Reflections of a Quaker Librarian: January 2021

GVSU Teach-In 11/10/21

"From Confrontation to Communication: How to Disagree without Risking the Relationship"

Remain curious, listen to increase my understanding about an issue, take care of myself, stay engaged
Expect discomfort, pay attention to others' body language
Tell about my experiences to explain my perspective
Ask why they say/think that
Remind myself that I'm an adult, it's [whatever] year
Think about how to respond differently than previously
Choose not to engage (listen rather than responding; or excuse myself)

Ask myself:

What makes dealing with a particular person difficult?
How do I handle myself in these conversations?
Do certain parts of my personality come out more?
What do I want to be different?
How can that happen?

MiALA Instruction & IL IG conversation 10/27/21

Topic: Fake news, misinformation, disinformation, malinformation

Malinformation is taken out of context and intended to harm.
Misinformation is an umbrella term; non-intentional spread of false info
Disinformation is the intent to spread false info
Fake news is a technique to discredit any news source.

Teach lateral reading to students to evaluate/check info.

We're the product in social media altorithms - through the length of time we stay on a newsfeed and to the extent that we comment/respond - that provides advertising revenue to the CEOs.

See: https://deltac-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/krystavincent_delta_edu/Ef5WtibQfR9LklX9f6D7YZwB9hxBpxamKvOetAZrSYMbbQ?rtime=nQYpnHaZ2Ug fake news, mis/dis/mal info

and

https://rumors.project.digital/

Music Library Association Midwest 10/22/21

Public Services Interest Group:

NASM accreditation has verbiage about demonstrating growth in the collection (e.g., scores!) and support for the program
Ask Music faculty to weigh in on what we should keep or discard.

Technology, Archives, & Preservation Interest Group:

Music Collection Development policy - CDs have a limited life, so what should we digitize to preserve (scan booklets as well)?

COMPEL: an electronic music library for a born-digital age. Hollis Wittman & Andi Ogier
(Virginia Tech)

CLAS Colloquium 10/15/21

Imran Mazid (Advertising and Public Relations – School of Communications) “Facebook and Instagram to Tackle Covid-19: An Analysis of Social Media Strategies of Top Hospitals in Australia, Canada, U.S.A, and U.K.”

Abstract:

Public health scholarship highlights that social media play a critical role in tackling a health crisis. However, we have limited knowledge about how top-rated hospitals used Facebook and Instagram to mitigate the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. This study fills this research gap by examining top hospitals' social media strategies. A total of 341 hospitals were included in the study. Facebook and Instagram posts were collected from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020. For this study, 171,625 Facebook posts and 60,554 Instagram posts were collected. Content analysis was employed to examine 1,000 Facebook posts and 1,000 Instagram posts. The results revealed that social presence strategies, health communication strategies, and Covid-19 strategies generated more user engagement than other types of messages on social media. The study also revealed that social platform is associated with the use of social media strategies.

My notes:

COVID-19: hyper-political polarization, vaccine hesitancy, resistance to safe health measures, misinformation. Needed public health messaging that engaged people and motivated them to use safe health behavior. U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada. [what is a social presence strategy?] Affective, interactive, cohesive messages in social media platforms to create a sense of community and engage people. Specific strategies for particular platforms (FB, twitter, etc.). FB, Instagram were targeted for study on public health messaging. Organizations use social media to disseminate info, not to engage. User engagement = interactions, re-distribution, likes, comments. Used content analysis, coding (definitions, norming). Need to use uplifting stories, emotional content, use polls/surveys to gather opinions, etc., rather than just providing info. [How to be more persuasive?] Evidence-based info, medical experts’ discussion with religious leaders to provide messages people feel comfortable with rather than “right” or “moral” info. Problem with social media is the individual and unique nature of feeds. 13 people create 90% of misinformation! Anecdotal, doesn’t make sense, but meets people’s sense of reality. If repeat lie often enough, it becomes “truth.” Social media hyperpersonalizes.

LILAC FestivIL 2021

Head, Alison J. Reading in the age of distrust. April 7, 2021.

"reading comprehension is a process of interaction, not ingestion.

