New Year, New Library: New Library (kind of)

It's been quiet here for the last month as we train new staff and bombard the campus with information literacy one-shots. In addition, much of my free time has been taken by volunteering for a local charter school that, like many schools in Washington, DC, lacks a school librarian or school media specialist.
To wit, for the 2012-13 academic calendar there are approximately sixty (60, 6-0) schools in DC that lack a librarian or school media specialist, covering between 16,000 to 17,000 students. There's plenty of blame to go around, starting with the Mayor, Vincent Gray (sample inflammatory statement from the mayor, "[W]e decided we would leave education to educators"), the Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, and individual principals, who decide whether or not to staff a school library. There is more sadness this way:

The results of a Freedom of Information Act request show that in FY11 and FY12, the money appropriated to DCPS [DC Public Schools] for library and media services was overwhelmingly used for other things. It paid for other things like building repairs, maintenance to HVAC systems. More than $400,000 was used for testing. DCPS used $80,000 of these funds to pay for a San Francisco-based consultant to develop a strategic plan for its Office of Family and Community Engagement.

This school, which one of my children attends, moved into a new facility last year, and this year finally has space for a library. But no librarian or school media specialist, and that's where parents like me come in. I suddenly find myself a Chinese-language cataloger (it's a Chinese-immersion school), blindly fumbling around, guided by ISBNs that may or may not lead me to a record, relying on Library of Congress Subject Headings that may or may not exist, and eyeballing the height of books to make a cataloging judgement. I've cataloged in Cyrillic before, with the help of a cheat sheet, and in Japanese, which I used to speak, but Chinese is a whole different animal.

On the plus side, the school has selected Follet's Destiny as an integrated library system, and it's easy to use. Within about fifteen minutes I felt comfortable with it, and this ease of use will allow teachers to check out materials to students. Double plus, some other parents are also librarians, and we've all taken active interests in the new school library.

In addition, the school is going to experiment with giving students raspberry pi (not pie, though that would be good, too), so I may be talking a bit (more) about programming in this space.

In the meantime, if you'd like to help DC's schools, please sign this petition. Thanks.

Another World is Possible: Particle Physics Goes Open Access

Well, it finally happened. The entire (sub?)field of particle physics, okay, ninety percent of it, just went open access (OA). Details, via Nature:

After six years of negotiation, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³) is now close to ensuring that nearly all particle-physics articles — about 7,000 publications last year — are made immediately free on journal websites. Upfront payments from libraries will fund the access.

Payments, from libraries, that would have gone to vendors are now going directly to journal publishers, eliminating the middle man. Simple. Elegant. Less expensive.

Let's get to the big question: is this replicable in other fields? Kind of. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, oversees the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that is responsible for producing much of the research in particle physics, and as such, the organization exerts more influence over what's published than similar bodies in other fields. It's hard to imagine the American Political Science Association (APSA), for example, being able to sway publishing in that field the way CERN does for particle physics. Political scientists aren't dependent on APSA for producing research; there's not a political science equivalent of the LHC. In addition, as Nature notes, particle physics is a concentrated field, in which twelve journals account for ninety percent of the scholarship produced in article format.

In sum, if you want to replicate this in another field, look for one with a strong, centralized organization and limited options for article publication. The organization can control research production, as CERN does, or wield power via accreditation, certification, or other means. It's not unthinkable that a OA could be a part of such a regime, in terms of either sheer volume or percentage of scholarship that is made accessible. That organization and just a few publishers/journals ensures fewer parties at the negotiating table, which may make it easier to reach an agreement to achieve open access in a field.

In the meantime, please credit SCOAP3, CERN, and these journals for taking this unprecedented step. Another world, another scholarly publishing ecosystem, is possible. Librarians play an important role in SCOAP3. Let's not just watch, let's get creative and build off of this.

Supposed To's: An Open Letter to Library Directors

A library director balances the library budget with the needs of the community, and for it is hailed as a hero.

There is something wrong with this picture.

You're supposed to be doing that!

Here's what Jenica Rogers did, working with faculty, administration, and other library staff to reduce dependence on American Chemical Society resources.

Given that there was no apparent ACS-based solution to our budget crunch in the face of what we feel is unsustainable pricing, we went to our Chemistry faculty and discussed all of this with them. This was not our first meeting; we’ve been discussing this since fall 2011 when we clearly understood that ACS pricing would continue to increase, and was pushing at the ceiling of what we could sustain.  Along with two librarians – the Collection Development Coordinator, and our subject liaison to Chemistry – I laid all the facts out. We described our subscription history in support of their scholarship, teaching, and learning needs, pulled out the costs for ACS content when we first subscribed in the early 2000s and referred back to the discussions we had then (when I was CD Coordinator, not Director), laid out the current cost of ACS publications and the price increases over the past five years, and estimated what our 3-year prices would be. Based on our discussion, I think that some of our faculty were surprised, some seemed resigned, some were horrified, and they were all frustrated by what seemed to be a plate full of bad options. However, after two meetings and much discussion of how to reconfigure our ACS subscriptions to meet our budgetary constraints, I believe that we all agreed that this goes beyond having a tight campus or library budget: this is simply not appropriate pricing for an institution like ours. The result of our first meeting was that the chemistry faculty agreed to take their concerns to the ACS based on their individual professional involvements with the organization, talking with sales and the Chemical Information Division about their concerns, and we agreed that we’d look into other library solutions to their chemical information needs.

