ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Pete Coco, formerly of Grand Valley State University, now Humanities Liaison at Wheaton College in Norton, MA.

With the continued improvements being made to web-scale discovery tools like Proquest’s Summon and EBSCO’s Discovery Service, access to library resources is reaching a singularity of sorts: frictionless searching. Providing a unified interface through which patrons can access nearly all of your library’s collection has an obvious appeal on all sides. Users get the googley familiarity and convenience of a singular, wide-ranging search box and, according to a recent case study done at Grand Valley State University, the reduced friction patrons face when using library resources correlates to an increase — potentially dramatic — in the frequency with which they access them. While these tools will continue to be tweaked and refined, it’s difficult to imagine an easier process for getting students to scholarly sources.

That’s the good news, and the story you’re likely getting from your sales rep. And while none of it is untrue, in my role as a teaching librarian I’ve seen more undergraduate students struggle to get what they need from web-scale discovery than I’ve seen benefit from its obvious conveniences. These students often know intuitively how to get to results from Summon’s search box; often they figure out on their own how to get to the item itself if it is available in full-text. In the library’s statistics, these might be counted fairly as successful searches. But when I ask the student whether the article at hand is what they wanted, I get one response far more frequently than all others: “Not… exactly.”

Web-scale discovery is doing about as much for these students as we could reasonably expect, and, in doing so, offers teaching librarians a challenge and an opportunity. Both are at root about our thinking, and they stem from the same fact: these tools offer an unprecedented convenience. For all the familiarity it allows students, our decision to make library tools more similar to commercial web search can reinforce the idea — primarily amongst students, but also, potentially, amongst administrators making personnel and workload decisions — that information literacy instruction isn’t necessary because students know how to get what they want from Google. If the new tool is like Google, then why does it require instruction?

There’s a lot to unpack in that question. First and foremost, what web-scale discovery borrows from Google does not make it Google. Searching Summon for scholarly articles will never be like searching Google — not because Summon cannot approximate Google’s user experience, but because scholarly communications will never be like the things students use Google to find.

Consider the freshman student looking for a pizza parlor that will deliver to his dorm. He comes to his commercial web search with a knowledge base and a self-defined need: pizza literacy, let’s call it. Having eaten and enjoyed pizza countless times in the past, he knows what it is and the range of forms it can take. Over time, he’s developed a preference for sausage, but tonight he wants pepperoni. Perhaps in this instance, he’s working under unique constraints — he saw a coupon somewhere, and is hoping to find it online. Whatever his specific pizza need, could there be any doubt that this student has the literal and conceptual vocabulary to effectively communicate that need to Google? In a way that will undoubtedly yield him with an informed pizza-choice?

Of course not. But consider the same student, his belly now full, turning to the research paper for his freshman composition course. Unlike his soul-deep craving for pepperoni, his need for “2-3 peer-reviewed articles” has been externally defined. If she is like too many of her peers, the professor assigning this requirement hasn’t done so in detail nor explained her pedagogical purpose for including it. She has given our hero but one bread crumb: go to the library website. Assuming his library’s discovery tool is featured prominently, it can potentially spare him the UI nightmare that would otherwise be the process of selecting a database to search. That’s quite a mercy, but it really only helps him with the first of many steps.

To find the scholarly articles that will meet the paper requirement, the student will need navigate a host of alien concepts, vocabularies and controversies that will, at least at first, drive his experience with peer-reviewed scholarship. And while some degree of anxiety is probably useful to his learning experience, there can be little doubt that the process would be easier and of more lasting value to the student who has support—human support—as he goes through it.

Put another way: good learning is best facilitated by good pedagogy. The tool is not the pedagogy and it’s hard to imagine how it ever could be. Because of all the concepts and conventions implicit to scholarship, the scholarly resource that is not improved for students by expert intervention is and always will be a chimera. The future of teaching librarianship as a profession will only demand more vigilance on this point.

But for all these caveats, with the right framing discovery can be an excellent pedagogical tool. Because it relieves so many searches of the burden of that first question — which database should I search? — we can use our time with students to construct, together, answers to questions we all find more compelling. What is peer review? Why does it matter? Why would a professor use it as a standard for student research? Each can be elegantly demonstrated with discovery, and best of all, students can demonstrate it for themselves and each other while my guidance focuses on the concepts and conventions underneath all the clicking.

