The Beerbrarian Moves On

I am not my job I am not my job I am not my job I am not my job I am not my job I am not my job I am not my job I am not my job I am not my

— F. W. Popov (@jacobsberg) May 17, 2015

Over the course of eight years, I held three positions at my former place of work (MFPOW). For more than half that time, I served as Director of Library Services. I started as a paraprofessional, with "Specialist" in the title, got an MLIS on the job, and worked my way up. I'm grateful to them for the opportunities and growth, and I hope they're as proud of what we were able to accomplish as I am. No doubt they took a risk in making me a director. Working with other library and university staff, faculty, and academic administration, we were able to

• modernize the library, including adding discovery services and a link resolver.
• promote the use of open educational resources (OERs) to the point where every introductory science course uses them, saving our students a lot of money.
• hire, train, promote, and maintain a diverse library staff 
• break down silos by cross-training all library staff on both public and technical services, with robust documentation.
• create a culture of experimentation, where staff aren't afraid to fail and learn from it.

But all those things cost a lot. They cost political capital. They cost emotional labor. And after those eight years, I got the sense that there wasn't much more I could do except maintain. I got the sense I wasn't wanted anymore, but I tried to stick it out. I was lonely as a middle manager, operating between university administration and library staff, and balancing those two often-competing roles was tough. I wasn't happy. I let it get to me. To their credit, the powers that be realized this. The timing wasn't perfect, but hey, it rarely is. I should have started my job hunt earlier, and I shouldn't have taken MFPOW for granted-- if you're thinking about going on the job market in "six months," start now! Though we occasionally disagreed on strategy and tactics, the mission of my former place of work remains a worthy one, and I wish them the best of luck. It's telling that the staff who remain, including the current university librarian, are people I hired and trained. It's a nice legacy to have. Onward. 

I came to librarianship as a failed academic, having dropped out of a political science PhD program. This new job gives me a chance to put that other Masters to good use (I applied for pretty much every Political Science Librarian position on the east coast, but never got past phone or Skype interviews--more on this later), and is right in my wheelhouse in terms of what my dissertation was to be: an examination of the role, or lack thereof, the globalization of the English language plays in state language policies, if you're wondering. I'll also get to work with area studies materials and other resources from my poli sci days.

In addition, I hope to bolster my skill-set. Some front-end web development, often involving integrated library systems (ILS) and learning/content management systems (the LMS is the scene of one of my better failure stories); more project management; more committee work; and maybe more instructional design. Also, a chance to turn a weakness, marketing and outreach, into a strength; and an opportunity to explore what critical librarianship looks like in a special library, as this position is in the academic wing of a federal library.

That being said, it's not an academic library, at least not in the traditional sense. I want to find out what I like more: librarianship or higher education. I want to make sure I'm not in the former as a way to stick around the latter.

I wasn't the job I left. I am not the job I just accepted. We are not our jobs. Not the ones we left. Not the ones we want to take. You are not your job.

Let's see where the day takes us.

I could go the rest of my life and never make a slide as good as this one. #claps2016 #critlib #sneakpeak #spoilers pic.twitter.com/Y7DmWlvAoj

— Kevin Seeber (@kevinseeber) November 20, 2015

Reconceptualizing "Fit": Theory, Practice, Praxis

As presently constructed, the practice of hiring based on "fit" is problematic. Fit too often means "people like me" to hiring managers, which perpetuates a vicious cycle of homogeneity.



In librarianship, that homogeneity is reflected in the demographics of our profession: white, cisgendered, middle-class, and predominantly female, with men both historically and presently overrepresented in positions of leadership (I am a data point here) and those pertaining to library technology.

Evidence shows the number of women in senior leadership roles has increased over the years. From the 1930s to the 1950s it was the natural order for men to be heads of academic libraries, particularly major research libraries. Research studies of the decades from the 1960s to the 1980s provide evidence of a shift from the assumption that various personal and professional characteristics could be identified to account for differences in the number of men and of women recruited into senior positions in academic libraries. Despite this, women remained vastly under-represented in director positions in academic libraries (Delong, 2013).  

This over-representation continued into the 1990s, and persists today.

Fit is an excuse for unconscious bias, as well as an excuse for the conscious kind. Norms of what a librarian "should look like" in terms of race, class, and gender identity, among other factors, are all enforced via fit. The homogeneity of librarianship is overdetermined, but I suspect that fit plays a role in why it looks nothing like the United States population. Librarianship is not even remotely representative.

It gets more depressing: American Library Association membership is getting less diverse in terms of race, and according to data (pdf) from American Community Survey Estimates Applied to Institute for Museum and Library Services and National Center for Education Statistics in 2009, there were over 118,000 librarians in the United States. Under 600 of them were black men.

This sameness has deleterious effects. It leads to groupthink, to monoculture. More diverse groups get better results in terms of:

• creativity and innovation
• decision-making
• problem-solving
• scientific research

In part, this is because social diversity is a form of informational diversity.

Simply interacting with individuals who are different forces group members to prepare better, to anticipate alternative viewpoints and to expect that reaching consensus will take effort. (Source is the above link.)

In the language of the market, diversity improves your bottom line.

And yet, I hire on fit. That's come at no small cost. I know I've been unable to hire people I think would make great librarians because of fit.

Applicant 1, you are brilliant. You will be an amazing librarian, probably a better one than any of the other applicants I've seen in this round of interviews. You understand our mission and you're already committed to it. You've lived it. You code switched three times in the interview in ways that felt organic and natural, not forced. But you won't become a great librarian here, and I'm disappointed in myself for writing that. I realize that oftentimes a discussion of "fit" is an excuse for all sorts of biases in hiring, especially in academia. However, fit applies here. As a manager, I have no idea, none, how I would harness the frenzied energy and passion you would bring to this job. I get the sense that you would kill for librarianship. These two things, the energy level and enthusiasm, terrify me. Our styles do not mesh. There is a mentor out there more suited to your needs. You'll find that person. But not here.

I work at a library with a staff of nine; we need to get along. There's an awful lot of cross-training that goes on, six of us can copy-catalog and four are interlibrary loan wizards, for example. Fit matters. And if we are to avoid the silos within libraries I've seen elsewhere, it matters even more.

What I want to do is to rescue fit, to reclaim it, because the fit described at the top of this post should not be the fit we think of. That fit leads to the decline of organizations. That fit, looking at the demographics of librarianship, above, perpetuates white supremacy.

If hiring based on fit is like a puzzle, then the homogeneous practice of fit is like choosing the same piece, over and over again.



The theory of fit, however, is different. Hire people that complement each other, that minimize each other's blind spots, and that come together to form a complete organization. That should be fit.



Do you have skills other people don't, do you think in ways that other people don't, do you have life experiences that other people don't? If so, then you fit, because those are plusses, and we'll try to get at that in the hiring process. Then we'll try to get at it in our workflows, creating safe spaces for voicing dissent and fostering experimentation.

The more organizations that do this, the more hiring managers and human resource departments that do this, the closer we'll come to having a praxis of fit instead of what we have now.



DeLong, Kathleen. “Career Advancement and Writing About Women Librarians: A Literature Review.” Evidence Based Library and Information Practice 8, no. 1 (2013): 59–75. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/17273.

The Adjunctification of Academic Librarianship

Much ink has been spilled talking about the future of libraries, but comparatively little attention has been paid to the future of staffing libraries, outside of Jeff Trzeciak's infamous recommendation to hire PhDs as opposed to librarians credentialed with Masters of Library and Information Science degrees. What is happening at my place of work suggests that perhaps we should be paying more attention to this aspect of potential library futures.

76% of faculty are adjuncts. 75% of our library staff are part-time. This is not a coincidence. #futureoflibraries aje.me/17sElUX
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) April 12, 2013

As director of the library, I'm culpable in this exercise. Trzeciak proposed to take advantage of a market efficiency, an excess supply of labor on the PhD market, and I am doing the same for MLIS holders. I have advocated for more full-time staff, paraprofessional and credentialed librarians, but due to an operating budget of $35 million (that's for the university, total, per year), my inability to successfully lobby the administration (though I'm unclear if I could successfully do so), and the political economy of permanent crisis in higher education, I find myself here, propagating a system I hate. There are two full-time staff and six part-time staff, two of which are in MLIS programs. Four are part-time librarians. They are, in short, adjunct librarians. This future of academic libraries may be coming to a university or college near you.

Why call these part-time staff adjunct librarians? Because when the only tool administration has is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Adjuncts are a solution to a problem in academic departments. They are now a solution in the library. And to paraphrase Tarak Barkawi, I am in part to blame for administering and legitimating this "Thatcherite budget-cutting exercise."

The only way, it seems, I can staff a library, is to exploit the surplus labor on MLIS job market. That is frustrating. That is sad. That is depressing. And I don't know what to do about it. I would love to make the part-time staff full-time, but clearly that is not going to happen any time soon here. In the meantime, part-time staff get a paycheck, but no benefits, and some experience. We get labor. But that labor is tenuous. Last week two of these staff members gave their notice. One librarian has moved on to a full-time job, six months after receiving a Masters degree. Another is leaving to focus on the final semester of an MLIS program, and the frantic job hunt that goes with it. And for us, the cycle begins anew. I wish I knew how to stop it.

An Interview With Hiring Librarians

I've done an interview with the good folks over at Hiring Librarians on, you guessed it, hiring library staff. Here's a taste:

Too many applicants come in unprepared. They haven’t done, or haven’t articulated that they’ve done, background research on the library, on the institution. Please please please go to our website and poke around. Tell us what you liked, what works, as well as what doesn’t.
Look at the mission of the institution; it’s something we take very seriously, and there are hard days when that mission, those goals, seems like all we have. Let us know how you can help us with that mission, and achieve those goals.

But of course go read the whole thing.

Why We Hired Who We Hired, The Aftermath

Because more people read posts than comments on posts, and because hey, more content, I'm going to do something like a Q & A using feedback about Why We Hired Who We Hired, one of the more popular things I've written on this site.

K Lowry wonders how I feel about thank you notes. Answer: I like them. A lot. It's a little gesture, but a meaningful one. And yet that being said, two of the people we brought to campus sent us notes (one, handwritten!, arrived after the initial post), and these two people weren't offered the positions. As for whether they should be handwritten or not, I have no preference, though getting mail at the library that isn't an invoice or vendor junk mail is always exciting (it's the little things, people). I get the convenience of emailing and don't understand why more job seekers don't do this. It takes maybe a minute, it's polite, it signals increased interest, and is the right thing to do. UPDATE: a 3rd thank you note has arrived, also handwritten (1:58pm, 8/22/12).

Nicola Franklin asks about resume targeting and specificity of cover letters. I'll address the former here, and the latter a bit later on in the post. I have two versions of my resume, an academic CV, for teaching and such, and a resume for library jobs. That's it. I'm not sure if that counts as targeting. I've applied for at least a dozen jobs over the past eighteen months or so, after all, what's the fun of having a title of "director" if you can't take it out for a spin, and received zero job offers in that time, so make of this what you will. However, if I get a resume from you, it's because you're applying for a library job, and as such I assume the resume is going to be at least somewhat targeted towards that. Even if you have no library experience, and we've hired people with none before, show strengths that apply to libraries, like customer service, problem solving, initiative, and finding information for yourself or others in digital environments, among others. The cover letter should also mention these skills, without being repetitive. It's worth mentioning that Nicola is a library recruiter in the UK, thus knows a lot about the job hunting and hiring processes. She blogs here. Do check it out.  In general, however, I think cover letters are harder to get right than resumes, and I like reading things that flow, so much so that I'll read a cover letter first at times, which brings us to this.


Commenter beckitty asks how I know a cover letter mentioned in the initial post was written in a few minutes? Here's how:

Thank-you for receiving my call today.  I am applying for the advertised Library Intern position at [redacted].  I have several years of experience in an academic environment with through [sic] knowledge of internet searching, teaching, and use of the technologies associated with academic librarianship. Please consider my resume and references as evidence of my commitment to the student learner, faculty, staff, and stakeholders of the incumbent institution. I look forward to hearing from you and discussing the possibilities. 

With Regards, 

[Redacted] 

That's the whole letter. All of it. In its entirety. Read these posts about cover letters. Then try harder. Give details. Proofread. This commenter mentions that she omits cover letters if a job posting indicates they're optional. I couldn't disagree more. If you're applying for a job and the cover letter is optional, write one anyway. If you're good at it, and it seems she is, it can't hurt. If you're not good at it, it's practice.

Again, what works for me, what I'm looking for, what other library staff are looking for, what non-library staff are looking for, at this institution may not be exactly what other people at other institutions are looking for. I know the job market is stressful, that it's hard to get noticed, that as of right now there's one job posted on the American Library Association Jobs List website for Washington, DC, and only four in Maryland. If you're looking for larger trends, I can say that we, at my place of work, aren't alone in looking for a particular set of knowledge, skills, and abilities, and that while I can't claim universality, I can claim some wider applicability. If you want a larger data pool, read through Hiring Librarians to get a sense of what other libraries and staff are looking for, and do your research on a particular institution or organization before applying. Good luck.


I leave you with this Facebook comment from an ALA JobList fan and my response.

• Fan: So not helpful. One person's experience and preferences? As if he were thinking the same way as every other place looking for people. All this shows me is how to talk to him, knowing that what works for him could be a total disaster at another place.
• 
  

  Me: I'm sorry you didn't find this helpful, [redacted], but to my credit, the post is titled "Why We Hired Who We Hired," not "Why Libraries Hired Who They Hired." I suspect that a post about larger hiring trends would send mixed messages to job seekers; as you note what works for me might not work for someone else, though I know that there are other academic libraries that operate a similar way in terms of hiring. The job search process is stressful enough as it is, and my hope is to offer some insight and transparency into that process at my institution. But thank you for reading all the same, and best of luck.

New Year, New Library: Why We Hired Who We Hired

We have a part-time position open here at my place of work (MPOW), which means reading, and weeding, through applications; interviewing; and making decisions, some tough, some not so much. We advertised the following position on a few listservs, the university website, and a few other places.
Intern Job Opening 12
Within three days our human resources department received thirty resumes and cover letters, twenty-three of which we, the library staff, quickly dismissed, as it was obvious that these applicants were applying just for the sake of applying. Of the seven remaining, three called me to discuss the position. I do not like that. I don't like talking on the phone, sometimes much to the chagrin of friends and family, and I did not give a phone number on the position description for a reason, though I salute the enterprising googlers who found me.

No, I don't want to talk about the job posting. Stop calling, RTFC, & follow instructions! #rantypants
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) July 31, 2012

Of these three callers, one submitted a cover letter that looked like it was written in under two minutes. That left us with six. Two we, library staff, were on the fence about. Because we're a small library, we decided to err on the side of caution and not invite these two applicants to campus. This left us with more time to do library things, like showing people how to print, where the bathrooms are, cataloging, and sending out links of squee animals. The other four were invited to campus, and accepted.
Our interview process is iterative. First there's a formal interview, almost always with not only library staff, but also someone from a dean or provost's office. I cannot stress enough how important it is to bring in someone from outside the library and library services when interviewing, at least for an academic library. It keeps the conversation focused on what a candidate can do for not only a library, but also the larger academic community, and it keeps the library jargon to a minimum. It also keeps me in check, lest I say something less than stellar about MPOW's administration, not that that would ever happen.

The second step is a tour of the library, culminating in a viewing of our broken microfilm reader. I have been at MPOW for almost five and a half years and not once has it worked. On the other hand, not once has anyone asked for microfilm except for interlibrary loan requests, which we happily grant. The third step is filling out a formal MPOW job application.

Both library and non-library interviewers were pleased with the four applicants, but to the library staff, two immediately stood out. Both had grade school teaching experience, as well as retail experience, important since librarianship is, in large part, about customer service. One of these candidates name-dropped The Wire, which is always a plus. The other commanded the room in such a way that it was clear five minutes into the interview that we were going to offer her the position. Fortune shined upon us when we found out that we could extend job offers to both of them.

The other two candidates were not bad, both are people with whom we could do business, but were simply less good than the two to whom we made offers. It happens. One of these not-bad-but-less-good candidates has a wealth of library experience, but that experience takes place at a very posh library in a posh area of a posh state. Given that MPOW functions something like a historic black college/university (HBCU) and educates more graduates of the District of Columbia public school system than any other private institution in the country, it didn't seem like the best fit. The other of these interviewees had less library experience, but talked cogently about the digital divide and making information accessible. This candidate would require more training, but an ability to examine oneself vis-a-vis unfamiliar surroundings is something that's hard to teach. All the interviewers, myself included, remain stumped on how to rank these two candidates.

It is also worth mentioning that all four people we brought in for interviews had at least one typo on either their resume or cover letter, and only one wrote us a thank you note, following up after the interview. One interviewee arrived twenty-five minutes early and asked to have the interview upon arrival. Don't do that.

I hope the offers we've extended are accepted, and I can post an update during training.

UPDATE: a related post is now up (2pm, 8/22/12).

Retail Librarianship

I find myself, quite suddenly, in a position of some authority where I work, which includes hiring library staff (no, we're not hiring now, unless you want to be director, and you don't, trust me). While I'm interested in where you got your MLS, what your favorite class was, previous library experience, and other such things, I find myself coming back to one simple question: have you ever worked in retail or a customer service position?

Look, don't get me wrong, I care about the degree that put you tens of thousands of dollars in debt, but I'm more interested in if you folded sweaters at the Gap one summer. Why? Because regardless of where you work in a library, you're going to interact with other people. Even the Technical Service gnomes. And other people can be jerks. You probably knew that. Handling those jerks, being diplomatic about it, takes a certain kind of skill. It's a lot easier for me to teach you how to use the ILS than it is to teach you that.

So I understand if you want to hide your sordid retail experience on a resume or CV, but for an in-person interview, I want to hear all about it.