Anthony Bourdain and the Culture of Living Outside Ourselves

Anthony Bourdain’s death last week in France has caused me to be reflective about the idea of living outside ourselves. While Anthony’s death raises many questions about suicide and suicide prevention in our culture, I want to think about Anthony’s gift of living outside of himself and the impact that this type of life makes.

Many people were impressed by Bourdain’s irreverent wit, and his storytelling skills, not to mention his culinary chops. I too certainly appreciated these aspects of Anthony’s personality.  However, what impressed me most about him was his ability to move beyond his, and his audience’s comfort zone to fully engage with people from different countries and cultures so that there was real insight. His was certainly not an engagement of the Michelin star restaurant chefs but rather with the authentic and everyday people and their cultural traditions and foods.

During his time in restaurant kitchens of New York, Bourdain consistently spoke up for the largely Mexican and Central American workforce. Not only did he support better treatment and recognition for the work they did, he also consistently suggested that as an American culture we should pay more attention to the Mexican and Central American cuisine and a growing group of Hispanic chefs that were making a name for themselves.

I use Bourdain as an example of getting outside of our own skin, culture, and comfort, and fully embracing the other as valuable. This attitude helps break through the xenophobia of many Americans, and also recognizes the dangerous hegemony of white American Christianity as the defining characteristic of America. The US Declaration states “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. If this is truly to be a defining characteristic of this country, then it must change our attitude, in a positive way, towards those that are unlike us.

Many of us have been fortunate to work at institutions with faculty, staff, and students from a wide variety of ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic backgrounds. As librarians, we often think of ourselves on the forefront of thinking about and interacting with different culture and languages. We work diligently on trying to build an inclusive workplace culture and to embrace and celebrate the diversity of our campuses. We build collections to support diversity, and as much as possible represent a global perspective.

For me personally, the challenge is to make all of our students feel fully appreciated as an integral part of the campus community. This is a difficult challenge as many students feel marginalized by the dominant culture and that they must, in public, play a role that is not authentic.

What does it mean to “live outside ourselves” with respect to our students? While there is an expectation of campus participation by administrators, it is easy to do the expected; attend lectures, musical performances, and basketball and football games. This type of participation is important and does show support for the people who organized these events, but they are not always the events or activities that are the most important to students, or ones that force us to live outside ourselves and immerse ourselves into the “other”.

Every campus has a large number of clubs that provide students options for social, cultural, educational, and spiritual interaction. These clubs may be as formal and long-standing as fraternities and sororities, or less formal, such as clubs based on nation of origin, which will vary annually by the number of students from that country on campus. Many of these clubs serve as “identity spaces” that provide an opportunity for students to truly be themselves, and not necessarily conform to the dominant culture. These clubs play a critical role around race, gender/identity ‘expression, religion, nationality, religion, and culture. While these clubs are rightly student focused and student-run, I think there is an opportunity for the library and its staff to step outside and build community with students where they feel most at home.

If the library is going to be an intellectual and cultural hub on campus then students across all cultures, languages, religions, and identities should feel comfortable in the library – the library could become one of their “identity spaces”. While I certainly don’t have all the answers on how to make this happen, I do have some suggestions that I think will make a difference. If this is to make a difference on campus, then there is a role for staff across the libraries from the Dean to the circulation clerk.

A few suggestions:

•  Establish a multi-faith prayer/reflection space in the library.
•  Invite student groups in for coffee and cookies or other culturally appropriate treats. Resist the temptation of making this about the library and how the students in the group use it. This is about understanding this group of students, their life at the university, hopes, dreams, and struggles.
•  Most universities have student club fairs that showcase the clubs to other students.  Walk around the fair and introduce yourself and ask about their club and the work they do. Student groups are excited and proud of their clubs and they appreciate it when members of the non-student campus community are genuinely interested in them.
•  Watch the student newspaper and ads in the student union for events where a student club really want members of the campus community to show up. Take some time out of your evening to participate, even if it is only 30 minutes.
•  If the library has space for exhibits or artwork, invite student groups to exhibit.
• Libraries like to build good relationships with student government associations, and the Dean often gets to make a presentation to Student Government. Taking this as example, ask major clubs to the library to talk to Library Leadership about their club and the work they do.
• Talk to students every chance you get, even if it is as brief as a "hello, how is your day going?" Students appreciate the genuine interest of staff, faculty, and administrators.

