Library school is heavily based in group projects. You might hear that this is what “real life” is like. I think that transferring dynamics and principles of group work from an academic context to a professional one is stretching it somewhat, but nevertheless, you do pick up some practical skills.

Continue reading for some practical advice:

Group Project Advice:

1) Keep groups small. Sometimes you won’t get to choose but if you have a choice, less is easier to coordinate.

2) Be upfront about your strengths. If someone identifies a strength that could be useful for a project, the onus is on them to then follow through with that strength.

3) Be upfront about your weaknesses. You should know your work habits by now and you should already recognize areas you need improvement in (or should be trying to). Don’t let your team know too late that you can be late delivering work (and could use some deadline reminders), or that you get email fatigue easily (and FB message is a much better way to reach you) etc. It’s not like you are going to be able to hide your shortcomings anyways. It’s much better for everyone to know the score right off the bat.

4) Be shrewd about being a team leader. One classmate once commented to me that in library school when you show even the slightest initiative, everyone else scales back. It’s been my experience that when you take a step forward, everyone steps forward with you, but now I’ve been in situations where everyone retreats! Remember, our profession tends to attract people who want to help in the background. Be realisitic: if everyone just wants to “get it over with” and you don’t think you can motivate others, set your expectations accordingly and do the best you can.

5) Make a schedule with lots of buffer time. Set your due dates well in advance to accomodate life. Most people in library school are not fresh grads. Most have worked for some time and many are part time. People have jobs, kids, and they’re dealing with things you have no idea about i.e. life. Schedule around life and living, not the other way around!

6) Agree on a main channel of communication. Consensus on this is critical. Don’t bend over backwards just because one person doesn’t want to register for GoogleDocs. The best projects I worked on stuck with one main area to coordinate work (e.g. a wiki, GoogleDocs etc.) and supplemented that with phone and email.

Common Challenges:

The idea below is not to criticize others, but to recognize in yourself, elements in your manner of working in group projects that might be problematic.

1) The AWOL member. They have an inflexible schedule and can’t make it to any meetings. They don’t respond to emails and you have no idea if they’re being read. Their cell phone is their pager.

2) The Flakey member/The Dropout member. They appear to take on a lot of responsibilities but they ultimately flake out without warning or they decide halfway through to drop the course. Suddenly you have a pile of tasks to redistribute and less than 24 hours to get your project together.

3) The Micromanaging member. They’re a perfectionist and expect you to be one too. They redo team members’ contributions and they’d do it all themselves if they could get away with it. You need to gain their approval to move forward with even minor details.

4) The How-Did-You-Get-Into-Library-School-?! member. They cannot summarize a paper. They never cite their sources. Their wiki skills = epic fail. They simply don’t meet the basic academic requirements for doing your project.

5) The Stress-Bunny member. They’re not coping well with their obligations, and are constantly high strung. Just speaking to them makes you feel more anxious and jittery. Talking about their stress just worsens their emotional state.

6) The Leech member. They let you do all the work and try to massage the project report to take more credit than what they have contributed. Their work is poor due to lack of effort rather than ability. They know the other members care too much about the project grade and will pick up the slack.

Anyways, there is no blanket solution for these commonalities that I’ve witnessed over and over again. All I can say is to try your best to understand where the other person is coming from, and consider factors like length of project, grade weighting, likelihood of constructive dialogue/conflict resolution etc. and base your actions on your situational context. Know when to cut your losses.

Also, try not to think of someone as merely a “problem” needs to be managed/placated/minimized; it is insulting for any adult. Nobody’s perfect and being professional doesn’t come easily to everyone. You don’t have to get to know someone well to treat them with genuine compassion and empathy. If you can’t find that within yourself, it’s time to stop and reflect. You might be too stressed to muster an empathetic perspective, or you might reacting too quickly.

I have to admit, all my information related ideas are being funneled directly into papers, leaving me with little material to post! I thought Irsquo;d restart with a shift towards more pragmatic postshellip;

On my end, Irsquo;ve been quite busy, already gearing up for the next semester. Irsquo;ll be the new student liason for CASLIS next year, am exploring strengthening student ties with APRA, and am happy to say that Irsquo;ve reconnected with TIG, as a consultant again, but this time regarding donor/gift development. On a side note about prospect research, the amount of publicly available information about donors is really incredible. Is there a word for the issues arising from aggregating personally identifiable public data? If not, there really should be. We still frequently call this a ldquo;privacyrdquo; issue, which is a total misnomer.

Irsquo;m also excited to be going to the CLA conference this year. My advice to new students regarding conference grants is to apply, apply, apply. Your chances of receiving funding are excellent. Also, if you are nervous about going alone or networking alone, just think that many people in attendance are friendly, helpful librarians! I really canrsquo;t imagine a nicer crowd to network with. Irsquo;ve found that people in the library field are usually supportive of new professionals and are generous in nature - so you can dispel any preconceptions about conferences being an exhausting schmooze-fest and get excited about meeting people who want to share their work and expertise with you. So keep your eyes on your inbox and apply already!

1. My classmates and I had roughly a month to put together an online system for aboriginal archival photos. The ldquo;betardquo; site is available @ student2.fis1311.ischool.utoronto.ca. Itrsquo;s linked up to Flickr so that users can help ID persons and places etc. but Archon is in place to allow an archivist or staff member of an aboriginal organization to filter through redundancies, spelling errors and the dross that can make user generated content problematic for information search.

