Blogging SARC IV

Somewhat belatedly–but it was a great conference and I’ve had a lot to think about since I got home late on Friday night.

Last week, I attended the SARC IV, a regional conference of the SLA, as a student travel grant recipient of the Florida & Caribbean chapter. The location, St. Pete, was lovely and the hotel had great wireless. Not that I got much chance to use it–I was busy soaking up everything I could.

Here’s a run-down of the presentations I attended:

Collaboration: Erasing the lines in the sand–presented by Ruth V. Fuller

• Team-oriented collaboration is more in vogue than leader-oriented collaboration, but in all cases a variety of political issues are likely to come into play. Successful collaborations are built on mutual benefit and firm deadlines.

Live Library Instruction for Distance Learners–presented by Catherine Levallée-Welch

• Covered the use of Elluminate for distance library instruction. Of particular interest was the use of Elluminate for virtual office hours.

Core Competencies for Information Professionals of the 21st Century–presented by Rebecca Vargha

• Moral of the story: learn how to change and change again. Track your professional and emotional competencies for suriving in the profession.

Managing Space Age Content–presented by Jeff Wolfe

• Just about the coolest presentation ever. Mr. Wolfe discussed his use of InMagic’s Presto to build a digital library of shuttle images for NASA. Specific challenges were supporting diverse users and managing user permissions for SBU (sensitive but unclassified) information.

The Library: the Biographer’s Greatest Asset and Greatest Threat– presented by Graham Farmelo

• Farmelo reflected on his experience at libraries and archives while writing his forthcoming bio of Paul Dirac. He has some questions for us: how can we improve security for unique documents while maintaining user accessibility, how can we offer better external research services such as translation & reasonable scanning/copying, and how can we work to create good archives of contemporary scientists’ lives.

Creating Digital Libraries, Practically Speaking–presented by Barbara Shearer, Inez Dinwoodie, and Deborah Balsamo

• Shearer discussed building the library collection for the FSU School of Medicine, serving med students spread across the state and mandated to be 95% digital. She keeps an eagle eye on database subscription fees as even small fluctuations hit her budget hard. Her advice: if anyone ever offers you the chance to build something from the ground up, take it.
• Dinwoodie discussed the information services at a federally funded research center in VA. Focused on access, maintaining visibility, and delivering value-added, filtered information. Keeping the info hub in the spotlight is important for continue existence. Uses an in-house product for social tagging of info resources.
• Balsamo discussed creating a dig. library for the EPA national library network. Ambitious project to scan over 50k internal documents.

Maybe you can tell, I’m really into digital libraries

Overall, I was impressed and inspired by the professionals that I met, the projects that they are taking on, and the tenacity with which they confront the challenges of operating a library in a setting that may or may not appreciate its value. At least, it needs to be reminded constantly, which is increasingly true for all libraries. Rebecca Vargha used a phrase I particularly liked to describe what it takes to thrive in this world: a determination to accept reality. Phrased like that, it’s quite a strength. Wishing for things to be better never gets you as far as working with what you have.

Fun times, free pens, big questions. This conference has definitely got me thinking, in a broader way than ever before, about what I hope to bring to this profession.

Learning smart

Okay, a recent internship interview has really got me thinking: if I want to be a techie librarian (more or less, although I have no illusions about my long term prospects as a general market techie), but still at core a librarian, how much tech is enough and which skills are the truly useful ones?  This came up b/c the internship involved metadata creation, which for some reason I assumed meant writing XML code, I guess b/c that is how I am used to looking at it. But duh, of course it doesn’t–it involves filling out a form that creates the XML code for you. The real skill is filling out the form perfectly. As a librarian, I might just be wasting my time if I try to take it further than that.

But then when I read blogs like Caveat Lector and Shifted Librarian, I start to wonder how I’m going to know just when I’m going too far and possibly wasting my librarian learning time. These librarians clearly have some, um, mad skills. Jenny writes “In my previous job, one of my tasks was to create authentication scripts for remote access to databases for my libraries.” Wow! That sounds pretty awesome, how did you learn to do that, and how did you know that was a good thing to do? I guess part of the answer is in her next sentence: “This was something I proactively pursued because most of my libraries didn’t have a programmer on staff who knew how to create these scripts, let alone a server to run them on.” Jenny responded to a need that no one else at her institution could meet. It would have been her job to bring the problem to the dedicated tech staff, if there had been one. But there wasn’t, so it became her job.  It seems probable that the main answer to my question about what to learn and fiddle with and suffer through is “can anyone else already do it?” If the answer is yes, then it’s not a good use of my time.

