I was intrigued when Steven notes that his literature search didn’t turn up “articles providing good examples of instruction designed with some intentional failure component that is there to ultimately aid students in learning how to think for themselves when they are dealing with information overload.” I was trying to think what an “intentional failure component” might look like, and I don’t really see it.

At worst it would be a “gotcha” kind of situation, where the librarian gives purposefully incomplete instructions to the class, the class fails to get the desired result, and only then does the librarian reveal why they have failed. I’m pretty sure there is a word for that kind of person, and the word is “asshole.”

Or one could set up situations where students are likely to fail. But what if they don’t? What if they do just fine without failing? Now we have a new meta-failure on our hands, and I don’t think I can handle that.

I think if librarian teachers really want to get some failure up in their sessions, the best thing to do is to ask questions to which you do not know the answers. Do live searches in front of the students where you have no idea what is going to turn up. Wing it. Then when stuff gets ugly, remind them that research is like that, and show them how the only failed search is one that you don’t learn from.

Last week, I had the joy of talking to Anna, Jason, and Rachel on their podcast, Adventures in Library Instruction. Our topic was “Winging It,” something I have done a bit of writing about already . This isn’t what they talk about every month on the podcast, despite the “AdLibInstruction” abbreviation of the full podcast title.

I had fun recording the show, which ended up sounding like a discussion at a conference or like a FriendFeed thread in real time and out loud. I think I had a chance to say everything I wanted to say during the recording, so now I’ll just mention that the reason that I wanted to talk about Colorado College’s block plan, and my own training as an actor, is because I wanted to show that I think that wanting or needing to “wing it” is based on situation and personality as much as anything. Sweeping proclamations about libraries and librarians are seldom very useful, and I think it helps to know as much as possible how a person arrived at his or her point of view.

While this means that I don’t spend a lot of time planning sample searches or writing guided activities, it does mean that I think seriously about the best ways to approach a class to make that kind of exchange possible. I may feel free and open to possibilities in my mind, but if that isn’t clear to the students, it doesn’t help.

I first started thinking of this a few years back when I took a class with “regular” students at my college, training to be a writing center tutor. The class was lively and fun with great discussions and arguments. Until we had a guest. Then everyone clammed up. The rapport wasn’t there. The dynamic of the class was one of sharing and discussing, and when the guest speaker came in, it switched to lecture mode, and the class fell into a coma.

I thought of this again when I read Iris’s latest post, I need to stop being such a librarian. She concludes the post this way:

Note to self: There’s no way to teach it all, anyway, so think harder about things that are both practical and imagination-sparking, and then teach those things more consistently. These students like to be intellectually engaged — that’s why they’re here — so go with that. Be a guest lecturer.

This takes what I have observed and comes up with something like a solution. As a guest, I’m not there to run down “how to use the library” or even “how to do this assignment.” I’m there to get them to see how the discipline in question frames questions and creates conversations and new understanding. I’m there to get them to see the beauty and the challenge of doing research and to suggest where they might start.

To do this doesn’t take coming up with new handouts or demonstrating more or fewer features of more or fewer databases. What it takes is making a subtle but significant shift in how I see myself and how I convey what I have to offer to students.

In A Win for the Stacks, we hear about how Syracuse University faculty are petitioning and protesting a plan for the library to move a portion of the collection 250 miles offsite, where they would be available for next-day delivery to faculty and students.

Then there is Reviving the Academic Library, an opinion piece by Johann Neem. Neem believes that “The library is a means to an end: enabling students and faculty to access archives.” And from his essay, it seems like he thinks that is the sum total of what a library should do. He blames “the emergence of the field of library sciences” (apparently a recent event in his mind) for librarians’ desire to convert libraries from archives into “vague learning environments which, when boiled down to their essence, are nothing more than computer labs with sofas and coffee.”

I’m not going to pick these articles apart. It has been done in the comments on Inside Higher Ed (an alternate title for this post is “Supercilious faculty and
defensive librarians”) and also in the FriendFeed threads where I first heard about the Syracuse situation and the Neem piece.

Instead, I’ll do something I usually try (and fail) not to do here, and that’s give advice. Not directly to the players in these articles, as I don’t really know the background for the Syracuse story or how Neem arrived at his conclusions. This will be more general advice. First for faculty, then for librarians.

