Image courtesy of Flickr user quinn.anya

With the holidays among us, email on a short hiatus, and a few new books on our bedside tables, several of us from the Lead Pipe would like to share some thoughts about what makes for a great gift book to give or to receive. Our favorite gifts books may not all be in Amazon’s Best Sellers list, but we offer our own short list with a healthy helping of caveats and opinions. What’s your favorite book to give or receive?

Brett

I have a theory of gift giving:

1. A gift should be something its recipient wants. It makes no difference whether they know they want it or not, which is the aspect of gift giving that always used to throw me off. To come up with the perfect surprise or, alternatively, to fulfill a long held wish; this was the conundrum. Half the time I would get obsessed with finding something they didn’t know they wanted but would light up their face the moment they opened it; the sort of present that would forever change their lives for the better. The other half of the time I would get obsessed with getting them the thing they always wanted. Now I don’t worry about it. If I feel pretty sure they want a gift, I’m happy to get it for them, provided it meets my other criteria.

2. A gift should be something its giver actually likes. Let’s pretend someone I love is really into cooking and really into science, and let’s pretend I’m in the habit of buying $500 gifts for this person. I still wouldn’t give them Nathan Myhrvold’s new book because of his behaviors and statements around patents. It’s not that I’m trying to dictate morality or taste for the people closest to me, it’s just that I know my own biases make it impossible for me to figure out if a gift I wouldn’t want for myself is something the person I’m buying a gift for would want to own. In other words, my not wanting something means I can’t be sure it meets the first criterion.

3. A gift should be a luxury for its recipient. There are plenty of things people want but won’t buy for themselves. Sometimes it’s something they simply can’t afford, but sometimes it’s something they can afford but have persuaded themselves they shouldn’t buy because it seems extravagant. The key is to find something in the latter category. Some of my favorites lately: good wine; specially imported olive oil; finishing salt; high quality socks. For some, newly issued hardback books fit into this category: we’ll wait our turn to get them from the library, maybe buy them as ebooks, or just wait for the paperback or until we find one used. I know that’s how I am, at least for the most part. It feels decadent to purchase a brand new book by a favorite author, one that’s printed on paper and can be mine forever.

4. A gift should fit comfortably within your budget. No one wants you to overspend. Maybe in a perfect world a $40 bottle of champagne or a $30 new release would make the perfect holiday gift. But a lot of us don’t have the scratch to go around buying $40 bottles of champagne or $30 hardbacks for everyone on our gift lists. In this instance, even for those people in your life who seem to have everything, a thoughtful donation makes a wonderful gift. You don’t have to tell them how much you’ve given. And, so long as it meets all of the other criteria, they’ll love it.

5. Experiences are preferable to objects. Most people have more stuff than they need or want. Ask yourself: is this something they’ll use all the time, or at least turn to in moments of crisis? If not, maybe you can give them an experience rather than an object. Personally, I include reading in the experience category more than the object category since most of us have developed the ability to find a good home for our books (objects) once we’ve read (experienced) them, whether it’s on our own shelves or others’. Which is why I love to give and receive books as gifts, and why I recommend breaking ties completely with any non-readers in your life. I’m kidding, mostly. As long as they like socks, olive oil, salt, or wine they can’t be all bad.

A few recommendations:

• Jonathan Franzen is not one of my favorite novelists, but he’s one of my favorite writers. The guy writes wonderful stories about his own life and he has great taste in literature. He also wrote my very favorite book review, the one from 2004 in which he sang Alice Munro’s praises in the New York Times. Print out this review and give it to someone who will appreciate it, along with Runaway and/or Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.
• Do you know any cool people who like good stories that make them question their assumptions and leave them feeling smarter? Two books that manage this trick: Atul Gawande’s Better and Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run.
• If inspiration is your thing, go for Mountains Beyond Mountains, the book about Paul Farmer by Tracy Kidder. It goes nicely with Farmer’s new book, Haiti After the Earthquake, and especially nicely with a donation to Partners in Health.

Eric

Ugh! I hate buying people books. I used to be an avid buyer of books, demonstrated by four full IKEA BILLY bookcases (before they became “thing”-cases). However, since becoming a librarian and having a kid, I buy far fewer books and rely on libraries to provide my family with reading materials. We have two great public libraries where I live – the Austin Public Library and our very own Wells Branch Community Library – both of which have met our reading needs very nicely. We make one or two trips to the library each week for story time and to pick up some new books.

More than anything, I want the people I buy for to use their local libraries to find new and interesting things to read. As a result, I’ve purchased a lot of book reading accessories along with doing some “research” as a gift. For example, I’ve bought my wife multiple book reading lights (that will clamp to a book or her Kindle) and one of those contraptions that holds a book open for you, which came in handy when she was suffering from mommy thumb.

