Apprenticeship is still critical in becoming a professional. For a student learning to use libraries, the opportunity to work in a small group with a librarian to answer questions should be priceless.

Note that the simple fact that someone is a professional librarian in a first rate academic library is probably a better certification of the information that person provides on her field of expertise than is publication in a peer reviewed journal.

Note too that editors are supposed to assure the quality of the things that they publish in their publications.

Publications from government agencies go through a process of review and validation that should warrant confidence from the reader, with the exception of politically motivated spin from our current administration. If scientific, those publications should be a trustworthy as publications in a journal, and of course they can convey information that could not be validated by scientific means.

A key problem with getting your information from peer reviewed journals is in terms of the balance of their publications. They don’t like to publish negative results, so a reader is likely to get too rosy a picture of the likelihood of hypotheses being validated. The most respected journals also emphasize radical departures from conventional wisdom, which surprisingly often prove to be wrong with further study.

Remember, the scientific community itself tends to depend increasingly on immediate access to findings from colleages provided via email and pre-print respositories. Of course, the scientists who would use the information in their research usually have the ability to judge its quality.

Still, the Internet changes everything. We need to think more of systems which allow readers to pool their opinions as to whether documents are trustworthy and useful, and indeed to assign weights to those opinions according to the expertise of the opinion givers.

I believe people unfairly attach negative aspects of the publishing industry to the work that is being published. Peer review is an important part of scholarship and I really dig it. I was always that student who cited RUSQ when others chose LJ. To some extent it’s different strokes for different folks, but that’s different than devaluing peer reviewed literature.

In my environment (community college) peer review is sometimes something to avoid and I have mixed feelings about that. It’s really more about accessibility of content for students in introductory classes… but I hate to think we’re “dumbing down” our goals and outcomes for our students. I also hate to frustrate them with content that is often just out of reach. Ergh!

You said: “to me, the purpose of most undergraduate instruction — across the disciplines but especially in the library — is to bring these new college students into an existing community of scholars, and giving them the skills, concepts, data and sharing the knowledge that will let them find their own place within that community.”

I have a lot of (probably false) negative perceptions of what it’s like to be a librarian for a ginormous university but this is definitely the part that I occasionally pine for. I occasionally have students who want to become members of a community of scholars.

Mostly I have students who want to get the info, write the paper, and then go to work/pick up the kids/mow the lawn, etc. Those students are bored and annoyed when I entreat them to consider their research papers as a contribution to a scholarly conversation.

It’s a good thing there are so many things that I love about community college librarianship–else it’d be tempting.

I’m wondering if the author who observed you meant your interaction with students was more like an interaction with peers because you were treating students like (potential anyway) scholars, or because she doesn’t see other professors talking with students about process and purpose and therefore doesn’t see it as “teacher-y” (teacherish? teacheresque?…professorial?)

Sadly, I think that many students are successful (if by success you mean graduate with a respectable GPA, which of course you may very well not) without ever understanding the purpose and worse maybe, the value of scholarly work. I think this is sad because it makes it hard for them to see the value in much of what they are asked to do as students and also because it feeds into the perception of higher ed as expensive (and not always effective) job training.

Being a part of helping students to see the value of scholarly work just seems so much more satisfying than so many of the other skills and even concepts on which we tend to focus.

This mindset echoes one that drove me batty when I was in my MLIS program. Many of my peers saw no value in the theory we were learning and instead wanted a “practical” curriculum. This makes no sense to me at all. We need to be fluent in the theoretical frameworks of our profession or discipline so that we can apply our understanding and make critical decisions in whatever contexts we work. That’s critical thinking, right? It’s what we strive to teach our undergraduates to do. Application of knowledge and understanding in “real-world” contexts is the ultimate goal of critical thinking, and *my* real world is academia and teaching.

I was just in a discussion today at our center for teaching and learning about teaching critical thinking. One of my colleagues from the College of Ed who teaches math to pre-service teachers summed it up: we want to push beyond the “how” into the “why.” And I think that’s what the scholarship of librarianship gets at. Why teach, catalog, do reference, provide services, etc., if we don’t investigate why these activities are beneficial to our communities or how we might use research to improve the ways we practice?