Advice for faculty

Click to enlarge.

It’s fun to get riled up and self-righteous on behalf of the preservation of Western Civilization (believe me, I know all about rile and self-righteousness, and you can check the archives of this blog if you doubt me) but it’s more productive to get to know the librarians and make your case for what role you think the library should play before things blow up in public meetings.

I understand faculty and students who value browsing the library stacks (see my advice for librarians, below), but I think it’s time to recognize browsing the local stacks as a pleasurable, useful activity, rather than a core research strategy. Even if you are at an enormous, inclusive library like Harvard’s you are still missing a great deal that is electronic-only. And you should certainly re-think passing on that strategy to your students who are likely to end up at institutions where the library has far narrower collections, or where the library has already moved to a collection that is more online than printed.

Putting aside that libraries have long been more than an archive for books, if you wonder why the library is taking on amenities that you associate with a student center, I’d like you to do two things. First, talk to students about this. Talk to a lot of students, not just the ones who know what you think and will tell you what you want to hear. Find out how students want to do research and homework, and why they still choose the library over the student center (if, indeed, they do). Second, please visit your library after 10PM during a busy time of the term. Too many faculty never see the library when it is fully in use by the student body. Perhaps you will be surprised by the variety of activity going on in the library, and how students move from quiet solo study, to group study, to social conversations and back again.

Advice for librarians

Click to enlarge.

I have misgivings about the truism “the user is not broken,” but let’s think about that for a minute, since it’s a commonplace in library blogland. I think one of the most useful readings of that phrase is that when readers tell us something, we should assume that they are speaking in good faith and that they know what they want.

So when student and faculty readers tell us that they want books they can open and handle and that stacks that are browsable are one of our core services as far as they are concerned, shouldn’t we respect that? Yes, budget and space problems are causing friction at many libraries, but I think too many of us think that people don’t browse any more, and some users are telling us that we are wrong.

We keep telling students that we have a hybrid library of printed and online sources, and that they shouldn’t privilege the online sources just because they are easier to use. Shouldn’t we take our own advice there?

Lastly, I think we all (librarians and readers) need to re-think what browsing and serendipity mean now. I think librarians have not done a great job in helping people browse that hybrid library. It used to be we could go to the reference stacks, plant our feet and look around for well-known or likely sources. Now, a big chunk of our reference books come to us from online packages that are segregated by publisher and have no call numbers so we can’t easily browse them alongside the printed works in the catalog. I’d love to see an iTunes style interface for libraries that can flip back and forth between “cover flow” and text lists, and which incorporated links to online sources and catalog records for printed books.

My mom said she’d match up to $200 in donations, and people came through with $195, which is excellent.

I realized that I hadn’t put in my money yet, so I did that.

After all is totalled up and PayPal takes their cut, I count $4,202.28 raised in just over a month by the Library Society of the World for the Louisville Free Public Library. One hundred and thirty six people donated through the LSW effort, with an average contribution of $33.40, and a median and mode of $20.

I set a goal of $5,000 and thought it was a stretch. It turns out I was right, but we didn’t fall that far short. I’m very proud of what we accomplished together, and very grateful that so many people trusted me with their money. I’m waiting for the PayPal transfer to come through, after which I’ll send a (real) check for something like $1,658.84, to go with the check for $2,543.44 that we already sent.

There is still the matter of the prizes. I didn’t do a great job of pushing the prizes as incentives, but we are certainly ready to use them as rewards. Everyone who donated before this blog post is elgibile to win. The available prizes for the dozen or so winners will be:

From photographer Jamie Powell Sheppard: one each of six different photo prints of the LFPL Main Library. That’s her work over my shoulder in the photo above. The prints are beautiful and so are the images. Please click on the thumbnails below, as the originals aren’t square.

Leo Laporte’s voice on your hope answering machine. Leo is the host of the TWiT (This Week in Tech) podcast and The Tech Guy radio show. He’s a pro, he sounds great, and apparently he’s an awesome guy since he just saw us discussing these prizes on FriendFeed and volunteered.

Eric Sizemore’s voice on your home answering machine. Sizemore is a librarian and a DJ. If you want people to think you have a deep, smooth voice or think you are involved with a guy who has a deep, smooth voice, this should be your pick.

