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So Marissa Lingen writes about the difference between practice for repetition and practice for the improvement of skill. While the piece is about writing and repeating writing workshops, musicians are an example used to demonstrate the concept - experienced musicians run scales as practice, which helps cement the progression of notes in various key signatures and helps to keep range, tone, and intonation of the instrument in harmony.
What they don't do is play the simple band arrangements of various tunes that they learned as beginners. That, too, would be practice, but it's not as useful, as there's very little complexity to those pieces, and so skills are not being exercised or expanded.
These things apply to all people whose job it is to create things, adapt them, or synthesize things together. It's more obvious for those in artistic pursuits, as the results of practice have perceptible consequences - usually a greater aesthetic pleasure for the experience of the art. But for others, like coders or librarians, the need for practice is just as great, and the need for skill-building practice the same.
If you're an information professional with enough really meaty questions and challenges that keep you on your toes and exercising your skills on a regular basis, you are probably in a dream job that makes many envious.
The rest of us, including those in public service, probably are not. It's no fault of the people we see - they're not looking for information that is difficult to find, usually. They're looking for good recommendations for fiction, things to help them get employed, promoted, or to make more money, for books to share with their children, or other things that are often fairly easy to find in an organized system that's searchable, whether the library holdings or the great expanse of The Interwebs. Teens may have more interesting questions, but they can be avoidant around staff people, making it difficult to provide information to them.
A large amount of the interactions at a reference desk in a public library these days are things that can be handled by the not-degreed staff. They tend to be things like getting library cards, checking on the availability of materials, making requests for materials, getting pointed in the right direction for various spots in fiction and nonfiction, and quick lookups for data that's usually a search engine query away. Saying this, though, can sound like someone is calling the degreed information professional unnecessary, which isn't true. There will always be outliers that need the professional's techniques and depth of knowledge to solve. The reality is, though, that many professionals in public service are not being used full-time for their research skills. The practice they get is repetition in library processes and direction-giving. After a few times at this, there's no extra skills being gained or exercised. It's the simple arrangements from beginning band.
So how does an information professional get good practice, if the people they are serving aren't likely to provide it on a regular basis? They often create problems of their own to solve. Not in a mischievous or disruptive way, but programs and outreach are often a result of having tried to find a bigger and more deep problem to put their skills to work on. If your population is a lot of people who don't have computer and Internet access, classes on using computers makes sense. If you have lots of parents who need help getting their kids to read, story times and book clubs can help with that. If technology is swiftly outpacing the ability to cope with change, then we create classes to teach necessary technology skills to get someone back into cope. If teens are losing places to hang out and express themselves in the community, we put up programs and tools and get resources to help build communities of shared interests and to give teens places to express themselves.
When we do these things, sometimes they work. Sometimes they fail miserably. Every time, though, we learn new skills and we practice. The good kind of practice, the kind that helps us get better. Our organizations, though, aren't always there to help us with these things. We're still wrapped up pretty significantly in the circulation numbers, the door counts, and the metrics that can easily be quantified and used as sound bites to convince the voters that we are still relevant and thriving. It's much harder to measure the impact of a program that let a kid finally talk about what's in their head, or that plants a seed that this technology thing would be a fun thing to play with or make a career out of, or that gets someone the skill they need to eventually find work for the first time in many years. Especially if it's a program that garners a small but consistent following. In a perfect world, information professionals would be interacting with their communities a majority of their work week, discovering new problems and trying to find ways of solving them that work for the community, possibly in conjunction with other agencies, communities, and enterprises. Programs, collection decisions, and other things that happen in the library would be driven by the needs of the community outside.
Instead, attempts like the model of desk staffing implemented by my organization make it difficult to do such things - there might be more time away from the desk and its mostly repetitive practice, but it's scattered in such a way that there aren't blocks of time to do community things and programs. Or to be able to get out into the community and find where those problems are.
What kind of practice are your information professionals getting? If you've got a meaty issue or your community or volunteer organization has a thing they are trying to solve or change, you have information professionals in the public library that will probably be happy to help you. Give them meaningful skills practice, please!
And be sure to mention to their administrators what a good idea of is to do those kinds of things - that way those information professionals aren't getting pressure to abandon or being cited or disciplined for helping in such useful problems, rather than doing what library administrators have believed are proper library duties and programs.
