Using Browns eight questions to prompt reflective writing

When submitting a portfolio to the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) - albeit for Certification, Chartership, or Fellowship - all evidence pieces must be reflective. The rough guidance for these pieces is to collect 3-4 per each of the evaluative criteria. CILIP prefers these evidence pieces to short and sweet, somewhere in the range of two pages or less. I don't blame them, reading through that many evidence pieces is a lot work, and as well as reflection there's something to be said for developing brevity as a skill.

Photo by Erik Eastman on Unsplash

Reflective writing can be a difficult skill to cultivate. Especially if you are used to writing in an academic or business setting, both of which tend to require descriptive and impersonal language and content. While my reflective writing skills have certainly improved over the years, I'm not going to lie and say it's something that I'm perfect at. So it's useful to think about ways that I can continue to grow this skill. Some people work well when given a framework to use for guidance and comparison, for example. So I've been exploring ways in which I can rough out a framework for reflective writing.

Brown’s eight questions are traditionally used to help authors draft an abstract for publication, with a total of 300 words that can be written in about half an hour. I've used this tool before to help others write abstracts for publications and dissertations, so I know how useful it can be. The questions are designed to prompt a very specific type of writing - concise, descriptive, and focused. They are;

1. Who are the intended readers? List three by name.
2. What did you do? (50 words)
3. Why did you do it? (50 words)
4. What happened? (50 words)
5. What do the results mean in theory? (50 words)
6. What do the results mean in practice? (50 words)
7. What is the key benefit for readers? (25 words)
8. What remains unsolved? (no limit)
From Brown (1994) Write right first time, Literati Newsline, Special Issue, 1-8.

I began to wonder if it was possible to re-frame the questions in such a way that they could prompt a different type of writing - concise, reflective, and focused. You can find my reworked questions here.

Like my reflective writing skills, it's not perfect by any means. It's not a tool that's right for everyone. But it's a start, and I wanted to share that with others. Have a look and let me know if you use it, and how it can be improved.

Superheroes and Awe

"We need to get our capes on an emerge from the LRC in our alter ego forms to rescue library services everywhere," proclaims one of the facilitators. Because the library is imperilled. It's fallen down the well, and the only people who can save it are the employees on the ground. I'm talking about the Library Superhero Roadshow, of course.

Raj Eiamworakul
The Library Superhero Roadshow is a professional development workshop that aims to inspire library staff to "shout about their work," at seminars, conferences, and in professional press. The process of being a "loud and proud" librarian (I'm not even going to touch on that one) is likened to being a superhero. Where are you on the "Superhero Scale of Professional Pride?" Are you shy and retiring, like Ant Man, or are you "superlibrarianly" like The Incredible Hulk? At first glance, it seems all in good fun. Except the underlying language and premise of the workshop are a teeny bit concerning.

It's not fun being a superhero. The work of a superhero is alienating, demanding, and requires impressive sacrifices. For example, Peter Parker/Spiderman and Clark Kent/Superman both sacrifice their love lives so that they can save the world. A reliance on superheros also externalises the responsibility for injustices. No longer is it the duty of citizens, public officials, or the state to solve our problems. Instead, superheroes will come to our rescue, literally carrying the world on their shoulders for us. It's not the fault of organisations or governments for systematically eroding worker's rights, dismantling cultural funding, or discontinuing social services. It's the librarians' faults - they're not shouting loud enough!

 
Serge Kutuzov
In a recent issue of Information Professional one of the facilitators writes that "It occurred to me that there was a superhero analogy between the self-depreciating persona we routinely adopt on the library helpdesk and the self-publicising role we should be aspiring to." Asking information professionals to engage in unpaid, voluntary, scholarly activity risks the overburdening and burnout seen in academia. It also misses a salient point - libraries are already overrun by volunteerism, and burnout. Linda Christian (2015) describes how under the guise of professional responsibilities, employers already routinely extract additional labour from librarians. Not engaging in scholarship doesn't make us self-depreciating.

