DIY Librarian

A couple years ago, I wrote about infiltrating a tech conference. I did it again today, this time attending my college’s IT conference. I was a bit nervous about it, since everyone else in the room was classed as an IT professional while my job is in the library group (but not in the library – go figure).

Partway through his opening remarks, our university CIO was addressing a problem and said, “We need a librarian in the room. You wouldn’t believe how badly we need librarians right now.” (Little did he know there was a librarian sitting right in the middle of the room!)

This is just one anecdote, but it’s not the first time I’ve heard an IT professional say they need a librarian to work with them. It reinforced my belief that “the L-word” has a lot of value and meaning and was very timely considering the proposed SLA name change (which I wrote about yesterday).

Later, I mentioned the SLA name debate to one of our system administrators who also happens to have a library degree. He said he didn’t like the idea of dropping the L-word from the name, and that he specifically wanted library training to complement his IT training.

Librarian Trading Cards took a break, but they are back! I always enjoy these little glimpses into the lives of other librarians – and I was especially pleased to see a card for Lesley Farmer, who will be a panelist at a program on succession planning I’ve helped to organize for SLA 2009. You can see a description of the program in the Social Science Division’s conference guide.

A friend of mine has posted a photo he took of Spencer Shaw, a librarian from Hartford, Conn., who received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Connecticut Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

Over at Information Wants to be Free, Meredith Farkas makes a case for the benefits of every librarian acquiring some basic tech skills. With a small amount of tech savvy and a “willingness to mess around with it and break it a few times,” she says, libraries of any size and budget can take advantage of new technologies.

As an inveterate tinkerer, I couldn’t agree more. I am lucky to have great IT support for my library, but if I want to experiment with new technologies, I have to be able and willing to play with them myself. For example, we are using both Plone and WordPress. The sys admin will help me install and update the software, and we have a great webmaster who maintains our main web site, but why should they have to learn all the inner workings of the software themselves? Both Plone and WordPress have great development and user communities, and as long as I have a sandbox to play around in, I can experiment until I get the results I want.

If I had to wait for someone to do these things for me, I’d still be in a queue, great IT staff or no. The library catalog, let’s face it, is not their top priority.

I would never call myself a programmer, but my parents introduced me to programming as a kid, and I’ve always enjoyed the challenge. In college, I satisfied my lab requirement by taking every computer science class my college offered – all two of them. These days, with the support of open source communities, it is incredibly easy to play around with programming. I think the biggest challenge is seeing it as playful and fun instead of scary – and I thank my parents for giving me the right attitude.

On the latest episode of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Tech Therapy, Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast discuss the future of library buildings. They begin the discussion talking about Goucher College’s new library building, which will include a restaurant, art gallery, and treadmills. They talk about the library as a social place, the academic symbolism of books, and the possibility of the bookless library.

I always find it amusing that a library building that includes nourishment for the body and the spirit as well as the mind is seen as something new. I used to work in one of the original Carnegie libraries near Pittsburgh, and the building includes an athletic club and a concert hall. The athletic club includes a pool, and formerly a bowling alley too. The library opened in 1898.

Part of what has always appealed to me about libraries is their role as community spaces. It seems particularly easy to use public libraries as examples, but good corporate, academic, and other libraries play community roles as well.

The best quote from the Tech Therapy discussion, I think, was: “So long as there’s a librarian in it, it’s a library.”

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.