Week 10: Workshop Reflection, Embedded Librarianship, & Webinars

Building on what we learned in our book clubs, this week groups had the opportunity to further hone their presentation skills through one-shot workshops. As with the book clubs, I found this to be an enjoyable and educational experience. For one, all of the topics the book clubs chose were really interesting and diverse—from library spaces to Netflix to QR codes. On top of that, all of the group presenters had creative and engaging ways for instructing on their topics. Since the chosen topics were all focused around librarian ethics, the workshops provided a great forum for discussing the moral obligations of today’s librarian. From an individual standpoint, working with my team members to develop our workshop allowed me to think more about strategies for teaching and how to select informative yet interesting topics. Also, having only a short period in which to conduct the workshop presented another challenge to plan around.

This week’s set of readings focused on the idea of embedded librarianship, which is the concept of having the librarian more fully immersed and connected with their patrons through meaningful participation in academic courses or increased collaboration with their departments (and associated faculty/staff).  Not surprisingly, the readings seemed most relevant to academic librarians, particularly the subject liaison breed. Still, both articles contained a lot of valuable information and made some interesting points: 

• ·         embedded librarianship is a great way to promote the services of the librarian
• ·         with so many college-aged users online now, librarians should strive to use technology to embed themselves (email, mobile text reference, website chat services, etc.)
• ·         librarians can take on an integral role in classroom learning—for example, by becoming an assistant instructor
• ·         embedded librarians can become members of the academic community they are trying to support, through online presence or physical presence
• ·         and finally, but perhaps most importantly, be where your users are

When I first started reading Chapter 7 of How People Learn, I hadn’t made the connection between this text and the other two articles. Soon, though, I realized that the authors are discussing the unique challenges presented by different subject areas. Or, as the authors simply put it “Different disciplines are organized differently and have different approaches to inquiry.” This, I think, explains well why embedded librarianship is important in the first place. And, in retrospect, it probably would have served me well to have read this before the other two articles (and judging by the list on the syllabus, I was probably supposed to). Still, reading it afterward gave me kind of an a-ha moment where I realized why I think librarians should ever be embedding themselves anywhere. Initially, I thought embedded librarianship was just a way for subject liaisons to better liaise with their users or an opportunity for regular librarians to use technology to reach more patrons.  

How People Learn along with the Montgomery and Matos et al. articles helped me understand that academic disciplines not only differ in the content they require from a library (i.e. books, journals and other resources) but in the type of services they receive. That is, as librarians, we cannot expect users from agriculture and music to approach the library in the same way. Because different disciplines require different information, the way in which users interact with information also varies dramatically. For this reason, we can’t afford to simply sit at the reference desk, expecting to dole out a one-size-fits-all assistance. Instead, we should look at what makes our users unique from others and respond to their information needs accordingly.

Finally, for the webinar viewing I chose “Using Social Media to tell Your Collections’ Stories” from the IMLS Connecting to Collections webinars. The webinar uses Adobe Connect, and I like the interface and features the software provides—chat sessions, polling feature and screen images. I was especially fond of the ability to poll live participants, as this capability allowed users to collectively introduce themselves (where they were from; what type of institution they represented, etc.)  On a content-related note, I thought the topic of the webinar was quite neat, and it seemed like the Connecting to Collections series contains a number of interesting webinars.