Rather than giving in to the temptation to compare discovery to Google as a means of marketing it to students, we should go out of our way to contrast the two. What is the difference between the commercial internet search and the library tool? What is the purpose each exists to serve? How does the commercial internet search engine decide what to show you? How does discovery? You might be surprised how sophisticated students can be when they’re given a space suited to sophistication. Discovery can help to create that space in your information literacy sessions.

Even in freshman courses, I’ve found that I’m able to dive right in to activities that lead to genuine and rewarding discussion. In one, for example, I have students choose a search term — usually the name of a superhero — and ask them to search it in both Google and in Summon (with the box checked for “scholarly” results only). To the average student my sessions, the distinction between thedarkknight.warnerbros.com and Batman and Robin in the Nude, or Class and Its Exceptions is instructive on its face. Discovery makes juxtaposition like this one quick, fluid, and highly demonstrable. My students don’t need to read more than the title and abstract of the latter to have a sense of the distinction at hand.

Discovery is also a great tool for “citation chasing.” Projecting a full citation in front of the classroom, I’ll preface the activity with a brief discussion of the citation itself. What is this text Pete is projecting on the board? Why does it exist? What are its component parts, and what do they tell us about the object it describes? Then I poll the students: how many of you think you could find the full-text of the article this citation describes using the library website? Depending on the class, anywhere from none to a half of the students raise their hands. Without discovery, I wouldn’t be able to say what I say to them next: The truth is you all can. So please: do. Within three minutes, the entire class has the full-text article on their own screens.

Discovery is not the tool for every task. Controlled vocabularies don’t federate well, and the student asking very specific questions of the literature is better off going straight to the disciplinary index. Known item searches proceeding from partial information are a recurrent challenge. We must be careful with the way we describe the scale of discovery to students. In our attempts to market discovery as convenient and easy, we may in fact be selling them on a product that doesn’t exist. In the absence of a clear purpose, convenience is not convenient.

But really, has convenience ever really been our only goal as educators? The commercial web has no doubt rattled the profession, and we must respond decisively to the vast changes it has brought to the information landscape. But when we start to speak primarily in terms of convenience, the risk is that we turn away from the terms of learning and pedagogy. It’s a choice you can make without even meaning to make it. The librarian who is able to choose between user education and user convenience, certainly, has the easier job. But will it be a job worth doing? Will his users get what they need from him? The hard thing, really, is find ways to give our users both with the fewest trade-offs. This is the tension at the heart of information literacy instruction. Romantics, we want to have it all. And so we should.

Some interesting articles about mobile technology caught my eye last week as I was finishing up the leftover turkey. Apple has come under fire for the reported inability of Siri, the voice recognition application on the new iPhone 4S, to find abortion clinics. As reported by CNN, quoting the American Civil Liberties Union:

“Although it isn’t clear that Apple is intentionally trying to promote an anti-choice agenda, it is distressing that Siri can point you to Viagra, but not the Pill, or help you find an escort, but not an abortion clinic,” the group wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

A spokesperson for Apple responded quickly:

“These are not intentional omissions meant to offend anyone. It simply means that as we bring Siri from beta to a final product, we find places where we can do better and we will in the coming weeks.”

This is but one example of problematic access and information issues with our mobile devices, a topic that was explored in more detail last week by Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain in MIT’s Technology Review in his provocatively-titled article The Personal Computer is Dead. Zittrain begins by asserting that:

Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers on the one hand, to operating system vendors on the other—and even those who keep their PCs are being swept along. This is a little for the better, and much for the worse.

Zittrain continues with an analysis of the state of mobile software development for Apple and Android devices, and the restrictions this development operates within. In Apple’s case users are limited to the software available in the company’s commercial space: the App Store (unless the device is jailbroken). Android apps are potentially available outside of the Android Marketplace, though I wonder whether many users go to the extra effort to locate and download those apps. In both cases developers are tied to the operating system of the device which dictates the parameters of the software. Perhaps most distressingly, there are hints that a similar environment for software development may soon be prevalent even on the PC: Apple has already introduced its App Store for Mac.

How does this aspect of mobile computing affect us as academic librarians? While we still have a sizable number of students without smartphones on our campuses on average,* there’s no question that smartphone and tablet usage is on the rise overall. What challenges will we face that accompany the increasing reliance on mobile devices? Certainly library database vendors are rushing to develop apps for these devices — how will we promote these apps to our users and integrate their use with the library website and other existing services? And while many libraries are also developing apps, that strategy may not be feasible for smaller libraries that already feel stretched by the efforts to provide digital library services.