If we are truly thinking about “living outside ourselves” as a model of engaging our student community, then this needs to be an ongoing conversation. As we understand our students and build community, opportunities will present themselves to engage with them around library services. Make it first about them, and you will find that you personally, as well as the library, will enriched by the engagement.

Bricolage, Assemblage, and Chaos Theory: Thoughts on the Research Process

I have always been fascinated with words, especially those that I hear in presentations or speeches where I think “that’s a new one” or “what does that mean?”.  Having studied Greek, Latin, French, German, and a bit of Spanish, I am always curious to know their etymology. I am also curious as how these new words might be useful in my work or personal life. Maybe I was an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary in a previous life.

Several years ago at an Educause keynote, Sherry Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, introduced me to the concept of “bricolage”.  Derived from the French verb bricoler ("to tinker") it roughly comes to equate to the English “Do it yourself”.  Turkle speaks of bricolage as a form of tinkering, a soft-style approach to computer programming that is more intuitive and experimental than the strict analytical coding approach (https://dixieching.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/the-triumph-of-tinkering-turkle/). This tinkering approach certainly speaks to the modern maker movement of learning by doing.  Bricoleurs, people who use this approach, look at the world and their work in a more right-brained way.

Within the arts, bricolage has a slightly broader scope to include the work itself that is made from objects that are readily available (Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage). Similar to “assemblage”, a form of art first introduced to me by an artist friend, Rudy Rodeheaver,  “assemblage” is art that is made by assembling disparate elements – often everyday objects – scavenged by the artist or bought specially (http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/assemblage). 

I was first introduced to chaos theory in a doctoral leadership class when we watched a film with Margaret Wheatley on Leadership and the New Science.  Chaos theory, grounded in mathematics and quantum physics is quite complex. There are two important aspects to chaos theory; things that appear chaotic are subject to an underlying order, and complex systems are highly sensitive to change where tiny changes lead to dramatic consequences (e.g. butterfly effect). Chaos theory has real-world applications and is used in predicting weather, and in cryptography and robotics, to name a few.  While Wheatley applies the ideas from chaos theory to leadership and organizations, I believe it has some insights to offer regarding the research process

Over the years since I first encountered these terms, I thought that they provided some insight into how research is conducted and how students sometimes see library information literacy instruction as too linear and prescriptive.

Research is certainly a “do-it-yourself” activity.  Thinking of the researcher as a bricoleur emphasizes the creative aspect of the research process; one that is nonprescriptive; one that does not have a predetermined path. Like an artist, the researcher uses the ideas she/he finds or brings to the process and creates something new; new knowledge, new insights.

I am attracted to the idea of chaos theory as a way to think about how research actually happens. Looking at the definition of “chaos theory” in Wikipedia I see, at least for me, the pattern of how I do research.  “Chaos' is an interdisciplinary theory stating that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, self-organization, and reliance on programming at the initial point known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions.“ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory)

I often start research with an idea that is quite undefined in my own head – one that has a variety of disparate ideas. When I am researching a topic that has a clearly defined outline, my outline very often quickly devolves into chaos, one that is torn apart and re-assembled in new ways.  As I start searching databases, discovery systems, journals, books, blogs, news stories, I am not always able to discern a pattern as one citation/idea leads to others that may or may not be related in an easily discernable way.  As I start to read what I have gathered, I begin to see some underlying patterns that help to organize my understanding of the topic and also shows omissions and sends me back to “re-do” the search.  One of the things that I look for are for some feedback loops that help my growing understanding of the topic.  These feedback loops should reinforce some ideas and weaken or help me discard others; they may show repetition of ideas or authors important to the research.

Even looking for articles or books, the process is not particularly linear, unless I am looking for a known book or article.  What I get for results, even at the macro level, depends somewhat on the starting point – e.g. Google, EBSCOhost, ScienceDirect, or a discovery layer like Primo or EDS.  I pick and choose from the results, usually from those on the first page or two of results. The introduction of filters or additional keywords will either narrow or expand the search and confirm a direction or present an interesting new tangent to explore. While we are taught to look for good keywords, or find a good article and look at the references, even these present options for creating a new research path that may yield results.  We have all experienced those “aha” moments when a seemingly minor new idea takes our research in an entirely different direction or provides a new insight that brings clarity.

