Library Revolution

Bravo, Dorothea!

One of the most common things I hear myself saying to the library staff I train is: “Play with it. You can’t break anything!!”

But I know that a lot of them are reluctant, or downright terrified of the idea of just jumping in and trying things out.

Read her full post about the “training wheels culture” and cataloging… I think it will ring true with many of the frustrations felt by many of us who find ourselves doing training for library staff. And she pulls no punches in venting these frustrations.

Librarians are a timorous breed, fearful of ignorance and failure. We believe knowledge is power, which taken to an unhealthy extreme can mean that we do not do anything until we think we understand everything. We do not learn by doing, because learning by doing invariably means failure. So a librarian just won’t sit down with AACR2, Connexions, and the AUTOCAT mailing-list archive and work out how to catalogue a novel item. Nor she won’t sit down at the computer and beat software with rocks until it works.

She’ll sit passively, hands in lap, and ask for training, feeling guilty the whole time for displaying ignorance.

And

What they need is to kick off the training wheels, honestly. Their locus of control vis-a-vis technology needs to move a long way inward. There is nothing more frustrating than dealing with fear-based apathy. I don’t mind intelligent skepticism; I’ll prove a given tool’s worth or I’ll abandon it. I don’t mind dealing with genuine problems. They happen.

I do mind, quite a lot, having to stand over a grown professional’s shoulder teaching her to use a set of essentially self-explanatory web forms because she cannot be bothered to learn by doing. And I do this a lot.

My husband and I picked up a new wii game last week. Did we:

A. Sit down with the manual and try to memorize all of the controller movements and their proper applications

B. Call Best Buy and ask that a member of their “Geek Squad” swing by the house to thoroughly train us in how to use the game

C. Refuse to play the game because it was unfamiliar to us

D. Pop the disc into the slot and start shooting away at bad guys until we figured it out

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I think a lot of librarians could learn a lot from playing more video games.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 11:21 am and is filed under Library Technology, professional development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.