Access to information — an aspect of information literacy — may also be affected by these restrictions around mobile devices. We’ve already read about the possibility of a filter bubble that impacts Google search results. With the increasing move to an app-driven environment, could an internet search provider’s app restrict or shape search results even further?

What should academic libraries be considering as we adapt to an information landscape that’s increasingly mediated by mobile technologies? How can we help our students, faculty, and other library patrons with their information needs while ensuring that they’re aware of the strengths and limitations that these technologies have to offer?

* The latest survey results from the Pew Internet Project show that the vast majority of undergrads have a cellphone (between 94-96%), and about 44% of 18-24 year olds own smartphones.

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Maura Seale, Research and Instruction Librarian at Georgetown University Library.

Now that the fall semester instruction rush is over, I have been able to spend some time catching up on my library blog reading as well as my own research. I recently read this post on Academic Librarian about the National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology 2011. The study basically found that undergraduate students are pretty attached to ‘standard issue’ technologies like computers and printers and recommends that universities and colleges should research what their particular students actually use and use that information to make policy.

This post made me think about the recent photo study I worked on at my own library. I work at Georgetown University’s Lauinger Library, which is the main library on campus. It houses the humanities, social sciences, and business collections, and unlike many campus buildings, is open 24 hours on weekdays during the fall and spring semesters. We’re primarily a residential campus and our building sees a lot of use. We (my department, Research and Instruction, and another department, Access Services) decided to do a photo study of some popular study spaces on the second and third floors of the library after hearing a presentation from Kathleen Webb of the University of Dayton. We knew that the library was heavily used and we were interested in figuring out how to make our spaces even more appealing to our students. On random days throughout the spring 2011 semester, we took photos and did head counts of nine distinct spaces. We analyzed this data over the summer and will be writing up our results shortly, after doing a few comparison dates in the fall 2011 semester.

I’m not going to talk about the conclusions we drew about the spaces themselves, as I’m saving that for the article, but our photos revealed a lot of interesting things about how students use technology. One of the spaces we photographed was our reference computer lab, which is very heavily used. That’s right – our desktop computers and especially printers are consistently used throughout the day. In the afternoons and early evenings, there is often a line at the printers; we even recommended that the library consider purchasing more printers, due to heavy use. Our reference room also has long tables that seat six, but they are usually occupied by four or less students, who use that space to spread out. What are they spreading out? Laptops, notebooks, and books, some of which are obviously library books. In the reading room on the third floor, students use the armchairs to read books and newspapers and the tables to use laptops, notebooks, and books.

It’s not that our students don’t use other technologies; I know that they use smartphones just from sitting at the reference desk and whenever I show a class how they can send a text with the call number and title to their phones, they get excited. But they’re still using that technology to find a print book and they snicker at the idea of Tweeting a call number and title. I really don’t see that many iPads on campus and I don’t know how much use our QR codes have really gotten. Sometimes I think that librarians want to anticipate change so badly, and are so keen on meeting our users’ needs that we jump beyond where our users are. It’s important to keep up on trends, of course, and to be open to technological changes as well as willing to embrace them, but we also need to stay grounded in what our specific users want and need. This photo study was invaluable in this regard and now we have evidence to make our case for more and better printers, as silly as that might seem.

What trends have you noticed in your user population? Are you doing anything to assess how technology is or is not being used on your campus? Have you discovered anything unexpected about your users in your own research?

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Cori Strickler, Information Literacy Librarian at Bridgewater College.

During idle times at the reference desk, or when the students are gone for a break, I find myself creating instruction “wish lists” of tools or gadgets that I’d love to have for my sessions. One item that has been on my list for a few years now is clickers, or student response systems as they are officially called. In academic classrooms they are used for attendance, quiz taking, or other more informal assessments. For me, I saw clickers as a way to solve one of my basic and most frustrating problems: getting students to be engaged during the sessions. Students have little desire to participate in library sessions and trying to get them to comment on their library experience is like pulling teeth, except that the process is a lot more painful for me than it is for the students.

For those of you who haven’t heard of clickers before, they are little remote control like devices that allow the students to answer multiple choice questions by sending their responses to the computer for real time analysis. They are sort of like the devices they use on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to poll the audience.

My library doesn’t have the budget for clickers, but this semester through a chance discussion with the director of the health services department, I learned that the college received a grant for 100 TurningPoint clickers and the necessary software. The director rarely needed all of the clickers at the same time, so she offered about fifty for me to use during my instruction sessions.

