Collection Development

I just finished Collection Development, my 7th course in Library School. The lectures and the readings were excellent, but the overall experience was somewhat marred because the professor was not able to remove files from the courseware interface that were no longer relevant so she had to add her own files on top of that. This led to quite a bit of confusion for example, there were two assignment files; one from the previous course and the one that she wanted us to us. The administration needs to work with her to fix this, I got the impression that she tried, and they were not helpful. The professor was very responsive to questions which was terrific because of the confusion of files.

The content was interesting but not really all that surprising particularly for someone with my background. I found what made the course most worthwhile were the assignments, especially the group assignments. We were divided into groups based on our interests (academic libraries, school libraries and public libraries) and I was placed in the Public Library group with 7 other people.

Our first assignment was individual and it was to critique a library collection policy. The second assignment (a selection and deselection paper) was a group project and the third, a journal article drafted for either the Acquisitions Librarian or Collection Management could be either individual or group.

The group assignments were most challenging, not because of the content, but because it was a group project done completely online. For me, it was an opportunity to re-practice my project management skills. As was the case in many of the previous classes I took, classmates did not want to seem to take charge (this was true even when there were leaders assigned to a project) but given the size of the group and the scope of the project we needed someone to focus attention on the project as well as identify what pieces needed to be written, what decisions needed to be made first in order to start and identify ways to make the final edit easier (since the paper, of course, needed to be written in one voice). The central part of the paper were the title selections that we were proposing, and to make things easier I developed a template, really an example and got approval from the professor. It certainly made the title selections look as though they were written by one person even though everyone contributed to that section.

There were problems, of course: Some people did not contribute at all even though I emailed them several times--I called that to the professor's attention and she excluded them from our project--we assumed that they were doing individual projects and as is often true in group projects, there were some who did everything but the thing that they had signed up for.

I was appointed group leader by acclamation and I must say that I was pleased with the final project (the professor said it was one of the best projects that she had seen and was doubly impressed because it was done with such a large group) but I found the process somewhat daunting in that too many files were flying around and mistakes that had been fixed in earlier versions kept showing up.

For the third assignment, I participated with a subset of the group. Our topic was "Acquiring and Publicizing Scandinavian Mysteries" and I tried to improve on the previous process by maintaining the file myself from the beginning and early in the process merging the sections that other classmates wrote. Then, we critiqed the draft (with all of the sections included) and I made the final edit based on the comments.

In this course, while I certainly learned about Collection Development, what most stayed with me was the experience of working collaboratively online with peers--as difficult as it was sometimes, it was highly satisfying.

Online classes

There was a story in the New York Times about online classes and programs this morning. It was interesting but mostly predictable. The teacher, it featured, taught from her dining room table in sweatpants and fuzzy slippers. Many of her students were international and the online format accomodated them. The article did mention that many students in many online programs spend more time on their classes than those in traditional settings because "class time" was not limited to a couple of hours per week.

The article also talks about the downside of online classes that students are limited to reading and discussing online and used an example of Irving Howe reading poems by Robert Frost in a class that the author had once had. I am not sure how many students have experiences like that but it does seem to be a limited view of online education. Students can download videos, audios and communicate via podcasts. For that matter, the limitations are mostly imposed by the teachers or students and not technology. Teachers have many options that they can use to communicate. For that matter, I still remember a grammar school class in which I first heard the words of Shakespeare spoken. It was 1959--I was 8 and the voice was Dorothy Tutin and the technology was a 78rpm record. When I think of Shakespeare, I still hear Tutin's voice.