Librarian Spotlight: Judith Currano

A day in the life of an information professional

A typical week for me, when the term is in session, includes:

• answering reference and authorship queries
• acquiring materials in chemistry
• making sure the students and researchers have the necessary information for their lab work
• teaching two classes a week in my chemical information course, which is required for doctoral students and optional for master’s students and undergraduates
• being active in my own and others’ course development
• and doing guest lectures in colleagues’ courses at the start of term

50-60% of my time is taken up with teaching, including more advanced topics in chemical information retrieval, such as comprehensive text searches and substructure queries. I also teach occasional classes in personal research data management (RDM). By the time the students graduate, they should all have the right skills. More recently, I’ve been working with a colleague doing more work surrounding publication ethics and peer review.

I am active in the American Chemical Society (ACS) where I am a member of the Council and am now a fellow, nominated by colleagues in the chemistry department. I am also active in the Special Libraries Association (SLA), where I teach basic chemical principles and chemical information retrieval skills to librarians during the summer months.  Although this is a lot of fun, I haven’t been able to do it very much during the pandemic.  My last gig was actually in Oxford in the UK, with my colleague Sue Cardinal, before the first lockdown.

Ethics has become an important part of my role, and I've been doing a lot of research into responsible conduct of research, particularly publication ethics its intersection with chemical information; In fact, I chaired the ACS Committee on Ethics from 2018-2020, which was a great honour and a terrific experience.

I like to construct problem sets and examples for the students to try and get them to think about how information is organised and creative ways of finding it using all the tools available. (I do not, however, enjoy grading the problem sets when the students are finished!).

I also really like performing a challenging search and trying to figure out why I got the results that I did!  What I learn from my own searches and those I do for my colleagues feeds into what I teach my students.

Adjusting to challenges

One of my greatest challenges is with the information retrieval tools themselves. The advent of smarter, more “intuitive” tools can give users overconfidence and make them think that doing a casual search will yield all relevant results. However, this may not give them a comprehensive picture. Simple searches are great in some scenarios, but it can be very hard to determine whether you have found all relevant results in a specific area if your tool’s search algorithms are blackboxed. Searchers need to have more discrimination when performing their searches. It’s valuable to show the students that unusual results are often obtained from a seemingly straightforward query, to work with them to learn the reasons for the unusual results, and to use what they learned to optimise the query. Some information systems have excellent advanced search features, which help users quickly retrieve highly relevant results for specialised searches. It is incredibly frustrating for me when such features are unavailable. My students and colleagues come to me most frequently when their basic searches fail, and that is exactly the time that I need access to more sophisticated tools!

Adapting during the global pandemic

When you have been teaching for 23 years, you certainly learn how to improvise! The resilience that I learned when standing in front of a classroom and working through an unexpected occurrence prepared me for the constant shifts required by the pandemic. It has been a testament to the modern library that, even when we had to close our physical locations abruptly, library services continued. Classes and workshops moved online, and information retrieval in chemistry was largely unchanged because of the amount of digitised content we have available. Library services were very much in demand when labs were closed at the beginning of the lockdown because everyone was taking advantage of the time away from lab to finish writing papers and review articles. There were, however, definitely challenges in getting access to the physical collections, and we need to give great recognition to our colleagues who managed physical and electronic access to our materials - they worked really hard.

At the beginning of the lockdown, we saw our best attendance ever at the Chemistry Library (online) training seminars, as people had more time to attend and Zoom fatigue wasn’t yet “a thing”. Some of my library colleagues in other campus libraries have suggested that neither they nor their library users particularly want to go back to physical reference interviews because they find the sharing of screens through a virtual session more convenient. I will definitely be offering consultation services in both formats, moving forward.

Overall, 2020 was a big year.

The new norm post COVID-19

There have certainly been challenges in higher education. Many of our students at all levels have not been in a classroom for a very long time. The first-year undergraduates spent the last couple of high school years studying remotely, and our third-year undergraduates moved to virtual study midway through their first year of college. Students are now used to learning and being assessed in a different way - a virtual way -  and they need time to adjust to being in a classroom again. We can’t just go straight back to the ‘norm’; we have to adapt how we teach and assess to fit these circumstances. We also have to think about how we support those students in our classes who have been exposed to COVID-19 and have to quarantine.

Since our libraries were closed from March 2020 until mid-summer 2021, we are seeing advanced students who have not had access to a physical library during most of their college careers and who now need to learn what we do and how to interact with us. We are not used to having to ‘attract’ students in this way. Libraries are accustomed to navigating student expectations and the institution’s educational vision, though, and I think that the pandemic has given us the opportunity to reinvent ourselves in some ways, while still excelling in those areas of traditional librarianship that are most valued by us and by our communities.

Another challenge that I’ve discovered is that it’s hard to ‘see’ a community when you can’t ‘see’ them. When working remotely, everything is heavily scheduled, so chance meetings and conversations are rare. I really missed the chats in elevators when I was entirely virtual, and I now find myself having to “re-meet” some of the people I work with.

I’m interested to see how teaching, library usage and education will change as a result of the pandemic move to online learning and services. We learned some great things about remote training, creating innovative methods of disseminating information to students. The challenge now is to pick and choose the optimal tools from both the in-person and virtual toolboxes. We need to keep the flexibility we have learned from the pandemic and continue to think creatively about how to teach students information literacy.

Advice for your peers

You need to become acquainted with the students and researchers with whom you work and share information so that you each know what the other is doing. Developing relationships with my colleagues in the Chemistry Department has helped me the most in my job. It is also helpful to establish common ground with colleagues. Even if it’s just a small conversation about pedagogy style or techniques, I can feed my experiences into the conversation but also learn from my colleague about theirs. This paves the way for us to consult one another about bigger and more important things.

We librarians sometimes forget, in our eagerness to help people, that we are professionals with specialised skills, and things that seem easy or intuitive to us may not be as easy for other colleagues. We need to be confident in our areas of expertise: finding information is easy, but finding the right information is a challenge, and one at which we excel!

To learn more about the support we offer to information professionals and access our digital toolkit, visit our librarian hub.