So, I now have access to a tool that I had coveted for many years, but that was only the easy part. I still have to figure out how to meaningfully integrate this technology into my sessions.

My overall goals are relatively simple. I want to encourage student involvement in any way possible so I would not have to lecture for fifty minutes straight. My voice just can’t handle the pressure. To be successful, though, I need to be purposeful with my inclusion. I can’t just stick a clicker quiz at the beginning of a session and assume that the students will suddenly be overwhelmed with a desire to learn everything there is about the library. Most faculty who schedule a library instruction session have a particular purpose in mind, so I also need to be sure that I fulfill their expectations as well.

After much consideration, I decided not to add the clickers to all my sessions. Instead, I decided to focus on first year students, who hopefully aren’t quite as jaded as the upper classmen, and haven’t already decided that they know everything about research.

For my first clicker experiment, I used them with a quiz to help me gauge the classes’ knowledge of the library. I also decided to use them as an alternative way to administer our session evaluation survey. Ultimately, I had mixed results with the clickers. The students did respond better than before, but I did not get full participation. While this isn’t a big issue with the quiz, this lack of participation was an issue when they were asked to complete the evaluation survey. For most survey questions I lacked responses from five or six students, which was a larger number than when I used the paper surveys and could potentially affect my survey results.

Their lack of participation could be due to a number of reasons. The students claimed they were familiar with the clickers, but they did not seem to be as adept as they claimed. Also, due to my inexperience with the clickers there might have been a malfunction with the devices themselves. Or, maybe the students just didn’t want to engage, especially since there was still no incentive to participate. When I looked back through the survey results, they did not seem to indicate any greater amount of satisfaction regarding the sessions.

This first experience with the clickers left me a bit skeptical, but I decided to try them again. This time, I created brief quizzes related to brainstorming keywords and types of plagiarism. My second class was smaller than the first, and I seemed to receive better engagement. The clickers also seemed to allow them to be more honest with the surveys and they seem more comfortable indicating their disinterest in the information presented, though the results also indicated that they saw the overall value in the information.

I have used the clickers in about twelve sessions this semester, and overall they were well received by the students. However, I am not completely sure that it adds significantly to the engagement. I also have not seen any indication in the surveys that my sessions are better or worse with their inclusion. I have discovered though that there may be some sessions, and topics, that are better suited for clickers than others. Upper level classes where I am trying to show specific resources do not lend themselves initially to clickers, and the time may be better spent with other activities or instruction.

I am still in the process of learning how clickers will fit into my classes, but I would generally call them a success, if only for the fact that is makes the survey process easier. Though, they aren’t the panacea for student engagement for which I had hoped. Activity type and student familiarity are essential variables that appear to affect clicker success.

Unfortunately, the overall nature of one shot instruction seems to be the greatest contributor to student disengagement. Student and faculty buy-in is the necessary component for library instruction success, whether it includes clickers or not.

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Mark Herring, Dean of Library Services at Winthrop University.

Summer’s over, I know, but we must go once more to the breach of web privacy. A California librarian recently complained about Amazon’s new Kindle ebooks lending program for libraries. The complaint focuses on Amazon’s privacy policy and advertising. In a ten minute video (the transcript of which is here), the librarian argues that in our hasty “greed” to get books into the hand of readers, librarians violated one of our sacred trusts: privacy protection. Amazon keeps a record of all books lent on Kindles via corporate servers. This information is later used like it is on the website, both to recommend new titles and of course advertise products by selling that information elsewhere. While the story was picked up in the library press and on Slashdot, it wasn’t widely publicized, at least not to the extent of the story of Amazon’s lending program. The reason why is simple: web privacy is now a non-starter.

This isn’t the first such story about Web privacy (or lack thereof), and it is not likely to be the last. But it is a non-issue and will remain so as far as cyberspace extends. It’s not as if we weren’t warned.

As long as go as 1999, in a widely publicized story (perhaps forgotten now?), Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, told a group that the issue of privacy on the Web was a “red herring” (no relation by the way). McNealy went on to say that “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” McNealy wasn’t the only one to argue in this manner, and neither is Amazon the only company with a patent disregard for privacy. Frankly, any company or social network on the Web puts privacy on low priority. Don’t get me wrong. Privacy isn’t an absolute right. I can think of times when not disclosing someone’s shenanigans would border on the criminal. But our patrons should be able to do basic library business without being hounded.

