This was the week that I planned to remove myself as much as possible from my regular working responsibilities and reconnect with my chosen community of Access 2020 which is the GOAT of conferences, in my books.

This did not happen.

Instead, I ended up working on a variety of management-related responsibilities and caught what Access sessions I could, asynchronously. I mention this not as a consideration for myself as some sort of martyr but because middle management work is work that can be devalued by both librarians and administration.

I was able to watch the opening keynote. Jessie Loyer’s talk on indigenous language revitalization through the lens of technology was everything an opening keynote should be: welcoming, questioning, challenging, and illuminating.

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I also want to give a special shout-out to Shelley Gullikson’s “Web librarians who do UX: We are sad, we are so very very sad”.

IMHO: Leadership/management/librarians must understand that charging individuals with the responsibility of the library website without the authority to make those changes without consensus or vote taking from librarians is nothing less than the abject rejection of professional expertise of UX librarians.

I say this as a former UX librarian who also found a relief from sadness in Scott Pilgrim .

Another Access presentation that I very much enjoyed was Amy McLay Paterson’s What is a Library Website, Anyway?

The library website is many different things to many different people, but in the academic context, it is primarily thought of as a research portal. But Paterson suggests that considering the library as a contribution to student success should not be completely overshadowed.

Later in the day, after I had watched Amy’s presentation, I tried to catch up on some of my reading and found this article — Creating a Student-Centered Alternative to Research Guides: Developing the Infrastructure to Support Novice Learners — that rhymed with some of concerns Amy raised earlier.

Ruth L. Baker (2014) suggested that LibGuides could be used more effectively if they were structured as tutorials that guided students through the research process. Such guides would “function to reduce cognitive load and stress on working memory; engage students through metacognition for deeper learning; and provide a scaffolded framework so students can build skills and competencies gradually towards mastery.”²⁸ In one of the few studies conducted to assess the impact of research guides on student learning, Stone et al. (2018) tested two types of guides for different sections of a Dental Hygiene first year seminar course. One guide was structured around resource lists organized by resource types (pathfinder design) while the second was organized around an established information literacy research process approach. The results showed that students found the pedagogical guide more helpful than the resource guide in navigating the information literacy research process. Stone et al. concluded that these pedagogical guides, structured around the research process with tips and guidance explaining the “why” and the “how” of the research process, led to better student learning.²⁹

Jeremiah Paschke-Wood, Ellen Dubinsky and Leslie Sult, “Creating a Student-Centered Alternative to Research Guides: Developing the Infrastructure to Support Novice Learners“, In the Library with the Lead Pipe, 21 Oct 2020

I take some comfort from the conclusions above.

Recently I was asked to give a 3 hour lecture to a small class of graduate students from the University of Windsor’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research. I found that I needed some form of scaffolding to frame the information I was about to present or students (and I) would feel terribly lost. I opted to structure the class around work of The Open Science Research Cycle, based on Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer work on academic workflows at https://101innovations.wordpress.com/workflows/.

In a perfect world, my set of H5P slides of The Open Science Research Cycle would be finished in time for the last day of Open Access Week, but here we are.