Promotion Through "Teachnology"

No matter what library we work in, we need to remind our users continuously of how librarians and our collections can assist them. A recent report on the top challenges facing academic librarians issued by the Association of College and Research Libraries declared that librarians "must demonstrate to the campus community that the library remains central to academic effort." One way to keep faculty aware of the library is by collaborating with them on steps to use library resources in the teaching and learning process. Easy-to-learn technological applications, called low-threshold applications (LTAs), provide a means to do this. LTAs are economical, conveniently available technologies that faculty can quickly integrate into their face-to-face or web-based courses.

Faculty resistance to learning library technologies stems from more than just lack of awareness or an underestimation of what librarians can offer. Some library technologies may seem daunting to faculty. Bibliographic or full-text database search systems can be a challenge. Besides the multiplicity of these systems, the syntax features differ widely. Common barriers include inadequate time to learn and implement the technologies and perceptions that they are too complicated and confusing.

The goal of an LTA is to make any type of educational technology easy and convenient for faculty to learn and use. If they have not done so already, academic librarians should shift from their traditional perception of electronic library resources as search and retrieval systems and instead promote them to faculty as educational and instructional technologies. We should think of our array of computer-based information resources as "teachnologies" because of their ability to blend teaching and technology to enhance student learning.

What technology innovations would faculty most likely resist? Steve Gilbert, president of the Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) Group of the American Association of Higher Education, has observed that faculty will avoid technology that takes more than 30 minutes to learn, requires more than a page of documentation, or carries any associated budgetary costs. Gilbert created LTAs as a solution to the technology-aversion problem.

As technology revolutionizes education, some worry that libraries will be increasingly marginalized. Courseware concerns lead the way. Products such as WebCT and Blackboard create self-contained learning environments in which faculty members adopt, unintentionally or otherwise, the role of information gatekeeper. In this new capacity faculty may exert significant control over student access to library resources through the courseware site. Without a presence on a course site, the library has a diminished role in the teaching and learning process.

LTAs can make a difference. They give faculty an easy and convenient mechanism for creating links between their course site and the library's information resources.

Consider the durably linked database article. At my institution we identified faculty members who provide readings for students by scanning hardcopy articles, reformatting them in graphics software, and then uploading them to their course sites. In many cases, the faculty readings were available as full-text articles in library databases. To help faculty simplify the process of creating e-reserves within their course sites, we developed an LTA for creating durable links. Faculty now can easily and conveniently develop e-reading lists by compiling and organizing links to existing library content. This saves work and eliminates concerns about copyright and licensing. Best of all, through this collaboration students are more easily connected to higher quality library information resources—and reminded of the role of the library.

It is a challenge to identify library-based LTAs that will appeal to faculty. LTA novices should begin at the TLT Group's LTA web site, which features the "LTA of the Week" as well as the archive of all past LTAs. The TLT Group actively promotes the development and sharing of LTAs, and librarians are encouraged to add to the growing archive.

Keep Gilbert's three criteria in mind when creating your LTAs. All of our technologies are free to faculty so they meet the "highly economical" test. Think about technologies that require 30 minutes or less for an individual to complete. Finally, if supporting documentation is produced, can it fit on a single page? While most LTAs are web based, whether all the instructions can fit on a single page remains a good test.

The greatest inspiration for potential LTAs will come from faculty themselves. Pay attention to what technology frustrates faculty and what technologies they are ignoring. LTAs could be used to work with the library's catalog-based or turnkey system e-reserve (already an existing LTA), create table of contents alert services available in existing e-journal collections (e.g., ScienceDirect, Kluwer Online, Emerald), and capture database articles as text files and upload captured files into courseware or e-reserves. Other potential LTAs could locate articles in databases using exact citations, supplementing the addition of specific articles to course sites or e-reserves; export citations from a library database into personal bibliographic software; and use direct borrow interlibrary loan options in systems such as First Search.

A library technology or research application may be less likely to work as an LTA when it involves too many steps, combines multiple technologies, or has questionable utility. There may be times when it is necessary to understand what MARC records are but not with an LTA. Remember, keep it fast and make it memorable.

While focus here is on faculty, librarians can be technology leaders for other users in other environments. For example, LTAs would be perfect for public librarians to market to their business community. School librarians could promote them to teachers, academic librarians could develop them for support professionals, teaching and learning center staff, writing center staff, instructional technologists, and even information technologists. They work anywhere that basic library technology can help our users increase their productivity and help them do a better job. Our constituents may be too busy for personalized technology training, but when properly designed and promoted, LTAs will further our goal of getting them to integrate the library into their lives and advance learning. Mount the directions for creating LTAs on your web site, and print them out and distribute them at meetings and presentations. That way our patrons will remember to use us wherever they might be.