To be sure, the strength of the poisoned privacy varies among various Web apothecaries. With Facebook rapidly approaching one billion users, only a tiny minority remain who can care about privacy. Only last year Zuckerberg reminded all of us that “the age of privacy is over.” At the time, some saw this as an about-face. But anyone who followed Facebook helter-skelter knew otherwise. James Grimmelmann remarked once that of all the social networks, Facebook had the best privacy statement, and it was awful.

But I like the way Zuckerberg phrased it because I think it sums up nicely where we are about the Web and privacy. It’s a brave new world, and those not yet on board are from another, older and quite possibly, flat one. This was never made clearer to me than a few years ago.

I had the distinct pleasure to visit MIT in 2009 and learn of new web-related inventions in the proverbial “pipeline.” Amid our somewhat graying profession were these twentysomethings, naturally, all exceedingly bright. Some of what we saw has already come to pass, while others remain in development. There were toys, apps, and so on. But what really caught my eye was a broach or lapel pin.

This pin, our attractive, late twentysomething, explained to us, made certain you never forgot a name or a face again. I’m terrible with names, so naturally I perked up even more. When you approach a person, she said, the pin casts his or her “vitals” on their chest, visible to you but not to them. Commonly known things, she said, like age, marital status, number of children, where they work, recent vacations or even recent accomplishments. This way, she told us cheerfully, you’re never at a loss what to talk about. You know, how are the kids, is Peter enjoying Harvard, and how was the vacation in the Caymans?

Several of us, all over 50, let out an audible gasp. But isn’t that a violation of privacy, we asked, almost in unison. Oh, no, she reassured us. It’s all on the Web anyway. And then she said something that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. When asked about the ethics of it all, she replied, again cheerily, “Those are issues taken up by another department. We don’t really engage in the ethics part of it.” And that’s when I knew. We are of a different age because even the developers no longer think about these things, assuming they once did. Ethics will ponder that matter and get back to you. But don’t call us; we’ll call you.

None of us want to remain fully anonymous, but many of us–at least those of us over 50–would prefer to remain somewhat private. Not anymore. Everything we are or hope to be, whether true or not, is on the Web; and someone is or will be making use of it. In this brave new world, we all live our lives on the backs of so many digital postcards that travel the globe daily.

This isn’t about going back, or trying to recapture the genie or clean up the toothpaste. Those days are over. Rather this is about how we librarians have become students of change and must now weigh those changes regularly. As the Web changes books, it also changes the libraries that house them. And so McLuhan was right after all: We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

And so here we are, once more to the breach. Habent sua fata libelli: books have their fates. The only question that remains today is this one: is this the fate we want for them, for our libraries?

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Jane-Rebecca Cannarella, a student at Arcadia University in Philadelphia who completing is her Masters with a focus in School Library Media Specialty.

Finding the right technology to use in the library, particularly the kind of devices that will best suit the largest number of patrons, can be an arduous task when considering the wealth of new advancements that are available. Many of these items can be costly or not intuitive to the user. But two new tools have proven themselves useful and user friendly in all varieties of libraries.

QR codes, or Quick Response codes, were first introduced for use in the auto industry in the mid-nineties. Since then QR codes, which are a two dimensional matrix barcode, have become increasingly popular in libraries. They store URLs and text data that can be pulled from the physical world onto mobile phones. This is done by using the camera feature to take a picture of the code which will be translated through software into text, web addresses, contact or location information, or other pertinent information.

The prevalence of smart phones and mobile devices with internet capabilities is hard to ignore. More and more of the population have access to smart phones, which makes the use of QR codes that incorporate information access and smart phone technology an appealing option for education and libraries. They are low cost options that are user friendly and easy to employ. There are many free QR code generator sites such as Kaywa QR code generator, qrstuff.com, and Deliver.com. Codes exist in a number of spots such as in the virtual world of blogs, online catalogs, and webpages, as well as in the physical world of book shelves and checkout desks.