If I  think about the research process in terms of bricolage and assemblage, I typically begin with bits and pieces of what I know, and from gathered articles, blogs posts, books, without any sense of how they go together, or even if they can be put together into a coherent whole. While I think of research as a somewhat coherent process, it really is rather chaotic, with feedback loops, and tangents that drag my attention to new or related ideas that may become fruitful aspects of my work. I assemble, disassemble, and reassemble with new pieces and ideas, in seemingly random but structured ways until something coherent appears.  Thinking back to the beginning of the process, I can often see where some new insight, seemingly minor at the time, changed the focus and the outcome of the research.

Taking these ideas and turning towards thinking about teaching students how to do research (aka information literacy), I believe students often view what is presented in class is a linear or formulaic process of doing research.  The new ACRL Information Literacy Framework (http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework) is certainly more process oriented, but because there are six frames, it is easy to think of them as distinct and mutually exclusive rather than chaotic, with underlying feedback loops and self-organizing patterns that overlap across and throughout the six frames.  While it is critically important for students to know how to find books and articles, and how to evaluate what they find, and how to cite those sources, these skills and the underlying frames are in no way a description of the research process. Students need to know how to take these skills, find the necessary information/ideas, and then, more importantly, think like a bricoleur/artist and take this information and create something new; their own understanding of the topic.

In the end, what does this mean for us in the library profession? I see these ideas as a call for developing our “tinkering”, “creative”, and “design thinking” skills in the work that we do and in the way we help students gain the skills and expertise for life-long learning.  I hope, encouraging students to think of research as a chaotic process that is full of creativity, feedback loops, interesting tangents, as well as having some underlying process, will help them approach the process with more optimism and less dread.  My hope, for myself, and my librarian colleagues is that we will allow this type of thinking to move us beyond or typical analytical solutions to more creative ways of approaching the problems we all face.

Library Scouting and Insight Building in Supporting the Future of Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship

Library scouting and insight building may provide a framework for looking at supporting the future of teaching, learning, and scholarship. Based on the ideas from “business scouting”; looking outside ourselves and our immediate industry for new models, disruptors, market forces, etc., library scouting looks to the knowledge and research ecosystem of faculty, granting agencies, and publishers for actionable insights into what academic and research libraries should be paying attention to.

While academic librarians talk about the disruptive changes in the ecosystem, our organizational models, workflows, budget priorities are, in many ways, still quite similar to the way they were 25 years ago. That said, the ways in which our faculty use our resources and services (collections, interlibrary loan, data services, information literacy training for students) is, in many ways, remarkably different than it was even 10 years ago. Likewise, our students’ use of the library (spaces, collections, services) too is radically changed.

Much of our thinking on the future of libraries has been additive as opposed to radical. We have struggled to maintain our core functions; our way of looking at the world while business and industry has turned much of conventional thinking and processes on its head. As a profession, we have not been particularly good at scouting out potential disruptive technologies or business models that fundamentally change our ecosystem. These disruptions change our users’ behavior and how they look for, use, and share information and knowledge and in turn, this disrupts or should disrupt the way we look at our work. Amazon, Google, and Apple unleashed a suite of services that totally changed how people interact with information, and the library profession as a whole was overlooked. While we have recovered in some sense and found ways to incorporate these services into our work, would our work and world look differently if we had seen these coming? If nothing else, maybe we would have forgone the bemoaning of students use of Google, Wikipedia, or Amazon instead of our OPACs and demanded better discovery systems from our vendors.

My challenge to myself, as well as others in the profession, is to look outside of the library profession and look to the broader world in which our faculty and students do their work. Because libraries are non-profit and few libraries have an R&D unit, we depend on the information industry and creative individuals (librarians, technologists, programmers, students) who create new products and workflows that make their work easier.

While libraries will continue to change and evolve based on changes in the information ecosystem, it is critical that librarians, faculty, and students come together to think creatively about the libraries so that the changes in libraries are not entirely driven by market forces, campus administrators, or librarians or classroom faculty who have a static view of libraries. We must rather look at the type of teaching, learning, and scholarship happening on our campuses now and are likely to happen in next 5 to 10 years, and build spaces, services, technologies, and staffing to support these.

We are well into the first generation of faculty who have received their doctorates in the digital age. Much of their research and study were influenced by the technology and resources that were available in digital/electronic form, and immediately accessible on their computer or mobile device. Their workflows are influenced by new products and services that come directly from information providers (Mendeley, Zotero, FigShare, etc.) Even disciplines that rely heavily on traditional printed books, find their scholarly work influenced by digital catalogs and indices; digitized collections of primary source materials, and finding aids. Most of these faculty also graduated from universities where large percentage of the book collection were in off-campus storage systems, where material was requested, paged, and returned to the library for their use.

