I decided to become a librarian because I wanted to help people find information and to teach them how to help themselves. Education and information are among my most core values; they undoubtably come from my family, most of whom are teachers. I have the same drive to share knowledge and understanding, but I prefer the reference desk to the schoolroom.
During my time at the iSchool, I led two workshops sponsored by ASIS&T. The first was an "Intermediate HTML" workshop with Jenn Carter in April of 2003. We designed and led the workshop together; she led the section on HTML tables, and I talked about Web accessibility and CSS. We gave our students a lot of good information, but I think I learned much more than they did.
First of all, I learned to have realistic expectations. Jenn and I packed far too much information into the workshop, and I realized that it was important to take smaller steps and to recognize even small successes. Much of what I learned is intangible and hard to put into words, because it's about how it feels to be in front of a room of people and needing to learn how to read people's reactions better. I learned that teaching is much harder than it looks.
Over the summer I took LIS 560 and, for my project, led a very small workshop on server-side includes. My partner and I applied some of the lessons I had learned from my first workshop, such as not attempting too much, and we finished our lesson plan in exactly the time allotted.
The evaluations from my first ASIS&T workshop overwhelmingly said that the most valuable thing the students learned was CSS and that they wanted more, so the next October I organized a workshop on "Basic CSS." This time I focused on one topic, gave a brief overview what CSS is about and how to use it, and threw it open for people to play with it and ask questions freely. My intention was to lecture as little as possible, because I think that CSS makes the most sense when people are doing something with it rather than hearing someone talk about it. I had not done a workshop with this format before, but I did it as an experiment and because of my own learning experience with CSS. The hardest thing about that workshop was trying to balance the skill levels of people in the class; some people were very technically savvy and wanted to get into complicated topics like positioning, whereas others were simply trying to find out what this CSS thing is all about. I think that the format of this class helped a lot with this problem because during the practice time, the labrats and I wandered around, answering questions and tailoring the response to the asker. I am still thinking about that workshop and trying to figure out what worked, what didn't, and what to do better next time. Teaching, like learning, is a process of continual improvement.
I have not led any classes at KCLS, but the service component of my job incorporates a hefty dose of instruction. I interact with patrons via email and explain how to use our public-access catalog interfaces, but mostly I support other KCLS staff members throughout the system. When people have questions about how the computer system works, they ask Kathy or me, and we try to answer them.
One particular area of user support is the reports that I wrote and made available for KCLS staff to access shelf-lists of their branch holdings. I wrote documentation about how to use the reports and asked the Web Services Librarian to put it on the KCLS Intranet. Staff also call me up or send me email, and I try to clarify whatever they don't understand. Sometimes the reason for their confusion is that what they want to do isn't possible with the scripts I provided, and in that case I run off the report for them. Lately I have received fewer questions about reports, which hopefully means that people understand them and are using them.
My other significant training role is a slightly strange one. When Kathy came to KCLS, I undertook the role of teaching her about the Dynix system and about librarians in general, since her experience is in project management and information technology rather than librarianship. I created a user account for her and showed her how to login, just like Meg had done for me six months before. I even gave her a short lecture on cataloging concepts ("bibliographic entity," for example) and MARC format. More subtly, I have also tried to "brainwash" her with the librarian's values and ethics that I have picked up at KCLS as well as at the iSchool. Kathy considers my help invaluable, and she is loath to give me up at the end of my internship.