Fobazi Ettarh (2018) describes vocational awe as the manifestation of an assumption about the inherent goodness of libraries. Libraries are sacred spaces, where employees are saints fulfilling their calling in a labour of love. We see this in Richard O'Connor's (2018) recent animation The Temple of Knowledge and when Maya Angelou (2012) called the library a "rainbow in the clouds," placed there by god. Ursula K. Le Guin (2004) even describes the library as a "sacred place to a community," in her homage to the written word, The Wave in the Mind. An entire book by Nancy Kalikow Maxwell (2006) has been dedicated to capturing the "deeper meaning and higher purpose" of librarianship. We would question this if it took place is other professional settings. Not so librarianship. Ettarh notes that in the professional literature the discussion about job satisfaction in libraries is about passion, or a lack of it, rather than fulfilment, safety, or support. For this reason, we must struggle and sacrifice to become 'superlibrarians' because being a 'normal' information professional isn't good enough.

In the face of grand missions of literacy and freedom, advocating for your full lunch break feels petty. And tasked with the responsibility of sustaining democracy and intellectual freedom, taking a mental health day feels shameful. Awe is easily weaponized against the worker, allowing anyone to deploy a vocational purity test in which the worker can be accused of not being devout or passionate enough to serve without complaint. (Errarh, 2018)

Self-depreciating indeed.

Keeping track of conferences and events for Information Professionals

I've been tallying up the number of CPD hours I've accumulated over the last year, and was surprised to learn that I'm approaching 100 hours worth of attendance at conferences, training events, and webinars! Crazy eh? I had no idea that there were so many different training opportunities in my sector. The funny thing is, I'm sure that not many other people are aware of exactly how much is available to them in terms of conferences and events for Information Professionals. There's no one place were these events are listed. You have to keep an eye out on Twitter and various LIS email lists to catch them.

A little while ago I decided that the small list of events that I had saved in Evernote could be better managed. I decided to import the information to Silk. I came across Silk in a round about way. It's no secret that I'm a big fan of the Ig Nobel Prizes; awards that "honour achievements that make people LAUGH, and then THINK." I often use the winning papers as examples for referencing workshops. While browsing the information on the Improbable Research website, I came across a beautiful representation of all the data on previous Ig Nobel winners using Silk. This is awesome, I thought. I can use this! And that was how I began to dip my toes into the fascinating world of data visualisation.

After creating the Conferences and Events Silk (which was super easy by the way) I thought it would be worth updating with information on conferences and events that I probably wasn't planning to attend, but that would still be of interest to someone working as an Information Professional. Today my page tracks nearly 50 different conferences and events across the UK, with a few from Europe thrown in for good measure. As far as I know, it is the most comprehensive list of library and information-related events on the web at the moment.

To what end? Well, I'm hoping the information will be useful to other LIS folks in the UK. I'm also hoping that after a year or two collecting and updating data I will be able to plot trends in event types. For example, already I can say that events usually fall into one of two categories; they're either very cheap (or free), or obscenely expensive. Very few events are priced in between. What does this say about our industry I wonder? Another trend in the data, which should come as no surprise to anybody, is the bias towards hosting events in London. I knew there were a lot more opportunities in London, but I had no idea how many - over half of the LIS-related conferences and events in the UK take place there!

To summarise, creating and maintaining the list of events has been a positive step in my own continuing professional development. Both as a source of opportunities, and as a means to understand the different groups of Information Professionals in the UK and their training needs. Hope you find it useful too!

Eye on the Till

Last week I attended a one-day overview of the business management system Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL for short. As has happened at most Universities, the Library I work in was merged with the Information Technology department several years ago. The new strategy of this merged department includes an emphasis on service management. As part of this, we have all received training in the wise ways of ITIL.

While I am all for continuous improvement there are a number of problems with ITIL, that after reflecting on the training we received I can begin to define.

Customers
"We should refer to students as customers."

"We should treat them as customers, especially because that's what they have come to expect."

"If we don't treat them as customers, they will go somewhere else and you won't have a job anymore!"

The above are pretty much exact quotes from our trainer.

I've said this before; ideas and the language we use to describe them are powerful things. As the old adage goes, the difference between a Terrorist and a Freedom Fighter is one of semantics, yet one is reviled and the other celebrated. What particular ideas are we implicitly agreeing to when we consent to call our students customers? To label the people we work with a customers is to dehumanise them. They become reduced to a consumer, a means of profit, and a metric. When we talk this way we're implicitly placing the profitable before everything else because inevitably some people are more profitable than others. Especially in Higher Education, where the coveted international student provides at least twice the financial income to their university when compared to the domestic student.

