It's Academic

What’s in a Name? Collaborating for Consistency

February 10, 2023

Early in my library career, I heard the phrase “work like a patron.” These words have come to mind frequently since then, often in conversations about user experience. Considering the language used in information literacy instruction is especially important. After all, terms like databases, peer-reviewed articles, periodicals and search filters are not often part of undergraduates’ lives outside of school.

Fortunately, a recent Niche Academy webinar, “Systemic Problems With Information Literacy Training” presented by Mary DeJong, covers these and other concerns related to engaging with students and faculty. If you haven’t seen the session yet, a description, recording, and (entertaining) slides are available online.

Many of DeJong’s observations about research assumptions and motivations — or lack thereof — resonated with us. At our library, this presentation reaffirmed our views on the need for wider conversations about a specific issue: communicating source types with students.

Why this focus? Consider these scenarios, based on a mix of past experiences:

During a research consultation, a student notes their instructor wants them to find at least three peer-reviewed articles and no more than two online sources for an assignment. They don’t know how they can meet these requirements, given that their peer-reviewed articles were all found online. Doesn’t that make them online sources?
When limiting a search by source title, the filter is labeled “Journal Title” — and newspapers are among the titles listed.
A student assumes anything in a library database search meets the criteria for an assignment, because articles within a library database are listed as required sources. After a database search, the student chooses the first three results, including a book review.

The webinar and subsequent discussions brought us back to working like a patron. When students are presented with an assignment or working on activities in an information literacy session, what are their experiences like? From their perspectives, what could be more clear or consistent? Are we providing explanations for jargon-y words or acronyms that may be unfamiliar? We certainly try to. But just as important — do our explanations match those of their professors?

We’ve had conversations with faculty individually about their assignments, with good results. However, we decided to plan a more focused effort by meeting with a group of writing instructors. We work with their classes frequently, so this seemed like a good starting point. We asked how they were describing different types of sources to their students, heard about what was most effective, and listened as they shared ideas with each other. We agreed to meet again, and may collaborate on a faculty workshop about this topic in the future.

Given our small campus and existing rapport with faculty, developing these ideas with them made sense to us. Down the road, we may develop a module or tutorial about this topic. Other institutions may start with tutorials and modules. Whatever the route taken, the end goal of reducing student confusion in a sea of information is a worthy one.

Reevaluating Our Liaison Program To Meet A New Normal

February 6, 2023

tags: Liaison Activities

by Cecelia Lasley

It seems that one of the most frequently used words over the past few years has been “unprecedented.” How do we as librarians adapt as these unprecedented times become our new normal? This is far too big a question to address in one short piece, but it is one that lingers in the back of my mind frequently as an early career librarian whose career will entirely exist in the environment created by our field’s answers to that question. It has been particularly front of mind for me recently as W&J entered a new strategic plan around the time of my arrival this fall, and the librarians subsequently took time this last month to discuss the library’s mission and goals, and to reevaluate the role that we all play as liaisons. Our updates to our mission and goals are still in progress, but our reevaluation of the liaison program will hopefully guide us as we continue to adapt to changes in our library, on our campus, and in our field and the world.

What does it mean to be a liaison? That is where we started our discussion as we thought through our liaison program for the first time since its creation seven years ago (liaison areas have been reassigned with personnel changes, but this is the first time that the program itself has been discussed to my knowledge). Like for many libraries, those seven years have been filled with lots of change for us at W&J – personnel changes (including the addition of myself and the College Archivist in 2022), a building renovation, and the onset of a still ongoing global pandemic. The way that our students learn, our faculty teach, and we support both groups is constantly evolving. Despite all of this change, the core goal of our liaison program remains the same – to better connect the library and academic departments in order to best support the academic needs of our campus community. To figure out how to refresh our approach to meeting this goal, we found inspiration in the results of the survey published in Antje Mays’ “Dangerous Liaisons: Brainstorming the 21st Century Academic Liaison.” This survey’s range of participants and honest feedback about the pros and cons of their liaison programs helped remind us that we cannot and should not be trying to do everything at one time, especially since we do not have any librarians whose sole job it is to be liaisons or reference/instruction librarians.

We structured our new goals after Salisbury University’s Librarian Liaison Duties. We defined three core thematic categories that represent the work that each liaison is supposed to take on for their departments: serving as a point of contact with academic departments, teaching information literacy skills, and developing the collection in our liaison areas. For each of these three categories, we established an objective, best practices (achievable goals for the category), and aspirational goals to challenge us to grow when we have the bandwidth and faculty buy-in to do so. Many of our best practice goals revolve around a core group of faculty members who have bought into working with us because our other duties require us to pump the breaks on trying to convince more reluctant faculty members at this point in time. This structure and these goals fit our current priorities as we navigate an ever-changing “new normal” without overextending any one librarian. I hope that as we and the field continue to adapt to changes in the academic landscape, we will continue to revisit our best practice and aspirational goals to push ourselves and our departments to better serve the entire campus community.

Has your library also done a similar revamp of policies/programs lately? What did that process look like? How does your library approach liaisons (if they have them at all)? I would love to hear your thoughts coming from a small library where liaisons are not always subject experts (meaning holding a degree in the discipline) in their assigned departments.

