library of primitive art

The keys to the kingdom

OKAY, SO MAYBE as a mid-career librarian I'm still fairly new to the new paradigm. But since when did LIS students and 'new professionals' (and I use the term warily here) have as much to tell us as we had to tell them?

Unsurprisingly, as my fiftieth birthday hurtles toward me I have been thinking a great deal lately about my place in the chrono-professional continuum. By this point in my career I might be expected to be something of an all-knowing sage. But I haven't learned this much about my profession in this short a span since I was in library school.

This soul-searching has been amplified by working alongside a younger coworker who now is also a newly-enrolled library school student. As a result I've been paying a lot more attention to what I do and what I know (or don't!), and how I present and teach it, and how it's all being received. It's one of the keener professional privileges to have the opportunity to mentor. But it's also just a little humbling.

It's still commonplace to knock library school as less than challenging or engaging. This is done most often by those (like myself) who weren't challenged by library school. For the record, this is not so much a reflection of innate intelligence as the poverty of ones alma mater. The cliché was always that you could only learn so much at library school; the greater balance could only be learned on the job. Unchecked this dismissiveness can be self-perpetuating: My mentor (Wisconsin, 1952?) often disparaged the library degree as merely 'the union card'. For his time this attitude doesn't particularly surprise me.

And when I think of the proto-Internet days of my library education, I am reminded that library science was not yet traveling at the speed of byte; we weren't that far removed from the punch card era. (Remember when Boolean operators were our WYSIWIG?) For all the foundation we received in traditional library basics, we at Columbia never knew there might be another way to learn the ropes -- not at least until we got to the 'real world' and discovered all those bright and knowledgeable graduates of other LIS programs. (There were, of course, standouts in my class -- you know who you are -- and I expect each and every one will respond with an aggrieved rejoinder.)

(Even as I was writing my post, Jennifer Macaulay was posting a sober and insightful appraisal of her own LIS Education which both confirms and belies my assessments here.)

It's easy to compare my library school education (Columbia University GSLIS [r.i.p.], 1981-84) to my younger colleague's. There are still some aspects that do not seem to have changed in twenty-two years ... or fifty-four, for that matter. I must say I find this disheartening. New concepts and approaches haven't yet reached all the way into the curriculum at all the (remaining) library schools.

One bit of encouraging news I have noticed comes from the changing nature of library literature. Back in the 'eighties reviewing lib lit was mostly a valuable exercise of tracking down references and familiarizing ourselves with the standard journals. What we found there was often pretty dull stuff: often outdated, it was presented as faits-accomplis by all-knowing strangers. Article indexing was slow to keep up with the literature. Hardly the stuff of inspiration. But nowadays scholarly print publishing is frequently supplemented by and will soon be entirely supplanted by e-journals. (Even so, I'm not convinced it's of any higher quality than it ever was, but that's somebody else's blog-fodder.) And how great is it to be able to used hotlinked citations to follow up on an author's train of thought?

I am particularly heartened that so much of the practical and inspirational library literature is coming from the LIS students themselves -- madly blogging away, questioning and learning and sharing, applying and sometimes improving upon what they've been told. I'm particularly pleased by that questioning part. I don't believe we were expected to be heard from, which probably didn't much help our appreciation of our chosen profession. While there's still plenty to teach the students, I'd like to think that there's a looping back to the library faculty and to the profession as a whole.

I write this in part to let the fresher faces among us know why they might be encountering such intransigence among their elders. In our defense, we never had it this good! Luckily for me this chance to teach has also been an education for me, allowing me to rediscover the joys (yes, and frustrations) or being a student again. Except, perhaps, for being a little wiser.

<Photo source UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Services>

WILT (collective wisdom)

What I learned today (or more accurately, this week) continues the dizzying ascent up my personal learning curve on all things two-point-Oh:

It's all well and good to learn by doing it by yourself, but it's quite another thing to learn by doing it with others.

Following an unusually productive meeting of librarians at my shop, those attending all agreed to heed the siren song of Library 2.0 and dive into it head first. In the first day, nay, the first few hours, we had created a blog site (in-house, and therefore password protected), a del.icio.us account, a Bloglines account, and a flickr! site. It's taking a little time for everyone to get comfortable with these new tools, let alone take advantage of them, and making them a regular stop on ones daily rounds may still be a little ways off. One of my colleagues had the foresight to showcase these new developments in his own blog. [Bravo! and why didn't I think of that? ;) ]

What has been a learning experience is discovering how these tools are used collectively. Working alone with your own 'babies', you are free to tinker around, make mistakes, figure out how to correct them, all without a great concern that anybody's taking much notice. (I am coming to understand with this and other blogs that there is always a lurking and hidden community that will happen upon what you've done; they may just not have much interest in acknowledging it.) While I was busy patting myself on the back for what I already knew, I was nevertheless tossed immediately into a different blog provider than my own ... where I proceeding to start all over, comparing notes one with the other, and even making some minor gaffes. But having already worked with one (for what, three weeks?) meant that I was at least aware of what I thought I could do, whether or not they are actually possible. (Unlike here, I can't change font size or color, not paste in images that aren't hosted on the Internet.)

More important, perhaps, is that I now could watch others struggling with the same issues, and finding their own solutions. Imagine that! And what's more, they had some pretty creative ideas about how to address them.

It's too early to see the full effects of this new libraries-wide cooperation. And maybe I'll just have to settle sometimes with some of the choices made collectively. ("Wouldn't it look better in purple?") But I'm definitely going to enjoy the stimulation and inspiration (and even the exasperation) that comes from this new learning paradigm.

Scaling Library 2.0

Live and learn. I have been wrestling with this post for days, tweeking and editing and expanding it far beyond its original germ of an idea. TIme to take the blue pencil to it and get it out there.

The title of this post can be read in two ways, and I mean both of them: Not only scale in the sense of 'ascend', but also 'scale' as in 'adjust the size'.

What started my thinking was a post by David Lee King entitled Making Time for 2.0, a must-read for library staff who want to know: How can I possibly have time for this stuff? (Shout out to the omni-web-present videoblographer Michael Stephens' Tame the Web for the reblog.)King answers both library administrators and managers unsure of how to "provide time, equipment, and training in order to successfully implement these new tools into the library's digital space" 2.0; and library line-staff, who may be reluctant to invest the time learning new library techniques.

In the Comments Jenny Levine makes the excellent point that in the final analysis time spent learning 2.0 is fungible: "I also think it’s important to point out ways to get BACK time that can then be devoted to tracking and playing with emerging technologies ... Doing seemingly small things ... can help you regain time, which is almost unheard of anymore."

One of the things that has confounded me about implementing Library 2.0 in our libraries has been a question of scale—both the size of the staff and the size of the audience. Michael Stephens’ delightful video reminds me that his library can loose a good-sized staff on exploiting the new social software. David Lee King answers the flip side of the coin smartly with his example of the solo librarian who still “has time for a library blog and console gaming nights.”

Both strike me as examples of libraries, big and small, that can depend on a large and diverse audience. But what of the small library with the small audience— due either to the narrowness of the subject focus, the library’s small core mission audience, or it’s restricted access policies?

Until recently my library has tended to operate under the Field of Dreams fallacy: It you build it, they will come. The collection itself will generate its 'natural' audience--whatever that is. There’s frequently little incentive to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ in special libraries, and therefore little incentive to innovate.

"You cover such esoteric topics that you either have to do it really well or not at all." This aphorism was uttered some time ago by my wife to describe the challenges and pitfalls of running a special library. When we launched our blog we knew that its subject matter—art, archaeology and material culture of much of the ‘non-Western’ world—would appeal to a fairly small audience. We also knew that the web audience was potentially far larger than our walk-in audience ever was ... or will be. We saw right away that the blog offered the opportunity to expand our patron base by reaching out to the audience beyond the walls. Would it draw more people into the library? Perhaps, but that wasn't really either realistic nor even the primary objective.

It suggests to me a third dimension of Library 2.0, namely depth: Our library can capitalize on its traditional strengths of subject knowledge but provide it to a wider audience. In the end, it's not so much a question of scaling down what Library 2.0 has to offer in deference to your narrow audience, yet taking advantage of Library 2.0 to discover and address an untapped and potentially much larger audience with the same economies of scale.

The mail must get through

This was the USPS's best guess at re-addressing a package to the Goldwater (not Golduster) Library. By the way, Joy is a Library Associate, not Resociation.

After having a great laugh over it as we passed it around, we summoned the courage to open it up. Inside were a packet of book order slips from one of our less favored vendors.

Visiting probies

Remember these faces. They may be coming to a human resources office near you soon.

I wanted to take the opportunity to showcase both my library and the Pratt SILS program's art and museum focus. I realize the usual term of reference is visiting fireman, but as these are library school students it seemed somehow appropriate. Besides, my term is gender neutral.

Apart from the guy in the electric tie, I can't provide names for any of these worthy visitors to my library yet. But I expect to see a lot of them in the coming week and a half. They are in Pratt's Museum & Library Research two-week intensive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a course founded by Dean Tula Giannini and given by my distinguished colleague Ken Soehner, Arthur K. Watson Chief Librarian of the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Met.

Photo © Erika Hauser

Embracing risk (sort of)

Thanks to Amy of Library Garden for putting her two cents into the most recent edition of Carnival of the InfoSciences by bringing our attention to the recent post by Alan Kirk Gray at Last Clear Chance, Good News. Your Place of Work is Risk-Free!

Library Garden calls it

a really nice discussion of how many libraries have arrived at making decisions based on trying avoid the worst thing happening. The result, according to this post, is that we miss out on possible successful actions because we are afraid of the possibility of some bad outcomes.

For me it comes right on the heels of the Wired news entry on the complementary need for companies to be flexible enough to embrace technological innovations over which they don't have complete control. And not-so-on-the-heels of my accumulated experience in a remarkably risk-averse corporate style, often known as "traditional". (Okay, so maybe it is called 'traditional' after all.)

There is also a pernicious corollary I was introduced to early in my library/museum education: "We tried it once and it didn't work." This was meant to prevent ones 'repeating the same mistake' but never took into account changing circumstances (technology, audience acceptance, staffing). I regret not having pressed the point a few times in the past when making changes could have had a significant impact on the present. This also dovetails nicely with the discussion last month on promoting a 'Culture of Maybe' in the workplace.

   Q.:  Newbie wants to know, At what point does one stop referring graciously to all the links in the chain of referral that let to the ultimate blog post (so-and-so mentioned here a post by whoosie, &c.), and simply cite directly? Is this ultimately a question of blogiquette?

Q: And who's got the best library management blog out there? There's pleny of chatter on the wire about the implementation of 2.0, but what about managing it? I'm fielding your recommendations.

Ostrich photo (what else) by gravitywave via flickr!

Heritage librarianship

As a mid-career librarian I was particularly struck the other day by David Lee King's post on the Library of Congress's efforts to trim its workforce by letting go of 'traditional' librarians unwilling or unable to adapt to new library technologies. (For both of us this came via Michael Casey's LibraryCrunch). I forwarded King's post to my junior library colleague, herself a newly enrolled library school student, suggesting that I felt as if I was but one step ahead of the library grim reaper.

To his credit King takes this news as a point of departure to emphasize the importance of honing ones core competencies, and on the obligation of both the employer to develop and provide and the employee to avail her/himself of such educational support.

I confess to having bristled slightly at having what I was taught in the dark ages (ca. 1984) called 'traditional librarianship'. My tongue firmly in cheek I suggested to David that we needed a new term to describe what came before whatever it is we have now -- much as the guitar became the 'acoustic guitar' once the electric guitar arrived on the scene. Taking a leaf from museum nomenclature, I humbly offer heritage librarianship as the new term of art for the old way of (library) life.

The same library colleague has also been working on assembling in a lower desk drawer what she calls 'The Museum of Library Science' from among all the discarded tools and equipment in our library. (Electric erasers, anyone?) I think she should consider taking this one step further, by providing interpretive displays of heritage librarianship in re-enactment. Of course, this will mean retro-educating the new librarians to play the parts ... or perhaps pressing newly idle senior librarians into service.

Photo source

Wiki while you work

An article on wikis entitled Veni, Vidi, Wiki recently posted on Wired  (at two in the morning?) by Ryan Singel  might just be a must-read for institutions wary of 2.0 technology and of librarians thinking about how to frame that technology to their administration. I've added the emphasis.

Wikis have also invaded the workplace. After programmers introduced wikis to large companies by sneaking them inside the firewall to manage software documentation, some large corporations adopted wikis for other purposes as well. From entire intranets to small group projects, enterprises are utilizing the power of wikis to enable simpler, clearer communication within a corporation ...

Wikis with the best technical features can still fail if the organization does not fully embrace their use. However, unlike open consumer wikis, in business they are likely to be used in the conduct of work, on specific projects, by people whose own interests are aligned with that of business. This is especially the case if, after the initial grassroots movement, management fully supports the wiki not as an optional, after-the-fact knowledge-sharing tool, but the primary facility to conduct work, eliminating alternate channels. The answer to almost any question has to be "It's on the wiki." Otherwise, depending on the culture, uninitiated employees may ignore this collaborative tool in favor of old habits.

Ironically at my own institution the catchphrase "It's on the Library Manual" has already taken hold with the library staff, and efforts to migrate the information from there to a wiki are already underway.

Re-education through blogging

I'd like to thank Annoyed Librarian for the thoughtful and comprehensive response given to my rather off-the-cuff (and perhaps even impetuous) observation on anger and loathing in the librarian community. As my eyes were opened by my initial 'discovery', so much the wider are they opened by AL's reply. (And by the follow-up comments to that post, but more of that perhaps at a later time.) She has devoted more thought and more bytes to the issue than I, and in doing so I hope clarified some of the questions raised by my more scatter-shot effort.

To respond to the easier points first, the politics of a blogger are either a matter of record or not, at the discretion of the blogger. In most instances I'm happy inferring them from the blog itself or, if there's no indication, not worrying about it. For me they're not usually an issue: I don't often preselect sources with a particular political bent in mind, although discovering them certainly may color how I respond to the blog, favorably or unfavorably. It's only human. Whether the blogger is also a librarian would seem immaterial.

Even as a neophyte blogger it's clear to me: If you see something blogworthy, whether a post or an entire blog, blog it. I did not intend to conflate AL with some of the views in her blogroll -- say, how ALA may be going astray doctrinally -- but if she shares some of the points of view there, so be it. (What I can make out of AL's political philosophy suggests we might actually enjoy a lively conversation with no few points of correspondence.)

Ironically, I see now that I managed to tar her for the 'crime' of providing access to these (still to me) disturbing points of view. And me a seasoned librarian, haven't I learned anything? My criticism, and it's a small one, was more about conflating humor and politics. Rarely do they mix well, let alone parse.

AL makes a good point: politically and socially conservative librarians get annoyed too, and why not? It's simply a different manifestation of the same human condition, one not often revealed in LIS blogs. I might submit that I should spend time reading 'liberal' blog rants, but that begs the question. Even as that prussian blue 'liberal' I have to concede that labels like 'liberal' and 'conservative' don't necessarily contribute to the debate, only to the shrillness of the demagoguery. And personally I find the labels more and more misleading, whether wielded by their owners or detractors. But I digress.

I'm not sure I would abandon the idea of blogrolls just yet, however. I like the idea of being able to showcase and promote useful (informative? humorous?) blogging elsewhere. But as far as seed material for my own blogging or for areas I think are out-of-scope for my blog, there are some corners I may choose not to highlight in my blogroll, and they will remain 'private'.

And here's where the librarian's professional mantra of impartiality and the still-quite-personal blogosphere might seem to conflict. Should individual librarian bloggers avoid capitalizing on the intrinsic potential of blogs because of perceived professional standards? I see now probably not. (Here I might be retreating from the 'blogs don't have to be personal' position I took in a comment to Life As I Know It.) Yet as someone who hopes to bring up an library-generated blog, with all the institutional and individual professional responsibility that adheres to it, I will have to face issues regarding the tenor and authority of our blog soon enough; Selection will become an issue.

By the way, some might think that I started a tempest in a teapot in order to draw attention to my new blog. That would be really clever if I had actually thought of it. Far from it! It's more a case of underestimating the potential for the very medium I was jumping into. I have been dodging controversy most of my life, in that annoyingly WASP-y sort of way, and applying it in my library career is simply a new outlet for a familiar attribute. I would just as soon matters here weren't thoroughly distorted by this one post, canting a blog meant for positive discussion of social networking software in the context of art museum libraries (and elsewhere by extension) toward polemics. There will always be a place for the latter; I'd rather it wasn't here. I don't want to stumble into a nightmare of endless intellectual pre-ignition.

And many thanks, AL, for the book citation as well. What kind of librarian blog contribution would it be without one? I look forward to perusing it. Rest assured that when I do, it will be more because you cited it and to enrich my own personal philosophy than as a vade mecum to your political beliefs. I'm sorry I can't gainsay a comparable publication that matches my political p.o.v.

Thanks also to Dances With Books for reminding me that I should be paying closer attention on what's blogging around me, let alone about me.

So let's on with the blog!

Sobering lessons from a business card

Christopher Harris's infomancy site contextualizes this brilliant observation from Hugh MacLeod's Gaping Void site, "a blog of cartoons drawn on the back of business cards - and reminds us that it isn’t about the technology, but about the end results".