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The Library & Information Science Professional's Career Development Center |
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Librarians
on Center Stage: Being a Teaching Librarian by Clint Chamberlain |
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Do
you recall the dreaded library lectures of your undergraduate years?
Perhaps a librarian would trundle a cartload of books to your
classroom, or perhaps your professor would lead the class to visit the
librarian in his or her natural habitat, but regardless of the location,
the experience was always the same: the librarian would expound about
different indexes and reference sources, pointing out feature after
feature of each dusty tome. And
you, dear undergrad, perhaps tried valiantly to listen in hopes of
gleaning some pearls of wisdom, or perhaps more often stared out the
window and paid little attention, under the assumption that you already
knew the basics of library research and did not need to learn more –
after all, you knew where to find the books, and how hard could it be
after that? Well,
library instruction has changed (although perhaps the attitudes of the
undergraduates have not), and never before has there been such demand
for librarians who are willing and able to perform a wide variety of
instruction-related duties. As the number of information choices and
formats increases, the need to educate our users in how to locate,
evaluate, and use that information will become more and more important.
Nearly every position advertisement for a reference librarian
includes instruction as a requirement of the job, and many positions are
devoted entirely to planning, promoting, and providing library
instruction. So
what exactly does a teaching librarian do?
The instruction-related tasks may vary widely, depending upon the
institution and position. For
example, in the library in which I currently work, all of the public
services librarians are responsible for developing both printed and
online help guides in different subject areas, each according to the
librarian’s areas of expertise. In addition, all librarians are expected to teach classes if
necessary, again according to their areas of subject expertise.
We also all conduct tours, assist users by giving one-on-one
instruction at the reference desk, and provide in-depth research
assistance by providing research consultations.
As if all that were not enough, we also work to develop online
means of instruction by creating helpful web pages and online tutorials.
All
of this activity flows more smoothly with someone to manage it, which is
where the instruction coordinator comes in.
In my current position as coordinator of the library’s
information literacy program, I am responsible for handling all of the
requests for instruction made by faculty members.
This duty involves maintaining the instruction schedule, finding
librarians who have the time and subject expertise to teach, and
ensuring that the library instruction lab is reserved if necessary.
I develop lesson plans, create handouts, and try to figure out
the best ways to help our students learn to find and evaluate
information on their own, whether that information be physically in the
library in a traditional print resource, contained in an electronic
resource to which the library subscribes, or floating free out in
cyberspace. Even though
most of the instruction sessions we teach here consist of 50-minute
one-shots or, more rarely, a series of visits to the same class, some
instruction librarians are lucky enough to be able to teach
semester-long credit-bearing courses.
One
of the many benefits of being a teaching librarian is that it gets me
completely out of the library during the course of a normal workday.
In addition to teaching in our own instruction lab in the
library, I often must leave the library itself to teach in one of the
computer labs scattered around campus.
As a result I am probably one of the most-recognized faces at the
university. Even those students who don’t know me by name know where
I’m from, and I often hear them referring to me as “that tall guy
from the library.” Maybe
it’s not quite stardom, but it does show students that librarians are
real people who are allowed out of the library on occasion!
I also get to interact with the students far more extensively than most of my colleagues do. While teaching, I’m “up on stage” for thirty or more minutes at a time. Although the experience was terrifying at first, my fear of public speaking has become practically nonexistent over the course of performing my daily duties. At the end of a successful class, I find myself filled with adrenaline and excited by the interaction between myself and the students, and I return to my office encouraged to search for even more for new and creative ways to hook students on finding information and thinking about how to apply it to their lives. Of course, it’s not all wine and roses. Some research indicates high levels of burnout among teaching librarians (see Sheesley for a summary of the research, as well as suggestions for how to deal with the situation). There are weeks when teaching multiple classes every day leaves me exhausted. Students are often less than thrilled to be told they don’t know everything there is to know about doing research, and they resent being told that doing a simple search using Yahoo is not enough. Faculty members can fail to understand that information literacy is a librarian’s discipline, that we are experts at it, and that we know better than they want their students need to be taught in that regard. Technology often fails, from slow or disrupted Internet connections to something as simple as a burned-out bulb in an overhead projector. You have to be flexible, responsive, creative, a tech-savvy risk-taker, firm with both students and faculty, an impassioned advocate for the importance of your work, well-organized, and ultimately possessed of good interpersonal skills and a love for teaching. Yet
then there are those classes when everything clicks, and you walk out
feeling as if you’ve made some small difference by giving the students
the tools they need to become independent learners.
Those are the days when you know that center stage is the place
for you. Sheesley,
Deborah F., “Burnout and the Academic Teaching Librarian: An
Examination of the Problem and Suggested Solutions,” Journal
of Academic Librarianship 27:6 (November 2001): 447-451. Clint Chamberlain is the Information Literacy Librarian at Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi. He received his MLS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001 and his MA in Archaeological Studies from Boston University in 1999. Article submitted March 2002 Disclaimer: The ideas expressed in LIScareer articles are those of their respective authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the LIScareer editors.
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Page last updated
10/03/2005
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