Week 7 Response

“Mom and me: A Difference in Information Values” reinforced many of my beliefs about information. The author had an idea about what was “right” for his mother, and I think he overstepped his bounds a little bit by trying to get her to see information in his way. I understand that it came from a “good place”, in that he thought he was helping his mom, but the reality is we might not know what is best for others. Sometimes we say something was done in the name of being good for the person but it is really causing them harm. One thing it made me think of is my cousin who is a student at the University of Chicago. He does tutoring for some low-income kids in the area. He told me that he was frustrated because he thought the kids’ manner of speaking was “bad”, and he was even more frustrated because the tutoring advisor also spoke in the same way. He thought she should set a “better example” by using “proper English”. I don’t agree. I think if she wants to speak like a middle-class white person that’s fine, or if she wants to speak in the manner in which she was raised, that is fine too. None of them is better than the other, but I fear that some people who are unfamiliar with certain modes of speech, in particular African American “slang”, see it as ignorant and uneducated. For some people, speaking in slang is going to be necessary and inevitable in their lives, and we shouldn’t be trying to erase that.
This belief that we need to set a “good example” pervades the institution of librarianship as well. For example, librarians may choose to purchase less “urban lit” (like Donald Goines) because they don’t think it’s “real” literature. But they don’t know. Maybe it’s not their experience, but that does not mean it is wrong.
Going back to the article, I was glad that his mom ultimately picked the car that was right for her and I was even more happy that the author saw that and learned from it. He doesn’t inhabit his mom’s world. He can definitely offer things to her from his world, but like he says on the last page “the concept of a personal information economy does not prioritize one human being’s value system over another”. This is part of the reason that I put those hip-hop CDs in to my economics collection development. The music is about a side of economics that some people may never see and not understand, but for other people, that’s a newscast from their world. Actually, I wish I had included the movie “Hustle and Flow” in the collection too, for the same reasons. If any of you haven’t seen it, I would highly recommend it.
I really like how he puts a call to action to his colleagues at the Association for Library and Information Studies Education and the ALA at the end of the article to expand their horizons and out the concept of a personal information economy in to practice. Of course, my sense is many people who have read this article already had an interest in this. What is more difficult is reaching the librarians who don’t care that much and “just want to do their job”. Its always hard to break through to the people who are fine with the status quo. But hopefully the passion from the librarians who have it will rub off on the ones who don’t.
I just want to comment briefly on the article “Teaching at the Desk”. When I first got hired at the public library my supervisor explained to me how we can turn patron questions in to “teachable moments” so they can have more autonomy navigating our resources. For example, if someone comes up asking me if we have a certain book in, depending on if its busy or not, I might take that moment to show them how to do a quick search, while at the same time stressing that I (or the reference librarian) is always happy to do the search for them too. Many patrons are pleasantly surprised upon learning a few simple tools to help them find what their looking for. I think it’s a bit different in an academic library, because there the students should be learning how to use the system for themselves more.
I appreciated that this article talked about the reference’s desk need to be familiar with different learning styles. I think this is in a similar vein as the “Mom and Me” article in that they both acknowledge when it comes to information seeking “one-size-fits-all” is not the best model. I especially liked the different types of questions the reference librarian can use to help patrons “move intellectually through the challenge of thinking through a problem” (460). It reminds me of some of the questions I’ve heard asked at the reference desk, including “I’m looking for this book with an orange cover” (that turned out to be “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”).
In closing, I want to give a shout-out to the reference librarians and all the staff at the Sequoya public library, as they always handle patron questions with grace and kindness. It's great to get to work with people who I want to emulate!