CC0 image from https://unsplash.com/

But here's the thing, libraries don't exist to be profitable. As a Librarian I am in the business of giving away books, information, and my time and advice for free. We occupy the same sphere as Hospitals and Schools, hell, we're even a registered charity. Do you refer to patients in Accident and Emergency as customers? What about primary school children? Or people who make the odd charitable donation? If you do, then friend I feel sorry for you.

What really annoyed me about this particular mindset, was the the worst case scenario that our instructor could come up with involved students taking their business elsewhere. For me, that is not a particularly bad thing at all. Other Universities and Libraries are not the competition. We actually collaborate on lots of wonderful projects, and Higher Education institutions in general work really well together. There are services and resources at other institutions that I simply cannot provide, and vice versa. In reality the worst-case scenario isn't one where a student makes a business decision between homogenised services. The worst possible scenario is one where the student isn't challenged, isn't provided for, and doesn't grow or develop as a result. The worst thing that could happen is that they don't learn anything.

The big choices that we make in life aren't about where we take our business, they're about the kind of communities we choose to be a part of, and the faiths/politics/moralities we grow into.

Ownership
"It's not proprietary."

This is an outright lie from the trainer, verbatim. ITIL was jointly created by the business process company Capita, (who owns 51%) and the Cabinet office of the British Government (who owns 49%) under the name ALEXOS. Capita recorded an operating profit of 640 million GBP in 2015. The ITIL name is a (registered) Trade Mark of AXELOS Limited. The training I received was delivered by a company called Global Knowledge, under license. Every training slide had a © mark and a copyright statement on the bottom. None of the images in the training presentation were credited, by the way. Not even the still from an episode of the Simpsons, or the handful of image macros.

My employer (a publicly-funded charity) paid a private company to deliver training under license which was developed by the British Government. While 49% of ILIL belongs to the United Kingdom, it is very much proprietary.

Ingenuous
"It's just a framework, an idea. Think of it as advice or guidance. Really, it's written-down common sense."

It's deceitful to suggest that corporatist ideology is just a bit advice. Ideas are contagious, self-replicating viruses and bad ones particularly so. The continual service improvement definition of 'better, faster, cheaper,' is a three-word simplification that could be the motto of economic liberalism. Something I have a hard time placing within an educational context. That definition of improvement doesn't match up to my own, and I wonder how many Librarians would say the same. As a member of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals I have a duty to consider the public good in my professional life.

I feel that applying business improvement ideology to something that is so clearly not a business is discordant if not irresponsible, and at least warrants a closer examination. Business improvement focuses so much on processes and metrics and these are easy things to measure when you are trying to make a financial profit. However I do wonder how Libraries will be cast when examined through the same lens. It's not a framework disposed to work in favour, that's for sure.

Thoughts on RLUK16

I've been thinking about my trip to RLUK16 last month, and thought I'd write a few lines about the talks that stuck me as the most interesting. I've had some interesting conversations with colleageus about how I can work what I learned into the support sytems for my current role.

Supporting Researchers

One aspect of my role that I have been asked to develop is Researcher Support. While I do have some experience in this area, it's been a while since I last dipped my toes in the world of Higher Education research. In an effort to bring myself up to speed, last week I attended an event organised by CILIP's Yorkshire & Humberside Academic and Research Libraries Group titled Supporting Researchers At Your University. I hopped on a train in the wee hours of the morning and made my way down to York.

By Rodhullandemu (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.

I found the day incredibly interesting - and really appreciated hearing about how research support has been implemented in different university Libraries across the country. A few of my observations from the day;

• Lots of Universities have merged their IT and Library departments. Those who I heard from did report that there was still some division between these groups despite becoming a merged service. In the past I have observed that this is often due to the different emphasis that Library and IT departments place on customer support.
• Lots of Libraries have a calendar of events supporting a dedicated research skills development programme.
• Everyone uses a 'Research Cycle' or a 'Research Compass' or 'Circle-Shaped-Research-Thing' to place their services in context. It works well as a visual description of an iterative process.
• The lines of responsibility between university research offices' and Libraries' appeared to be a constant theme - yet this was something that few people were willing to discuss in any detail. I appreciate that it can be a politically sensitive issue, but clear communication is an important aspect of collaboration. And in this case, collaboration between university research offices' and Libraries' is unavoidable.

I was able to take away something to think about from every presentation; from Elizabeth Gadd's recommendation that academic Librarians attend the annual ARMA conference, to Eddy Verbaan's ruminations on incentivising research data management.