Archon is open source, and itrsquo;s pretty easy to use once itrsquo;s been installed. It works very well with photos, although I had other classmates who experienced difficulty with trying to upload audio content. Irsquo;ve been discussing this system with the head librarian at the special Spadina branch at the TPL, and wersquo;ll see if any northern aboriginal organizations I get in touch with might find this a useful solution. Go F/OSS!

2. Have been slowly working towards a fundraiser for the SHSS library w/the Child amp; Youth Advocacy group at my faculty. The first thing I want to buy the students is the Twilight series! And Halo books. On a side note, I finally learned how to play Halo and have no idea what kind of appeal a Halo BOOK would have, but it was honestly the only thing I could convince the younger male students @ SHSS to read.

3. Irsquo;m working on a paper that I hope to eventually submit to our facultyrsquo;s open source journal. For some reason, my profs have always assumed that I was going to pursue the academic track, speaking as if academia was some kind of inevitability to me, as natural as aging. But despite my theoretical bent, my goals have always been advocacy, community outreach, etc. Working with organizations like TakingITGlobal, the Inuvik Youth Centre, etc. Theory has really informed that type of practical work for me. Obviously not directly, but certainly from an ideological/philosophical perspective, the influence of which is very profound.

FI hosted a public lecture today, ldquo;Knowledge at the End of the Information Agerdquo; with David Weinberger, who I was familiar with through The Cluetrain Manifesto but never realized was a U of T alum. Weinberger is a playful speaker, and as a self-described optimist, has some very warm and fuzzy things to say about the net. I canrsquo;t say I take the same tone, but I nevertheless found his observations about changes in how we conceive of knowledge, compelling.

Weinberger began by describing the internet as ldquo;weird,rdquo; but emphasized that for such a new medium, it is strikingly ldquo;familiarrdquo; in that wersquo;ve all picked up on its usage - as broadcasters as well as consumers (not necessarily in the capitalist sense) - pretty quickly. Why? Because internet knowledge, unlike traditional print knowledge, is becoming more human. Internet knowledge is messy, fluid, fallible and complex. Itrsquo;s not a topical text shoved into an exclusive categorization by a removed authority figure; it derives its meaning from social context, the online ldquo;conversation.rdquo;

This is why I think itrsquo;s helpful to consider the internet as a curious medium with both literate and oral properties.* And although you need the ability to read and write to use the internet, many of its www texts, if not the majority (?), are not really textual. Internet information demonstrates the communal and localized aspects of an oral society (but at the same time, it definitely lacks certain key features of oral society).

The internet is not the first modern medium to be neither distinctly literate or oral (it does have afterall, many unique features that are neither textual nor oral) but itrsquo;s the first one that is so participatory. As such, tensions between the values and expectations of the literate and the oral have exploded as both paradigms struggle to impose very different power/knowledge structures onto internet information. The internet wonrsquo;t acquiesce to state power and the paradigm of literate knowledge in the way that film, radio and tv have.

But the thing is, the internet is really neither oral or literate, and not even a mix of both. Which is perhaps why these struggles, which have profound impacts on our laws, our culture, and our knowledge, always feel to me like theyrsquo;re trying to catch up to something else. (Although if I had to pick a medium the internet is most like, Irsquo;d choose comic books, and Irsquo;m not at all surprized at the resurgence of the comic book in mainstream culture, especially in youth.)

*n.b. By ldquo;literaterdquo; I donrsquo;t mean just being able to read, and ldquo;oralrdquo; isnrsquo;t just conversations. I mean all the structures and values that literacy or orality functioned within. Suggested readings: Harold Innisrsquo; The Bias of Communication and Michael Clanchyrsquo;s From Memory to Written Record.

Some older people will marvel at how ldquo;Gen Yrdquo; people prefer to learn about current events from Stephen Colbert and why a video like The Great Schlep can speak more immediately to them than say, the BBC news or local political debates. I suppose they didnrsquo;t grow up in an age where you are told to distrust everything everyone tells you, but to buy all their products and services anyways. Wersquo;ve come a long way from the No Logo days. Being anti-evil-corporation didnrsquo;t seem to get us anywhere except more appropriated. (From the Capitalism amp; Hegemony handbook, ldquo;If you canrsquo;t beat em, brand em.rdquo;) It seems the only way to be heard in a consumerist society is to be a customer, and then yoursquo;re always right!*

Is it so surprising then, that Canadian youth donrsquo;t take traditional sources of authority or traditional institutions ldquo;seriouslyrdquo;? And if everything is such a joke, and everything is for sale, why not turn to information sources that are completely farcical to begin with? And while other mediums can produce materials that reflect this ethos (check out The Totally Untrue History Ofhellip;), what better place to mock The Author and The Truth or even The Facts than the internet?

(from Bob Staake)

The continentalists wrote about the death of the author, but perhaps not quite like this. Globalized generations are running out of spaces to believe in; God has been dead for ages, and the nation state is faltering. What has previous generations left for mainstream culture? Wersquo;ll take what we can get. I can always count on my next online distraction and retail therapy. In lolcats and branding we consume. Therersquo;s no post after postmodern and therersquo;s nothing to take seriously anymore. Yoursquo;ll never be trustworthy but you can at least be funny.

* And people wonder why Gen Y is so uppity in the workplacehellip; This is the generation that was told to buy their career through rising tuition fees. Of course theyrsquo;re so entitled; the education system has made them customers instead of scholars.