Memory and the Reference Librarian

Ah, the intersection of cognitive and information science -- truly a dream for the CogSci Librarian. Today's confluence twins the reference librarian and memory, based on a recent article by Walter Butler in Reference Services Review entitled "Re-establishing Memory: Memory's Functions and the Reference Librarian."

Butler does a nice job of defining memory and then using some practical examples of how this relates to the work of a reference librarian. I'll summarize the bits I like, but if you are interested in memory, I recommend the article in full because the explanations are relatively simple and very clear, especially with respect to how memory works.

In Butler's introduction, he explains how memory is a "tacit expectation" for reference librarians, and he breaks memory down into three realms:

• Memory in the librarian's brain
• External devices which assist in knowledge storage
• The establishment of memory in the patron's brain

For a great definition of memory, I turn to my trusty reference friend, the Dictionary of Psychology by Raymond Corsini. Memory, he writes, is

1) the ability to revive past experience, based on the mental processes of learning or registration, retention, recall or retrieval, and recognition; the total body of remembered experience. and 2) A specific past experience recalled.

The entry lists 24 different types of memory and provides 16 see also references. My other trusted friend in this realm is the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, which has 48 articles with memory in the title. If you want to learn more about memory, I encourage you to refer to these sources. But I digress.

Butler talks about memory in the context of both neuroscience (where memories are stored) and psychology (describing types of memory). It's fun to mesh the types of memory with the reference librarian's toolkit. For instance, semantic memory -- which refers to "knowledge about general facts," such as "words, chemical formulas, equations, and names" -- might map to ready reference in the librarian's world. Butler refers to Tulving by defining episodic memory as "something which is personally experienced and includes a place and time" -- which might map to the patron's personal interaction with the librarian. Finally, schematic memory, referring to how we perceive objects, people, and events, refers more to the place of interaction -- and maps (heh) to where the interaction takes place: in the library, online, or remotely.

Butler suggests that these types of memory relate to three areas of reference librarian tasks, which he selects from the Reference and User Services Association (2000) Guidelines for Information Services, where librarians are considered ...

1. Service providers: Butler talks about working or short term memory and long-term memory for librarians as service providers with this example of a patron who asked where he can find the chemistry books: "The location of chemistry books is the long-term, schematic memory [for the librarian], whereas the user is the new, short-term memory, which has the potential to become an episodic memory." Reference librarians may use systems such as written lists, browser bookmarks, or folksonomy tags as external memory devices.
2. Educators: Written notes for the patron, handed to her after the session, may serve to reinforce learning. Further, Butler suggests that an interview closure tool such as a short survey could serve as an external memory aid to help "trigger ... both the short-term memory and possibly strengthening associative long-term memory." Butler wonders how this kind of tangible memory tool might be used for phone transactions; I would argue that an email might serve to reinforce what the patron learned during the phone conversation . For IM / chat / electronic encounters, the physical act of typing back and forth with the librarian may serve as an additional learning function for the patron.
   
3. Knowledge managers: Librarians need a lot of memory to manage their knowledge! There are many different types of knowledge to manage in the librarian's world: awareness of their users, technical and resource literacy, and the ability to appropriately share this information with their patrons are a few that Butler mentions; he adds that "the institution [must] practice memory skills" as well -- the librarian's knowledge is great, but it does the institution good if the librarian can share her managed knowledge with new colleagues.

Going back to librarians as educators, I was struck by Butler's assertion that if librarians use "diagrams to show a process of structure, users may be able to secure memory better." Remember (ha!) that next time you are tempted to draw a Venn Diagram to illustrate some complex library math.

And then go ahead and draw the diagram!

For More Information

• Butler, Walter. (2008) Re-establishing Memory: Memory's Functions and the Reference Librarian. Reference Services Review, 36(1), 97-110. Available through Emerald online, or @ your library.
• Corsini, Raymond. (1999) Dictionary of Psychology. Routledge. Possibly available @ your library.
• Smelser, Neil J. and Paul B. Baltes. (2001) International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier. Sometimes online and possibly available @ your library.
  

Confluence of Cats & Science

YouTube says: "Two professional engineers illustrate the proper care and practical benefits of cats." In this case, three cats. The video is narrated by engineer and "guy who has all those cats", who talks about food (especially tuna), cat hobbies (such as lounging, floral arrangement regurgitation, and various forms of low-energy performance art) and potential uses of cats as energy sources (not quite successful).