Most new faculty graduate from major research universities, whose libraries are robust with both broad and deep print and digital collections, as well as support for digital scholarship, data management, copyright and publishing assistance. As newer faculty begin to redefine scholarship, it is critical then, to be looking to new faculty to understand their needs and expectations of what libraries should do to support their research, scholarship, and teaching, as well as what they expect for their graduate and undergraduate students. For the foreseeable future, new faculty, new areas of research and scholarship, new forms of pedagogy, technological advances, and students with very different expectations will continue to stretch the definition of library. They will come to your university with a set of expectations, good or bad, about what a library is and what role it plays, if any, in their lives and work.

We know that some faculty will continue to publish articles and monographs, though it is already apparent that these traditional outputs have limited value in some areas of scholarship as they are too slow, cumbersome, and in some cases not able to adequately represent modern scholarship. In order to accommodate new research outputs, it is likely that an increasingly diverse set of scholarly outputs will created. These might include datasets, 3D models, virtual and augmented reality, digital critical editions, documentary films, digital media, hybrid books that are a mix of text and interactive video, visual simulations, etc. It is also likely that some of even traditional scholarship will be developed using complex digital tools and methodologies like text and data mining, mass geolocation, gene sequencing, prototyping, etc. This type of multimodal scholarship will also spill over into pedagogy and the type of assignments that faculty will assign to students. It is also critical to think about the visual and performing arts where performance as scholarship is important and may not fall into easily defined categories and require new types of support for both faculty and students.

As a library dean, I think constantly about the future of libraries, and about content, and publishing, and research data, and copyright, and a seemingly endless list of other concerns that inform the work that academic libraries do to support faculty teaching and research and student learning, creativity, and scholarship. In this work I look to my Dean/University Librarian/Director colleagues across the academic library landscape (Oberlin Group of Liberal Arts College Libraries, state university libraries, Association of Research Libraries, the Coalition for Networked Information), and to friends and colleagues at the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. These heavy hitters provide a glimpse into the future for academic libraries and for the major issues that need to be addressed, many of which will only be addressed collectively.

While we in the library profession have reasonably good insights, it is critical, in thinking about the future of the academic library, to convene a series of ongoing conversations with faculty both in disciplinary as well as cross-disciplinary groups to talk, not about the library, but about the type of teaching, learning, and scholarship that they envision for themselves and their students over the next 10-15 years. Ideally, these conversations would include people from the office of research, campus IT, as well as those on the edge of the Academy that faculty interact with as part of their work; granting agencies, business and industry, professional associations, and publishing. It is likely that such a rich set of conversations would confirm some of the directions that we are seeing in today’s research library and would certainly challenge our assumptions and directions in others. In the ideal world, I would also invite key people from Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and others as they influence the information ecosystem of our users.

Likewise, an ongoing conversation with undergraduate and graduate students for how they see the library in their life is important. Students use the library very differently from faculty and balancing the needs of both students and faculty may be challenging. Lynn Silipigni Connaway, OCLC Research Scientist, has done extensive research in this area and published an important study “Library in the Life of the User: Engaging with People Where They Live and Learn” https://www.oclc.org/research/publications/2015/oclcresearch-library-in-life-of-user.html. Lynn’s research can be used to test what you are hearing from your own students and to probe areas that need further understanding. As new students arrive on our campuses every year, it is important to constantly be looking to hear from students.

Circling back to the idea of “library scouting and insight building” how might we think about collecting these conversations not only from our own campuses but across the higher education landscape. What insights might we build from being able to mine these conversations; aggregating comments based on discipline, type of institution, senior faculty vs junior faculty, type of scholarly output, use or non-use of library resources and services, etc.? Insights might also lead to collaborative projects and also providing opportunities to address some problems at scale. How might these insights influence our budget allocations, our use of spaces, the type of positions we create, the skill set we recruit for.

As a starting point, an interesting startup, Libdot (libdot.com) is attempting to do this in the area of the future of work in academic libraries. Hopefully, we could collectively think about how we might address other areas of this where we are collecting and mining data on how our primary audience is doing their work. There is no expectation that this would be a magic bullet but rather a new tool that would provide some collective insight that goes beyond the anecdotal.

From this broad understanding of what faculty see as a future of their teaching, learning, and scholarship it would then be important, as a next step, to think about what type of library space, collections, technology, services, and staffing are needed to support this work.