Another orphan blog joins the archive

This  blog is officially inactive as I return to graduate school. Cheers!

Open Access and MFA theses

Exhibit I: The U of Iowa recently instituted mandatory electronic deposit of all graduate theses and dissertations henceforth. Again, I am generally in favor of this, and newsflash, this is the way the academic world is heading. My own U is trying to go 100% digital for graduate T&D’s starting this fall. These documents will be made publicly available in our institutional repository.The U of Iowa, of course, is home to the most famous MFA program in the country, the Writer’s Workshop. As the MFA is currently structured, it is considered the terminal academic degree in the field. As such, the final product of the degree is considered an academic work, created w/in the academy for academic purposes.

Only, that’s not really how it works. Although it may look like and academic degree and act like one in the job market (after you have a publishing career anyway), students in MFA programs think of themselves as writers, not academics, and the MFA is usually a period of intense, focused work geared toward the production of a saleable manuscript. I think it even says that in a lot of MFA descriptions–you need a booklength manuscript to graduate. That’s a measure that reflects the demands of the marketplace, even if the degree is earned in the academy.

So you know where this is headed. U of Iowa MFAs don’t want their TD’s electronically accessible. They are afraid that having a clickable version online will disqualify that work from consideration by publishers. They might be right–we don’t know yet, although there has been no trouble for writers of more obviously academic work getting their stuff published once it has been made electronically available. It also remains to be seen just how visible these ETDs will really become. Institutional repositories are not indexed by Google or any other web search engine. They are stuck underneath layers and layers of library gateways. To find one, first you would have to know it existed. Of course, you could just make a habit of frequenting the IR’s of schools whose ETDs you wanted to keep abreast of… it would be possible to find them, but it’s not like you could just type it into Google and wham. At least not yet.

This is a quandary for me, as both an MFA student and an MLIS student. I resent the attitude of exceptionality displayed by the departments in question at Iowa–the idea that their work should be exempt from a policy geared toward the general good, not toward any kind of desire on the University’s part to make money from their creations. That’s paranoid, but also a sign that the academics and librarians who support open access are not getting the message across (although Peter Suber always tries). Getting control is not the point behind this, the point is maintaining access. If your work is different from other products of the university academic community, then maybe you ought not do it within the academy. Letting you off the hook (which is exactly what the Dean eventually did) sets a precedent that could allow departments to beg off and defeat the whole… well, movement sounds a bit ideological, but a movement it is.

On the other hand, well, if having my MFA thesis online means I can’t publish it, that sucks. And I’ll have to raise a fuss about it when the time comes for me to upload, although I kind of doubt that the Deans at my school will take my concerns as seriously as Dean Lopes at Iowa. In fact, I should probably start raising this issue now if I have any hope of getting around it…

The only real solution, I think, would be to require some kind of critical piece or let the artists’ statement alone count for the actual “thesis” in question and make the manuscript of creative work part of an unpublished defense process, b/c simply letting MFA’s off the hook is problematic both to the status of the program w/in the academy and to the process of gaining control of academic work.

Me 2.1

This piece by Christina Wodtke on Boxes & Arrows is full of gems for people who are on the verge of a new career–like, of course, yours truly as I near the final semester of my MLIS. I particularly like this passage:

It feels like “artist” or “writer”—something inherent in your makeup that chose you, and you didn’t choose it at all. But don’t be fooled! A curious person of talent and intellect can end up many places. A rocket scientist could be just as easily an engineer, a theoretical mathematician, or a concert pianist. The left and right brain play nicely with each other in certain people.

Probably, a lot of librarians feel just this way. Our stock in trade is sensing the idea behind the action and performing that action that makes the idea live. I love academic work; I am also inspired by technical challenges and being tangibly helpful to others as they seek information. I like projects that are intensely creative as well as projects that are have a grunt labor, applied theory dynamic to them. I think I like these two kinds of mind work so much that I often tend to seek out aspects of both of them in any project I am doing, even if it is not obviously either of those two things. So, not surprisingly, every career test I’ve ever taken has come up woefully inconclusive. Yet I constantly seek that one perfect livelihood that will match all of me, and I worry when a drastic change seems appealing. As Wodtke asks,

Think of the places where you hit a self-imposed wall in the past: the opportunity to become a product manager, the time you took a programming class and loved it yet didn’t follow through. Was it because you were afraid of losing your sense of self?

