A finger on the pulse

(Hello again, neglected blog.)

In order to best serve our online students, our library has access to all of the sections of all of the courses offered in ANGEL. A side effect of being in every single section is that we get a copy of every single email that’s sent to a course’s entire roster. At first, this seemed like a burden with only a teeny payout of being able to keep up with news and issues I might not otherwise hear about.

A recent example of this benefit was a flurry of messages from instructors (in different programs) reminding, pleading, and demanding that their students pay closer attention to the format of their references and citations.

A-ha! Sounds like a job for passive programming! (That’s a term from my residence life years, when I did passive programming such as posting a weekly weather report for my residents; active programming is more along the lines of breakfast with the custodial staff or a movie night.)

I added a post to our blog advertising or encouraging students to visit the section of their research guide regarding citing sources. This message appears within a feed on every graduate program’s library website. (See image) Hopefully this will catch our students’ eyes as they return to the library website to relocate the information their instructors expect them to include in these assignments.

But I’m a taxpayer!

Norwich doesn’t do traditional ILL for our online learners. Given the amount of time an item spends in transit (from the lending library to Norwich to the student and back to Norwich and the lending library), our graduate students have little time to use the material. (Often, we will purchase a requested book for our collection, and the requesting student gets it first.) It can be far faster, though, for our distance learning students to make an ILL request through their local public library than through Norwich.

One of the administrators of a graduate program I work with brought an interesting problem to my attention: some of our distance learning students are being informed by their local libraries that they can’t use these libraries to do research towards a degree at another institution. Apparently, this “policy” isn’t limited to local college and university libraries: my colleague mentioned that a public library system in one of the nation’s largest cities will not lend to our students for the same reason. But, um, aren’t our students paying taxes to use their public libraries? Hello?

I asked to be informed the next time a graduate student encounters this roadblock. I’d like to learn about this firsthand.

Another way to communicate online

I’ll say it again: I’m grateful to come into this job just as the new course management software is being rolled out. It’s helpful to be able to learn ANGEL alongside my colleagues, the faculty, and students, because I’ll learn so much more by being part of the initial launch.

It’s been helpful to learn about the behind-the-scenes technical aspects of ANGEL, but I’m most looking forward to learning how the students decide to use ANGEL. Specifically, I’m curious to see how they use the Ask a Librarian discussion forum.

Norwich students have several ways to contact me and my reference colleagues: we use email, phone, and instant messaging. My predecessor (now my boss) experimented with being an embedded librarian and quickly learned that it was too time-consuming to check in with all of the seminars in our ten graduate programs.

ANGEL offers an efficient solution: a discussion forum that’s accessible to students in all programs. It’s called Ask a Librarian, and my colleagues and I will check daily for new posts. The forum is efficient because we’ll only have to check one location in ANGEL for new posts, but that’s just icing on the cake: I think it’s more important that the posts and replies are visible to every student in every program. My hope is that the questions posted (and answered) there will be useful to students across disciplines.

Still, I can’t predict how Ask a Librarian will be used. Will most questions be general or topic-specific? Will other students respond to a post and offer advice or further information about the problem? Will the forum get much traffic, or will students prefer to use email, the phone, and instant messaging? (It just occurred to me that the younger students may see the discussion forum as an extension of status messages in Facebook: a place to mention something about your life within your community and invite feedback. Conversely, perhaps there will be some students who prefer to ask their questions privately by one of our other methods.)

My environment

I’m coming up on my one-month anniversary as a Distance Learning Librarian. Much of what happens in the first month of any new job is getting used to the new surroundings, remembering names, and keeping all the departments (and their responsibilities) straight.

Yesterday, I was very excited to have my first reference shift. It was the first day of classes for our undergraduates, so the majority of questions weren’t assignment-related. I’ve already worked with a few graduate students (by phone) and helped with access and research questions, but it was really fun to help the undergrads with more directional questions.

As I mentioned to the freshman during library orientation tours, I’m a freshman, too: I’m new, and I’m learning about Norwich right along with them. During my reference shift, a lot of my responses were, “I don’t know: let’s find out.” That’s why I like being a librarian: I get to learn all day. And any of my friends will tell you that I retain a lot of little bits of information, so I enjoy knowing which departments on campus to send students, the hours of the campus center, and what time a certain University event begins.

Yesterday I learned:

• where to get discarded library hardcovers (for our Rooks, the freshmen cadets, to stiffen their epaulets)
• which of my colleagues discards newspapers (which the Rooks need to dry out their boots)
• where the uniform store is, for a student who was recently recruited and needed a name tag
• who to call at the Registrar’s office to find out the location of rescheduled classes
• which Algebra section’s textbook is sold out at the bookstore
• where the library’s three-hole-punches are kept
• where the mezzanine printer is

So, why am I so excited about working with the undergraduates when the bulk of my responsibilities are to online graduate students? I like knowing what’s going on around me. Because some of the undergrad questions are more Norwich-related than library-related, it helps me learn more about my new environment.

Of course I’m going to need to know where printers and hole-punches are. I really enjoy getting up from the desk and discovering, with the students, where things are. It helps me remember for future reference, but I also get to know my community: the Rooks who are getting used to holding their hats a certain way, the freshmen fumbling to understand their schedules, a staff member who works for a department I hadn’t learned about, and students learning (like me) where things are in the library.

It’s the same way I work with the distance learning students. We may not be standing next to one another, and I may not be leading them to a specific area of the library, but I’m doing similar things to connect with them: asking questions, clarifying, trying and failing, trying and succeeding, and learning from their questions in order to become a better resource for them and their classmates.