants and their colleagues from other Illinois libraries will implement web technologies that foster community participation and develop leadership, innovation and positive change.

    The institute is the brainchild of Anne Craig, director of the Illinois State Library, who has “exceptional vision in seeing a need and conceiving of such an innovative way to meet it,” according to Dean Jane Treadwell, University Librarian at UIS. Treadwell is chairing the steering committee which selected the instructors, mentors and teams of participants and will guide the work of the project.

    Other UIS participants include Natalie Tagge, visiting Instructional Services Librarian at Brookens Library, who will serve as a mentor in ILEAD U, and two other Brookens librarians, Pamela M. Salela and Amanda Binder, who will participate in cross-institutional teams that will learn to use participatory technology tools to understand and respond to patron needs.

    “We hope to foster a philosophy that technology becomes powerful in libraries when people engage with it critically and thoughtfully,” said Tagge.

    Additionally, Ray Schroeder and Shari Smith of the Center for Online Learning, Research and Service are acting as consultants to the instructors for the project, and David Racine of the Institute for Legal, Legislative and Policy Studies will direct the evaluation of the ILEAD U grant.

    “We in the Brookens Library and COLRS are very excited to collaborate with the Illinois State Library on this project that has the potential to transform the way that libraries interact with their patrons,” noted Treadwell.

    Smith, associate director of COLRS, added, “The ILEAD U grant is an excellent example of why libraries and librarians are uniquely qualified to lead their communities forward to a new knowledge society. The grant has been carefully crafted to include cutting-edge technology, careful assessment and evaluation, location-specific consideration and stakeholders from around the state.”

    Participatory technology tools will include:
    Blogging tools
    Digital audio/podcasting, photography and video
    RSS feeds
    Social networking and photo-sharing sites
    Videoconferencing and web conferencing
    Virtual reference and virtual worlds (ie. Second Life)
    Gaming
    Instant messaging
    And more

    “The Illinois State Library is proud of its strong commitment to continuing education and providing librarians with the tools and resources necessary to address the ever-changing needs of their patrons,” said Secretary of State and State Librarian Jesse White. “Nowhere is the need for continuing education more important than in the area of technology. Librarians need to constantly enhance their skills to keep up to date with the latest technology, and ILEAD U represents an exciting, innovative new program to build technology and leadership skills among Illinois librarians.”

    Posted on

    Prof. R. David Lankes receives the 2009 Emerald Outstanding Paper Award

    Emerald Group Publishing of the United Kingdom has selected Syracuse University School of Information Studies (iSchool) Associate Professor R. David Lankes’ paper, “Credibility on the Internet: Shifting from Authority to Reliability,” as a 2009 Outstanding Paper Award Winner.

    Emerald is the world’s leading scholarly publisher in business and management, publishing more than 190 journals as well as serials and books, and had more than 20 million articles downloaded in 2008 alone. Emerald invites each of its journal’s editorial teams to nominate what they believe to be the most outstanding paper and three highly commended papers each year.

    The editorial team of the Journal of Documentation, which published Lankes’ paper, selected his article for the award, dubbing it “one of the most impressive pieces of work the team has seen throughout 2008,” according to the announcement.

    Emerald bases its decision on a list of criteria, including the contribution of new knowledge, structure and quality of the writing, rigor of analysis or argument, relevance, and timeliness or connected to the latest developments in the field.

    His paper addresses how Internet users determine the credibility of information on web sites from a conceptual level and how that affects new online tools and services. He describes how and why people are dependent on the Internet for information, and also describes the progression of users shifting from analyzing the credibility of an online source to determining the reliability of sources.

    Lankes will be recognized at the 2009 Literati Network Awards for Excellence ceremony.

    Lankes is director of the Information Institute of Syracuse and a fellow of the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy. Lankes’ research focuses on education information and digital reference services. He has authored, co-authored or edited eight books, and written numerous book chapters and journal articles on the Internet and digital reference. He holds a bachelor of fine arts in multimedia design, a M.S. in telecommunications and network management, and a Ph.D. in information transfer from Syracuse University.