According to YouTube, "None of the cats, humans, or engineers were mistreated in the making of this film. They were however, slightly annoyed."

This video definitely some sound reasons for cat acquisition and retention.

(thanks to Christine for the link!)

Extra-Curricular Librarian

I recently spoke at the Spring 2008 meeting of PVAAL, the Pioneer Valley Association of Academic Librarians. My topic was "The Adjunct Life and other LIS Extra-curricular Activities," and at the talk, I reflected on my five years teaching library students and blogging. I promised to post links to what I talked about here, as well as the PowerPoint I used.



So ... the Adjunct Life comes from the title of an article I wrote in June for Library Journal (The Adjunct Life). I summarized the article and added new bits, but if you want to know what it's like for me to teach, this is a good review.

I talked about blogging -- why I do it and how I find the time. Why? I addressed some of that in an October blog post entitled "Another Reason I Blog." Another handy side effect of my blog is that I can point people to it as a way of getting to know my professional interests. It's a more comprehensive business card / resume, which illustrates my thinking and quirks (and sometimes even my cats).

Finally, I talked about two articles I am co-writing with a graduate student at UConn. We are writing about our shared experience in the Scopus Student Ambassador program, which I blogged about back in June. What was (is, we're still writing the second article!) fun about the process was that we had different angles on the project -- Chelsea was very interested in the peer-to-peer nature of the training, while I was focused on the great partnership between the UConn libraries and Scopus. And we both get two articles out of it! (More on them when they are published ...)

So ... all of this extra-curricular activity takes a lot of time. Is it worth it? Mostly, yes. The good thing about blogging is that I can do it on my time -- so when I am feeling unintelligent, I can keep my mouth / blog shut, and when I am feeling inspired or determined to understand something better, I can blog about it. Teaching is it's own reward -- the students are great fun, inspiring, and they encourage me to keep up with LIS trends, technology, and databases, all while keeping perspective on the essentials of library theory

Managing (Medical) Complexity

Another terrific medical article by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker. This one is about doctors using checklists to decrease the amount of infections in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). I read it when it came out in December and didn't plan on blogging it ... but the article has stayed with me, so I thought I'd blog it. a) because maybe it'll interest you, Dear Reader, and b) so I could re-read the article and cement its ideas even more firmly in my memory.

The Checklist describes the work of Paul Pronovost, MD, PhD (public health) who developed a checklist to routinize the roughly 178 daily tasks ICU patients need. Gawande states that the average stay of an ICU patient is 4 days, and the survival rate is 86%. Pronovost's checklist, designed specifically to lower the rate of line infections in ICU patients, was implemented at Johns Hopkins in 2001. A year later, their 10-day line infection rate had dropped from 11% of all patients to 0%. Yes, zero percent! They reran the numbers and followed patients for another year. Over the 27 months of using the checklist, they had only 2 line infections. Astonishing!

Pronovost observed two main benefits of these checklists: a) they help with memory recall. As Gawande notes, "When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position." And b) the checklist itemizes "the minimum, expected steps in complex processes." Gawande notes that nurses were empowered to enforce the doctors' adherence to the checklist, thus improving their use.

Sadly, because a checklist for physicians is not sexy, Pronovost's ideas have not been widely adopted in this country. One exception is the 2003 implementation in the inner-city Detroit hospital Sinai-Grace, where line infection rates dropped by 66%. This was estimated to have saved over 1,500 lives and $75 million dollars over three years. Pronovost and the Keystone Initiative published these results in a 2006 New England Journal of Medicine article.

Gawande personalizes the case studies with his usual flair; the article discusses the near-drowning of a 3-year old in Austria who by age 5 had "recovered her faculties completely," (her doctors had used a checklist) and a Massachusetts limo driver who suffered a serious line infection in the hospital and fortunately recovered (his doctors had not used a checklist). He also talks about the process by which the US Army Air Corps implemented flight checklists as they rolled out the B-17 in the mid-1930s, commenting that "[m]edicine has entered its B-17 phase."

I hope that more hospitals will take this checklist approach, as it certainly seems to be a sound idea.