They can be implemented in a number of ways within libraries. Codes can be used in library stacks to direct the user to supplement online electronic resources, they can be accessed for catalog records to inform the user of location information, or they can link to audio tours. Many libraries are utilizing them to create a more unique user experience. For example, Lafayette College Library used QR codes to create an interactive mystery game to better acquaint incoming freshman to their college library, the students were able to access the scavenger hunt information through the website. Librarians were stationed throughout the library and would hand the students the QR codes upon successful completion of a clue. At UC Irvine the libraries use QR codes within the stacks: the arts section points the user to further browsing within the physical collection, and the math QR codes directs the user to the best ebook collection for their query. Contra Costa County Library uses the QR codes for directing patrons interested in popular books to further reading as well as to market downloadable audio books for those that want to listen while using public transportation. And Sacramento Public Library allows patrons to access reference service information through QR codes.

Through these codes libraries can reach the user in non-traditional locations, this increases library usage frequency creating a stronger sense of community. With increasing patron activity and easy access to the library, even remotely, in mind another free resource that has been successfully implemented in libraries is the use of Conduit.com. Conduit.com allows users to create a library specific application that be accessed on a smart phone, as well as a community toolbar in order to drive traffic and increase patronage for the library. The community tool bar provides continuous access to library resources and services addressing the need for students to use peer reviewed resources available to them without their knowledge.

Since patrons, particularly students, are more comfortable accessing information online in order to conduct research, a toolbar that showcases the what is available at the library will result in accessed data that is valid and reliable. Librarians can provide a visible link to the databases, Twitter, blogs, and ebooks that are available through the library. This increases the use of existing, and paid for, library research and self-service tools that might be ignored by the patrons in lieu of Google searches.

At Arizona State University the web services librarian put Conduits on all the public computers in order to highlight library services to patrons that might not know of the availability of those resources. The Colorado Statue University Libraries use Conduit in order for patrons to have access to multiple library resources simultaneously. The Bush Memorial Library at Hamline University uses them as a way for users to search the catalog and databases without having to go through the library website each time. It also gives the user the opportunity to get customized toolbars for their educational specialty.

The application works in a similar manner: it allows the user easy and immediate access to the library’s Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, wiki sites, and blogs. It directs the patron to sites and resources that the library offers in a remote setting. Both the application and toolbar claim to be easy enough to create for even the least tech savvy person.

While both QR codes and Conduits rely heavily on smart phone usage, it is in the best interest of librarians to understand how advancing technology can best benefit the library. Free technology that focuses on enabling patrons to have better access to library sources will provide them with more well-rounded and peer-reviewed research, while those patrons that do have access to smart phone technology can reach their library services even when it is not physically available to them. Having this technology at their disposal allows patrons to become a more independent and empowered learners as well as bringing overlooked library resources to the forefront of the users’ search. Most importantly, these technologies create a sense of community while broadening the uses of the library.

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Laura Braunstein, English Language and Literature Librarian at Dartmouth College.

I was chatting recently with a professor in my liaison department who was beginning research for a new book. Did she have everything she needed? Was there anything I should look into ordering? Yes, she said, the library was pretty well stocked with books and journals for the topic. However, many of the books she needed we only had as ebooks – for those, she would order print copies through interlibrary loan.

One of my colleagues had a similar experience. He was talking to several of his liaison faculty about a new ebook collection in the Humanities. The collection would be great, they told him, when they needed to look something up quickly, or search for a mention of a particular topic. But they would still want print books for serious study – ebooks weren’t the same, they told him, “we just don’t read that way.”

Many of these professors own Kindles or other ereaders, and love them – for reading the latest Ruth Rendell mystery on a six-hour flight to France to visit an archive. It’s one thing, they tell us, to read for pleasure on a screen – but it’s quite another to read for understanding, for critique, for engaging in the scholarly conversation. And this isn’t a generational matter – some of the faculty I know who seem most committed to print are younger than forty.

Does reading in the Humanities necessitate the long-form, linear, analog experience of the codex? Even when I tell these professors about the features available in some of the new ebook platforms – highlighting, annotation, sharing notes, etc – they still assert that they “just don’t read that way.” (And what applies to reading is even more crucial in writing – when it comes to tenure or promotion, they tell me, no monograph “born digital” would ever “count” in the way a print book would.)

Ebooks seem like sweet low-hanging fruit – they have enhanced searchability, accessibility at any time or place, and reduced storage and preservation costs. What’s not to love? Ebooks seem to make our students very happy. Often they don’t want to read a book cover to cover (although their professors might wish they would), and searching for relevant passages seems to satisfy their needs for many assignments. And journal literature seems exempt from the preference for print – I haven’t heard many complaints about deaccessioning back runs of print journals represented in JSTOR’s collections, for instance.