"read either an academic text or news article together before a library session, teasing out connections and questions the article raises in a class session or through online annotation, and modeling active reading. What terms and phrases do authors use to name things? Who do they write about — people who are experts, or communities that are most affected?

"student readers need to build understanding and the capacity for empathy rather than tearing apart and rejecting readings that are not aligned with their own perspectives.In our contentious times, students must learn to critically analyze what topics and voices are amplified and which ones are not. ... deeper understanding of the technological and social forces shaping the circulation of information in society today.

Media Literacy

boyd, danah. You think you want media literacy ... do you?

"Rather than thinking about the intention behind the production, let’s analyze the contradictions in the interpretation." ... "this means building the capacity to truly hear and embrace someone else’s perspective and teaching people to understand another’s view while also holding their view firm. It’s hard work, an extension of empathy into a practice that is common among ethnographers. It’s also a skill that is honed in many debate clubs. The goal is to understand the multiple ways of making sense of the world and use that to interpret media."

IAML

In the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, & Documentation Centres conference, I heard a presenter (either Erin Conor or David Frappier from University of Washington, Seattle; "Developing music library literacy") mention http://readscale.org/ as a method to assess reference. The tool allows the assessors to rate answers according to complexity: the effort, skill, and specialized knowledge needed. It’s free, and I could ask more about it.

Take a look at Carla Williams' music guides.

The Archiv der Zeitgenossen has created an escape room that presents the Archive and archival methods in the context of an immersive narrative and has users engage with material and technology. The archivist, Martina Kalser-Gruber, partnered with the Center for Game Studies. Trailer.

Interesting presentation by Philippa McKeown-Green, "Traditional knowledge, music copyright, and libraries: a beginner's guide" - reminded me of the book:

Callison, Camille, Loriene Roy, and Gretchen Alice LeCheminant, Indigenous notions of ownership and libraries, archives and museums. 2016.

The 2nd presentation was by Chelsea Wong (a copyright attorney), "Finding harmony between 'commonplace' and 'copyright' - about music. There are certain fundamental ideas to consider first before doing a comparison, when trying to determine if there has been a breach of copyright.

Music Research Data Management

Jackson, Amy S., and Sean Luyk. Music Research Data Management: A Guide for Librarians.
A-R Editions, 2020.

"Music research and performance produces large volumes of complex, varied, and valuable data; through their work, music researchers and performers create and use physical and digital data of various kinds, including but not limited to audio and video files, images, music scores, textual documents, and structured data files" (p.7).

"In its most basic definition, research data is information that has been collected, observed, created, generated, or used in the course of original research" (p.7).

E.g.,

"recordings used to inform a future performance or composition,
text(s) consulted during musicology research, including published scholarship,
interviews conducted in music education research,
fieldwork collected in ethnomusicology research,
ephemera documenting musical performances,
published scholarship in journals or books" (p.8).

In July, 2021, I wrote to colleagues in Music asking them to consider adding the studies that contributed to their creative/scholarly work, such as their analyses of scores or recordings (as allowed by publishers, copyright, and/or licensing), to ScholarWorks, GVSU's institutional repository. This is the kind of thing that will help future scholars.

Re: dance: "dancers consider dance to be a performance art, ephemeral and evolving according to circumstances. Video recordings are seen as documentation of a single performance, and not a definitive version of a choreography. Submitting anything to an archive is considered to be an act of fixing it in a final version, and many dancers, especially those practicing contemporary styles, do not believe in the value of a fixed version, although dance scholars find these resources invaluable.18 Dancers also appreciate interactivity and multiple camera angles, instead of simple, straight on shots as taken in a performance. Dance is intended to be experienced in different ways by different people, and fixing it in the archives gives it a permanent form19" (p.113).

I added links into a new box to the Music, Theatre, & Dance: Faculty Guide to the Library, Data tab.

Notes on teaching 7/7/21

I had a breakthrough in instruction! The CAP 220 professor created the Zoom breakout rooms and managed them - we started at "opposite ends" and worked toward each other, checking on the groups as they worked. Methods: groups chose keywords & posted them on Jamboard; students then grouped keywords by concept on Jamboard; then they searched their assigned database & noted keywords on Jamboard when they found relevant info. Reported out at the end.