An LSW Cod of Ethics mug (courtesy of Nichole Dettmar). Make an ethical stand! Makes everything taste like cod!

Beautiful, luxurious Black Forest Malabrigo yard from Abigail Goben

One item from the way cool libpunk store from Amy Buckland. I’m not sure, but I think my netbook runs faster and cooler since I put that libpunk sticker on it.

I still need to talk to the other people involved–Abigail and Amy had their own plans for selecting winners, which is fine–but my overall plan is to randomly select names of donors to match the number of prizes, contact the donors and let them pick first-come-first-served which prize they want. We’ll see how that goes.

Here’s the deal: we are at about $3,700 right now. There’s no way we are going to hit $5,000 and I’m mostly OK with that. But I’m still extending the fundraiser through Friday night in the hopes of reaching $4,000. And I think we will do it.

A donor that I am particularly fond of (namely my mom) has a challenge for us. She will match all donations we get between now and Friday night, up to $200 total. So every new donation is effectively doubled. If you can afford to donate $10, my mom will turn that into a $20 donation. If you can donate $50, it’s like you just donated $100.

Another reason I want to wait has to do with the incentives. I have forgotten to mention some of them here and only have half a plan on how to award them. But more about that later today. For now know that every dollar you donate from here on gets doubled up to $200 total. Here’s the button, you know what to do:

Don Quixote in his library by Gustave Doré

Whenever I hear someone–an elected offical, often–say that “libraries are for research and information and literature, and not for X” where X = video games or DVDs or comix or books that aren’t in English or Goosebumps or Madonna’s Sex or boardgames or sewing circles or popular novels; whenever I hear that, I think “this is a person who doesn’t really like libraries, who is scared of libraries and what they represent, and wants others others to be similarly scared.”

I think that research and information and literature are all wonderful things, and that almost every library must put some or all of those things at the core of their mission. But that’s not why I think libraries kick ass.

I think that libraries kick ass because libraries help people expand their imagination.

And there is more to the imagination than the serious, gray, DOA literature that people envision when they say that libraries should be for “serious” stuff. Libraries need to collect broadly to reflect the cultures in which they are embedded.

Libraries do many other things, too, many more obviously utilitarian things that even elected officials can get behind, like helping people learn to read or find a job. But in order for people to want to learn to read or get a better job or discover a cure for cancer or write a haiku, they need to have their imagination awakened. Before we can make ourselves better or make our world better, we need the imagination to envision something better in the first place.

To be able to be in the midst of thousands or even millions of volumes containing the expression of human thought and feeling in all its multitude of forms is an awsome thing. Even more so when you think that there are many more libraries like the one you are in, none of them complete. I have memories of being a child and realizing that whatever I happened to be interested in, I could go to the library and come home with an armful of inspiration. I get this feeling from every library I visit, and I hope that I can pass some of that feeling on to students where I work.

The first line of the Darien Statments says, “The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization.” Grandiose, perhaps, but it’s something I tend to believe. The Library, and even the small-l-library, provide a way to immerse yourself in the present and past of a culture or a civilization, and come to the surface ready to create the future.

Michael Stephens says that “libraries should encourage the heart,” which I have always thought is kind of corny. But now I think that perhaps we are saying the same thing. Libraries kick ass when they allow our hearts and minds to expand and roam freer than before.

At this moment, we have **$3,638.95** after PayPal takes its cut. So that leaves us with more than $1,300 to raise today and tomorrow.

It still could happen. I have had over $100 in donations come in already this morning. Today is the [LFPL Blogathon](http://lfplblogathon.pbworks.com/) where you donate some money to the LFPL, then blog about why libraries are awesome. Look for my post in this space later today.

If you donate using the LSW donation button below, you will be eligible to win one of the fabulous prizes [mentioned in my last post](http://stevelawson.name/seealso/archives/2009/08/one_week_to_go_in_lfpl_fundraiser.html). I heard from photographer Jamie Sheppard that the prints she’s donated are 11×14, so those are going to look quite nice on someone’s wall.

I’ll resist the urge to write some kind of wrap-up until tomorrow. Until then, please donate using the LSW button here, or [directly to the LFPL Foundation](http://www.lfplfoundation.org/). And my thanks to the 120+ of you that have already donated.

