DIY Librarian

The other night I went to dinner with some colleagues, and discovered that one of my companions was a fellow University of Pittsburgh Information School alum. She asked me who my favorite professor was, and I told her that I was really inspired by an adjunct professor, Amy Knapp. She then told me that Amy had died just a couple of weeks ago. I was shocked. Amy was very young - only 46 - and had been battling cancer for the past year. (There is an obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.) I hadn’t kept in touch with her and had no idea she was sick.

I took two courses with Amy. One was on social science resources. I’m not sure what motivated me to take it at the time, since I wanted to be a humanities librarian, but since I ended up in a social science library it’s proven very useful. The other was a course on bibliographic instruction, and I remember a story she told the class which has inspired me ever since.

Amy worked at the University of Pittsburgh’s main library for a long time, and was eventually promoted to assistant director. But in this story, she was working at the reference desk. A returning student (that’s academic lingo for a student older than 18-21 who is returning to undergraduate education) came to the desk, looking flustered and near tears. She was double parked (the University of Pittsburgh is an urban campus), needed to be somewhere, and couldn’t figure out how to get there or how to park legally.

Amy could have told this woman she was a librarian, not a parking attendant. She could have told her that this was a library, not an information booth. But she didn’t. She picked up the phone, called the office the student needed to talk to, and put the student on the phone. The student got her issue resolved.

Amy’s point: now how does this student view the library? Probably as a welcoming and friendly place on campus. Is she likely to come back when she starts her classes? And how much trouble was this for Amy to do?

When you have the power to help someone, especially someone who is clearly reaching their breaking point, why go out of your way to say “no”? When you sit at a reference desk, you represent your library, your institution, and libraries and librarians everywhere. Make us proud.

Steven Bell, writing on ACRLog, says that static personal web sites are becoming less common among academic librarians as they are replaced by blogs, social networking profiles, and other interactive web tools. He argues, however, that a static site can still benefit librarians. Brock Read, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus, asks, “Should professors and librarians delete seldom-used personal pages, or keep them around for posterity?”

More important than whether your site runs on WordPress or Drupal or hand-coded HTML is whether visitors can find out about your professional accomplishments. (I’m assuming here that your blog is not anonymous or pseudonymous, and that you consider it part of your professional self.) Is there a link on your blog to your academic credentials? to awards and honors you’ve received? to your publications and presentations?

In my roles as a conference and program planner for professional associations, I often look at personal and staff pages of all varieties looking for information. And I do sometimes rely on web searches to help me identify potential speakers. I’m much more likely to give you a call if I can find that you’ve already presented on a topic I’m interested in. In this day and age, why not also add video of yourself speaking?

I think (though I’m not as immersed in the culture) that other academics benefit from enhanced personal sites as well. I regularly research potential speakers for lectures and symposia sponsored by my organization, as well as prospects for open faculty positions. I can give the committee a much more detailed profile if I can find a recently updated profile (or CV or resume or whatever you want to call it). If I can’t find a profile, I have to rely on what I can find through web searches and literature searches, which is probably not as complete, nor as focused.

The bottom line: a personal web site, of any variety, gives you some control over how people view you. Here’s mine, also linked from the sidebar of DIY Librarian, and from my employer’s web site. OK, the design won’t get me hired as a web designer, and it’s nothing revolutionary, but it is up-to-date.

Ron Charles, a book critic for the Washington Post, has become disenchanted with Harry Potter – both the books and the cultural phenomenon.

I see a lot of parallels between book critics and librarians in this article. Charles writes about being told, “Imagine being able to sit around all day just reading novels!” He laments the fact that fewer American adults are reading novels, and very few are reading anything but bestsellers.  He worries about the future of his profession, with dwindling newspaper book review sections. He wonders whether the “long tail” will ever really appear.

At SLA, Stuart Basefsky presented a proposal for the Personal Information Trainer (PIT). A PIT is an employee benefit reserved for key individuals within an organization. The idea is to change the librarian from a cost center to a valued employee benefit, and the perception of the library from a free service to a valued service. Basefsky made a comparison to bottled water—it is essentially the same thing as free tap water, yet we pay a premium for it.

Basefsky stressed that the PIT would still be available to and provide services to everyone in the organization, but he admitted that the idea might still go against the ingrained egalitarianism shared by most librarians.