For More Information

• Berenholtz, S. M., Pronovost, P. J., Lipsett, P. A., Hobson, D., Earsing, K., Parley, J. E., et al. (2004). Eliminating catheter-related bloodstream infections in the intensive care unit. Critical Care Medicine, 32(10), 2014-2020.(abstract in PubMed)
• Gawande, Atul. Annals of Medicine: The Checklist. The New Yorker, Dec. 10, 2007.
  
• Hales, B. M., & Pronovost, P. J. (2006). The checklist-a tool for error management and performance improvement. Journal of Critical Care, 21(3), 231-235. (abstract in PubMed)
  
• Pronovost, P., Needham, D., Berenholtz, S., Sinopoli, D., Chu, H., Cosgrove, S., et al. (2006). An intervention to decrease catheter-related bloodstream infections in the ICU. New England Journal of Medicine, 355(26), 2725-2732. (See also Erratum: An intervention to decrease catheter-related bloodstream infections in the ICU. (2007). New England Journal of Medicine, 356(25), 2660.)
• Walker, Tim. Make a list of "crucial basics" and check it twice. Hoover’s Business Insight Zone, Feb. 11, 2008.
  In researching this post, I found a Hoover's blog post by Tim Walker commenting on the checklist idea and wondering how it could be applied to business and career.

Reference Theory & Practice

I'm thrilled to link to my article on The Reference Interview: Theories and Practice, recently published by Library Philosophy and Practice (LPP). They abstract it thusly:

The reference librarian's task is to translate the patron's question into one that can be answered with the library's resources. The first element of that task is to know what the patron wants; the second is to know what resources the library has and how to use them. Reference librarians must learn continuously throughout their careers, both because new resources become available, but also because patrons present questions requiring new resources. This article will focus on how to determine what kind of information the patron needs through the reference interview.

If you're interested in reference, I recommend the article.

And if you speak Albanian, I would suggest you read the first iteration of the article, "Intervista referale: teori dhe praktika," published in Biblioletra in November (pdf of entire issue). The article was originally solicited by my former student and president of the Kosovo Librarians Association Besim Kokollari, and he translated it into Albanian.

For More Information

• Brown, Stephanie Willen. The Reference Interview: Theory and Practice] "Intervista referale: teori dhe praktika," [Article in Albanian] Biblioletra, v4, n2 (2007): 7-11. (pdf of entire issue)
• -- The Reference Interview: Theories and Practice, Library Philosophy and Practice (LPP), February 2008.

Neuroanatomy Now

Neuroanatomy seems to be hot in my podcast feed lately. Ted | Talks just featured a presentation by Jill Bolte Taylor, neuroscientist and stroke survivor.


(or read the transcript)

And my favorite brain science podcaster, Ginger Campbell, just podcast a "whirlwind (55 minute) tour of brain anatomy, based on Beyond the Zonules of Zinn: A Fantastic Journey Through Your Brain (2008) by David Bainbridge. Thanks to Dr. Bainbridge’s generosity (and permission) Ginger has embedded some of the brain anatomy figures on her podcast site, along with the author’s legends. This MRI of Bainbridge's own brain is pretty cool.

For More Information

• Bainbridge, David. Beyond the Zonules of Zinn: A Fantastic Journey Through Your Brain. Harvard, 2008.
  
• A Brief Introduction to Brain Anatomy. Brain Science Podcast, March 7, 2008. See also the figures page.
  
• Taylor, Jill Bolte. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. Lulu.com, 2006.
• -- Ted| Talks. February 2008.
  

A Little Light Music

Time for a rare musical recommendation: the Aluminum Group. They cite the Carpenters, Sergio Mendes, and Brasil 66 as musical influences, and their "lushly orchestrated pop" is simply divine. They've been around since the mid-1990s, but I only just heard them. Where HAVE I been?!

Anyway, here are some favorites:
Lovely Day will make you happy.



The song "Post It", about a lost post-it note, will make you want to rummage in your purse. Hear it and other songs from their 2008 release Little Happyness at MintyFresh, their "record" label (sound quality isn't great, but you get the idea). You can also read a review of Little Happyness at Pitchfork Media.

Another Cool (End-user) Widget

I'm close to reading an article in National Geographic about animal cognition (which I'll blog soon, hopefully), when I spotted this at the bottom of the page:

NGM Widgets
Put National Geographic images and puzzles on your web page.