Still, I’m wondering how one can decide which skills to work for as a librarian in training that will translate best into a wide variety of potential future jobs, b/c the market I see now may not be the market I am entering six months or a year from now. If I am at an institution that has a tech staff, how do I get/stay up to speed enough to transition to a situation that is less helpful? Or will there come a point when most places have a tech staff, and really I need to be honing my coordinator/patron advocate skills to communicate w/ that staff to get stuff done?

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?

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.

Here’s homework, where’s the learning?

Why does it always surprise me that in the last 20% of any given semester I need to do about 80% of the work for a class? Digital Libraries and Organization of Knowledge are headed into the home stretch, which has meant starting the familiar cycle of reading massive amounts of articles and moving my fingers up and down over a keyboard in order to fill up pages with words and then turn those pages in for credit. Meanwhile, Research Methods is off to a fast start with 120 pages of reading and article write-up due Monday. So I’ll be busy, but the real challenge won’t be turning everything in on time. It will be figuring out what I’ve taken away from all of this and how I will apply both to next semester’s work and the career I’m trying to build.

I still haven’t quite nailed the relationship between course work and learning in library school. I’ve encountered challenging, well-planned projects and busy work in equal measure. I have slogged through the pages of mind-numbing studies of nothing, but to be honest not as often as I’ve spent hours chasing links across the web to learn about a new idea or technology that my class reading turned me on to. This degree is exactly as exciting as you make it. I think the main thing that sets off my Student Librarian Schizophrenia is the realization that for every moving and shaking blogger that makes me say hell yes, that’s what I want to do, there’s some classmate or colleague to face on a weekly basis who seems pretty focused on getting through classes with the least amount of work with the highest GPA possible. And am I alone in feeling, sometimes, that library school classes are geared exactly for them?

Before tossing it into the rubbish, I happened to thumb through the PBK Newsletter that my sister toted down from my Michigan address for me. It’s a strange little publication, devoted entirely to reminding people who have been told they are smart how smart they are. What I did find was a personal essay about what happens to people who get good grades after they graduate from college. His point is that when faced with the choice between security or risk, most adults end up choosing security (not without valid reasons) and abandon their A+ ambitions for B- complacency. Although I don’t think I’m quite there yet, similar thoughts have crossed my mind when I think about my current educational track. About 3 papers into my first semester, I figured out that the average grade given out in my classes was somewhere between an A- and an A. When, later in the semester, I downgraded my effort just a little to accomodate social agendas, the grade stayed the same. I’m the kind of person who wants to work hard, who wants the work that I do to mean something, but it’s not easy to keep up that level of discipline when you get the distinct impression that it might just be self-deception. Do I really need to work hard? One of my classmates, who also a law degree and several years of practice under his belt, caught on even more quickly and broke it to me around the time we had our final poster presentation due that I could probably turn in a smiley face drawn on a paper towel with ketchup and not flunk the course. That’s an obvious exaggeration, but pretty accurately describes how you can start to feel when academic standards aren’t clearly enforced and you have a schedule full of semester-long classes that seem like they could be taught with about four focused hours of explanation. To be fair, I understand that most libraries just need qualified practitioners, not flaming intellectuals. On the other hand, some of us didn’t choose this degree as a way out or as a soft option, because we couldn’t or wouldn’t choose something more challenging, we chose it affirmatively, believing that there was a way to serve communities and be a part of the academic world at the same time, believing that it was a profession that could put all of our motley talents and experiences to use at one time or another. We want to rock!

Learning in library school is probably the same as learning anything: no one can make you do it. Especially as a grad student, it shouldn’t take an awesome teacher or an exciting subject to keep me motivated. All it should take is a library and an internet connection. I’m already looking for ways to start finding my own interests and ways to pursue them in small ways, such as taking the ACRL’s Web Design for Academic Libraries online course (gotta get the student rate while you can). I’m spending hours scratching my head, trying to figure out a way in to the wonderful world of open source software without the benefit of a computer science degree. I’ve started to realize that this is a necessity for defining your own sense of purpose in library school and then sticking to it. The people who keep their A+ ambitions are the ones who set their own grading scale.

