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.

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!

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.

Librarian, poet, blogger

Much like meeting Steve Kronen, reading this interview poet Jess Mynes (conducted by Kate Greenstreet, one of the poets I’m reading this semester in workshop) has made me feel proud to be working toward becoming a librarian, and, I hope, a poet. In the meantime, I’ll just keep blogging, using what Mynes perfectly describes as the librarian’s instinct to say “‘This is out there. Check this out. Do you know about this? Have a look at this.'” Exactly.

Off to the races of another semester

Entering my second week of the spring semester, I can see time management and organization is going to be a necessity, not a quaint idea that might apply to me. Here’s the line-up:

On the library side, I’ve got

Library Networks and Systems (yay!)

Archives Management (maybe I’ll discover a deep and abiding passion for musty old papers, but worst case scenario it’s five Saturdays with an excuse to go to South Beach).

On the MFA side it’s

Poetry Workshop (my only workshop this semester so I’m hoping to feel a bit more settled and productive)

US Women Writer’s of Color

Postcolonial Theory.

On the work side, I am doing my internship hours as an assistant for web projects based in the Digital Library. Right now, we’re working on a new titles podcast and I’m trying to resist the urge to buy my own iPod… but I don’t know how long I’ll last.

Put it all together and it looks like a sure bet that I’ll be hopping, days filled with reading and trying to wrap my head around new ideas. And more than a little writing, I hope, which brings me back to the unresolved question of what my blog might really have to offer the biblioblogosphere. The perspective of a library student seems to be well covered, not only by Wanderings of Student Librarian but also the blogs of recently graduated librarians or librarians without ML(I)S’s who are in the process of making it official. Others are better kept-up on technology and information trends. So, where does that leave me? As with most projects in my life, the only way of figuring it out is probably just to keep writing and see what churns up.

Back to the Biblioblogosphere

The grades are in and I’ve officially completed my first semester of dual MLIS/MFA enrollment. I took 4 English classes (2 lit, 2 writing workshops) and 1 library class (since I have a two semester head start in that program, I needed to slow down and concentrate on the English). In between I worked 20 hours a week, tried to maintain multiple blogs, serve on a couple of committees, exercise 3 times a week, cook food every night so that I didn’t have to buy lunch, and teach a Sunday school class with my husband.  The results? From a GPA perspective all is well, and I didn’t let any of the juggled balls majorly drop.

From a career perspective, I’m torn between saying things are just fine and things look a little different. Part of me wants to keep diving into the smorgasbord, especially the writing side, and part of me says that if I want to get anywhere in library world, the world that I started this whole program to be a part of, I am going to need to get focused. I’ve never been particularly good at that in the past. I remember starting a personal essay for some scholarship application in college with the sentence “If I could describe myself with one word, it would be ‘and.'” Not much has changed since then. It’s never hurt me yet, and I have always tended to feel best when I am firing on all cylinders–BUT–I am only human, and I want to be ready to focus when the time comes to build a professional reputation or when outside circumstances require it. Or maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it. Maybe I should work on connecting my areas of interest and seeing how they apply to the work I wish to pursue. After all, there’s plenty of bridges that can be built between literature, writing, music, and libraries.

But, now that workshop poems and Melville papers have eased up, I’ve started a process of catching up with all the biblioblogosphere developments I’ve missed over the past few months. I finally started a Bloglines page (in part because I have managed to get my internship next semester to include working on the development of an RSS feed for our library–yay!) and I’m being urged to check out Second Life. Will do, perhaps over this week’s trip to Michigan.

I was powered up by this entry on Caveat Lector today, talking about blogs as an increasingly accepted form of professional publication. I’ve read other bloggers on this topic, but this is a particularly forceful look at why blogs form communities among professionals in a much more rewarding and tangible way than journals. All of this points back to the fact that I need to stay on top of this, my theoretical professional face (the only blog that I have that can be linked to me through a simple Google search of my name as well). Especially now that I have signed on to work on Web 2.0 projects at my library, I need proof that I know whereof I hope to speak.

The world of library blogs is so vast, however, it’s hard to claim that I have anything unique to contribute most of the time. Of course, I have my one and only perspective on the world, but it takes more than that to generate worthwhile material. My favorite blogs do have a mix of personal experience and professional reflection, so I know I’ve got at least some material (perhaps not as fully developed as it could be–what exactly is it like to be part of a program specificially designed to train academic librarians? what am I experiencing in this environment that might not be elsewhere?). But the blogs I go to again and again also offer good advice, tips, and tools that I would not have found on my own. What I can add to this remains to be seen. So, for the time being, I’ll keep on keeping on, and perhaps a better sense of a niche will develop.

Irony of Ironies

Massive amounts of time devoted to reading the author who inspired the title for this blog (in case you’ve lost track, that’s Melville and the title is ripped straight out of Moby Dick) and other general homework concerns have severely limited my contributions of late. In fact, I can’t even remember the last time I read someone else’s library blog, let alone updated my own. I’m joyfully up to my neck in English classes. Still, I’ve got to keep in mind that the library world is where I want to be headed before too long and not lose too much track of it.