Awesome. Widgets for normal people who want to see more National Geographic "stuff." This stuff includes a jigsaw puzzle out of a National Geographic photograph, a great photo of the day:



and their "Daily Dozen" - 12 photos they like each day.

So back to my earlier post about ESPN football widgets (Widgets! Libraries Need 'Em). We need to be offering creative widget-y things for end-users to put on their web space -- blogs, iGoogle, NetVibes, Facebook, course web sites -- so they can easily search & use library materials. I envision widgets for searching the opac (like what WorldCat does with its search box, only with stuff from YOUR library), searching EBSCO, ProQuest, iCONN, institutional repositories, archives (Conn. History Online, eg) ...

LibGuides and ProQuest are two companies I know of that let *librarians* create widgets and put them someplace handy (see my sample ProQuest widgets -- thanks PQ!). That's a great first step. But I'm talking about widgets for end-users: students (college, high school, graduate), teachers at all levels ... Look at the instructions for National Geographic's widgets and see how easy they are to create and use.

Anything that we put online for users to use should be made easier to use, find, and "widget-able" for people to put wherever they want.

A Story About Cochlear Implants

Jane Brody writes in Tuesday's New York Times about Josh Swiller, a 37-year-old who has sensorineural hearing loss and recently received surgery for cochlear implants. Swiller was born with some ability to hear, and wore amplification devices, but several years ago, he had to stop using them due to headaches and ultimately lost all hearing. He was fluent in sign language and was adept at reading lips.

So three years ago he "underwent life-changing surgery, substituting a cochlear implant for the hearing aids that were no longer working..." With the implant, Swiller's hearing is at 100%, although he appreciates being able to remove it, particularly on the subway.

Brody mentions some touchy issues, like the opposition to cochlear implants by some in the deaf community because they believe that implants threaten that community. Indeed, she quotes Swiller as saying that "...[b]ecause of cochlear implants ... deaf schools around the country are rapidly losing enrollment." She also quotes him as saying that sign language can be learned later in life, "...but not English." Not sure I agree with that, but it's an interesting argument. Certainly learning to speak can be more difficult.

Finally, Brody describes what hearing at 100% was like for Swiller. It reminds me a bit of my experience achieving binocular vision, and must echo (excuse the pun) what Stereo Sue experienced.

“The first sound I heard was ‘sh’ — I’d never heard that or ‘s’ before,” [Swiller] continued. “Then one day, I passed someone on the street talking on a cellphone, and I heard everything she said crystal clear. That had never happened before — hearing something when I was not paying attention to the sound. I can now hear conversations from another room; before I couldn’t hear distant speech at all.”

Definitions

• "Cochlear implants are electronic devices that contain a current source and an electrode array that is implanted into the cochlea; electrical current is then used to stimulate the surviving auditory nerve fibers (Wilson, 2000)." American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
• Sensorineural hearing loss: "...occurs when there is damage to the inner ear (cochlea) or to the nerve pathways from the inner ear (retrocochlear) to the brain. Sensorineural hearing loss cannot be medically or surgically corrected. It is a permanent loss." American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
  

For More Information

• American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. (2004). Cochlear Implants [Technical Report]. Available from www.asha.org/policy.
• American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. "Types of Hearing Loss." Available from www.asha.org/policy.
• Brody, Jane. Cochlear Implant Supports an Author’s Active Life. New York Times, February 26, 2008.
  

Books Brody mentions; links in WorldCat:

• Chorost, Michael. Rebuilt : How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
  
• Swiller, Josh. The Unheard : A Memoir of Deafness and Africa. New York : Henry Holt and Co., 2007.

Widgets! Libraries Need 'Em

This is one of my favorite Giants, Osi Umenyiora. And this is an ESPN widget of him ... doesn't seem to include the postseason or the Superbowl (which is a shame), but it was *ridiculously* easy to add to this blog. Or, frankly, just about any other social networking tool on the planet, from Facebook to Friendster (still?!) to just about anything in between.

Shouldn't library tools be this easy to add to a user's site?

Imagine ... an OPAC widget. An Academic Search Premier widget. A Scopus widget. An Institutional Repository widget.

Why not?