Heidi Yacker and John Ganly provided insightful commentary and questions about Basefsky’s proposal, and then the audience and presenters entered into a lively discussion. Ganly said he thought the PIT idea, startling as it may seem to some, is not really a new idea but rather a return to “human presence” in libraries. He added that the problem with outsourcing is the loss of the “cultural ethos” of the organization.

Kudos to Basefsky for bringing a bold proposal to SLA, and to the session organizers for the format. I’d love to see more responders at presentations next year.

It’s conference season again, and I’ll bet that most conferences will include a session where attendees can work on their elevator speeches.

I worked on mine at the SLA Leadership Summit in January, but it hasn’t gotten much use since our elevator’s been on the fritz. (It’s difficult to talk about much of anything when you’re climbing 6 flights of stairs.) I’ve decided that instead I will work on my plane speech.

After the last few conferences I’ve attended, I’ve sat next to a talker on the plane. The talker invariably asks lots of questions upon learning that I’ve been at a library conference.

Aren’t libraries obsolete? Isn’t everything on the internet? What do I think of Google? What do librarians talk about at library conferences?

This is a perfect opportunity to talk about why libraries are important, the good and the bad of Google, and dispel a few librarian myths (why yes, I do have a master’s in that). I have a captive and interested audience. I’ve just been at a conference talking about all of these issues.

After attending the APLIC-I conference this year, I sat next to a man who was curious about Google. Having just heard Siva Vaidhyanathan talk about the Google book scanning project, I was prepared to talk about the pros and cons.

If you sit next to me on the plane coming back from SLA, watch out! If you don’t want to know about libraries, you might want to bring a book, or break out the crossword from the in-flight magazine.

In addition to the house-buying, a couple other things are keeping me from blogging as much as I might like. One of them is a semester-long class on supervision I’m taking through my university human resources department.

Many librarians “fall” into supervisory roles and do not have formal training. (See, for example, Rachel Singer Gordon’s The Accidental Library Manager.) I only took the management courses in library school because they were required, but I do remember one professor telling us that almost all librarians are supervisors—if not of full-time staff, then of students or volunteers. That woke me up, because I had no intention of being a supervisor.

I’m glad I was forced to take the courses, because here I am, a department manager. Even so, I felt unprepared for my first supervisory job, and still feel like I have a lot to learn.

Staff are the majority of my budget. I’ve spent a lot of time honing my tech skills and learning my subject matter, but relatively little time on improving as a supervisor. I come away from the keynote speeches at leadership events feeling really empowered—but that feeling fades after the event. With a weekly class and homework assignments, I’m forced to apply the things I’m learning.

I’ll try to report on the things I learn that are especially relevant for librarians. My first discovery is that I have shifted from Introvert to Extrovert on the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator. What a long way from the kid who was so shy her teachers wondered if she could talk! I’m sure that my supervisory experience and leadership roles in professional associations played a part in this transormation.

One of the issues I hope to investigate during the course of the semester is how delegation is different in libraries than in other departments because of the separation between MLS and non-MLS staff.

In light of all the talk about conference planning and speakers in the biblioblogosphere lately, and in light of the excitement about Library 2.0, I found this conference report from Inquiring Librarian quite interesting. Jenn Riley doesn’t tell us what conference she attended, but it sounds like the mix of librarians and non-librarians was very productive.

Meanwhile, the Lipstick Librarian will miss Michael Gorman in his role as contrarian for our profession. I expect we’ll find another one before too long, so I’m not too worried, but we do need someone to question our professional values in order to strengthen them.

By the way, welcome to anyone finding this blog through the Carnival of the Infosciences #43!

’Tis the season for lists, and I love lists. Not as ends unto themselves, but as beginnings for conversation and debate. I thought I’d start by listing the library blogs that have stood out in my reading this year. I have a small list of blogs in the sidebar, which I do weed and reseed occasionally, but it remains more a collection of the blogs that originally inspired me than a current reading list. I also have a public Bloglines blogroll so you can see what I’m reading in RSS, but the categories may not make sense to anyone but me. (For instance, “News” is health and science stuff that I read for work.) So, without further ado, here is the short list. It doesn’t include everything that I read and enjoy, or even everything that I think is important. It is quite simply the

DIY Librarian Top 5 Library Blogs of 2005

librarian.net. One of my original inspirations, both for blogging and as a librarian. Jessamyn continues to offer unique insight, to bring attention to important issues in libraryland, and to be very gracious and helpful to the up-and-coming (including me).