Is a user who routinely requests a print copy when the ebook is in the library’s holdings just multiplying the costs we thought we were saving? Should we deny these requests? Should we tell our Humanities faculty that even if they “just don’t read that way,” they should, because that’s the way the world of scholarly communication is moving in most other fields? Do we need to change their habits of reading, and habits of mind? Do we lead them to new formats or follow their preferences?

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Veronica A. Wells, Access Services/Music Librarian at University of the Pacific. You can find her online at Euterpean Librarian.

If you give a student an iPad…she will ask for Angry Birds. This is one of the many lessons I learned when I handed four students each an iPad at a recent library workshop.

Thanks to a grant awarded to two of my colleagues, my library has had the opportunity to purchase and experiment with iPads for reference and instruction. It was quite entertaining to see the students’ reactions when I told them they would be using the iPads. It was even more entertaining to watch as they effortlessly used the requisite apps and navigated the device.

I attended ACRL’s Immersion Teacher Track Program last summer and I saw several librarians with iPads. I asked them if they were using them for reference and instruction. Most said they weren’t quite sure yet, but that they had been encouraged to experiment. To me, this is a very exciting time. There is no Best Practices with iPads…yet. Right now we are free to make up the rules, fail, and hopefully learn about ourselves, our colleagues, our students, and the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of this new technology. And that’s exactly what we’re doing at my library.

Earlier this month the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article discussing several iPad project presentations held at the annual Educause conference in Philadelphia, entitled Colleges Take Varied Approaches to iPad Experiments, With Mixed Results. None of these projects come from academic libraries, but I am really interested in the ways in which higher education institutions are experimenting with tablets and to see if they might have some advice for academic librarians. For example, Pepperdine University is comparing a group of students using iPads for their coursework to a group using printed books or laptops. According to the researchers, preliminary data shows that the iPad-using students appear to be more engaged with the course material. Perhaps this means that students might be “more engaged” in a library instruction session or a reference interaction when given the opportunity to use a tablet. For more details, check out the Pepperdine iPad Project website.

In my library workshop, we used the iPads with the help of QR Codes (or Quick Response Codes) to get students moving around the library in order to find books, sound recordings, musical scores, Billboard magazine, and the Multimedia Studio. In general, the class was relatively successful and I can’t wait to try it again with a larger group. While students were able to seamlessly and effectively use the iPads and apps, a couple of them struggled when it came to looking up something by call number and finding the music reference area. This fascinated me. Why is it that students can figure out an iPad without much effort, but not the physical library? Are they or is the library to blame? But I wonder if there might be a way for us to rethink our physical space of the library so that it “makes sense” to our digital natives like a tablet or cell phone does. It’s at least making think that I need to relocate the music reference section.

Have you experimented with tablets at your library? How have students reacted?

This month’s post in our series of guest academic librarian bloggers is by Jessica Hagman, Reference and Instruction Librarian at Ohio University. She blogs at Jess in Ohio.

Last fall, I taught a one-credit learning community seminar. During the week where we discussed research and library resources, I showed the class this video from Google, describing how the search engine works. I suspected that most students had no idea how links come to the top of a Google search results page and no basis on which to begin evaluating the results beyond page rank, a suspicion confirmed by research from the Web Use Project (previously discussed here on ACRLog).

Yet, when I asked whether the video surprised them or if the search engine process was different than they had previously thought, I heard the proverbial crickets. Finally, one student spoke up with a shrug, “I guess I’ve just never thought about it before.” While I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that few students spent time thinking about the mechanics of Google, it was startling to hear it stated so clearly.

I thought about this comment again a few weeks ago when I ran across a link to Eli Pariser’s TED Talk “Beware Online Filter Bubbles.” In the talk and his new book elaborating on the subject Pariser argues that companies like Facebook and Google use the data we share online to build a personalized bubble around each person in which they only encounter information, news and links that confirm their already established world view and assumptions. And while the bubble is pervasive, it is mostly invisible.

After watching the talk, my thoughts turned to the undergraduate researcher writing about a contentious social issue like gun control or abortion whose browser history limits the scope of the results they see on Google. I’ve discussed Google searching in many library instruction sessions, but it’s usually been to point out the poor quality of some of the search results and to encourage students to look beyond the first link. Starting in the fall, I will mention the personalization of search results as well, so that students are at least aware that their search results reflect more than just the keywords they searched.

The implications of the filter bubble may go beyond the research for a freshman composition paper, however. In the later chapters of his book, Pariser argues that the pervasiveness of filter bubbles may hinder learning, creativity, innovation, political dialogue, and even make us more susceptible to manipulative advertising. It’s difficult to discuss these consequences in a one-shot library instruction session, but to know that the bubble exists is a powerful first step to escaping it when necessary.

I will be teaching the learning community seminar again this fall, and this year I will show them Pariser’s talk. While I think it’s important that they be aware of personalized search and its potential implications, I’m also very curious to hear what students think about personalized search and a world of filtered information. While they may not have spent much time thinking about Google in the past, I hope that seeing the video will encourage them to think about how their own search history and browsing data affect what see – or do not see – online.

Social networking and media are attractive tools for academic librarians. While we are still looking for the killer application for an academic library, our experiments and efforts to leverage social media to connect with students are worth pursuing and occasionally produce good results. There is evidence that having a presence in Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can increase the possibility for connection between the academic library and its community members. Some of us are taking a more strategic approach to using social media. We may be creating guidelines for the appropriate uses of media, staff teams devoted to the regular use of social networks and our parent institutions are getting more serious about their use of social media as well. Where we still struggle though is in figuring out how to exploit social media to get students to become more aware and make better use of academic research resources for their course-based assignments.

I’ve always thought the real success of social media for academic libraries would involve some type of application where we would create networks that allow our students to engage with us and their peers to get the research help at the point of need. Consider a scenario where a student is working on his or her research paper assignment. He or she needs to find several articles for background information, but hits a roadblock in trying to find a few on-target scholarly articles. Instead of falling back on an Internet search, what if the student could tap into a social network monitored by academic librarians who could quickly respond with advice and direct links to the appropriate resources? It’s similar to the embedded librarian approach, but without the need for a formal arrangement with a faculty member for a specific course. The network would allow librarians and students, and perhaps faculty as well, to informally engage with each other to promote academic success.

Now a start-up, entrepreneurial venture is pursuing the exact sort of thing we academic librarians recognize as a good idea, but are without the capital and infrastructure to create ourselves. As I read the New York Times article “Homework Help Site Has a Social Networking Twist” I got that deja vu all over again feeling. The article discusses a new firm called Piazza that is signing up higher education institutions for a homework support system based on social networking concepts. According to the article here’s how it works:

Students post questions to their course page, which peers and educators can then respond to. Instructors moderate the discussion, endorse the best responses and track the popularity of questions in real time. Responses are also color-coded, so students can easily identify the instructor’s comments. Although there are rival services, like Blackboard, an education software company, Piazza’s platform is specifically designed to speed response times. The site is supported by a system of notification alerts, and the average question on Piazza will receive an answer in 14 minutes.

Go to the Piazza site and read some of the testimonials from faculty such as this one: “Piazza has proven to be an ideal forum for my class. Compared to conventional bulletin boards, the design makes it much easier for students to find relevant posts, and for my staff and me to keep track of outstanding questions.” At first Piazza sounds like the typical course management system discussion board where students might post their questions. Piazza adds the social networking component by issuing alerts so questions receive an answer quickly. Apply that to a research help scenario and instead of waiting around for a librarian to respond to a question posted to a discussion group, a text message could alert the librarian that a student needs assistance pronto. Even if a librarian wasn’t available to provide immediate assistance, in a large network research help could be provided by a more experienced student or faculty member, with a librarian checking on the accuracy of the response and improving on it if needed. Piazza is designed to reward good responses.

One thing I did notice about Piazza is that most of the highlighted courses are in the hard sciences. No doubt most of the assignments are problem-based, rather than research projects. The article states that while Piazza now has subscribers at over 300 institutions (it may be just one or two faculty per institution), it’s not making a profit and isn’t exactly picking up new customers like gangbusters. That’s something we academic librarians often overlook when we ask questions like “Why didn’t we create Google (or Amazon or YouTube, etc.)?” We seem to think that we have a natural instinct for coming up with surefire entrepreneurial concepts that involve the organization and distribution of any type of information content. What we fail to recognize is that most of these ventures lose money and disappear quickly. We like the idea of starting up an innovative new business venture, but we rarely think of the risks involved. Even if Piazza doesn’t make it, as the article points out, there are plenty more startups out there with every intent to disruptively innovate higher education with new concepts and platforms for helping students to learn by interacting in different ways with each other and their instructors. While we academic librarians may not be on the forefront of creating the new innovations, we may benefit by following the action closely and picking the right ones with which to partner.