Some analysis, via another library director:

To underscore just how radical this is, Jenica spells out that the American Chemical Society “is in the unique position of both approving programs and selling the content necessary for approval” — an egregious conflict of interest.  (I’m wondering how unique this is, actually.) For this, the ACS extorts free labor from faculty who have no choice but to publish (or perish) — free labor to the ACS, but certainly not free to the supporting institutions — then turn around to charge increasingly high prices for their product. Jenica notes that “the ACS package would have consumed more than 10% of my total acquisitions budget, just for journals for this one department.”
N.b.: this also points to the importance of including librarians — or at least librarian-informed judgment –  in the university program approval and review process; some universities understand this, while others do not. It is to Jenica’s credit that she has built the organizational relationships to make possible the necessary conversations to do what elsewhere would be unthinkable.

"Unthinkable?" Really? Isn't this what library directors should be doing? Are our peers really this deaf to the milieu in which libraries find themselves in the twenty-first century? To trends in scholarly communication? To the value of building organizational relationships?

What Jenica did only works if others do it. She can't be the lone voice in the wilderness. Don't praise her for doing her job. Look in the mirror and do your job. You're supposed to be doing that!

Indeed, in 2011 we ended our relationship with the Nature Publishing Group, whose namesake print publication was responsible for more than fifteen percent of our print serials budget. Fifteen percent! I'll let that sink in, and feel free to do the math if you'd like. Library staff worked with the provost and affected faculty when eliminating Nature. It helps that we're a small university without graduate programs in the sciences, and with faculty focused more on teaching than research, but SUNY-Potsdam's experience is proof that larger institutions can and should be investigating and then acting on alternatives. Because, you know, that's part of our job. That's what we're supposed to be doing.

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.

Library and Craft Beer Bullies

I have the strange fortune of being in two industries, one as an employee, the other as a blogger, that perceive themselves as being bullied. The former is librarianship, the latter is craft beer. There's no shortage of ink, digital and actual, spilled over this in librarianship. We're the victims of budget cuts, subject to the whims of vendors. We're not in control. When we exercise what agency we have, we might think we're driving, but the correct analogy is probably closer to downhill skiing. We're heading down a path, dodging trees, trying not to fall, but we think we're going to end up in the valley regardless of what happens on the journey. "Yes, there is a teleology here."

Or so the story goes. I find a tension in the discourse around this subject: that libraries and librarians are agents, are superheroes, and yet at the same time find themselves objects, acted on, then perhaps reacting. I prefer to think of it as complexity. Agents at one moment can be structures the next, and the opposite is true as well.

Craft beer defines itself, in large part, by what it's not. It's not bland, light, made with adjuncts, not made in fifteen locations. It's not macro beer, made by Bud, Miller, Coors. And yet what it's not is a myth. Craft beer can be all those things, though perhaps in two rather than fifteen locations, and even owned by the large companies mentioned above. Like libraries, craft beer has a chip on its shoulder, feels oppressed, and, perhaps like libraries, with good reason. To wit, a document that purports to show the incentives offered by one distributor of beer, Reyes Premium, to remove Devils Backbone, a Virginia craft beer, off of local draft lines. 

If this document is genuine and accurate, this could be considered evidence of a distributor paying its employees to remove a craft brewer from a draft line in favor of Blue Moon. It’s my opinion that Blue Moon sucks, as does Shock Top, which is also mentioned in the photograph. These beers masquerade as craft, but are made by MillerCoors and InBev, respectively. The best thing I can say about them is that they might get you to move up to Allagash White. These beers are to craft beer what “useful idiots” are to Lenin.* 

That being said, selling beer is the job of any distributor and its employees. Distributors are paid to put products in bars, restaurants, and on the shelves. These bonuses (if genuine) are incentives for a sales force; this is a common practice in other industries and businesses. People who love craft beer have a tendency to romanticize this industry while forgetting that it is also very much a business. People strive to make good beer for a living, but without turning a profit on that beer, we’re left with hobbyists, not an industry. 

On the other hand, bonuses, incentives, and commissions that involve cash introduce the potential and possibility of kickbacks. One can easily envision a situation in which an employee of a distributor splits his or her bonuses with people who work in bars, restaurants, and stores that sell alcohol, or even that the bonuses come from brewing companies themselves. MillerCoors and InBev have deeper pockets than any craft brewer. DCBeer is not suggesting that this is the case here, nor do we have evidence that such practices are occurring in this or any instance. We merely have a photo posted to Twitter. However, there have been discussions of this behavior in the past, and no doubt there will continue to be more in the future.