So let’s see… Last week, my research methods class had its library session. Even though I wasn’t the one leading it this time, it was very gratifying to see how grateful everyone was for having the mysteries of JSTOR, LION, and remote proxy log-in explained. They probably would have muddled through without being aware of these types of tools, but I like to think that now that they know things will go just a bit more smoothly for them during the rest of their graduate studies.

As for us interns, we keep on keeping on in collection development. One of my friends has recently started his job search in anticipation of completing the MLIS in the spring semester. It’s sometimes hard to believe that I’ll be following in his footsteps in not very long. To that end, even if I’m not devoting most of my studying time to library topics this semester, I have started the process of resume building by volunteering for an ALA committee and the strategic planning committee at my library. I know that some type of article should be a goal before too long, but that seems like a lot to take on at the same time as I try to generate portfolios for my MFA workshops. Deep breath–one goal at a time!

Can you say taking 5 classes?

I haven’t updated this blog in donkey’s years, but here’s a quick rundown of what’s been going on, in no particular order.

1) I went to a beautiful poetry reading by Steve Kronen, who also happens to be a public librarian. V. encouraging for dual MLIS/MFA seekers such as myself, and his poems are wonderful. I highly recommend his book Splendor.

2) My library is getting Central Search to replace MetaLib as our federated database search, and from the demo today it looks promising. Also, I finally got to meet our library’s head systems librarian. Too bad I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, my comfort uniform that I put on in preparation for my three hour Melville exam.

3) This semester I’m taking Information Sources and Services for Science and Technology, and surprisingly liking it a lot. My partner and I are going to prepare a presentation on Physics resources for our final project, getting back to my once upon a time scientific roots.

4) I’ve discovered Alexander Press’s online classical music listening library, which my library subscribes to, so no more lonely silent mornings in collection development. I have music to keep me company now, on demand.

5) Collection development: that’s my internship post this semester, and I’m enjoying it so far despite the manual labor aspect. I like the communicative process between library and faculty and I feel special reading the titles of new books first.

Whew! Back to homework.

Sweet vindication

My moment of MLIS glory has finally arrived in the guise of an MFA class, Principles and Problems of Literary Study. It’s a foundation research methods in the humanities course, and the professor heartily assured us that we would be good friends with the library by the time it was done. I smiled a small but knowing smile. When we talked about primary sources, he mentioned ongoing digitization projects at several libraries and I was like, I know all about it! When he mentioned that a lot, though not yet all, humanities research can be done through the library’s online resources, I thought to myself, yup and I already know how. Our first assignment was to immediately trek over to the library and collect our assigned critical texts for next week’s individual presentation. At this point he scared me a little by saying that it took a bit of digging to find some of the titles in the catalog (sometimes the titles didn’t work but the author did and vice versa), but I know that says more about ALEPH than anybody’s research skills. So off we went, and I quickly found my book and made for the checkout counter. I didn’t get very far. I couldn’t help but see a fair number of my classmates standing in the midst of the PN’s and PS’s with bewildered looks upon their faces. A couple had already given up and were heading downstairs to complain. I cut them off at the pass (very politely and non-imposingly I hope) and asked if I could help, since I worked there and all. Naturally, the books were there, it’s just not all that easy to find stuff in Library of Congress if you aren’t used to it. I got a couple of handshakes and a little respect out of the deal, even if I probably have now signed myself up as the go-to classmate when library work is required. I don’t mind a bit. I am so happy when I see the right book matched up with the right person. I also now have at least one idea of a librarian’s natural ally in any given department: the prof who teaches foundation research courses.

On the flip side

The start of the fall semester here at the university where I work means that I am now officially experiencing the dual in “dual degree.” After two semesters of solid libraryness, I am plugging back into my English lit roots and getting started on the MFA portion of this program. I’ll still be taking library classes, but probably only one a semester from now on because it’s a race to the grant finish line to see if I can squeeze in the 18ish credits left on the MLIS plus the 48 this one takes before I lose the funding that made this whole thing feasible in the first place. So I’m off to the races with four English classes: two workshops, Melville (to whom, if you recall, I owe the title of this blog), and the core lit theory class that everyone has to take. I’m pumped. On the library side I’ll be balancing all this humanities stuff out with Information Sources for Science and Technology, but that doesn’t start for another week.

In working life, my internship has rotated into Collection Development. For the past two days I’ve been learning about how all these books end up in the Tech Services mailroom, waiting to be cataloged and linked and put on the shelves. As the process stands right now, the pre-ordered selection process is whole lot of work and most of it tedious, but I am already enjoying thinking about the library on a more macro level. The inflow of brand new books that we plan is part of what keeps the stacks vibrant and relevant to the scholars at work on campus. And it’s fun to think that I’m getting to see the titles before anyone else does. Too bad I don’t get that much of a say just yet, but maybe I’ll be able to slide that approval slip for Talk Talk into the order pile if I am crafty….