Training wheels & being polite

A couple weeks back, I avidly followed the flurry of posts about librarians and training wheel culture on Caveat Lector, IWTBF, and others. Most of the time, I was nodding my head in complete agreement. Their observations about librarians, risk aversion, and utter, complete fear of failure rang true with what I’ve experienced so far as a student and intern. There are a few exceptions, but in general I’ve found it to be the case that striking out in a new direction or toward a new skill is at best viewed with suspicion and at worst actively discouraged. Not by everyone, not all the time–but there is a constant sense that you are exposing yourself when you dare to try something new. The safe path is to stick with the herd.

Several reasons for this training wheel culture were offered by bloggers with a lot more background than mine–including laziness, lack of interest, differences in learning style, and a lack of willingness to leave the comfort zone (could this possibly be related to the fact that so many people have gone into librarianship b/c libraries are perceived from the outside as one big comfort zone for book lovers?)–but when I read this NYT op-ed by Verlyn Klinkenborg, I couldn’t help but wonder if the problem also has much deeper roots in gender roles in American culture. Klinkenborg writes about how, among female college students, she observes a sustained and pernicious politeness, a lack of willingness to even have an opinion, let alone express it and defend it in the face of criticism. I do what she mentioned all the time: end my comments with “but I could be wrong, I really don’t know.” It feels safer. It feels less bossy. K argues that men are not subtly trained to defer in this way. I tend to agree. Is the training wheels culture, then, merely coincidental to the fact that most librarians are also women? Are strains of timidity within the field and the perception of antagonism from outside the field (ie from computer science people) a result of female-dominated professions being denigrated in general?

I’m tending to think that yes, there is a connection, and the first thing I can try to do is stop apologizing for what I know or even what I think I know. Why should I? Why should being wrong matter so much more than being engaged?

Make that a yes

My library class this semester is Health Sciences Librarianship, and it’s getting to be about that time to start thinking about what to do my final paper on. One area that I have consistently been interested in investigating throughout past classes has been, how is this area of librarianship affected by computer-mediated interaction in general and social software in particular. Just as I was about to ask, hmmm, are medical libraries testing out the social software waters, and if so what does it look like–what pops into my Google reader but this cheery little post about the establishment of the MLA’s Task Force on Social Networking Software blog:

Behind the scenes, the SNSTF is working on recommended Web 2.0 software, suggested guidelines for using Web 2.0 technologies, and tips and tricks for MLA units wanting to use blogs or wikis to collaborate. But check the SNSTF public blog for related news on Web 2.0 technologies and how they impact MLA members.

Perfect timing!

Language as an evolving tool

Ever since my stint teaching English in Brazil, I’ve been of the school that language is a tool, nothing less or more. The reason that we learn it is to use it to get our needs met. When we stop needing it to do that, it starts to go away. Adults can acquire language just as children do when necessary. People who spoke one language for the first twenty or more years of life can find that they have more or less lost it after many years of operating in another. It’s a tool, and if you don’t use it your mind will lose it to make room for something else.

A couple articles today have me thinking about this. First off, there’s the study that just came out in Nature that offers a formula predicting how long it will take irregular verbs in the English language to become regular. Ie, the past tense of the verb “help” use to be “holp,” but now we say “helped.”  They found, through extensive analysis of texts from old through modern English, that language “regularizes them at a rate that is inversely proportional to the square root of their usage frequency.” Meaning, the less common verbs will change first, and the most common will probably never change. But the fact is that with usage, language changes.

The same goes for vehicles of language, such as our favorite, the book. Over in the Guardian books section, I found this piece about booksellers’ perceptions of where the industry is headed.  They feel confident that the book may be around, but not so sure about the physical space of the bookstore. In light of my enthusiasm for language as a down and dirty, supremely functional tool, I’d like to think about this as one more way that usage of language changes it over time and not one more way that my chosen profession is likely to find itself out of work. There are more ways to get books and non-book forms of information–that’s exciting, and useful. Onwards to thinking about where libraries might fit into that kind of de-centered model of info production & use.

It’s a still almost a year away, but…

My expected date of graduation is August 2008, and that’s only two complete semesters away from now. It’s coming on faster than I thought–which, as of this week, I’m glad of. I know I’ll be a raw beginner, but I’d like to get started, and I’d like to think that the profession can find a use for me. So, as is often the case when you’ve given a little piece of your heart to something, I’m on an emotional rollercoaster this week as I imagine myself making my way closer to being an actual library professional. My feed reader brought me some views from people who are the kind of people I hope to be in a year: new professionals in academic jobs. Via ACRLog, I heard from two new librarians this week,  Brett Bonfield and Josh Petrusa. The passion and intelligence in their writing is obvious and to me, quite encouraging, but I think what I responded to even more was their realism. Yup, the role of a librarian might be in crisis no matter how much we love libraries. Yup, it might be hard to make our bold new ideas fly once we hit the workplace. Somehow it’s really helpful to hear people who are doing what I want to do tell it like it is for them. I have found a couple of great mentors along the path to my own education and they have great advice, but I sometimes feel the need to reality-check this and balance it with the view on the ground from my soon to be peers. I think there are going to be big differences in the trajectories of our careers as compared to theirs. To bring some of these up helps me start preparing for that. On the other hand, it’s always important to listen to more experienced voices as well–everything is bound to be new to us right now, but on the other hand they’ve lived through a few cycles of major change and have a broader perspective.

Still, when such a voice of more experience, such as  Karen Schneider’s on ALATechSource, echoes concerns that time is running out for libraries to meaningfully keep up with change, it also becomes clear that us young’uns do have some reason to ask these hard questions. Now, preferably.

So, as I’m reading through the library feed on my Google reader, I’m finding that I read articles about where the profession is headed in a new light. From all corners, I’m hearing that there are some great things out there and some major worries. Brett Bonfield’s post in ACRLog and Karen Schneider’s in ALATechSource really got me thinking. I know they are not alone in asking the hard & scary question of what will we, as librarians, actually be doing in ten years, but their phrasings seemed particularly relevant to a student-on-the-verge such as myself. Brett, a first-year librarian himself, came right out and said something that I think a lot of us are our nervous about–going to library school is a big decision in terms of financial and opportunity cost, but more than that, we’ve started to give our hearts to this field. Possibly the worst thing I can imagine is that I’ll wake up in ten years, heartbroken again, because I have no place and have failed to preserve an institution that I love.

Across the pond

School libraries in the UK are having a funding crisis, too:

“The research, based on interviews with representatives of 300 schools, found that over 92% of secondary schools and 61% of primary schools were spending far below the recommended figure a head on books for their libraries. One in 20 primary schools banned children from taking any books out on loan, while half closed libraries at break times.”

Having watched my mother in law live through a year of blatant, perpetual disrespect at the hands of her middle school’s admin as a media specialist, I can say that this article rings true, except for the fact that the kids at her school were fairly heavy users of the library. Principals often expect a media specialist to handle every single facet of library operation on their own, and then wonder why everything can’t be done at once. Shelf-reading or ordering? Overhead projector check-out or setting up new software on the computer? The principal in my mother in law’s case laughed at her request for a paraprofessional assistant to help with book check-outs while she was leading workshops and doing more labor-intensive tasks (even though library assistants were overall quite common in her district). A lot of principals seem to be taking the attitude that they’d rather have another teacher than a librarian, and it’s hard to blame them when so much emphasis is put on testing. One case I’ve heard about involves a librarian being expected to teach classes and fulfill library responsibility.

But there is one thing I would like to steal from our trans-Atlantic neighbors: can we please call our hours of operation “opening hours” instead? I am incredibly charmed by that phrase.