Somewhat less accidental systems librarianship

There’s a discussion getting started in the biblioblogosphere that is near and dear to my library student heart, and I’m glad to be listening in.

Dorothea Salo kicked off with her post Naturalizing Systems Librarians.

Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, Michelle Boule, and Meredith Farkas all responded. I hope they keep talking, because this comes as great encouragement to a library student looking at the gap between here and there and getting ready to jump across. I’m excited by the job listings I now see that require web dev. skills along with instructional skills, XML know-how along with cataloging know-how. I’m also gearing up to learn as much as I can to get myself ready for those jobs, and often finding it a frustrating process. And, other than a curriculum that tries to pretend technology hasn’t happened, my biggest enemy has often been myself. Before I know it, when I don’t understand why the Apache server I’m trying to configure isn’t doing anything or why my fonts are all wonky after I’ve attached the CSS file, I have sometimes ended up saying to myself what I cringe when other people say: “I’m just a librarian.” It’s a common line, sometimes delivered humbly, sometimes defensively, sometimes arrogantly (go figure). All of these deliveries hurt us when we say them to others and worse say them to ourselves. But I have learned to remind myself that there’s no “just” about it. Not in the world I want to work in.

I’m encouraged to hear librarians saying that it is not only possible but necessary for librarians who never expected to be hackers to get a working skill set. I’m also encouraged by their personal stories of having no structured opportunity to do this in library school but being able to learn it as they went along nonetheless. The learning process they describe–play until it breaks and then learn to fix, copy and paste as much as you can and then learn what you can’t, think about what you actually need to know to serve your library and then find a way to get it–is very much like the one I’ve been using and hope to use much more in the future. I can do that. I won’t be perfect and I may not be fast, but I can put my head down and keep trying. And that’s a good thing, I guess, b/c that is not only what I want to do in my library career, it’s what I might find myself doing regardless.

I was particularly interested in Meredith’s questions here:

“What does knowledge of 2.0 tools mean? You have a blog? You read blogs? You edited the Wikipedia? You have a Facebook profile? It’s important for librarians to keep up with the hot technologies, but does it make someone a techie? No. Can you install MediaWiki software on a server? Have you moved blog content from one software to another (say Moveable Type to WordPress)? What do you do when your blog or wiki’s database becomes corrupted? What mechanisms would you use to prevent spam on a blog or wiki? Can you customize our blog or wiki to look like the rest of our website?”

So, with that said, I’m trying to come up with a desiderata for what I should try to put in my own skill bucket. The list right now is:

• learn much more about servers and how you maintain them
• work through that Python book I keep checking out
• get some server space somewhere so I can learn how to install, tweak, and migrate content into my own WordPress
• learn how to build a database-driven website
• slurp as much alphabet soup as I can stomach: PHP, SQL, Java, Perl, and whatever else is floating around in those job postings

The next question is, how to do this effectively and in a way that might demonstrate that i have these skills to others? I’m keeping an eye out for student-discounted education opps via ACRL and projects that I could volunteer for that I can justify learning these things for. I’m also investigating the tech training education options that my school sponsors–seems like there used to be quite an extensive list of self-paced courses you could access. In the meanwhile, I’m lucky to be working at a library with more tech books that I could ever need, so spending my own money that server space might be the impetus I need to stop browsing and start coding or copying or whatever it is I determine I need to do.

The Manolo says

This past Monday, my fabulous mother-in-law started a fabulous new job as media specialist at a museum magnet middle school. One of her many considerations was, what shoes can she wear that simultaneously comfort the feet she is standing on all day long, meet teacher dress code, and impress the fashion savvy South Florida chillins? I advised her to query the Manolo, who regularly offers customized advice on just such dilemmas. There must have been some major synchronicity going on, because the Manolo had just answered such a query from a librarian who needed the super fantastic shoes on a “flip flop budget.” Here is his answer: low heeled boots by Franco Sarti. Check his post for pics and a link to buy. It seems like sound advice, but be warned that Manolo spares no one, not even sensible librarians, from the rigors of saving your pennies for the super fantastic. The price on these puppies is still more than I have ever spent so far on a single item of clothing (wedding dress excluded). Also, one must wonder about tall boots in tropical climates. But they are fun and a down to earth take on the boot craze, and maybe there’s a knock off somewhere that would be a little more wallet friendly.

