Week 10: One-Shot Workshops

Hah! Do you see that there? That photo of a young, hip looking librarian leaning against some shelves? That's me! Ok, it's not me. But it's a stock photo that represents me, and I got it from Getty Images which as of just recently gave up the good fight against internet plagiarism and now allows anyone to embed photos their website and it attaches that fancy photo cred tag at the bottom, too!

That photo above is brought to this blog by this week's One-Shot Workshops that we held in class. The first group that went did a presentation on copyright and Creative Commons, and showed us some great resources where we can access legally free-to-use images and music! As librarians, copyright plays an important role in our lives, as according to the ALA Code of Ethics (were you paying attention last week?) it is our responsibility to balance the rights of the creator with the rights of users. That can be a fine line! But not so fine that I had trouble walking it earlier last week when someone in China asked me during an online reference chat if they could have their friend in the States come and scan the whole book they wanted from our collection and send it to them. The answer is no. That's copyright infringement, and is definitely not acceptable.

The second group that went presented on Diversity in the Library, an always important topic in any field. The problem we have currently is that librarians are overwhelmingly white females. But the group presenting on diversity opened up the discussion to include more diversity than "How can we get men/people from other ethnic backgrounds to be librarians?" which is so often the only question addressed. They simply asked what having diversity in a library means to us, and we found that we came up with a wide variety of answers. To me, it means having the people staffing the library reflect the community they are in. I worked in a public library in an urban area, and most of our patrons were African-American, but almost all of our staff were white ladies, and that really stood out to me. To other people, having diversity in the library meant a diverse collection reflecting many different subjects, viewpoints, and formats. To others, it meant respecting that not everyone who works in a library has the same background or experience. To others, it meant having employees who have a disability, or resources for those who have disabilities. Our classmate who is blind is a constant reminder of how we can easily help those who have disabilities just by taking a few extra thoughtful steps. She explained that if she had had even a small browsing collection of books in Braille as a kid, it would have meant the world to her to be able to go to the library and pick out a book to read like any other kid. I really hope that by having her in my classes, I carry the idea of accessibility with me throughout my career.

We went next, and our workshop was on avoiding controversy when weeding library collections. It's kind of weird to think about, but weeding (removing books from) a collection is a necessary part of librarianship, and interestingly enough, it's the task that is most likely to stir up controversy in a community. People start saying things like "The library is throwing away all those good books that my tax dollars paid for!" and things get out of hand quickly. So based on the information I'm learning in my Collection Development course, we outlined a few strategic tips to make doing our professional duties less likely to cause problems. I think it went pretty well! I was actually nervous to do the workshop, oddly enough. I wasn't nervous to do the book club a few weeks ago, which was the same length of time and with the same people. It must have been because giving a workshop is considerably more structured than leading a book club. I think it went really well, though, and I shouldn't have been nervous in the first place.

The next group to present was talking about banned books, and we got to pretend like we were high schoolers, which was a riot. It was definitely a lot of fun, but I think the group may have gotten a little out of hand with the antics. Their presentation was good, we talked about why we thought someone might ban books and why we (as high schoolers) disagreed with people making those kinds of decisions for us.

Our final group's workshop was on learning to use the Apple Voice Over technology, which was a really great learning session. Unfortunately, only three people in the room (of about 10) had Macs, so we had to share, which wasn't bad but it would have been a better learning experience if we could have all easily tried to follow along. Anyway, it was immediately clear how complicated using adaptive technology can be! It really gave us a good idea of the kinds of challenges people who need to use screen readers face when using computers.

Overall, everyone did a great job, in my opinion, and I had a lot of fun learning from my peers! I really love when we have the class structured in these small groups and get to learn from each other. I've really enjoyed getting to know some of my classmates I haven't had the opportunity to really interact with yet.