There's more information, and speculation, here.

Both in libraries and beer, much of any alleged bullying happens behind the scenes, away from the public. The paying public doesn't see the how and why of that draft line moving from one beer to another, or the how and why of an ebook or journal that's no longer available. It our job in both those fields to acknowledge, publicize, and fight that bullying without coming across as whiny or shrill. The solutions are also similar: education, outreach, marketing. We're targets; let's adapt.

* The initial DCBeer.com post attributes this quote to Marx. I have corrected it here. Photo credit to twitter user @wort2yourmom.

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.

August Local Beer Roundup

Emphasizing the "beer" part of "Beerbrarian," there have been a few noteworthy developments in Washington, DC beer news lately. In a warehouse not too far from the Takoma Park Metro station, 3 Stars Brewing began to make and sell beer. 

The Urban Farmhouse is a saison-style ale that is hopped, but not over-hopped, with Centennial and Cascade. Given that no other local breweries offer this style, Bluejacket’s saison is not yet a local brew, kudos to 3 Stars for product differentiation. Green, white, and a handful of pink peppercorns go into the boil, which also includes a generous amount of wheat. The former is obvious on the nose, and plays well with the spicy esthers from the yeast. The latter is clear in the body and appearance of the beer, which finishes with a vegetal aftertaste, almost like biting into a fresh red pepper. A cask of the Urban Farmhouse had orange peel and more Cascade hops, creating big citrus flavors towards the end of the beer, washing away the spices.
Neither Coleman nor McGarvey profess to like brown ales, another locally underrepresented style, but you wouldn’t know it from the Southern Belle, an 8.7% ABV stunner that tastes much closer to 6%. Toasted pecans were added to the boil, and complement the chocolate malts and delicate, effervescent carbonation. One cask of the Belle featured vanilla beans; the taste was eerily reminiscent of pecan pie, not at all boozy, and vaguely suggested lactose. Another cask used lightly toasted oak, adding hints of white pepper, sourness, and a dry finish.
The Pandemic Porter will probably attract the most attention, and have you hollering “two for $5″ as if you were in Hamsterdam. Both DC Brau and Port City brew robust porters, but 3 Stars doesn’t have much interest in that kind. Instead you get a 9.6% ABV imperial coffee porter, with a gallon of Qualia cold-brewed Yirgacheff concentrate added to each barrel. Vanilla and coffee dominate this beer, but there’s a quick, dry finish that doesn’t linger, and thanks to the skills of both Qualia and head brewer McGarvey there’s very little bitterness. One cask at Churchkey upped the coffee quotient to the point where I got the shakes. Picture Du De Ciel’s Peche Mortel taken to 11 and you’re somewhat close. Another cask utilized heavily toasted oak, which stood up to the vanilla and coffee flavors, drying out the beer and further hiding the alcohol content.

Meanwhile, over in Northeast DC, DC Brau collaborated with another local brewery that doesn't have brewing space yet, Bluejacket, on a grätzer. A hoppy smoked wheat ale native to what was once Prussia, then part of Germany, and now part of Poland. 

this style is functionally extinct in the wild, like a Dama gazelle. If you attended SAVOR in 2011, you may have gotten a taste of something like a grätzer from Bayou Teche Brewing’s “Bouncanee,” a smoked wheat ale, and Choc Brewing in Oklahoma has gone to great lengths (Weyermann smoked malt, yeast from a Polish homebrewer, and water replication) to brew a traditional version. Two of DC’s finest will take a crack at continuing to revive this style, calling it “The Embers of the Deceased.” At just 4% ABV, it joins Ground Wolf and Your Favorite Foreign Movie as sessionable offerings brewed at DC Brau.

In expanding market news, New Hampshire's White Birch Brewing has entered the DC market, initially with three styles.

Crown of Gold (Rye Pale Ale / 4.2% ABV)
From the brewery: English malts, toasted rye for spice, American ale yeast, and whole leaf Cascade hops. Sounds like a winner to me.
Hop Session Ale (American IPA / 5.1% ABV)
Somewhere between a mini-version of an American IPA and a hoppy red ale or American amber, this is the only year-round release the DC market is going to see for the time being. Citrusy West Coast hops playing nicely with caramel malts, finishing with some of that resin-y dryness you kids love so much.
Hop to Wit (Witbier / 5.2% ABV)
Puns! Witbiers aren’t known for being particularly hoppy, but this one is, with an additional juicy kick that comes from grapefruit peel and pink peppercorns (traditional witbiers opt for orange peel and coriander). Let’s thank and reward them for not calling this a white IPA.

Look for both 3 Stars and the grätzer on tap at finer establishments around town. White Birch will be in bottles at stores and restaurants.

Cheers!