For my dad, who has always been into underground comics, I’ve purchased materials to make his own comics, as well as found him articles and commentary on R. Crumb from academia. I like to think it provided a new perspective on a topic he’s always been obsessed with.

One year, when I worked at the University of Michigan’s Graduate Library, I made the reference staff there custom book plates on hand-made paper that featured scenes from in and around the library. I tied them up with a glue stick and a little bow.

But an actual book? There’s too much individual choice to select a title for someone else. I am too finicky a reader to presume I could pick something that someone else was sure to like that they couldn’t get for free at their local library.

(Although I’ll second Brett’s recommendation of Born to Run, especially for athletes and runners.)

Emily

See, I have this resentment with systems that aren’t open or those that won’t play nice with others. My phone is a first-generation Droid and my traveling computer is an ancient (three years old) Asus eeePC 900, whose linux-based operating system, Xandros, was so frustrating and ridiculously hard to update that I gave up and started over by installing Ubuntu. I refuse to get an iPhone or iPad (I’m still so confused as to who thought this was a good name for a tablet computer) and am loathe to engage in the i-ification of everything. (But I do love my still functioning classic click wheel iPod.)

Maybe it’s my stubborn idealism about open interoperable technology, but if I had the resources I’d give everyone I know a Nook Tablet – and not just because I really want one. I’d do it because the Nook Tablet is the ultimate in playing nice. It reads almost any format of e-book publication – or any other kind of file, for that matter – which is far better than the Kindle will do. I’d do it because I want there to be a major competitor to the Kindle and Amazon. I’d do it because the Nook is more in line with the interoperability standards I’d want in my devices.

And of course there are a few books I’d have pre-loaded on these Nooks. I’d give three:

• Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks – because as the title indicates, it’s for everybody!
• Cookwise by Shirley Corriher – because it’s a basic for the kitchen, and I love to read the hows and whys behind my meals.
• The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak – I got this for $3 from a vendor at ALA Annual for an airplane read on the way home from NOLA. It was by far the best novel I’ve read in years, and the fact that it was published by the not-for-profit Bellevue Literary Press doesn’t hurt.

Hilary

Like some of my colleagues here, I don’t often give books as gifts unless they are specifically requested. And that is for the reason that most of my family, friends and colleagues are resourceful library users. Nevertheless, my top picks are…

• The Best Recipe (or The New Best Recipe) – this is an ever-evolving compilation of well-vetted recipes by the folks who run Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen. This book disseminates the best approach to common recipes (e.g., banana bread, pizza dough) based on a series of tests conducted by professional chefs who run experiments on each recipe. Think of it like a Consumer Reports for recipes.
• Flip Flop Fly Ball (by Craig Robinson) – this is a book that I secretly lust after and I am not at all a baseball fan. This is a superb reference for example after example of beautiful ways to make a compelling point with data, in this case sports stats.
• The Plant-Book (by David Mabberley) – this book is THE essential reference book for people who like to think about plants. It’s equally as appropriate for a hard-core botanist as it is for a backyard gardener.

Erin

I seem to be in the minority amongst my Lead Pipe colleagues and am what some might call a book-pusher. I routinely gift books for holidays and birthdays, and have also been known to randomly distribute paperbacks throughout the year based on gut reaction. Often, my gifts are secondhand books, collected from thrift shops, library book sales, church rummage sales or straight from my own shelves.

Subject content varies based on the individual and I have a variety of strategies for matching a book to its reader. One is to poach ideas from curated lists. There are hundreds of best book lists that are compiled each year from both mainstream and independent groups. I have also found success in tapping the network of my peers, including browsing people’s public-facing Amazon Wish Lists and Library Thing reviews. Another strategy is to ask librarian friends and coworkers for recommendations. Or, I just buy another copy (or give away my copy) of a book I have read and loved, willing to chance that my friend or loved one will enjoy it as well.

This holiday season, I gifted books to each of my three brothers, including The Hunger Games series, a new official Scrabble dictionary, a compilation of canoe games, Philip K. Dick’s Valis, and The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg by Robert P. Crease. I love receiving books as gifts, although my to-read pile towers dangerously at the point of collapse. Being able to look at my shelves and recall where a certain book came from makes me happy. It contributes to my idea of a personal library – one compiled by those who know me the best and carefully curated and culled as the years pass.