Results: students commented that they were able to use more specific keywords & narrow their searches, that they had a better understanding of the project; that they had a broadened perspective of research and using creativity to get answers, and felt more confident.

Notes on teaching 3/9/21

When will I learn to have "instruction interviews" like reference interviews, either f2f or via Zoom? What profs say they want via email is almost never what the students need or the prof truly wants. I should have thought, "WRT 150, keep it simple." They weren't even really ready for library searching, let alone citing complexities. So...I was really hard on myself afterward, but now feel that no one died, and at least I was a friendly face/voice, and showed them the basics of searching and using a citation generator.
And we did do some of the figuring out what is a title vs a "website", an author vs publisher....
And that it's really, really subjective!

Sympathetic responses of colleagues:
A. Wow -- what a roller-coaster! From your posts prior to the class, I was assuming (and of course, didn't ask!) that you were prepping for just about anything BUT a WRT150! I'm glad you pivoted, and provided what was appropriate and accessible in the moment, and sorry that you got caught up in incomplete communication with the prof which ruined your day ahead of time!

Yeah, trying to sort out web sites as a just one type of source or modality is a losing cause! And trying treat them like formally published print materials causes the same problems in citing as it does in trying to use MARC to describe them!

B. if you're anything like me, I'm sure you're your harshest critic, and I'm willing to bet it went much better than you think. CERTAINLY no one died and I'm sure everyone took something away from it. That all sounds really useful! I know with first year writing I always feel like I do too much too!

CLAS Colloquium 3/18/21

Eric Harvey (Multimedia Journalism) “Who Got the Camera? A History of Rap and Reality.”

Eric studies what counts as journalism, hip-hop culture, TV & media studies: potency to convey reality and shifts since 1980’s. He studied ethnomusicology; his dad was a cop, heard radio news about cop killer song while in a squad car: 1st time had a political opinion about something – the very music he listened to. His book covers 1986-1996. Rappers disliked term “rap” or “gansta.” Preferred “reality rap” – poetry of what Black life is like – war in community, knowing it as experienced it, as journalists cannot. “Harsh reality of life in the ‘hood.” Street knowledge. Political force. Black America’s TV station. Intention to create Black leaders. 1989 “dawn of reckoning”; 1990’s “terror dome.” After fall of Berlin wall, communism was not the foe any longer – pornography & vulgarity were. Rodney King = white police war on Black people; reallocation of resources from war to street gangs. Tabloid culture began – Fox true crime tv, daytime talk shows, prime time lurid, sensationalist, entertainment “news.” “Idiot culture” of modern news – titilation rather than professional journalism, “new news.” TV condensed & simplified news, presented in a visual context, & didn’t require a certain level of education that printed news did. Hip-hop was suited to sample this type of tv news. Album-length headlines of actions, provacateurs, reality entrepreneurship – tabloid struggle with power struggles. Mass-mediated pop culture! Music was meant for black audiences and everyone else “eavesdropped” on it. Appealed to white kids: messaging, as pop stars. Song = text, liner notes & visuals = paratext. Ice Cube loved Farrakhan because he angered white people, which is what Ice Cube wanted to do. Hip hop has a wide bandwidth – lots of meaning, dense lyrics. Living thru a lot of this again now.

Sookkyung Cho (Music, Theater and Dance) “Schubert's 1817 Sonatas.”