Saturday, June 24: A little sweat, a lot to learn

Still high on Nola from the Many Voices, One Nation buzz of the night before, I woke up before my alarm with the intention of having a more leisurely breakfast than Friday’s and also having some time to blog in the convention center before the NMRT Conference Orientation Session. This plan was working out just fine until I set up my laptop in the convention center, pulled up my schedule and realized that the orientation was in the Sheraton. Yikes! I hauled it down the gauntlet of booths and blue-tote bagging hordes to catch the shuttle and walked in only a couple of minutes late, but just in time to hear a woman representing Wilson encouraging us to take advantage of freebies and food offered by vendors even if we were only students. Then she told us about a free and open breakfast the next morning, which naturally I didn’t remember any details about later on. The orientation was pretty helpful, and I had plenty of time to chat with the others sitting at my table–a recent grad, a recenter grad, and a public librarian of two years. Useful advice that I called upon throughout the rest of my stay included:

1) Don’t be a TOAD. TOAD=Tag on all day. Take your badge off when you leave the convention center or the hotel, for real. Just do it. You look like a little less of a tourist and a lot less of a dork. (Sad to attest, I saw one fellow conference attendee who did not get this advice cruising Bourbon St. at midnight, Ebsco lanyard round her neck and badge in full view. Bourbon St.!)

2) Take time out to see the city. Didn’t think I would want to, being ever conscious of how much I had invested to attend, but after my first soiree in the Quarter I couldn’t wait to walk around, so did plenty of that one my husband arrived. I probably missed a couple things that would have been interesting, but I’m glad I didn’t miss the jazz or the beignets.

3) Strike up conversations. You are surrounded by librarians. If you can’t say hi to a librarian, you must have the worst case of social anxiety in the history of mankind. Everyone goes to conferences to meet people, so start meeting. A shuttle ride can = a captive audience.

4) Don’t feel bad about talk hopping. Everyone does it. If you are bored, get out. If you want to catch the best of two worlds, split the time.

5) Go to the exhibits but remember that you’ve got to pack everything you take. This was a good message to hear, and I did manage I think to take only what I genuinely wanted or could use. Including the Google hat.

The highlight of the orientation was definitely the New Orleans Cheap and Dirty handout by Tulane librarian Paul St. Pierre, a Canuck who clearly knew what he was talking about. I relied on his list of restaurants and bars to stay off the beaten path and within my budget.

After the orienatation, I had my first mini-scheduling crisis. Before 1:30, I needed to get my stuff from the first hotel, schlep it to the convention center, get a shuttle to the second hotel, check in, reorganize, and make sure I arrived in plenty of time to the ALCTS-PAR presentation Mold and Its Effects (which I volunteered to report on for the newsletter). What to do? Try to catch part of a presentation? Cruise the tempting vendor exhibits? Go straight to schlepping, do not pass go? Blog? Well, I settled on taking a preliminary cruise of the vendor hall, which completely overwhelmed me. I managed to snag a cool graphic novel tote and a couple stress balls, but I was too shy to start actually talking to people so I could get my card swiped for those cool prizes. The moment that I wanted to cry came when a vendor approached me to ask me to help with market research but, upon finding out that I was a student, said that I wasn’t who he was looking for. Of course that was his limited vision (I’m a future customer, eh?) but at the time of course I assumed it was my personal shortcoming.

Luckily my ego got a boost when I got to help someone find their way around New Orleans using all three of the maps I had collected. He was impressed, and when I told him I was in town for the library conference he said “It figures. Who else carries three maps and cross-references all of them?” Score one for what I hope is a positive stereotype.

After much hurried walking and sweating, I got checked into my fabulous new room and had just enough time to call my husband en route before heading up the street to the Mariott for the ALCTS Mold presentation. I’ll have a separate post for it, seeing as I actually took notes. I headed back to the convention center to catch the NMRT presentation Leadership through Publication. I stayed for the first half, but found that most of what they were saying I had been fortunate enough to hear already through the librarian who mentors me and the director/professor who taught my Seminar in Academic Libraries class. I bopped back down to the exhibits to see if I could catch up with the crew for some help in cashing in, but to no avail. I was a little less overwhelmed this time, but still disappointed in my apparent lack of ability to score the coolest free stuff.

I called D one more time to find out that he had finally made it in and was resting in the hotel room after a homework all-nighter, so I didn’t feel bad about sticking around to see the Opening General Session and I’m really glad I did. This time I had better luck finding a couple of people from the crew to sit with and chat with during the proceedings. It took a second to adjust to seeing Michael Gorman’s face on 4 jumbotrons simultaneously, but the program moved at a good clip. Mayor C. Ray Nagin actually showed up to welcome us, but it was kind of hard to clap for him after what I had heard the night before from New Orleans residents. Madeline Albright completely rocked my world with her rigorously intelligent discussion of religion in US foreign policy and world affairs. I didn’t realize how much I was starving for intelligence in public discourse. She got numerous applause breaks, including when she condemned the Cuban embargo, the Patriot Act, and Guantanamo. She is officially my second hero of the year, right after Stephen Colbert.

At long last, D and I were reunited at the Astor. After some catching up, we started down Decatur to reach Frenchmen St.to find the food and music we were both craving. We settled on a jazz bar and restaurant called Snug Harbor. I had gumbo and an oyster sandwich, he had some kind of fish in creamy sauce, and we both sampled the local brew, Abita. We talked and lingered and got back to the hotel sometime late.