Alexis Whitney - Learning Retrospective

I attended an OLA workshop on October 22 called "Build Your Own Intellectual Freedom Training." I wanted to go to this because while we have a lot of different trainings, we don't have one that's exclusively devoted to this topic.

It was a really small group--only about 6 people. I was the only person from MLS there.

For the first half, Dr. Burke from OU SLIS talked about the concept of intellectual freedom, and how important it is to have policies outlining the library's view on this. We talked about the Freedom to Read/View Statements and the Library Bill of Rights, and all that good stuff we all remember from library school. Then Dr. Burke talked about some research she had done in which she compared various library's intellectual freedom/collection development/materials challenges policies, and how they mostly include the same few important things.

For the second half, Jeremy Jordan, a trainer with the Pioneer System, led us through something called the ADDIE model, which he likes to follow when working on big projects. ADDIE stands for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation. Since we only had 2 hours, we only worked on Analysis, Design and Development.

The project we worked on was a video, designed for front line staff like shelvers, circ, and part time people who may not be totally familiar with the concept of intellectual freedom, but who may be called upon in the course of their workday to explain it to angry customers who want to know why the library has something they personally disagree with on the shelves.

We ended up writing and shooting 2 scenes, as well as explanatory voice overs. The first one starred myself and a librarian from Oklahoma City University. She was the shelver, I was the outraged customer. I accosted her as she was shelving and demanded to know why on earth the library had DVDs of the series True Blood, which is full of sex and violence and magic. She took me to a librarian who explained the reasons for this, but I was still unsatisfied and stormed away.

The other scene had a concerned parent complaining to a circ person about how she and her young son walked by the computers and saw that a man was looking at pictures of breasts. The circ person went and talked to the man, and determined that he was doing cancer research for a relative. When this was explained to the irate mother, she apologized for the complaint.

These were meant to show employees how to politely and professionally handle situations where people tend to act demanding and horrible. I think something like this could be beneficial for us, possibly, but maybe not going as far as making a video. It is a neat way to demonstrate concepts and behaviors.