[Urtext is an edition created by consulting various primary sources, published – so easier to read than a facsimile, often including the composer’s corrections after the 1st edition.] Schubert created about 1000 compositions; some are rarely played. Piano pieces require a sensitive touch. In 1817 he wrote about 6 sonatas, after he had written 537 compositions already. Schubert lived in outer ring of Vienna until 1816, when he moved to the inner city, which gave him access to culture. His first commissioned work was in 1816 too. He wasn’t published much during his lifetime. Never owned a house – stayed with friends. Salieri was a sought-after teacher, but disapproved of German song, so Schubert left his tutorage after awhile. Beethoven had moved to Vienna & was a “musical god” there & influenced Schubert’s compositions. But Schubert wanted to move away from that influence. Turned to piano sonatas – considered an archaic form by 1817 –were complex to understand and play, but he felt ready to tackle them. Sookkyung recorded 4 of the 7 composed in 1817 (not #567, which Schubert revised later – 1820’s and another that wasn’t completed). 537 has 3 movements – 1st shows importance of dances, 2nd has a theme he used again in other compositions. 557 last movement has light character, dance element. 566 may have had 4 movements, but Sookkyung only used 3 – 1st is very dark (minor key) that then goes into a major key at about 48 seconds. 2nd movement is very lyrical. 575 has a cyclical element – same motive throughout all movements. See her website for videos & more explanation. Recorded at Saint Cecilia; cd will be released – April 16!

CLAS Colloquium 1/28/21

Pablo Mahave-Veglia (Music, Theater and Dance) “The Cello Concerto by Leo Sowerby.” A few years ago, Pablo asked me to find a score of this piece and I did find the only surviving copy, in Chicago. Pablo followed up with the heirs and has done a lot of research, in addition to editing the cello part and score. Pablo wrote that he is trying to, "provide the context that places it as an important contribution to my instrument’s American literature" in the colloquium abstract. He and a pianist collaborator are working on a piano reduction of the orchestral part with the goal of performing and recording it, bringing it to orchestras' attention, and getting the whole concerto performed and recorded. It was premiered in 1934 but hasn't ever been played in public again. I love observing this process.

Kirsten Strom (Visual & Media Arts) “Bomarzo: A Musical Tour of Italy’s Park of the Monsters.” The Sacro Bosco (sacred forest or grove) is a sculpture park created in the 1500s "representing mythical gods and monsters, creatures of the land and sea, and harbingers of the underworld" (colloquium abstract). Kirsten visited and photographed it, then composed music for the individual sculptures as a tour of the park. Her singing, instrumentation, and compositions themselves reminded me of both Janie Mitchell and Jocelyn Pook. She did a multimedia slide presentation with the photos, some of the song text, and recordings.

Kody Wallace (Music, Theater and Dance) “The Role of Gesture in Perceptions of Expressivity and Technique in Solo Vocal Music.” Kody studies and teaches gesture in vocalists and conductors. He said that gestururing reduces the cognitive load of most people, can help us regulate the cadence (pace and rhythm) of our delivery, control volume, and highlight or clarify words and ideas. Seeing someone gesturing can increase recall in viewers, and in viewers or listeners, increases the perception of emotional expressivity of the performer.

All 3 of these presentations were fascinating.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Keynote speaker Yamiche Alcindor (YA) (journalist) 1/18/21

Some quotes from the talk:

Only when it's dark enough can you see the stars - MLK Jr.
Don't let anyone nickname you - Gwen Ifill said to YA upon meeting her.
Virus of white supremacy. Press forward. Pay attention. Cannot waiver from our goal to change this country. We are the generation winning our freedom. It's so hard to see how we move forward, heal, unify. Give yourself silence to listen to that voice inside you, and space to fail. Find people who really believe in you and who have your back. Build a community to support you. It's fine to compromise, but persevere. See and recognize color, honor history and culture, but [know that] color of skin isn't a stigma. Advance social justice, no matter your job. - YA

January Faculty Dialogues: Julia VanderMolen's session 1/12/21

My thoughts on participation: Ask students to answer students' questions; Ask students to provide an example in chat or whiteboard, jamboard, etc. - words, drawings, visuals.
Julia does a version of Pictionary, where she draws a picture on the whiteboard and students have to guess what it is in chat. I could do that.
Ask 3 questions of students (Jamboard): What do we know, What do we want to know, what did we learn?
Ask students: What is the concept here? What is another word that could substitute for it? (synonyms)
Make Google doc or slide versions of my handouts = more accessible.

Whitworth, Andrew. (2020). Mapping Information Landscapes.

alterity = outsideness
chronotope = time and place (Bakhtin, 1981); spacetime
discursive = involving discussion
locus = place

Whitworth poses the question of what if using digital maps and GPS lets the navigation and positional parts of our brain (e.g., mental maps) atrophy (p.xv)?

