University Times

Robin Kear’s first trip abroad was all that was necessary to spark her innate wanderlust. As a Chatham College freshman, she spent six months studying in France’s Loire Valley and followed that with a shorter study trip to Morocco in her junior year.

Little did she know that her love for travel would mesh with a career as a librarian. As a student at Chatham, she worked in the library and enjoyed it, but as she pursued a bachelor’s degree in global policy studies she didn’t really consider the library as a career choice until she was swayed by a professor who had a graduate library degree.

The Pittsburgh native headed west, earning a Master of Library and Information Science degree from San Jose State University. From there she traveled to Africa for a six-month internship as a librarian with the United Nations in Nairobi, Kenya.

After many miles — the 33-year-old has visited 26 countries and 35 states for business or pleasure — Kear returned to Pittsburgh, joining Pitt’s University Library System last year as a reference/instruction librarian.

Her work at Pitt includes time on the reference desk helping library users and leading information literacy sessions for faculty and students, but her interests continue to have a global focus.

Active in several professional organizations devoted to international librarianship, the globetrotting Kear traveled last month to Vietnam where she led a workshop at Cantho University for Asian colleagues on reference services and the use of Web 2.0 applications in library settings.

Grant funding from private sources in the United States has built four libraries in Vietnam and provided a budget to bring professional speakers — Kear included — to instruct the librarians there.

It was Kear’s first in-depth teaching assignment. Working with a Vietnamese translator, she taught five days of day-long classes.

“I really appreciate faculty work even more,” she said, after finding out firsthand what goes into preparing for and presenting a full week’s worth of material.

Kear found the librarians there eager to use any application that is available in Vietnamese. Facebook, for instance, is not, but other social networking technologies such as Blogger, Google Docs and Gmail are. She set up a wiki (a web page that’s able to be edited or added to collectively by its users) for her class, leaving several members in charge of it so participants could continue to add to it on their own.

“If it’s in their language, they use it,” she said, adding that while Vietnam’s print and broadcast news are controlled by the socialist republic’s government, she found no Internet sites blocked. The bottleneck she found online was low bandwidth that slowed computers.

Kear said her students were a mixture of public and academic librarians with interests in technology and in reference. Most Vietnamese libraries, she said, have a reference desk but were seeking ways to enhance their services. Part of her presentations focused on planning the launch of a new service such as reference by phone or online chat. Other sessions helped the librarians hone their skills in communicating with users of their reference desk services. Often, Kear said, “customers don’t know how to express what they need.” Librarians need to develop skills in “negotiating the question,” to draw out the details that will enable them to help the customer find what he or she is looking for without being evasive or intimidating.

Kear said teaching the Asian librarians was quite different from her experience at Pitt. She said it was difficult at first to adjust to a lack of feedback from the students — they didn’t nod or change their expressions in class — in contrast with American students who are very participatory and not shy about asking questions. Asian cultures differ in that the teacher is viewed as the expert and students typically ask questions only when the teacher invites them to do so, she said.

Surprisingly, though, when Kear paired the students to practice mock reference desk interviews, the previously silent students quickly became anything but quiet.

She was particularly struck by the Vietnamese librarians’ eagerness to learn and adapt new knowledge for their country and their libraries. “That made it such a wonderful experience,” Kear said, adding that she was surprised by how rewarding she found the experience of sharing her knowledge and skills. “They really wanted to know what I had to say.”

Kear said her extensive travel experiences have expanded her cultural awareness and helped in her professional life, enabling her to better understand Pitt’s international students and the challenges they face while studying in the United States.

She’s also found some common themes among librarians around the world. Intellectual freedom and censorship issues cross national boundaries, she said. And, Kear said the factors that motivate librarianship are the same worldwide. Regardless of their culture, she said, librarians are drawn into the field either by their desire to help people, their love of books and information or their desire to connect people and information.

“The urge for librarianship is universal,” she said.

—Kimberly K. Barlow