CityofNewOrleans

That's the name of the wireless network that I am connected… wait, disconnected, wait connected.. to here in my hotel room. I'm half-listening to the war stories the librarians I am rooming with are tossing back and forth across the suite as I tap this out. Seeing that my connection is quite fickle, I don't want to spill my future librarian's soul into this little form box only to have it disappear, which is really just too bad as I have a lot on my mind. First and foremost, what do I need to do to make this conference an investment in my future, both in terms of connections and inspiration? If my connection gets a little stronger I'll have some time to find out what other library bloggers are saying about being here at ALA, but it might not so I might just be faced with an evening of–the horror– relying on my own instincts about how to map out my weekend (meaning, how to balance all the great advice I am getting with my own goals and exploration). The good news is everyone seems to think this conference is like the funnest thing ever, and I don't want to miss out on that either, but I also want to make sure I am taking care of business, you know?

First impressions: hey, it's all good for a newbie like me. I've now got a cool badge holder and a blue bag. Neat. Also, EVERYONE we've met has told us how happy they are to see us. And you can tell they mean it. For more experienced conference attendees, there are some worrisome signs. All the restaurants in the mall food court were closed at 5 and this left us a bit underfed. All the shops in the mall were also closed. Everything at the mini-mart on the corner is at least twice it's real price. I wish my wireless would be good. But it's early, and the real reason we're all here is going to start kicking in tomorrow.

Tomorrow's agenda: sweating for a good cause with Librarians Build Communities.

We just got little gift baggies delivered to our room! Complete with shot glass!

PS After 20 minutes of hoping and praying for a working wireless connection, I gave up and broke out the hotel-supplied ethernet. You gotta do what you gotta do.

Plugging into the conversation

Yesterday was a postless, nerve wracking day–what if I never came up with any ideas about what to actually write about on my library blog? I was sure mine was destined to be a short foray into the biblioblogosphere. All of you library bloggers out there make it look so easy! So I took a deep breath and did some deep digging… well, deeper digging than I had done in the past. I figured the best way to get into the conversation was to take awhile to seriously think about what people were talking about.

How perfect, then, that I soon found myself at this week's Carnival of the Infosciences hosted at Library Garden. So much to digest, so little time. Once I had landed at Library Garden, I found Peter Bromberg's post "Thoughts and ALA Bootcamp: An L20 Manifesto." I've been following the Bootcamp a little bit but I wasn't aware that any controversy had developed until reading this post, so I don't really have any comments about that. What I really grooved on was his vision of Library 2.0 and how I imagined it could help young and future librarians connect with the field. He proposes that we begin to imagine Library 2.0 as "a conversation" that will grow as large and as wide as we let it. That way nobody needs to feel threatened or criticized and an atmosphere of give and take idea sharing can help the good ideas rise to the top and the less helpful ideas become more helpful. His 30-point manifesto, I think, offered a great mental checklist for how to approach all this excitement and change with a purpose, no matter where you currently stand in the library hierarchy.

A sense of purpose is one thing that library school is really making me look for. I had a high school philosophy teacher who endlessly emphasized that all human knowledge is won through cycles of clarity and confusion, each cycle leading deeper into the maze. Well, the same has been true with deciding to become a librarian. You do informational interviews, read articles, peruse career outlooks, and think you have a pretty good feel for what it will be. So you get a job in a library and sign up for classes, and wham here comes the confusion. If I may be so bold, I'd like to call it Student Librarian Schizophrenia (SLS). By day, you scan barcodes, shift shelves by the ton, and make sure the sticky labels stay on (when you're not giving directions to the restroom). By night, your mind is filled with fresh articles and ideas and technological toys that seem to have nothing to do with the library as you know it. Your classes are challenging and the work anything but. On top of that, people give you funny looks when you say you are pursuing not one but two Master's degrees in order to work at a library. Is this really what you want to do with your life?

Don't get me wrong–I understand that my work now is simple by design and that if I hang in there there's some really exciting stuff in store. I care about the detailed, tedious work I do because I value what a library provides and I know it depends on the small stuff as well as the big ideas. So I sweat the small stuff and keep a sense of humor.

Anyway, to get back to Peter's manifesto, I think joining in the Library 2.0 conversation would be a valuable way for any library students to start to develop their own sense of the profession. Keeping in mind that "Anyone can participate in the conversation" but also that "The best listeners extract the most value," we have a lot to gain from plugging in. And if you know some young'uns and new'uns that are plugged in yet, give them a nudge because they might just love it.