Three weeks ago today was the storm that flooded the Louisville Free Public Library. In that time we have raised over $3,200 in the name of the Library Society of the World. Over 100 of you have donated. Thank you. If you’d like to donate now, please do:

We got Boing Boinged. Louisville Public Media interviewed Greg Schwartz and me about the flood and the fundraiser and ran a radio news story with audio clips from us both (that link isn’t working right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s the right one).

Andy Woodward has started the LFPL Blogathon to stir up some more interest in the fundraiser. Please go to the lfplblogathon wiki and sign up to participate.

This is all fantastic.

But when we started all this, I kind of stuck my neck out. I said we’d raise $5,000. Which makes us still about $1,800 short.

So if you meant to donate, but haven’t yet, please do it now. If you have already donated, thanks very much. I’m planning to bug my co-workers one more time, and here I am bugging you. If there are people you can send my way this last week, please do so.

If you aren’t sure if you want to donate, consider this: you could win fabulous prizes!

Shortly after September 1, we’ll have a drawing. Or multiple drawings. We haven’t really got this figured out yet. But know that Abigail Goben is giving away three skeins of “luscious” Black Forest Malabrigo yarn, Amy Buckland is donating libpunk merch, and Nicole Dettmar has donated a lovely LSW Cod of Ethics mug.

As if those incentives weren’t enough, photographer Jamie Powell Sheppard has offered to donate six prints of photographs of the Louisville Main Library (seen above). Every donor to the LSW effort will have a chance to win one of those classic-looking prints.

So. Please donate. Please mention to other people that they can donate. And maybe you’ll win cool stuff!

If you’d rather send a check, send it to the Library Society of the World Clubhouse, PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. Make the check payable to Steve Lawson.

This money goes into my personal accounts and then I will write a check to LFPL. If you don’t like that idea (and if you don’t know me, I don’t blame you), here is the information for making a donation direct to the LFPL Library Foundation:

The Library Foundation
Attn: Flood
301 York St.
Louisville, KY 40203
(502) 574-1709

The short story

At this moment, 94 people have donated $3,143.19 via PayPal, check and cash. On Saturday I mailed a check for $2,543.44 to the Louisville Free Public Library Foundation, which they received today. So we have done good, but still have a ways to go. If you haven’t donated, please donate today. If you have donated, thanks, and please help spread the word.

The longer story

On August 11, we got Boing Boinged. Here you can see what your blog stats look like when all the librarians hit your blog on a Wednesday, and you get linked from Boing Boing on the following Tuesday.

As a result of the boingboinging, an anonymous donor (someone previously unknown to me) donated five hundred (500) dollars via PayPal. This is astonishing to me that someone would trust me with their money like that, and I’m very grateful. I’m almost as astonished that a faculty member at my college congratulated me today on the boingboinging.

After that $500 donation came in, I transferred all the money from my PayPal account to my bank account. PayPal takes a small cut of everyone’s donation, which is how we end up with that $2,543.44 figure (no, nobody donated $3.44). Once the transfer went through, I wrote the check, wrote a dopey letter, and sent it all with delivery confirmation. It arrived today.

(I know these are tedious details, but I am trying to be transparent as possible without, like, giving you the login for my bank account.)

I got a very nice call from Mary Hunt at the Library Foundation today, thanking us for our donation. I wish you all could have heard her say how much it means to them to get the amount of support they have had from their local community and from people like us. When I told her that we were all moved by the photos of the flood, she said “it was much worse than it looked in the photos.”

So that brings us up-to-date. Donations have slowed to a trickle (two Sunday, one Monday, none Tuesday, one Wednesday). There are plans afoot to get some more attention and perhaps motivate more people to donate, and I’ll post about that as soon as I can.

But if you have thought about donating but haven’t yet, this would be a great time to do it, and help me feel more confident that we’ll hit that $5,000 goal by September 1.

I have a new page with just the donation information, so if you want to link to a page here, I suggest this one: http://stevelawson.name/seealso/help_lfpl

And to all those who have donated so far, I can’t thank you enough. People keep complimenting me on this, and I’m proud to have gotten things started, but I haven’t donated a cent yet. It’s all of you who have donated, linked, tweeted (and retweeted), facebooked, submitted the link to Boing Boing, donated items for incentives (more on that tomorrow) and otherwise got us to where we are today.