Yes, often it was, so it’s encouraging to read that others feel the same way and somehow have made it through. I’m beginning to realize that I may never find the perfect field for me, but what I will do is find a series of jobs that I can find challenge in. Somehow, I hope, if the job market willing

The rhizomic library

Aaron at Walking Paper writes about libraries starting cafe branches, i.e. bring the library to the cafe rather than the cafe to the library. He goes into much thoughtful detail, so I recommend reading the post, but reading it triggered a connection for me: how can the library become rhizomic?

The cafe branch idea reminds me of an article about successful television shows that the NY Times ran a couple of weeks back. Basically, the critic’s idea was that shows that are currently successful have a rhizomic (root with many branches that can take on a life of their own) model rather than a single, grand entity. The example was Heroes, which has fan fiction and the potential for spin-off’s and interconnecting worlds, versus Friday Night Lights, which is perfect but more or less complete w/ out participation of the viewers. Libraries think of themselves as single entities, often, but there might be a way to think about ourselves as a something that can spawn many smaller, equally vital offspring… and enough of that metaphor already, but I like the model as a way of imagining future libraries. If access to information is the root, what are the branches?

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?

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.

Sad is not the word

A long, rich life is a thing to be celebrated, but I know I am not alone in feeling a sense of loss upon hearing the news that Madeleine L’Engle has died. How lucky we are that she left us so many wonderful books to see us through the rest of our lifetimes.

yes!

I’ve had a long, long hiatus on this blog… but I’m coming out of premature retirement to shout a hearty “Hear, hear!” for what Mike Rossner, Executive Director of Rockefeller University Press had to say about the  American Association of Publishers PRISM “initiative.” I’m sure anyone reading library blogs is already in the know about OAP (open access publishing) and the state of STM publications, but reading that letter alone will give most people a good grasp of the dynamics at work here. The great thing was, I read about Rossner’s letter first on the Machinist blog at Salon and then on Caveat Lector–so this is resonating far beyond the biblioblogosphere, which is great to see given that it is an issue that affects all taxpayers whether they know it or not.

Well, at least this time it’s a term for male anatomy…

I’m trying to look on the bright, or at least realistic side, as I read this by now piece of old news about the most recent winner of the Newberry Medal, The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron. Turns out that school librarians across the country (hard to tell exactly how many, the story likely implies more than actually are) are refusing to buy this book because it has the word “scrotum” on the first page. The mind boggles. Maybe I would expect something like this from the same folks who insist on banning a book about Cuba that portrays happy children, but I would have liked to think that a perfectly normal, scientific term in a book meant for middle schoolers wouldn’t have caused such a massive freak-out on the part of professionals who are theoretically inclined to protect free speech. But, as my mother-in-law the school media specialist reminded me, school librarians are some of the most enthusiastic self-censors around, and until I’ve served a year in their position I shouldn’t go criticizing their choice to avoid buying a book that they can reasonably predict will cause them headaches on the job. What I just can’t swallow, however, is that the librarians they found to quote seem to condemn the book not just as a potential troublemaker but as bad literature, simply because it had the word “scrotum” on the first page. Realistic language for a realistic piece of anatomy? That can’t be good! Here is a quote of the offending passage offered in the article:

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

Less than talking about the actual scrotum, which belongs to a family dog, btw, it is reveling in a piece of language as it enters the mind of a young girl. She is fascinated by its sound and meaning, not by its taboo-ness. So how on earth does this passage fit the outraged tone of this description of the book by a school librarian? (also quoted from the article):

“This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn’t have the children in mind,” Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote on LM_Net, a mailing list that reaches more than 16,000 school librarians. “How very sad.”

Howard Stern-type shock treatment? I repeat: the mind boggles.

Not going to ALA Midwinter, but…

Thanks to my weekly American Libraries Direct email, I already have the first itinerary item on my next Seattle visit. When this will be, I don’t know, but I know I won’t miss visiting the Richard Hugo House Zine Archive & Publishing Project. Richard Hugo is the author of one of my favorite books of poetry, 31 Letters and 13 Dreams (sadly out of print, so keep an eye out at used bookstores) and I think it rocks that he has not only a museum, but a museum that supports local literary life with readings and workshops and, as I started out saying, the Zine project. One thing that my MFA program is currently making me more aware of is that literary innovations depends on unknowns getting their start in their friend’s publications and in other types of independent publishing venues. That’s chapbooks,  zines, and increasingly websites, so it’s great to see an organization devoting itself to catching what might otherwise fall through the cracks. Writers and scholars will benefit for decades to come.