Some of my trickiest legal research presentations are the ones that aren’t so focused on the law. As a law librarian at a school with strengths in interdisciplinary fields like health law, I am frequently asked to give guest presentations on classes that straddle disciplines. The complexities of integrating these different disciplines makes this type of research especially challenging to teach effectively in a short presentation.
But I’ve recently made some big improvements to my interdisciplinary research presentations. Although these improvements were undertaken in the context of presenting for a health policy seminar, they should be relevant to any librarian doing a guest spot in an interdisciplinary course.
Interdisciplinary Confidence
In the past, part of the difficulty of giving one of these presentations has come from my own lack of expertise, or at least from my own perception of that lack. I have no background in the healthcare field and I almost never get reference questions about it, so my research skills in this area are probably a little underdeveloped. Never mind that these skills are definitely up to the task of introducing a bunch of total newbs to the relevant resources and strategies; this inadequacy is something I have acutely felt during these presentations.
Although I suspect that these feelings are close associates of my old pal imposter syndrome, I decided to “level up” my skills. PubMed is a complicated resource with a starring role in my health policy presentation, so I invested a few hours into learning its intricacies. I skimmed the syllabus[1] and did some brainstorming, pondering the universe of paper topics students might choose and building some searches around them.
I must be a librarian to my very core, because this was way more fun than I expected! And although I didn’t learn much about PubMed’s features that I didn’t already know, getting some “alone time” with the database did make me more comfortable using and demonstrating it.
This new level of comfort paid off. When it came time to demonstrate PubMed for students, I didn’t stick to my usual canned search queries and instead solicited suggestions from the class, especially ones related to their ideas for paper topics. This immediately caught their interest. One student suggested that I look into the effect of extreme weather on populations with chronic disease. Much to my dismay, the MeSH subject headings I was so eager to demonstrate did a poor job with this intriguing topic.
But I didn’t fret about the paucity of results, because I was comfortable. And there was no need to fret. It turned out that a well-crafted keyword search was pretty much golden for this particular topic, returning a manageable number of highly relevant studies. What could have felt like yet another disaster to lay at the feet of climate change instead became a great opportunity to demonstrate which tools and strategies might fit better with different research objectives.
Interdisciplinary Connections
Another difficulty posed by interdisciplinary research presentations relates to drawing connections between the disciplines involved. At times, mine have felt like two entirely separate presentations, which seems at odds with the themes professors are trying to convey.
After an afternoon of research, I expanded my presentation to more explicitly address interdisciplinarity. I ended up including material that covered the benefits of this type of research, as well as some ideas about how to approach synthesizing information produced according to the norms and methods of different disciplines. I also highlighted how some of law’s idiosyncrasies play into this notion of synthesis.
Honestly, I was not 100% confident about including these materials. In my instruction, I take pains to emphasize practical skills my students will use, and this stuff was more abstract and philosophical in nature. However, these are the materials that the professor reacted to with the most enthusiasm. Afterwards, she explained that getting students to think critically about the connections between these disciplines was one of her major pedagogical goals for the course, and one that could sometimes be difficult to address directly in a satisfying way. Of course, this type of collaboration between librarians and other law faculty is itself an occasion for interdisciplinary synthesis.
Interdisciplinary Improvements
There’s no getting around it: interdisciplinary presentations are tough. The specialization of law librarianship itself presents an obstacle that isn’t necessarily present in main campus libraries where all disciplines regularly intermingle. This is a shame, because the challenge of the material all but ensures that students could really benefit from this type of instruction.
The strategies I’ve written about feel like they are the low-hanging fruit as far as making improvements. Indeed, I was initially hesitant to discuss my PubMed practice session, fearing that it all amounted to saying “git gud” to my colleagues. However, as I tried to emphasize, the practice was largely about making myself comfortable enough to go out on a limb and really show students how the resource works. And the other major strategy–bringing interdisciplinarity to the forefront as an instructional theme–now seems so integral to what I’m trying to get across that I can hardly believe I ever omitted it. To paraphrase one of my cinematic heroes, this theme really tied the presentation together!
Ultimately, these experiences left me feeling much more prepared to approach these presentations confidently and holistically, but they also left me wondering: what’s next? How can I continue to make my interdisciplinary presentations better? If you have any ideas, suggestions, or anecdotes, let me know.
[1] Another protip: ask the requesting instructor for a copy of the syllabus. It’s always nice to have it on hand.