I think ebooks may do this too - the Index isn't at the "back" or "end" of a book; it can be really difficult to go back and forth between extra materials like glossaries or maps and the text in a Kindle reader, for example.

Ch. 6 9pp. 133-166) may be relevant to Dr. Bob's research.

I don't think that Whitworth deals with an indigenous idea of time at all, and it would be fascinating to apply the following article's conceptions to Whitworth's:

Reid, Geneviève, Renée Sieber, & Sammy Blackned. (2020). Visions of time in geospatial ontologies from Indigenous peoples: a case study with the Eastern Cree in Northern Quebec. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 34 (12), 2335-2360. https://doi.org/10.1080/13658816.2020.1795176

On concept maps and assessment: "Structuring of an information landscape is in evidence, with the map being a representation of this process. ... It makes tacit understandings of relationships more explicit, as they need to be uttered and given form by being placed on the map. And this record can subsequently be consulted and scrutinised.... The concept map is seen by the learners as having not only present value, but future value (ibid., 10), as the basis for later judgements..." (106).

The ibid. refers to Herring, J. (2009). A grounded analysis of year 8 students' reflections on information literacy skills and techniques, School Libraries Worldwide, 15 (1), 1.

Thus, making maps helps students put ideas into words and put them in relationship to each other. And, as with any manipulable (think construction toys), explaining the map to another person or other people helps learners see their ideas more clearly [this is me]. If prompted, it can also help them express their ideas in the vocabulary of the information sources.

Whitworth credits the notions in the last paragraph to Hepworth, Mark, and Geoff Walton. (2009). Teaching information literacy for inquiry-based learning. Elsevier.

Information Mapping Game

Le Louvier, Kahina, and Perla Innocenti. (2019). "The information mapping board game: a collaborative investigation of asylum seekers and refugees’ information practices in England, UK." iR information research 24 (1). http://www.informationr.net/ir/24-1/isic2018/isic1835.html

A game like this could be used for helping students navigate the library building, website, information needs and access, barriers, or emotional / affective information literacy. Or, alternately, geography students could collaboratively create maps of these types of things based on their library research processes. The discussion in their groups and between them and the liaison librarian (and the prof) would be where the librarian might learn the most. Thus, this type of game or mapmaking could also serve as an assessment tool.

Could Economic Theory Replace Capitalism?

Pratt, John. "Could Amsterdam’s New Economic Theory Replace Capitalism?" (Jan 24, 2021). https://climateactionaustralia.wordpress.com/2021/01/24/could-amsterdams-new-economic-theory-replace-capitalism-time-doughtnuteconomics-auspol-qldpol-economics-for-the-21st-century-tellthetruth-demand-climateaction-stopecocide/

Based on Kate Rayworth's book Doughnut Economics (2017): stop economic modeling based on continual growth! Work within the ecological limits and human needs. Cities around the world are trying it out.

Music Information Literacy

Bickley, Tom. "What is Music Notation?" In Christensen, Beth, Erin Conor, and Marian Ritter (eds.). Information Literacy in Music: An Instructor's Companion. Music Library Association and A-R Editions, 2018.

"Encoded within music notation...[are] details of pitch, duration, dynamics, phrasing, and, sometimes, articulation, ornamentation, and even fingering.... cultural origins of the piece and its transmission history.... a container for information and the relationship among sound, interpretation, performance, tradition, instruction, culture, and the concept of 'music'" (84).

Assignment: Go to the call number "M" (not ML or MT) and pick one item to answer the following questions.

Call number? Who composed the music? Was there an editor? If there are words, who wrote them? What performers are required? When was it composed? When published? Describe the music notation, including any unusual symbols. Describe any written performance instructions. Describe any information provided about the composer and/or piece. What performance details are specified? What performance details are missing? What would you need to know to be able to perform this music? (87-88)

Reflections of a Quaker Librarian

Thursday, January 21, 2021

Birding 2021

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

Professional Development 2021

GVSU Teach-In 11/10/21

MiALA Instruction & IL IG conversation 10/27/21

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