on reading....

Doctoral students faced with seemingly infinite reading assignments often ask me how for advice on how to keep up with the reading demands. They ask how much of the assigned reading do they actually have to read. Well, all of it, I tell them. There is a mild panicked response, a deep sigh, a hand rubbed through their hair as if they are about to clear a large swath of jungle. Which they are, in a way. If the literature is the jungle then their skills at reading and comprehension and time management are the little machete they need to swing to make a path. There is no magic answer, I tell them. There is no magic formula to use, no magic solution. One simply needs to start reading.

My core doctoral course is the first one most students take and it is an interdisciplinary program so we have students coming from outside of information science who have never read any IS literature. How does one approach a the mountain of literature that all fields create? The syllabi we create provide modest direction by creating categories of readings –introductory articles or chapters, readings on theories and models used, sections on research methodologies, core concentrations, thought pieces, etc. It is a tree to be climbed, a mountain to be conquered, a river to be forded. But, again, there are no secret strategies to surmount the obstacles. One simply needs to start reading.

Each ‘work’ that is read paints part of a picture. That picture is individual and unique to the person doing the reading—it adds to their knowledge and understanding of the many topics they have to cover. I have been painting this particular LIS picture for over 20 years, longer even, and it is broad and has depth but some areas need further definition. It constantly changes, too, like a Pollock painting that keeps morphing in and out of focus. New information replaces old information, but even then that older information is still valuable. Areas that were once shallow deepen and areas that were once very ‘rich’ can shallow based on new developments and changes to old practices (i.e., my understand works in proportion to the whole of literature written about it).  I work and study primarily in information organization, specifically cataloging and classification in libraries, and the rapid changes in our practices and standards over the last 10 years or so has left me breathlessly trying to keep up with all the literature and new ideas. I want also to reestablish my interests in scholarly and scientific communication, bibliometrics, etc., which means I have to emerge myself back into the literature that has grown since I first studied it years ago.

I’ve also reestablished my roots in theory development overall and in library and information science in particular---meaning I had to investigate how I learned originally from Elfreda Chatman back in 1998. In doing so I finally understood a bigger picture—that she was drawing primarily from sociological theory, which I didn’t understand as a young doctoral student. Sometimes we don’t really understand what we are reading the first or second time around, sometimes it takes years because in that time we had to build up our knowledge base. My father used to tell me---rarely do we truly understand the ‘meat’ of what we are reading. It takes time. Its take contemplation.

There are all sorts of tools and techniques for reading---go to any section of a bookstore on reading and you can find hundreds of works relating theories and best practices. In the end, though, I think it is just sitting down and reading that really works. Take notes, or not. Read, re-read, sit, think, write out some thoughts or make a map, build outlines, draw bridges over intellectual landscapes….whatever works. 

on writing...

Want to talk a little about academic writing. I’ve been stuck in a several years long writer’s block, mostly thinking that nothing I have to say is worthy of writing about. It is a common situation experienced by academics---the pressure to produce grand amounts of ‘product’ undermines the creativity and confidence necessary to actual do the work. I have quite a list of things I would like to research and write about, a few of which are simply thought pieces, requiring only my knowledge and experience.

In my role as an academic I serve as an advisor to quite a few doctoral students and I have seen about 14 dissertations come to fruition as chair, with a few more on the way. I have not seen very many of my students publish from their dissertations, however, which has always perplexed me. And, until now, I myself did not write anything from my mine.

This past month I finally cracked open the old beast and proceeded to extract/rip/tear two articles from it. The study was historical in nature so it is actually still relevant and I found it fairly easy to do—which begs the question, why did it take me 15 years to do it?

There is an enormous emotional and psychological investment in a dissertation and for many years I could not even look at mine without getting dizzy and nauseated. I finally re-read it a few years ago –only because enough time had passed for me to forget it. It wasn’t bad, to be honest. Some silly mistakes and I could recognize, or remember, clearly how it had seemed to me at the time to be such an important piece of work, something that would rock the world of library and information science. Which it did not, of course. It is just a study, a freshmen work of a now junior academic.

Perhaps much of this ‘fear’ comes from how we read the works of others, or hear them present their work at conferences or special lectures. I confess that I find it impossible to keep up with all the work being done in my little corner of my beloved LIS field, let alone the broader context of social science and information communication and technologies. The journals I still receive in print form pile up on my desk and the online ones are easily forgotten until I happen to remember to peruse their content, despite the annoying alerts I get to read, read, read!  If I can’t keep up with my reading then how I can inform my research and writing….and teaching!?

The textbook I started 10 years ago lays abandoned, having blown through two publishers. Articles half-heartedly started, or presentations given that never evolved further into some publishable products, book chapters for edited books floundering around on a flash drive somewhere. I have mounds of notebooks with long rambling handwritten missives about some idea or research project that have never amounted to anything.

And, yet, I finally found the confidence and energy I needed to write from the one manuscript that really counted, that has been glaring at me from my bookshelf for 15 years. Perhaps it required me reaching some invisible milestone or some level of maturity that I did not yet possess. I have noticed that in the last few years I have let go of some long-held beliefs about my field, my work, science, and the scientific community that I had inhabited for so long….let go of what I saw as my contribution to it and my place in it. Did that need to happen so I could break the writer’s block? What is the signal that finally set the writing in motion?

Well, who knows really. Maybe I will find out sometime in the next 15 years. It remains to be seen if the journal will actually publish my two articles---the review process has only just begun. But, I have great satisfaction in actually checking this particular item off my writing list.

Pic of title page of my dissertation: