library of primitive art

You've been meme'd!

Putting the 'me' in meme, this exercise in social 'tag-you're-it'-ing

I guess it was inevitable that I would be fingered by a fellow librarian from the biblio-blogosphere to participate in the latest virtual parlor game, Five Things You May Not Know About Me. Fortunately for me the tagger was Jenny Levine, and she is such a new (and most welcomed) friend that there's a good chance she might not know these things about me. This post's for you!

I had half a mind to phrase it entirely in the negative, as in "Isn't double-jointed, can't touch his elbow with his tongue, nor engage in any similar amusing party tricks." Or perhaps I could weigh in on the "boxers vs. briefs" controversy. (Where's the novelty in a 50-50 proposition?)

Anyone who knows me even a teeny bit already knows w-a-a-a-a-y more than they need or care to know about me, so forthcoming am I with autobiographical factoids at the drop of a hat. There'll be no revelations in this for my long-suffering coworkers.

1. Surely the least unknown thing about me is that I collect automobile license plates -- lots of them, about 1,600 at last 'count'. Trust me, this exemplifies 'selectivity'. This puts me squarely in the dilettante category among my fellow collectors in ALPCA, the corresponding hobbyists' club. This, and I share a one-bedroom apartment. And I don't own a car. Please don't ask ... !
2. When I moved with my parents from suburban California to New York City between seventh and eighth grades, they let me pick the college prep I would attend. I promptly selected one near my father's office, that had carpeted classrooms (this evidently impressed me), and quite by chance was single-sex and would remain so until my senior year. Okay, so I was like twelve. This might explain why nowadays I deliberate so long when I have to make a choice, even on a restaurant menu.
3. I have outlived most of the schools I've ever attended. This may also be true of a lot of baby boomers. My kindergarten folded, my elementary school was plowed under for subdivision, my high school went bankrupt, and my library school -- dear old Columbia SLIS -- was strangled by its parents. My junior high closed briefly in the 'eighties for lack of students, but has since reopened. And my undergraduate alma mater is going strong and still makes alumni appeals.
4. Throws, bats, writes, eats and sleeps: Left. Left-handedness is a non-issue, unless you're left handed.
5. I'm the fourth James Day in the last five generations, each of whom was given a different middle name. That's why I'm Ross. I'm also clearly the last of the James Days, unless I choose to name a pet James. I've never had nor have I sought a nickname: Ross just doesn't nick and nothing else has stuck. (Mike the Janitor from grade school tried Rusty, since my red hair looked as if it had rusted, but the moniker never took -- thank goodness.) I'd be jealous if it weren't for all the nickname horror stories out there and unwanted shortened forms of names.

I am beginning to worry about the poor individual who ends up the last to be asked her/his five lesser known things. In what might be an illuminating sign, many of my library pals don't feel yet any calling to blog. If they do blog, they're also steadfastly fad-resistant. Fortunately Jennifer "Don't Call Me Jenny" Macaulay (see 5 above), who has weighed in with her five things before I could tag her, has in her valedictory comment left me a perfectly gracious way not to worry:

6. "I never pass along chain letters, chain emails, pleas for help or money, etc."

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>

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!

The things you learn ...

... when cobbling together a blog.

Today I learned that there are a lot of angry librarians out there. Not disgruntled. Not cranky. Not even quarrelsome. Just plain angry. This when I was trying to populate the sidebar I've called Anecdotes, facetiae, satire, etc. In my pre-blogger days (that is, until this week) I might drop in on Librarians Guide to Etiquette or Annoyed Librarian to enjoy self-mocking jibes at the library community. It seemed something definitely worth sharing.

I found many of these dyspeptic blogs nestled in a blogroll of the Annoyed Librarian, whose wry stylings I admit enjoying. Granted she labels her roll Library Blogs and Websites: Political, Humorous, Informative. The blogs that alarmed me must be the 'Political' in that collection of strange bedfellows.

An interesting thread running through many of these blogs is the conspiracy theory. I haven't had too many professional dealings with the A.L.A., but I have a hard time believing they're the center of a cabal whose evil goal is fluoridating the water, figuratively speaking. In any event, there was a distinct us-against-them thread running throughout. The profession, they bemoan, is heavily weighted by wrong-thinking liberals set on despoiling the name of Library. It's sad to contemplate the self-loathing inherent in thinking you're the persecuted minority within your chosen profession.

One of the reasons I was attracted to this profession -- enough to want to be part of it -- was the universally good-naturedness of its practitioners. Librarians may be overly self-effacing, I reasoned, but they're fiercely proud of who they are and keenly aware of their intrinsic worth. It's probably one of the reasons that librarians have such a high approval rating with the general public. It's not often that a librarian will throw a book back at you. The infrequent exception tends to stand out glaringly. I never imagined these were inherently left-wing traits.

Librarians, like sanitation workers, lawyers, and houseparents, are political (well, some of them, at any rate), but as a group they tend not to be bomb tossers. 'Earnest' might be the worst thing you say of them collectively; in some cases, 'blinkered' or at their very worst, 'strident'. (In the interest of full disclosure, I work in the prussian blue core of the Blue States.)

In the end it put me in mind of the fact that, even in the hands of librarians, the quintessentially impartial, there's no pretence that the blogosphere is anything but personal. And If 'political' here means 'conservative' or 'right-wing', all power to her. Maybe in this instance, however, it would be wise to wield those library-learnt categorizing skills more deftly.