Library Dust. The biblioblogosphere is blessed with many eloquent writers, but I enjoy Michael McGrorty’s prose the most. I save the Library Dust entries in my aggregator because they are almost invariably worthy of savoring rather than scanning. This is one of the few library blogs that I recommend to people who aren’t librarians.

Information Wants To Be Free. I’ve only started reading this blog fairly recently, but it’s quickly become one of my must-reads. Meredith has a calm and rational, yet simultaneously exuberant, take on library and technology issues.

Librarian Trading Cards.This one has only been around for a couple of months, but I hope Amy keeps it up. Lots of fun and good for the profession too.

Open Stacks. I have not been reading Open Stacks as much since the focus has turned to podcasting—something I’m sure is very cool and worthwhile that I just haven’t made time for yet. However, I am completely in love with the Carnival of the Infosciences that Greg started back in August.

Honorable Mention: Conference Blog

SLA 2005 Conference Blog. For the first time, I wished I had more Internet access at a conference. Not so I could check in at work or post to my blog (sorry!), but so that I could check in on SLA 2005 for program changes, session reports, and local restaurant and recreational tips. This was also my first time participating in a group blog.

Honorable Mention: Non-Library Blog

The Comics Curmudgeon. Kind of like Mystery Science Theater for the funny pages. Instead of taking a smoke break, I read The Comics Curmudgeon.

For the first time, I have a booth at the Carnival of the Infosciences, hosted this week by The Krafty Librarian. I’ve really been enjoying the carnival (especially since there hasn’t been a new This Week In LibraryBlogLand in a while) so I was happy to finally have something to contribute.

Yet another librarian decides not to renew his ALA membership. I don’t really know how big this trend is or how much it affects ALA, but it seems like librarians have gotten very vocal about dropping their memberships.

Is it that with blogs and wikis and other social software we no longer need professional associations to build a professional network? Is it that ALA has gotten more out of touch with its members? Or is it just that with the blogging explosion, people have a forum to share their frustrations with ALA?

I don’t belong to ALA, but I do belong to SLA and APLIC-I, and I find them very valuable. I am also fortunate enough to have an employer who is willing to pay my dues and most of my conference expenses. If I had to foot the bill, I am sure that I would look even more closely at the value of my memberships.

There are not many librarians in my particular field (population research), so I value APLIC-I for putting me in contact with those librarians. I get advice, news from the field, and a fantastic resource-sharing network. I’ve had the opportunity to write for the newsletter, present at a conference, and participate in leadership and conference planning. The conference brings together about 40 people who have similar work environments, and is very productive. Both the membership and the conference fees are cheap by ALA or SLA standards. If I worked in a less specialized environment, I might get the same value from a regional or state library association.

I value SLA for putting me in contact with the librarians in my local chapter. Even though I work in a large university, I am not part of the library system and might not meet these colleagues otherwise. I also value my subject division for programs at the conference, and the conference for giving me access to speakers with national recognition. Both the chapter and the division have provided leadership opportunities. The membership and conference fees are both expensive, though, and if I had to foot the bill myself, I would think twice about it.

I belonged to ALA as a student member and during my stint as a public librarian. I found the job fair at the conference very useful as a student, mainly to get some interview experience without having to travel. I found the programs overwhelming—the highlight for me was getting a book signed by Mick Foley at a YALSA event. As a public librarian, I liked getting American Libraries and discounts on READ posters, but I knew I’d never be able to afford to go to a national conference. I got more out of attending county level meetings and workshops.

I’m curious if associations don’t mean as much for Next-Gen Librarians or whatever we are, especially those who don’t have to publish and demonstrate service to the profession in order to get tenure. We can network informally online, and we can create wikis or join Flickr groups when we need more connections. Perhaps we think of joining associations like joining clubs—something our parents did, not something we do.

Nonetheless, the popularity of conference blogging and blogger meetups gives me hope. Regardless of how we feel about any particular association, I think we need a professional association to advocate for us, so I would hate to see them fade away.