Learning on the Job

I am both a MLIS student at SCILS and a Web Developer for Rutgers University Libraries, and I intend to share my perspective on this project from those lenses in future posts. But for this, my first post, I would like to share some thoughts as the father of a toddler and a soon-to-be toddler.

I remember feeling anxiety, hope, and a daunting sense of responsibility when my first son was born. I didn't know how to be a father. As in parenthood, I find myself in a moment of great expectations as part of a team embarking on an ethnographic study, another new frontier for me. In both cases, I'm doing my best to "learn on the job."

One thing I had to realize rather quickly about parenthood is that little kids can't tell you what they need in words. You have to intuitively understand how to address their needs by reading visual cues, interpreting partial words, and otherwise avoiding meltdown by whatever means necessary. The pediatrician, Dr. Harvey Karp (a.k.a. "the baby whisperer"), tells us meltdown usually occurs when the child feels like you're just not "getting it" (Parker-Pope, 2008). More than once I've had to reveal my inner caveman to get the point across that yes, "I know you don't want to get dressed!!!" To my astonishment, simply reiterating their feelings on their level is often more effective than using the "calm parent voice" while weathering a sonic blast that would make Pete Townshend cringe.

Librarians have to intuitively interpret information needs everyday. In the ideal world, every student would have their own librarian to interpret their needs, soothe their anxieties, and teach them to gracefully navigate the frightening maze of scholarly information. Instead, we must do our best tailor our Web site to be that "surrogate" co-pilot, knowing it's a poor substitute, but hoping it will point students we may never meet in the right general direction.

Undergraduates are new to the research process and learning this new "language" can be very frustrating to them. And when we don't "get it", they don't kick and scream. OK, sometimes they kick and scream, but more often they say "whatever" and go away with a bad experience. Unlike the parent-child relationship, they can survive well enough in the wild.

Likewise, it can be frustrating and overwhelming for librarians and staff to keep up with the rapid changes in information technology we've been experiencing. How do we decide which technologies are the most important to focus on? How do we understand what our appropriate place is in the social frameworks each new technology enables? How do we let them know we "get it"?

An ethnographic study is a sensitizing process (Crabtree et al, 2000). We hope it will allow us to see the world through others' eyes. It can open doors for understanding and collaboration, and ultimately we are collaborators in each student's education and each scholar's research. As a Web developer, I am most interested in how we can practically apply the student narratives we collect to real-world decisions about interface design, usability, and investment in specific technologies. That will come, but I do believe those narratives will reveal communication problems we were previously not aware of, and improvements in communication will eventually lead us to the place that other parents tell me about when they say, "It gets easier."

The shift to parenthood was not easy for me because it required a fundamental shift in my own identity. I believe that libraries are going through a similar phase as many of the values they've traditionally provided are shifting in focus. While some anxiety is natural and understandable, a deep understanding of our students' perspective gives us the opportunity to both find new needs to fill, and reinforce our traditional services in words they will understand.


References:

Crabtree, Andy, David M. Nichols, Jon O'Brien, Mark Rouncefield, Michael B. Twidale. 2000. "Ethnomethodologically informed ethnography and information system design." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51:7, pp. 666-682. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. external link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(2000)51:7<666::aid-asi8>3.0.CO;2-5

Parker-Pope, Tara. (2008). Coping with the caveman in the crib. Retrieved March 10, 2009, from The New York Times Web site: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05well.html