References

Mays, Antje, “Dangerous Liaisons: Brainstorming the 21^st Century Academic Liaison” (2019). Library Faculty and Staff Publications. 304. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/libraries_facpub/304/

Salisbury University Libraries. (2020, February). Librarian liaison duties. Salisbury University. https://www.salisbury.edu/libraries/research-resources/_files/liaison-duties.pdf.

Academic Integrity and Emotional Well-Being

February 3, 2023

by Ula Lechtenberg

Every year, Pitt chooses a theme and provides grant funding to projects and events that speak to that theme in some way. This year is the Year of Emotional Well-Being. And while it may be too late to submit something for this particular grant, I have been thinking about how we teach academic integrity could have great impact on students’ emotional well-being.

Consider this scenario:

A student is about to turn in their research paper that they worked on over last few weeks. As part of the submission process, they must run their paper through a plagiarism checker. They fret about this because what if they accidentally plagiarized? They don’t want a bad grade and they don’t want their professor to think less of them. So here they are, stressing about their citations.

Anguish over citation formatting and worrying about getting caught accidentally plagiarizing are not positives for emotional well-being. But think about how the topic is usually framed. Discussion about academic integrity and potential violations of it are often framed in punitive ways. “If you get caught cheating, you will get a zero. There is a zero tolerance policy if you are caught plagiarizing. Don’t cheat or plagiarize because it is bad.”

For students new to college and for those more senior, these phrases are not helpful. They are scary. And, before you say anything about them being deterrents, are they? Over the course of this pandemic, there were more reports of cheating at colleges. Part of this is likely because of the rise of detecting tools, which are problematic in and of themselves. Yes, there are going to be some students who cheat because they can. The majority, however, probably do it because they feel like it’s the only way to keep up.

Learner-Centered Approach

Since 2016, the University Library System at Pitt has offered a badge to students upon completion of a set of Academic Integrity modules. While not required across the curriculum, they have been widely used across many programs first embedded in Blackboard and now Canvas. With the help of an internal OER grant, a group of us decided to expand on the existing modules, incorporating new themes, and taking a less punitive approach to the topic. Once the modules are done, we will be licensing them for reuse through Creative Commons licensing.

The updated modules will help faculty contextualize the topic through a learner centered approach. Students are doing their best and the traditional approaches tend to increase anxiety and fears over academic integrity violations. Updates to these modules focus on creating an interactive, learner centered experience encouraging students to think holistically about academic integrity in their own lives. Modules are more personalized to include stories and real life examples that build upon student experiences rather than focusing on deficit thinking.

Yes, cheating and plagiarizing are bad and there are consequences for that behavior. But we want to teach students why they should care in the first place–scholarly conversation and all.

Connect and Communicate Presents – Collecting Pennsylvania Political Twitter Data

January 31, 2023

by Alex K.

Presented by

John Russell and Andrew Dudash

Wednesday, February 22 at 2:00 pm EST

Registration Link

This presentation will review efforts to collect election-related Twitter data from Pennsylvania-specific accounts and hashtags for 2018 and 2020 in the run-up and aftermath of both election cycles and what was learned from the process. The presenters will also discuss the work that goes into building social media data collections and some tools that can be used to support such work for platforms beyond Twitter.

John Russell is the Digital Humanities Librarian at Penn State University Libraries, University Park. Andrew Dudash is the Social Sciences Librarian at Penn State University Libraries, University Park.

We will mute participants on entry into the Zoom room. Session will be recorded and available on YouTube after the session. We will enable Zoom’s Live Transcription feature during the session.

If you would like to present with C&CS, please contact the C&CS team.

The ethics of digital piracy

January 27, 2023

tags: ethics, piracy, shadow libraries

by Rob Sieczkiewicz

As librarians, we often encounter patrons engaging in behaviors that can be frustrating or disruptive, from ignoring due dates to vaping in study rooms. Is digital piracy a problem you’ve considered? Are you aware of the extent to which students and faculty on your campus rely on pirate sites (also known as shadow libraries) to download copies of textbooks and others resources that your library may not provide?

I began to pay attention to the digital piracy problem after the U.S. Justice Department seized and shut down the website of the popular shadow library, Z-Library, in November 2022. Soon after that, I was helping a student request a book through interlibrary loan. The student expressed their disappointment at the loss of the pirate site, which they had relied on to access books for their classes. This event made me question the extent to which students resort to ebook piracy as both a cost-saving measure and a tool of convenience. Despite our efforts to reduce textbook expenses for students through our textbook reserve program and the promotion of open educational resources, it is clear that students are using other methods to get assigned materials.

The ethical dilemma posed by digital piracy is real. While we want to ensure access to information for our students, especially those with limited funds, authors do have a right to control how their work is distributed and to make a living from their writing. Curious about this crucial issue, Haley Dittbrenner (a Susquehanna University sophomore) and I applied for and then received Susquehanna’s March Fellowship for Ethical Leadership. To better understand the prevalence and impact of digital piracy in academic libraries, we will survey faculty and students about their own experiences with shadow libraries. We hope to spark a dialogue about the ethical implications of digital piracy at Susquehanna University, raise awareness among those who use pirated materials of the risks and consequences, and identify measures students and faculty can take to reduce digital piracy.

We are currently reviewing the literature and designing the survey, but we plan to share our results with Pennsylvania Library Association members at the annual conference or through another medium. Are you also curious about ebook piracy on your campus? Interested in collaborating? Get in touch with us here!

Note: This post includes text originally written for our March Fellowship application. The final text was edited with the help of the artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT.