Furloughed

The last time I went to work was Friday, December 21st, 2018. I set up an out of office message, took a look around, and left. I still have some trail mix and chips on a shelf in my office. I wonder if they've gone stale, or if a library mouse is enjoying them and the solitude.

When the shutdown started, our living room furniture was set up just so. Since then it's been moved two more times. I think we're finally happy with it.

I do some quick calculations in my head about our food situation. We're fortunate that we can miss a month or two of paychecks and be okay, but just in case, better to buy in bulk now--hello, Costco--and supplement with Aldi or the "seconds" produce at the weekly farmers market. I update my resume and CV, just in case.

The second week of the shutdown my wife notices some water damage on our bedroom ceiling. We call a roofer. They spend maybe twenty minutes poking around, and two days later write us an estimate for $11,000. We laugh.

I also apply for unemployment in the second week. I figure I pay into this system, I may as well use it. At the end of the process the unemployment website gives me fifty-eight jobs to apply for that are either in a library or library-adjacent. I filter them by distance to my house, fifteen miles or less given Metro and the state of local roads, and an hourly rate of $20 and over. The updated search returns zero results.

I hear nothing for over a week, then get a letter in the mail, instructing me to use their website to file a weekly claim. There is no information on how to file a weekly claim on the website. I call instead. Due to the volume of callers, I'm asked to try again later.

I meet fellow furloughed friends for lunch downtown. The takeout traffic looks okay, but the dining room is empty, and a server confirms that business is down about seventy percent. Some of the staff are losing shifts.

Mr. 12 in particular thinks the shutdown deals are a hoot. We live within walking distance of an &pizza, a fast casual chain that cooks made-to-order pizzas in a high-speed oven. They're offering a free pizza with a federal or contractor ID card between 6 and 8pm every day, and bless them for it. On Friday, January 11th, the day of the first missed paycheck for federal workers, there's a line out the door at 7. I don't tell Mr. 12 that I could buy about eight pizzas at the hourly rate my contractor bills.

My aunt sends me $100 Trader Joe's gift card. We don't need it, but the thought, the kindness, matters so much more. When I go "public" on social media about filing for unemployment, I receive more kind messages, and some friends asking about the process, which they'll choose to go through.

Ahh, of course they did. Meanwhile this is costing me thousands of dollars.

‘Could you make these guys essential?’: Mortgage industry gets shutdown relief after appeal to senior Treasury officials https://t.co/fbWFYO6nq9

— Kakistocracy Man (@jacobsberg) January 11, 2019

People ask me how I'm holding up. I tell them that the laundry is done, the house is clean, the meals are home-cooked, I'm caught up on prestige tv, and the dogs are walked. But at about week three I start thinking about the $6,000 or so I've lost thus far. As a contractor, I'm almost certainly not getting that back. My anxiety spikes.

It spikes a second time when I think about going back to work. The emails I'll come back to, the feelings of being overwhelmed that other staff will almost certainly have and how I'll manage that, the accreditation committee that hasn't been tended to in almost a month, the missed deadlines. I bake cookies. I walk the dogs again.


If you'd like to help, and have the means, the following organizations do good work:
Bread for the City
Capital Are Food Bank
Greater DC Diaper Bank
So Others Might Eat

"And how does this affect me?" International diplomacy and my job

Source

When diplomats get expelled, they're all going to come to my place of work, and almost all of them will visit the library. Here's what we do.

1. Some of these diplomats are going to be offered a buyout, given the offer to retire. They'll take retirement seminars, and make use of the library's Career Transition Center print and online collections.
2. Some will be retrained. Russian speakers may luck out, finding openings in other countries that use a Cyrillic alphabet. Others might not be so lucky; maybe they'll have to learn Pashto, or Danish, or Portuguese... and take the appropriate courses concerning the sociopolitical and cultural aspects of new destinations. 

Regardless, all of these people will be looking for housing, some will be looking to place children in local schools, and all will be adjusting to life in a new place on short notice. It's incredibly stressful.

Anyway, we'll be here with the resources they need, and we'll be here short-staffed, thanks to a hiring freeze.

Hey, it's me. I just got off the train.

<Extremely Remi Malek voice> Hey, it's been a while. Here's what's new.

My good friend and colleague Jessica Olin had been asking me to contribute an interview post to her blog, Letters to a Young Librarian. I was concerned that it was too similar to a "This is How I Work" meme post (in the Dawkinsian sense, not the cats who can or cannot haz cheezburgers sense) that I wrote in late 2014, also because Jessica asked me to. I got settled, I think, at the new job, and tried to be self-aware enough to focus on what I do now as opposed to how I worked in 2014 at a previous job. So in that vein, here's a similar post. Compare and contrast.

Building on those posts, I'm making a conscious effort to do a few things differently at this job, with varying degrees of success.

• Not eating at my desk: I know there are and will be days when I'll have to hunker down and get stuff done at my desk. Eating anywhere other than there is good. It gets me out of the library. It puts me in contact with other people I work with, and with people who either use or may use the library. 
• Leaving the library more often: even if it's just to crash an event and get free food, and for the reasons mentioned above. 
• Much more outreach: I'm just a boy, leaning into my discomfort, with talking to people about the library. 
• Going for more walks: easier when your workplace has paths and trails that look like this 

Sour oranges. I may pick a couple for masitas de puerco.

Not sure if that's a Little Yellow or Sleepy Orange butterfly.

Earlier in the year, Dr. Sarah Clark and I discussed critical librarianship, or "critlib," on Steve Thomas' podcast, Circulating Ideas. I abhor the sound of my voice, but maybe you don't. She wrote about it, too.

Topics included diversity versus inclusion, information literacy, and cataloging critically, among other things.

Source

Coming up, more blogging! Really. Because I have a book chapter to plug. And maybe I'll expound upon those bullet points.

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

On Institutional Repository Success: Discovery, Search, Metadata

Over the summer I was asked to talk about institutional repositories and how to define what makes them successful as part of a job interview in an academic library. The text of what I said, along with some of the accompanying images, is below.

DIGITAL REPOSITORY SUCCESS

I've been asked to present my thoughts on what it means for a digital repository, an institutional repository, to be successful, and how to measure that success.

Very few people I know go into an institutional repository (IR) to look for something. It's not the way that search and discovery work. What I propose we do is to link the IR to our current search and discovery workflows, that is, link the IR to things that people already use.

It's not about making the repository more visible, it's about making the stuff in the repository more visible.

The IR is nothing without the things inside it; we need to have things that people want, and people need to know that they want those things, those items. Those items need to be where people can find them.

Don't have an IR just for the sake of having one. I turn here to one of my favorite library and information science theorists, Frank Zappa.

Thanks, Zappa estate.

Zappa once said that if a country wanted to be taken seriously, it needed two things: a beer and an airline. For Zappa, these are symbols of modernity. I want to make sure that an institutional repository isn't just a symbol of modernity, that we don't have one just because everyone else does, or because it's what academic libraries "should" have, but because it will be used. And for sure, having one is nice. On its own, an IR sends a positive signal concerning open access initiatives to faculty, to an academic community, and that's good, but it shouldn't be the main reason for having one.

Furthermore, we shouldn't have an IR because it's seen as a solution to non-existent or undefined problems. In organization theory, this is known as the "garbage can model" of decision making.

Not sure why PBS hosts this smushed image.

If we're going to have an IR, it should solve existing problems. It should help, not hinder, and it shouldn't exist for its own sake.

So with that in mind, we have an IR here, and an open access initiative and policy. We can improve the IR, and more importantly the stuff in it, in two ways, discovery and search.

For discovery, there are a few options. At my former place of work, we used widgets as well as a tab in our discovery search box.

Note the widgets, circled. (And yes, this is called burying the lede.) 

If possible, add a facet in the discovery layer search results. We already teach the use of these facets, may as well make the IR, and thus the stuff inside, more visible.

Note: no IR facet here. 

Results can also be expressed such that the IR is more visible. In "bento box" results, there could be an IR section of results, for example.

And of course if we don't have strong metadata for items in an IR, this won't matter. Application Platform Interfaces (APIs), Omeka has one, for example, are a good way to bring robust metadata into discovery. Digital Commons uses Open Authentication Interface, which is also workable. There's certainly room for collaboration with vendors here.

Metadata is also important in searching outside the library. Plenty of us, and faculty, use Google Scholar. With a link resolver we can bring faculty back to the library site, to the IR.

What success can look like. 

The library isn't a gateway, isn't always a starting point, so we need to bring what we have to where our users are. The library may not function as publisher, but it can certainly act as distributor.

Why is metadata so important here? Because Google Scholar works better with some schemas, some formats, than others. It doesn't play nicely with Dublin Core, for example. Without that robust metadata, we might come across our friend the paywall.

We've all seen one of these before, right? 

Ahhhh, the paywall, simultaneously too expensive, "you want how much for that paper?," and insultingly inexpensive given all that work that goes into research and publishing. Poor metadata will send people to a paywall instead of an IR for the same paper.

So discovery and search are two ways to build on IRs, to expand their capabilities. But if these methods work, how will we know? How can we track the output and measure the impact of an IR?

Traditionally, we use bibliometrics: citation tracking, pageviews, downloads, and the like. Our good friend COUNTER fits the bill. As the number of digital-only items grows, altmetrics become more important. Are articles being shared on LinkedIn or twitter? I know that one organization has tried to measure the effects of "#icanhazpdf," article sharing on social media, with mixed results. And increasingly, the line between biblio- and altmetrics are blurring.

Return on investment is also an opportunity to measure IR success, albeit crudely. Back to that paywalled article; we know that Elsevier thinks it's worth $36. Could we then write, in an annual report, that we added x-number of articles to our IR in 2015, or a fair market value of x times whatever the median article value is? That might be effective in terms of telling a story to academic administration.

Qualitative methods could also prove useful. Interview faculty, either individually or in focus groups, ask how IRs work, or don't, for them.

Speaking of faculty, this doesn't work without buy-in from them. It's why open access policies and initiatives are so important. Open access papers tend to get cited, get read, and get used more than those that are paywalled. Academic publishing looks like a moral hazard at times; faculty publish stuff and then we in the library have to buy it back from publishers.

Want one? Buy one!

We're asking a lot from faculty here, with the open access policy and the repository. We're asking them to trust us with their research, their work, and we librarians need to continually earn that trust. And that trust is part of success.

So to recap, institutional repository success is, to me, when you find the stuff, whether you notice the repository or not. When the repository is

• Easy to use. 
• Useful.
• Interoperable, in that it works with what we have in terms of discovery platforms and search.  
• Smooth and seamless, reducing friction so we don’t have to search in multiple places. That is, the IR can be unseen and still work! 
• Branding/marketing can be useful: be consistent.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to present, and I look forward to your questions and comments. 

Take this with a grain of salt because I did not get the job.

I Got Soul, But I'm Not a Soldier: On "a quiet culture war in libraries"

University of Utah Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources and Collections Rick Anderson has published an opinion piece in Insights, titled "A quiet culture war in research libraries – and what it means for librarians, researchers and publishers." This article is illuminating and instructive, but not, I suspect, for the reasons Anderson intended. Rather than revealing or elucidating a problem – the author offers no evidence beyond his opinions as the first comment on the article points out and cites only himself – it is a useful look into the mindset of a dean, one that I suspect is shared by others, as well as university and associate university librarians throughout North America. The article can also be read as an apologia for the current state of scholarly communication and library and information science (LIS) practitioners' roles in that.

I.

Anderson posits a spectrum from soldier to revolutionary with regards to how academic librarians and library staff approach their jobs, and that the tension between these mindsets drive much of the labor in academic libraries. To wit:

The soldier can be thought of as generally operating under ‘marching orders’, which he takes from his institution’s mission and strategic goals, and tends to focus mainly on local needs, the impact of library services on current patrons, and the library’s alignment with its institutional mission. Those with a predominantly soldier mindset will tend to think of the library primarily as a service and support program for its host institution.

And

The revolutionary mindset thinks less in terms of marching orders than in terms of global vision. A librarian with a predominantly revolutionary mindset will tend to think more about the library’s effect on the global scholarly community, its potential role in solving global and systemic problems, and the long-term impact of its collections and services in that context. The revolutionary will tend to think of the library less as a service than as a leader and educator on campus.

Anderson is rightfully careful to note that soldiers and revolutionaries operate on a spectrum, but by focusing on the extremes, "two different orientations," he writes, or at least the Weberian ideal types, the article gives the appearance of binary thinking and false dichotomies. His use of "spectrum" and "continuum" as cover are not unlike a lawyer who introduces something for the jury to hear, knowing it will be stricken and thus resonate.

The multiple uses of "war" are worth examining. Soldiers protect and defend, while revolutionaries take, using tactics that are sometimes outside the norm ("Man the barricades!"). Soldiers, viewed here, are drones, executing a mission, a mischaracterization of what actual soldiers do, and the discretion they exercise. The title of the article, however, postulates a different kind of war, one that will be familiar to students of United States' politics and history, a culture war. This phrase has a particular meaning, left-right/liberal-conservative.

This is a profoundly unserious analogy and metaphor, as the culture war in the United States had, and has, very real victims: poor people, single parents, the LGBT community, women seeking abortions, and people of color who used drugs, among others. However, it is because of these victims, and the co-option of militaristic language by the right in the United States that we must take it somewhat seriously. After all, if Anderson wanted to he could have used the principal-agent problem from organization theory to make the same, still unserious, point. That he chose to use the language he did is telling.

Soldiers defend the status quo (right/conservative), while revolutionaries seek to overturn it (left/liberal). As it pertains to scholarly communication, here is what soldiers are defending:

A professor publishes something, using the labor (librarians) and capital (materials purchased and leased) of the institution. The library, as an arm of the institution, then must pay for that article (again!), often as part of a "big deal" package of databases. 

It's a heck of a system to defend, and a great many people in higher education and publishing would not agree that the current political economy of scholarly communication is worth defending. Yet Anderson seems to treat the status quo as the correct, proper, and neutral system; a defense from someone who knows firsthand how tenuous the political position of academic libraries can be on a campus. Running an academic library is a fascinating middle-management experience; perhaps many library and university administrators expect soldiers while fearing or silencing revolutionaries. Yet when administration and the library align, which can be often, it's a beautiful thing. At one former place of work, I presented to faculty on open access and open educational resources (OERs), then worked with faculty and administration on assigning OERs instead of textbooks, and helped bring about a policy change in the university regarding required texts. Soldiers and revolutionaries look less like a spectrum and more like a Venn diagram than Anderson acknowledges, though there is some overlap on one of his matrices.

If there is any value in rescuing Anderson's soldier-revolutionary continuum, it is that they are not mindsets, but rather a series of practices that are contingent on a host of factors, both local and global, that would be difficult to pseudo-scientifically chart, plot, or graph. Library and university administrators can foster such practices or suppress them; some tech companies tout an 80/20 or 90/10 work schedule that gives room for practices Anderson deems revolutionary.

Stuck between university administration and the revolutionaries he sees online, Anderson may have internalized the mindset of the former. This is the writing of a person who views himself as under attack, both professionally and personally, in libraries, politics, and society. To the extent that others in positions of power in libraries share this mindset, this evidence-free article made it through the peer review process, after all, it is worth exploring.

II.

Anderson's scholarship is a self-referential meta-communication, more #critlib than #critlib. Time and time again Anderson has attempted to police the bounds of discourse he deems acceptable in the LIS community, particularly as it pertains to open access and scholarly communication. For someone who seems closed to the works of Michel Foucault, it is an interesting turn. Anderson continually attempts to create "truth," what is or should be accepted as reality, in his writings on Scholarly Kitchen, and this article can be read as an extension of that.

No doubt Anderson has observed the revolutionary mindset on twitter, and I suspect he has built this mindset inductively from his time on that site, a Burkean watching the new media revolution. Yet Anderson does not like to interact on twitter, finding the 140 character restriction to be limiting, lending itself to attacks rather than debate, which gives no credit to interactions like #libchat, #snaprt, and #critlib. He is happy to mine twitter for content, and to stereotype, but not to participate in community-building and learning networks.

Anderson positions himself as someone with answers, someone who sees the big picture and lays it out, never mind that the current model is increasingly unsustainable, which people realize, which is why we are seeing more big deal cancellations and open access mandates. Helpfully, however, Anderson has published this opinion in a web-based, open access journal, itself a revolutionary practice that is becoming more normal. This, too, is telling. After all, if scholars want to reach the most people, open access publications are the best scholarly medium for doing so.

III.

Anderson writes, "We are now working in an information environment that makes it possible for each library to exert a global influence in unprecedented ways. The desire to do so is both praiseworthy and solidly in keeping with many of what most of us would consider core values of librarianship." And yet so much of this article is not about those values, but how those values pertain to monetary value. Return on investment, time is money,... the monetization of all aspects of librarianship, the tension between these mindsets, is what this article is about, not our values. Anderson asks that we consider the trade-offs, the consequences, of his mindsets, but it certainly seems like economic scare tactics to this reader: that one should be more a soldier than a revolutionary.

In the end, it is not the soldier and revolutionary mindsets, nor the spectrum of the two, that matter here, but Anderson's. To the extent that other library and university administrators share his, this article is a valuable look inside, behind the curtain. It is worth reading to understand certain strains of thought in higher education and academic libraries, not for the arguments or opinions themselves. Anderson sees himself, his position in libraries and society, and those like him, as under attack. The same is true for the political economy of scholarly communication. He simultaneously shortchanges and overstates the power of LIS professionals (we cannot cajole or coerce faculty into OA mandates without their buy-in, for example), on social media and in their workplaces. There is danger therein, as is often the case with those who feel threatened. This application of organic statism to academic libraries concerns me, and I wonder what kind of candidates the University of Utah will get for open positions if Anderson's opinion is widely read. Be that as it may, I commend Anderson for showing us his thought processes in an easily accessible journal, and I wish other deans, university librarians, and administrators would do the same.

@mchris4duke "The author has declared no competing interests" except investment in kyriarchy

— Sparky (@sparkymonster) July 7, 2015

Elsewhere on this site concerning this author:
A Rant on Vendor-Librarian Relations
Your Special Collections Won't Save You

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.

Faculty Perceptions of a Library: Paneling for Assessment

I presented "Faculty Perceptions of a Library: Paneling for Assessment" at the Association for College and Research Libraries 2015 conference in Portland, Oregon on Friday. What follows is my presentation of that paper. Should you like to read the real thing, it's available here, and feedback is most welcome.

Abstract: This paper introduces librarians and library staff to “paneling,” a technique employed here to analyze the discourse around and within how faculty perceive an academic library at a small university. The concept of panels comes to librarianship from anthropology, and shows great promise as not only an assessment tool, but also one that informs library practices and behaviors. 

How the assessment sausage gets made. 

In both the paper and presentation I discuss the who, what, how, and why of panels. Paneling is a methodological tool, and when assessing one should use multiple tools. 

This was for one person who I knew would attend. They know who they are. 

Panels are interpretive. What I mean by this is that we, as people, create meaning when we observe, participate, and interact with each other. Panels are explicitly subjective; that is, my interpretation and understanding may differ from another person's. 

Paneling involves editing and coding the testimony of what anthropologists call informants into narratives, which gives a great deal of power, of editorial discretion, to a researcher. 

What I was looking for here are faculty narratives about the library. How do they perceive it, understand it, and tell each other stories about it. So in the spring of 2014, the then Associate Provost and now Provost and I convened a series of faculty focus groups to assess and understand how they view the library. With a major accreditation regime acting as a proverbial sword of Damocles, or a "buy-in," if you prefer, we were able to interview all of our seventy-plus full time faculty in seven semi-structured focus groups. We organized these groups by major, program, and school wherever possible, asking faculty what they thought of library services, collections, staff, website, and more. 

There were challenges to working with faculty in what are often their "natural" groups. Focus groups comprised of colleagues, some junior, some senior, are subject to the same kind of group dynamics that may occur in faculty offices, lounges, and hallways. It's a weakness of panels, one that I was very aware of. Some faculty may have felt silenced, for example, and while editing and coding faculty responses, dissent isn't included if it doesn't fit into dominant narratives. 

Nonetheless, there were very clear faculty narratives present, across majors, programs, and schools. I hand-edited and -coded these, which were then reviewed by the Provost for some measure of interoperator reliability. We were able to organize these narratives into five panels, stories about the library.

1. Physical library space
2. Library website
3. Library instruction
4. Print and online collections
5. Customer Service

Note that it is impossible to get a clean separation with regards to these panels. It is difficult, if not impossible, for example, to talk about online collections without talking about the library website. 

With regards to the library's physical space, the dominant narrative among faculty, across majors, programs, and schools, was that the library have more flexible learning spaces. We've been able to carve out some spaces for mixed use, but they also come with mixed results. For example, multiple faculty referred to one of the library's newer mixed-uses spaces as "scary." 

Creating these kinds of spaces can be difficult, and will involve weeding, deaccession of older materials, and stack shifting. When I mentioned this to faculty, the response was positive; being in focus groups, having a conversation with them, allowed me to make that process more transparent, which will hopefully minimize problems down the road. 

At the time of the focus groups, we were transitioning to a new library website build around a discovery service, details here, and those faculty more familiar with the changes liked it. But other faculty members were frustrated with the site, and mentioned going to other institutions' websites to conduct research, or even calling for research on social media, such as "icanhazpdf."

The overwhelming narrative regarding library instruction was "more." More one-shots; more for-credit courses, as one of our schools has; and more learning objects both on the library website and on our learning management system. 

Two narratives emerged from the Print and online collections panel. First, that our collections are out of date. Second, that the policies and procedures by which we develop and grow collections are unclear. Here, as in other panels, faculty are giving us clear feedback. If we act on it, and we are, we as library staff will be better able to earn their trust. 

With regards to customer service, one faculty member referred to our reference librarian, at the reference desk, as "the nice lady at the reception desk." Overall, faculty asked for more events at the library, and some even volunteered their services, talking about their research, or current events, which I take as a sign that faculty are reaching out to the library staff, interested in partnering with us. 

What we as library staff want to do is to act on these faculty narratives, approach them from multiple angles. Faculty are telling stories about the library, narratives. As library staff, we don't have to be passive here. By listening to faculty and acting on their perceptions, we can participate in those narratives and reshape them. 

There are, of course, alternatives to panels. We could have used surveys, as many librarians are wont to do. However, surveys never would have told us about how scary one of our rooms is, for example, and with these focus groups we were able to have all full-time faculty participate. Surveys have more of an issue with representation, because not everyone, or even most faculty, would fill them out, and the questions one asks in a survey often affect the outcome, how people answer. 

On the other hand, individual interviews would be too time-consuming, as would be the case with an ethnographic study of how faculty use the library. 

Again, we were able to leverage accreditation to get full faculty participation in focus groups, but it's just one piece of the puzzle, because yes, you should use these other methods as well. Lots of kinds of meat go into a hot dog, and assessment should be multi-method as well. 

In addition, in a time when higher education seems obsessed with numbers, with statistical data, we shouldn't lose sight of other methods, there's more out there, and if we ignore it, we ignore both interesting and useful questions and answers.

Higher education is quantitative in part because of a policy orientation where evaluation is seen as equivalent to counting and measuring. - Donna Lanclos

Panels helped us uncover stories about the library, and stories have power. We're able to act on those stories, those narratives, and that too is power. And that's why I used panels here.

We might use them again, for adjunct faculty, for university staff who don't use the library for whatever reason or reasons, and maybe for students as well. They're a tool in a toolkit for assessment, and as you can tell, I think this method is more organic, and useful, than most.

I'd like to find out more about what many different groups think of our library, and I think that interpretive methods have a role in getting us there. Thank you.

----------------------
I had about 13 minutes to discuss what turned out to be more of a 15-minute presentation, so I had to gloss over issues of epistemology in discussing interpretivism, and some of the nuts and bolts of editing and coding faculty testimony, but again, the paper goes into these in a bit more depth, and I welcome your thoughts, comments, and questions.

Elsewhere on the site:
Explore the presentations and conferences tags.


Presentation image credits:
Hot dog Venn diagram via Woot Shirt, 3/19/15, http://derbyimages.woot.com/73175/7a1aad0d-9545-4a52-84a6-8aeff6266cdf.jpg
Dancing squirrel via Imgur, 3/19/15, http://i.imgur.com/op3mwqQ.gif
Snow, “Informer,” via EastWest Records, 1993, 3/19/15, giffed by Back2th90s, http://www.back2the90s.com/upload/9/6/5/back2the90s/informer-snow.large.gif
Prime Directive slide from @anthrotweets
Sword, maybe of Damocles, via MS Clip Art
Frye Meme, Futurama, Fox Network, 1999, 3/19/15, https://imgflip.com/readImage?iid=176908
Parker Posey, “Party Girl,” via Sony Pictures 1995, giffed by cryinanddrivin http://33.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lx8xazJ6J61qzq62xo1_400.gif
Loading Page gif via http://www.dotnetfox.com/Terms-and-Conditions.aspx
Puppy! via Imgur, http://i.imgur.com/Zhr7yNY.gif
Counting money, via Yahoo! Money, 3/19/15, http://l.yimg.com/os/publish-images/news/2013-10-16/3d716da5-9448-4fef-b15e-5e5bc58fb975_counting-money.gif

Technical Services Brain Drain? Musings From an Outlier

A few recent conversations in libraryland, mostly sparked by troublesome catalogers, have me thinking about the relationship between technical services, the so-called "back of the house" tasks in librarianship, and recognition and leadership.

Let's go ahead and thank Becky Yoose for this.

When I began working here, I had the heady title of "ILL, Cataloging, Acquisitions Specialist." It rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? In due time, that became "Technical Services Librarian," and now I think I'm one of the few with a technical service background who has made the move into library administration. And I wonder why that is.

And yet there is some dissent here. This is just my impression, but others have pointed out a number of people with this background in positions of leadership, so maybe this is just my perception, or an inferiority complex.

I haven't cataloged an item this semester. Not copy cataloging via OCLC's Connexion. Not original cataloging, using Omeka, or creating a MARC record. Instead, I've taught twelve library instruction session one-shots this semester. And I spent a lot of time writing about information literacy last year, normally a "front of the house" concern. And I wonder if my transition from technical services to administration is related to moving towards more "visible" library tasks, like teaching.

Next week I'm heading to the Association of College and Research Libraries conference, and I don't see a lot of back of the house representation in the conference program. And I don't see that representation in Library Journal's "Movers and Shakers," though some of the more technology-savvy folks could be considered technical services. An aside: I read each and every winner, congrats to all of them, to see if I can "borrow" any of their good ideas for this library.

Is there something to being back there, cataloging and acquiring, alone, or at least the perception, the stereotype of it? Are catalogers worse at communicating their value, and values, than other library staff? As Erin Leach puts it:

As much as we want people to understand our point of view, we have to start talking about how our work impacts the experience of library users in a jargon-free way. We all say that cataloging is a public service, but do we explain how the metadata that has been created and remediated in the appropriate ways has a direct effect on whether or not a user finds what they're looking for? Do we explain how fields in the records we create effect facted searching and how incorrectly coded records show up under the wrong facet? [Read the whole thing, I'll wait.]

Does these factors keep capable people from leadership roles, and if so, what do we lose? What does technical services bring to the leadership table? To start:

• A focus on details.
• I suspect the divide between the front of the house and the back of the house is felt more in the back, so library staff who work in the back are more likely to understand the negative effects of silos. 
• An understanding of the role of metadata in discovery and in the user experience, per this marvelous collection of tweets. 

I don't have any answers to these questions, but I'm thinking about them. Please think with me.

On Librarianship, Community Relations, and Temporality

At the International Federation of Library Associations World Library and Information Congress, this slide caught my eye.

Librarians in relation to their communities. Peter Lor's slide shows a scale of engagement. #wlic2014 pic.twitter.com/OiOYN6JHsX
— Annie Pho (@catladylib) August 21, 2014

I responded with

Peter Lor's graphic, pic via @catladylib, should be a graphic equalizer, IMO. #wlic2014 pic.twitter.com/WVUyVvSC8v Less progress, more temporal.
— Get Behind Me Baetan (@jacobsberg) August 22, 2014

I understand the teleology behind Lor's graphic here. Librarianship is a critical profession, and I believe that information and knowledge can be emancipatory. However, when I'm giving directions to the restroom, or showing someone how to navigate our sadistic printing process, my end goals are not social justice.

To that end, it may be useful to think of Lor's terms as temporal variables, as seen below.

And another time, snapshot 3, may look different. In a meeting with campus stakeholders, for example, I would continue to use the language of social justice, as it fits with the mission of my place of work, but I would also use more "return on investment," and talk about our service to and participation in our community, perhaps labeled "clientele" here. That is, at different times, in different situations, we relate to our communities differently, and we should be strategic about those relations.

Lor's presentation was based off a paper, which is available here as a pdf. His discussion of the graphic above starts on page 6, and is based off his experiences with libraries in South Africa. It's an interesting read.

The ALA Annual Post #alaac14

At the American Library Association Annual Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada I'm presenting a poster on Sunday, June 29th, from 2:30-4pm in the Exhibit Hall. The topic is how discovery searching alters library websites and search boxes, and is based on this giffy blog post.

On Monday, June 30th, from 4-4:45pm, I'm on a panel moderated by Daniel Ransom on the experiences of first-time library directors. Kristi Chadwick, Jessica Olin, and John Pappas are also on the panel, so it will be a good mix of public and academic librarians.

If any of this sounds interesting, or you just want to say hi, add me to your schedule.

Speaking of which, here's where I'll be. And yes, I'm overbooked for many of these. I'll wake up and see where the day takes me. If I missed something you think I might be interested in, please let me know.

My ALA Schedule

Useful Sites

Main conference website

Transportation

Vegas on a Budget

American Library Association Party Map

Unofficial Guide to Socializing via I Need A Library Job

Eater Las Vegas is your friend

Survival Tips and Vegas Eats from Library Journal

American Libraries Cognotes (pdf)

Arts Guide to Las Vegas from the Association of College and Research Libraries Arts Section (pdf)

The New York Times' Digital Strategy and "The Future of Libraries."

Last week the higher-ups at The New York Times did a bang-up job of reminding everyone that institutional sexism is real and pervasive. In addition, someone on The Times' payroll leaked a digital strategy document, titled Innovation Report 2014, to Buzzfeed that librarians would be wise to read.

To wit, The Times has a metadata problem: they lack both a controlled vocabulary and informal systems to tag stories behind the scenes, making it hard for reporters, writers, and digital content staff to make and promote connections.

“Without better tagging, we are hamstrung in our ability to allow readers to follow developing stories, discover nearby restaurants that we have reviewed or even have our photos show up on search engines.” (Page 41 of the report)

It took the Times seven years to come up with a “September 11th” tag, there's still no “Benghazi” tag (41).

“Just adding structured data, for example, immediately increased traffic to our recipes from search engines by 52 percent.” (44)

That's the price of bad, or non-existent, metadata.

There's more. The full Times report is hosted by the Neiman Journalism Lab, which also has excerpts. All images below come from that page.

Does this sound familiar, librarians? Do you think library websites are "gateways?" What is the role of content and discoverability?

The stuff that we, libraries and archives, have is valuable. But do we recognize opportunities when we see them? Gawker did. Phelps did. In reporting on the firing of executive editor Jill Abramson, The New Yorker did, scooping the Times on events that happened in the Times' own building.

Do we let the perfect be the enemy of the good? How afraid of mistakes, of failure, are we, even when we're surrounded by it?

Altmetrics: it's not just for scholarly communication.

Listen to your communities. Be responsive.

Your silos? They stink. They're often a product of organizational culture. They have implications for staff, and for communities.

The Times' Twitter account is run by its newsroom, while the business side of the Times handles its Facebook page, making for a confusing, incoherent public face for the paper.

“Because that's how we've always done it!”

Be curious. Seek continual improvement. Talk to people elsewhere, and steal their ideas. It's flattery. This is what conferences are for.

Again, it is okay to fail. I fail all the time, often in spectacular fashion. Failure is normal. Failure is natural. Try to create a culture where it is okay to take chances and okay to fail. And if something is failing, recognize it.

/Laughing
/Sobbing

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

The full report is worth a read.


Elsewhere on this site:
Glass Houses, Pots, Kettles
The End of "The End of Libraries"

Libraries, Beer, and Lobbying in Washington, DC

On Monday, May 5th and Tuesday, May 6th hundreds of librarians will descend on Capitol Hill to lobby Congress for funding. National Library Legislative Day is in its fortieth year, and one need not be in Washington, DC to participate.

But what if it were thousands? Tens of thousands?

Every year craft brewers arrive in DC to throw a party called SAVOR. The event takes place in DC in no small part because the brewers can have a legislative day, reminding Congress that breweries are small businesses that employ Americans and use agricultural inputs. The one year that SAVOR skipped DC, the Craft Brewers Conference was here instead, affording yet another legislative day.

I understand that politics, lobbying, and asking for money strikes some as distasteful, but if you are in a position of leadership in a library, or even if you're not, this is something you should be doing. The money you're asking for supports your communities and if you want to speak the neoliberal language of return on investment (ROI), libraries have you covered there, too.

• Every dollar spent on an academic library returns about four dollars.
• Every dollar spent on a public library returns between three to six dollars (page 3-4 of this pdf for both those numbers, though other dollar amounts are available elsewhere. Sorry, I don't know if there's research on special, law, governmental, and other libraries).

Lobbying and asking for things doesn't always work, but sometimes it does. For example, the Food and Drug Administration wanted to test the spent grain of breweries for various pathogens, and it wanted either breweries or the farmers who use that spent grain to feed livestock to foot the bill. Costs would no doubt be passed on to consumers, too. Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY, and more importantly Amy Schumer's uncle) and Mark Udall (D-CO), among others, intervened, citing the economic impact to craft breweries that donate spent grain to farms. Two bills, the Small BREW Act and the BEER Act, probably won't pass, but to quote Lifehacker, "you don't get shit you don't ask for." Asking is important, as are building relationships within our admittedly broken political process.

And that brings us to the American Library Association. The ALA Annual Meeting, or at least the Mid-Winter one, should be regularly held in Washington, DC for the same reason that craft brewers come to town. We need more advocacy, we need it more regularly, and we need to build relationships over the long term. The Congresspersons in the House of Representatives are elected to two-year terms. What if at least once a term thousands of librarians from all over the country met with them?*

What's at stake?

• Net Neutrality
• Funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services
• Funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities (these two via Rep. Paul Ryan's, R-WI, proposed budget)
• Open access for taxpayer-research
• Online privacy
• A whole host of education-related issues
• And much much more.

Speaking of SAVOR, here is DCBeer.com's coverage of the event, which takes place on May 9th and 10th. Craft brewers will be on the Hill on the 8th and 9th. The National Beer Wholesalers Association held their annual meeting, again, always in DC, last night. There was beer and ice cream.

Drinking beer in museums, National Portrait Gallery edition. Cc: @nbwabeer pic.twitter.com/CAgVR8Yhw1
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) April 29, 2014

Beer and ice cream pairings, anyone? pic.twitter.com/aZug7kNrLI
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) April 29, 2014

SAVOR Behind the Scenes: How the Brewery Selection Process Works
I also wrote a few profiles of some breweries:
Crux Fermentation Project
Funkwerks
Lickinghole Creek Craft Brewery
Societe Brewing

Anyway, more lobbying and advocacy in DC, and in state capitals, which means state library association meetings in capital cities, too, please.

* And yes, as a DC resident, it is selfish of me to ask for this. I'd also add that DC has no "stand your ground" law, same-sex marriage, some of the more robust transgender protection laws in the country, a human rights commission, and many minority-owned businesses, among others.