September is Library Card Sign-Up Month and it’s got me wondering how many people I know actually have library cards. So, I’ve decided to do a fun (and very unscientific) survey to find out.
If you’re reading this, please comment on whether or not you have an active public library card.
I will reveal the (completely anonymised) results in a future blog post at the end of the month.
So, I want to do a thing. But I needed to get permission to do the thing. And yesterday I got permission to do the thing!
The thing I want to do is interview some public librarians about innovative public library programs that happen outside the library building and don’t have to do with books.
“Haven’t you already done this, Heather?” I hear you ask, “I remember you writing about this last semester.”
Yes, I have done some exploring on the topic of innovative non-book-related public library programs outside the library building. But when I researched it last time, I didn’t have permission to do proper interviews with the librarians overseeing the particular programs and services. All I could do was ask them for documentation and basic details.
Now what I want to do is find out about even more of these kinds of programs and services. I’d like to have longer conversations with these librarians to learn more about how they run their programs and what makes them successful. (I have a list of 13 questions.) I plan to combine the interviews into an article that I will submit to a library professional journal or share through the iSchool Public Libraries Initiative (IPLI).
Before I could do any of this, however, I needed to run this by my school’s Office of Research and Integrity Protections, which oversees research compliance. I filled out a not-too-long and not-too-scary form called the “Application for Research Designated as Exempt” – for projects that don’t fall under the oversight of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) – and described my proposed plan.
And yesterday they sent me an email saying that my proposal “does not meet the definition of human subjects research… and does not require IRB oversight.” So many negatives in a sentence may sound bad, but it’s actually very good. It basically means that even though I’m doing research and talking to human beings, it doesn’t really count as “official” research on human beings, so the IRB doesn’t need to be involved.
Long story short: I can go ahead with my project.
My next step is to revisit the library programs and services I’ve already investigated to see if the librarians involved are interested in being interviewed. I’m also on the hunt to locate new innovative programs and services.
I can’t wait to see what I find!
I’m a lucky girl. In addition to going to library school, I get to work with the iSchool Public Libraries Initiative (IPLI), which was launched last fall at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. IPLI is described very well in this article as “a discovery zone for public library innovation, a hub for student inquiry on librarianship topics, and a means to circulate new ideas and research findings to public library professionals.”
So what does this mean for me? Well, it means that I get to participate in research surrounding public libraries. What’s even better is that I get to choose the sorts of projects I work on. Pretty sweet, right?
But therein lies the problem.
When asked by my faculty mentor what I’m interested in working on, the answer is very often, “I don’t know.” Not because I don’t have any ideas but because I have too many.
“What are you interested in?” she asks me, “What do you want to learn?”
“Everything!” is my frequent response during these conversations, and then my faculty mentor exhibits great restraint by not rolling her eyes at me.
Unfortunately, “everything” is not really a reasonable topic when doing public library research. Of course, librarians of all types are doing research about all sorts of things, so almost anything you can think of is probably being researched by one person or another. But for the individual graduate student hoping to make a contribution in the field of public librarianship, “everything” is not an achievable goal.
So I have to narrow things down, and I’ve gotten better at it. Instead of focusing on “everything,” I have instead:
There are still other things I am interested in when it comes to public librarianship — I have a whole nerdy spreadsheet full of possibilities to delve into when the time is right — but it seems wiser to concentrate on just a few at a time instead of fruitlessly trying to tackle all of them at once.
I’m really grateful to be working as part of the IPLI team. Having the opportunity to research public libraries is fascinating and incredibly rewarding. Now, if only I can remember that important life lesson “You can do anything but not everything.”
The Adventures of Library Heather 