Because if we don't get good practice, we get bored, burnt out, or disciplined when we try to do it on our own.
What they don't do is play the simple band arrangements of various tunes that they learned as beginners. That, too, would be practice, but it's not as useful, as there's very little complexity to those pieces, and so skills are not being exercised or expanded.
These things apply to all people whose job it is to create things, adapt them, or synthesize things together. It's more obvious for those in artistic pursuits, as the results of practice have perceptible consequences - usually a greater aesthetic pleasure for the experience of the art. But for others, like coders or librarians, the need for practice is just as great, and the need for skill-building practice the same.
If you're an information professional with enough really meaty questions and challenges that keep you on your toes and exercising your skills on a regular basis, you are probably in a dream job that makes many envious.
The rest of us, including those in public service, probably are not. It's no fault of the people we see - they're not looking for information that is difficult to find, usually. They're looking for good recommendations for fiction, things to help them get employed, promoted, or to make more money, for books to share with their children, or other things that are often fairly easy to find in an organized system that's searchable, whether the library holdings or the great expanse of The Interwebs. Teens may have more interesting questions, but they can be avoidant around staff people, making it difficult to provide information to them.
A large amount of the interactions at a reference desk in a public library these days are things that can be handled by the not-degreed staff. They tend to be things like getting library cards, checking on the availability of materials, making requests for materials, getting pointed in the right direction for various spots in fiction and nonfiction, and quick lookups for data that's usually a search engine query away. Saying this, though, can sound like someone is calling the degreed information professional unnecessary, which isn't true. There will always be outliers that need the professional's techniques and depth of knowledge to solve. The reality is, though, that many professionals in public service are not being used full-time for their research skills. The practice they get is repetition in library processes and direction-giving. After a few times at this, there's no extra skills being gained or exercised. It's the simple arrangements from beginning band.
So how does an information professional get good practice, if the people they are serving aren't likely to provide it on a regular basis? They often create problems of their own to solve. Not in a mischievous or disruptive way, but programs and outreach are often a result of having tried to find a bigger and more deep problem to put their skills to work on. If your population is a lot of people who don't have computer and Internet access, classes on using computers makes sense. If you have lots of parents who need help getting their kids to read, story times and book clubs can help with that. If technology is swiftly outpacing the ability to cope with change, then we create classes to teach necessary technology skills to get someone back into cope. If teens are losing places to hang out and express themselves in the community, we put up programs and tools and get resources to help build communities of shared interests and to give teens places to express themselves.
When we do these things, sometimes they work. Sometimes they fail miserably. Every time, though, we learn new skills and we practice. The good kind of practice, the kind that helps us get better. Our organizations, though, aren't always there to help us with these things. We're still wrapped up pretty significantly in the circulation numbers, the door counts, and the metrics that can easily be quantified and used as sound bites to convince the voters that we are still relevant and thriving. It's much harder to measure the impact of a program that let a kid finally talk about what's in their head, or that plants a seed that this technology thing would be a fun thing to play with or make a career out of, or that gets someone the skill they need to eventually find work for the first time in many years. Especially if it's a program that garners a small but consistent following. In a perfect world, information professionals would be interacting with their communities a majority of their work week, discovering new problems and trying to find ways of solving them that work for the community, possibly in conjunction with other agencies, communities, and enterprises. Programs, collection decisions, and other things that happen in the library would be driven by the needs of the community outside.
Instead, attempts like the model of desk staffing implemented by my organization make it difficult to do such things - there might be more time away from the desk and its mostly repetitive practice, but it's scattered in such a way that there aren't blocks of time to do community things and programs. Or to be able to get out into the community and find where those problems are.
What kind of practice are your information professionals getting? If you've got a meaty issue or your community or volunteer organization has a thing they are trying to solve or change, you have information professionals in the public library that will probably be happy to help you. Give them meaningful skills practice, please!
And be sure to mention to their administrators what a good idea of is to do those kinds of things - that way those information professionals aren't getting pressure to abandon or being cited or disciplined for helping in such useful problems, rather than doing what library administrators have believed are proper library duties and programs.
Because if we don't get good practice, we get bored, burnt out, or disciplined when we try to do it on our own.
