Yarning Along the Path from BI to IL

I look at the stitches and see my own thinking.

I'm back at work after two weeks of holiday. As festive and restful as the time off was, I am ready to return to my work. This week is quiet in the library, which means I continued the scholarly reading first mentioned in my last Yarn Along post.

"Changing Landscapes, Enduring Values:
Making the Transition from Bibliographic Instruction
to Information Literacy" by Elizabeth O. Hutchins,
Barbara Fister, and Kris (Huber) MacPherson in
  Journal of Library Administration 36.1/2 (2002): 3-19,
and my continued chunky garter stitched cowl. 

I wasn't going to post this week since I'm flitting from article to article at this point. But once I started reading the article I'm sharing today, I realized it deserves a post so I could process it further. It is a piece that describes the positive transition from bibliographic instruction (BI) to information literacy (IL), where the latter builds upon the foundation set by the former, at two liberal arts schools in Minnesota. It is co-authored by Barbara Fister, a researcher and practitioner in my field whose ideas challenge and excite me, and whose Twitter feed is one of the most edifying of those I follow. She's been doing information literacy, and doing it well, since before the term rocked the library profession in 1989. She's awesome.

In my current project, I'm doing a sort of historical retrospective about information literacy in my field, as well as information literacy as discipline. There's more to the project than that, but I want to wait until a later post to share the gritty details. For now, suffice it to say I am immersed in the LIS literature that documents, reports, analyzes, and reflects on the shift that occurred in academic libraries between 1989 and 2000 (and beyond), from delivering "bibliographic instruction" to delivering "information literacy instruction". And this article, "Changing Landscapes, Enduring Values" (see image caption above for full citation) is fantastic for my project. I'm finding myself nodding along in excitement, cheering quietly at my desk, and reacting in all sorts of engaging ways with the piece -- much of which winds up in my marginalia. 

Excited marginalia is exciting :)

...which led me to tweet the following last night in my excitement:

...aaaand I just wrote a hashtag, in pen, in the margins of an article I'm reading and annotating. #digitalanalog #mediamerge CC: @tgrett
— Donna Witek (@donnarosemary) January 8, 2014

(for anyone interested in such things, the hashtag was #sigh)
— Donna Witek (@donnarosemary) January 8, 2014

I was sighing (or #sighing) wistfully because one of the schools the article offers as a case study has an active and engaged tradition of student scholarship, where student scholars annually attend conferences to present their work, often done in collaboration with the faculty who teach them. These are undergraduates, mind you. And the library at this school is involved in this tradition of research excellence. #sigh indeed. And awesome (or #awesome?). It's from reading case studies like these that I get reinvigorated to pursue the same kind of excellence in information literacy collaboration at my own institution. This reinvigoration is vital to my ability to do my job well.

Here is a representative nugget from the article:

Librarians work with academic colleagues as peers and fellow educators. This mutual respect contributes directly to collaboration and, in turn, to students becoming more engaged in their research. Librarians and classroom faculty share the goal of preparing students to participate in scholarly conversations, to evaluate resources critically through a particular disciplinary lens, and to be capable of contributing to the discipline's scholarly discourses. (p. 7)

This is exactly what I strive for in my work with my research partner and co-teacher, Teresa, on our campus. It's so exciting when it "works". But it's even more exciting when you can scale it as well as model it for wider adoption by your peers. This is something Teresa and I are working with an eye towards at our institution...though how it may happen here is yet to be seen.

It's getting there... (And it's even longer now!)

And I've added to the chunky scarf I started before the holiday break! More than ever, knitting is helping me process all I'm reading. I am loving doing these two things together. I also think this is going to be more of a cowl than a scarf: I'm envisioning the kind of thing where I add a few chunky buttons to one end, and create a button hole on the other end, and you wear it by crossing the ends just below your neck and buttoning it closed. It's very chunky. But it's also mesmerizing, for me at least, as the one who is making it.

That's what I have for today's Yarn Along. Thanks for reading! 

Making as a Means of Processing and Reflecting

...or, my return to working with yarn in the name of research.

This week, I needed to knit something. It didn't matter what it was, though with a toddler I knew it needed to be easy and interruptible. I decided on a chunky scarf in garter stitch, using mondo needles so it would be fast, productive work. I was feeling productive -- feeling as though I simply had to make something with my hands. So I started this project.

I am also immersed in reading for a research project I am working on about the field of library and information science (LIS), and more specifically, the positioning of information literacy within it. This research will hopefully turn into a journal article soon after the new year.

On my second day of working on the scarf, it occurred to me that it might be very productive to alternate reading sections of challenging LIS theoretical scholarly literature, with knitting several rows of my scarf. The goal would be to use the knitting time to process and reflect upon the reading I just did, and then return to the reading refreshed and ready to tackle the next set of ideas.

And so, I tried it... and my goodness, talk about the perfect marriage of two activities. I don't want to say too much about it yet -- I'm not yet in a position to try to figure out why doing these two things together is so successful for me. I need to do it more. And so, I shall.

"LIS, Method, and Postmodern Science" by Ron Day in Journal of Education and
Information Science Education 37.4 (1996): 317-324, and a chunky garter stitched scarf. 

I plan to link up with Yarn Along at Small Things for as long as I am using knitting as a means of processing and reflecting upon the reading I am doing for my research.

So, this week's knitting project: the beginnings of a chunky garter stitched scarf.

And this week's reading: an article titled "LIS, Method, and Postmodern Science" by Ron Day. To give a taste of the brain-twisting challenge this article and others like it pose in terms of reading, processing, and understanding, here's a representative snippet:

As a form of knowledge, LIS too must reflectively examine its own historical construction and its methodological procedures in terms of the information flows around and through it. But since information is both the object of study in LIS and is central to the process of postmodern science, the questioning of method in LIS is not simply a reflective gesture within the profession, but is centrally important for postmodern science as a whole. The relation of LIS to postmodern science is like a Möbius strip: the problem of the object involves the problem of the method. For the postmodern science of information studies, "information" constitutes both its "inside" and its "outside." (p. 321)

I just love this stuff. And knitting makes me love it even more.