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William C. Bonaudi Library's Down the Research Rabbit Hole Issue 4 | Kyle Foreman: Original Parts

06/01/2020
profile-icon Rhonda Kitchens
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Heading image of William C. Bonaudi Library's Down the Research Rabbit Hole Issue 4 | Kyle Foreman: Original Parts

 

The William C. Bonaudi Library talks to Director of Safety, Security and Emergency Management, Kyle Foreman about his lifelong research practices at work and for fun. 

 

Could you share some books, blogs, journals, or other sources of information you use to keep up with your profession.

 

Public Safety offers a wide variety of media in order to stay proficient.

Websites:

Campus Safety magazine is probably the foremost online resource for Campus Safety professionals. Written by people who actually do the job, it’s the most reliable source, I believe.

Higher Ed seems like an unbiased source of information. The writers seem to be well-centered and transparent; if higher ed is doing something and it’s not a good practice, the Inside Higher Ed writers don’t turn their heads to it.

The Journal of Emergency Management is a great resource for emergency and crisis management issues.

Books:

Crisis Management: Planning for the Inevitable by Steven Fink is an excellent and timeless classic. The lessons in the book continue to ring true 35 years after this book was first published.

Crisis Leadership Now by Laurence Barton – Excellent. Over the years I have attached multiple post-it page markers to topics in my copy. I’ve referenced it a lot over the years.

What Were They Thinking?: Crisis Communication: The Good, the Bad, and the Totally Clueless by Steve Adubato. A great reminder of how crisis management can go wrong and what human traits cause it to happen.

**We can interlibrary loan these books for you. They are also available via North Central Libraries.
 

You have to talk to a lot of audiences and people from a variety of backgrounds.  Do you have a technique for getting out critical and sometimes difficult information?

 

The audiences Campus Safety has contact with a range from one person to hundreds of people. Each audience or customer will require a different presentation. To achieve this, you simply have to understand each audiences’ or customers’ needs.

But, the biggest thing you have to do is show that you care and be honest, timely, and transparent. Once you’ve lost the customer’s trust, it takes a very long time to rebuild it.

 

In your off-hours, you work on some amazing vintage vehicles.  How do you learn about these vehicles, hunt down the parts, and keep your research together?

 

My hobby is working on old Ford trucks, vintage 1970-1978. I own two, and my buddy owns two and we frequently help each other out. Thankfully, there are old Ford truck enthusiasts worldwide and multiple web resources for research and for buying parts. It can be a challenge sometimes hunting down a part, and in some cases, the part can be cross-referenced because it was used on several types of Ford vehicles. I keep a three-ring binder for each of my old trucks to catalog the research and to log the repairs or upgrades.

 

 

 

 

 

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William C. Bonaudi Library's Down the Research Rabbit Hole | Issue 11 | Mattias Olshausen, eLearning Coordinator | Truth Seeking
01/12/2021
profile-icon Rhonda Kitchens
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Image of Mattias Olshausen with Issue 11 of the William C. Bonaudi Library's : Down the Research Rabbit Hole

 

 

In your last job at Central Washington University (CWU), you were working on a research project.  Tell us about it. How many people were involved? What was the topic? Where are you at with this research? Did you discover anything interesting or find more questions?

 

I worked as a Research & Instruction Librarian at CWU for about two and a half years. It was my first full-time job out of grad school. In that position, I had faculty status, and part of my professional development involved doing my own research and getting peer-reviewed articles published. For the last such project I undertook at CWU, I teamed up with a couple of my colleagues, Elizabeth Brown and Lauren Wittek. Since we all taught library research skills, both in credit-bearing courses and one-off lectures, we were interested in finding out how much of an impact our teaching, and exposure to library services in general, had on students’ command of these skills over the course of their studies at CWU.

To this end, we sent out a survey to the whole student body. It’s difficult to sum up the results in a paragraph or less, but we did find evidence that students typically had more confidence in their research skills the higher their class standing was. It was hard to tell how much credit we ourselves could claim for that improvement. If nothing else, though, our instruction of first-year students in introductory classes gave them a place to start by demystifying some of the multitudes of resources at their fingertips.

I’ve moved on to other projects here at Big Bend, but Lauren and Elizabeth can use the results of the survey to further develop library programs and services at CWU.  This is the nature of academic research – it often does not produce earth-shattering conclusions, but it’s still worthwhile if it produces evidence on which we can base decisions, as well as spur future research, either by ourselves or others who read our work.

 

As a Librarian, what is the hardest question you have ever been asked.  How did you solve it?

I can’t recall a particular “hardest question” I’ve been asked. As a rule, though, the more challenging reference questions are the half-formed ones. Sometimes patrons aren’t really sure what they’re looking for or have a hard time putting it into words. Good reference librarians learn how to help patrons flesh out their research topics/questions, partly by teasing out what the patron really is and isn’t interested in. If you have a choice in the matter, there’s not much point in writing a research paper on something you find boring.

 

In your off-work life, do you have an area you casually research as more of a hobby and intellectual interest?

There are many such areas for me. I love history, and there are some historical topics I’m passionate about to the extent that I’ll willingly read dense textbooks on them, such as modern German and Russian history. Partly, I do this to better understand how human societies evolve, rise, fall, and recover; but also because history contains endless stories of triumph and tragedy that can be more thrilling than fiction.

I also have more obscure interests. Since I was a kid, I’ve enjoyed watching hawks, eagles, and other birds of prey. At the moment, I’m obsessed with observing golden eagles, which are much more reclusive than the magnificent baldies I grew up seeing in Western Washington. I use maps and information from the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, the Nature Conservancy, and other agencies or organizations to know where to look for them. Watching falconry and rescue videos on YouTube has helped me identify the few goldens I’ve been lucky enough to spot so far.

 

What book, poem, or study have you read that engaged you so deeply you were changed?

One of the most interesting books I read in the last couple of years was Lying About Hitler, by Richard J. Evans. It was about a Holocaust denial-centered libel case at which the author, a distinguished British historian, appeared as an expert witness. The testimony of Evans and his fellow historians were critical to winning the case, as it proved both that the plaintiff (writer David Irving) was a Holocaust denier and that there could be no honest, reasonable basis for Holocaust denial. They made a powerful statement about the importance of serious, truth-seeking, evidence-based research.

This book didn’t change me per se, but it confirmed my respect for history as an academic discipline. Before getting my Library & Information Science degree, I earned an MA in History. While I am on a different career path now, I remain proud of that accomplishment. 

 

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Introduction Image of Database African American History

 

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#BigBendCCBookChallenge: Jennifer Mccarthy on The Water Dancer by Ta-Nahisi Coates
03/31/2020
profile-icon Rhonda Kitchens
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FROM: Jennifer McCarthy, French & German Instructor 
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Image of book cover.
Literary criticism uses the word defamiliarization to describe the
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