Librarians View Instruction as Integral to Their Professional Identities. A Review of: Julien, H., & Genuis, S. K. (2011). Librarians’ experience of the teaching role: A national survey of librarians. Library & Information Science Research, 33(2), 103-111. doi: 10.1016/j.lisr.2010.09.005
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective – To explore the ways that professional and non-professional library staff experience and relate to their instructional roles. Design – Online survey. Setting – All types of Canadian libraries, including public, school, post-secondary, medical, special, and other libraries. Subjects – A total of 788 library staff persons with instructional responsibilities. Methods – In 2009, the authors constructed a 20-minute anonymous survey that contained questions about the nature of librarians’ instructional work, their preparation for doing instruction, and their experiences as instructors. Subjects were recruited via several electronic mail lists. The authors used SPSS to analyze the quantitative data and NVivo to analyze the qualitative data. Main Results – The study found that the majority of subjects believed instruction to be integral to their professional identities, although some viewed it as an imposition. The nature of instructional work varied greatly, but included short presentations; a series of sessions; semester-length courses; and one-on-one instruction. Subjects prepared for instruction through on-the-job training; reading professional literature; attending workshops and conferences; taking a formal course in instruction; and other methods. On the whole, training helped library staff to feel more prepared for teaching and to embrace instructional work as integral to their professional identities. Study participants derived enjoyment from instruction in the form of satisfaction with facilitating student learning; relationship building; personal development; task variety; and appreciation of the heightened profile of library staff. Subjects also described several barriers to teaching, including administrative, technological, and logistical barriers; client and faculty interactions; and interpersonal challenges such as nervousness or lack of preparation. Finally, subjects described the ways that instruction has changed with the impact of new technologies, increased expectations, and changing pedagogical practices. Conclusion – Library administrators should support the teaching duties of librarians and library staff by helping to provide them with adequate preparation time, resources, emotional support, and training. In addition, formal preparation for instruction should be integrated into professional library training programs, including MLIS programs, to better prepare librarians and other library staff to participate in information literacy instruction.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".