To me, the gift of a book is never wasted. Although a certain amount of sentimental value is placed on volumes given, I never feel pressure to keep something I have read forever. If a gift book does not particularly resonate with me, I pass it along on its journey, donating it to a library, friend, or random person on Twitter. With e-books, this is more difficult due to closed and proprietary systems, one of many flaws in our existing structures. There is a place for the circulation and sharing of books outside of a library, with the public and personal coexisting serendipitously, sustaining one another.

Photo by Marion Siegel (we think)

Introduction

Over the past few months, several of us at Lead Pipe have been watching the Occupy Wall Street movement with interest. How does one protest something that seems to be part of the foundation of a culture? And when a foundational institution benefits only a small subset of its members, how does one not protest? None of us at In the Library with the Lead Pipe have ever seen, in the course of our lifetimes, such an amorphous yet focused, long-term, geographically distributed picket line in our own country. It is an inspiration to all those who feel that “business as usual” isn’t working for them. (Not to mention the movement’s endlessly clever picket signs.)

In the spirit of Occupy Wall Street, we at Lead Pipe have been reflecting on some occupations of our own. We each asked ourselves, what should we be occupying to make a statement about a social, cultural, or economic problem in our field? What should cause librarians to strap on our walking shoes, raise picket signs, and craft pithy slogans? What would our occupation do, look like, and chant (literally or metaphorically)? What, in short, should we as librarians be protesting in our own culture?

Occupy the Research and Practice Divide

As a member of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), I get print copies of both College and Research Libraries, the association’s research journal, and College and Research Libraries News, its monthly magazine. Usually, the research journal is tossed into a growing pile of to-reads and I take the magazine with me on the bus. I’ve found that the most useful articles that impact my day-to-day work come from C&RL News (see this gem on lending textbooks at UT San Antonio – an important project, cost considerations, and results – and something I could see replicating on our campus).

There’s a running joke with my colleagues at work that resurfaces with each new issue of College and Research Libraries; upon its arrival, we snort, “I won’t read anything by or for librarians!” We get a laugh out of it, but there’s truth there. Most stuff written in LIS research journals is difficult to read in the context of a busy work day, and as I become more familiar with the research process through my Ph.D. program, I’m coming to realize that a lot of it lacks credibility. The first assignment I was given (along with the rest of my Ph.D. cohort) was to identify a “good” research study and bring it to class – at which point, each of our selections was torn to shreds from a research perspective.

On one hand, I have practitioner colleagues complaining about the irrelevance of LIS research literature; on the other, I have LIS faculty members lamenting the poor quality of the bulk of it.

I’m occupying LIS research literature. I’m indignant that its impact on practice is minimal, and I don’t believe it is only practitioners’ lack of application or researchers’ lack of skill – it’s a gap that both sides need to help fill. For practitioners, this may come in the form of a shift from relying on anecdotal information in making decisions about services and collections; for researchers, it could be a focus on how the results of a study are communicated.

For example, the website for Project Information Literacy (PIL) has research findings, but also presents short video clips summarizing the project and its implications. Already the results of the study are shaping decisions at my library as we design our physical spaces and services.

This philosophy – of producing actionable writing – is at the core of the editorial decisions of this blog. To that end, please share your experiences translating research into practice at your library in the comments below.

-Eric

Occupy Yourself: How to Be A Change Agent All By Your Lonesome (At First)

During my library school graduation ceremony one of my professors handed me a coffee mug, gave me a hug, and declared “You’re a real change agent! Good luck to you!” Despite having taken both management and marketing classes, I had no idea what on earth she was talking about. Ergo, I simply smiled and nodded. Nine years, and many struggles and sea changes in the landscape of library science later, I get what she was going for: being a change agent, troublemaker, or dissident in the library–pick the jargon with which you are most comfortable–can be both exhilarating and lonely. Sometimes simultaneously.

It’s the nature of a public service career. At some point, even if you don’t interact much with library patrons , you are going to get discouraged. Very discouraged. Quite possibly it’s already happened. Maybe the thought of Amazon going into publishing has pushed you over the edge, or perhaps Library Journal’s 2011 Placements and Salaries Survey was the final straw. Or maybe you’ve just finally reached the end of your patience with the glacial pace of library change compared to the faster-than-light speed of social and technological changes. Whatever the cause may be, you know you have to do something. But what? What can you, one library worker, do to transform your institution?

Occupy yourself.

Change always begins with you, and not just because Ghandi ostensibly said so.¹ Unless you hold an official leadership position within your organization, you probably don’t have much formal power, and even if you do have a measure of influence, its upper limit ends where the next level of management begins.² Therefore, the only thing you have 100% complete control of during your workday is how you choose to conduct yourself. And while this may seem unfair at times, it is also an opportunity to distinguish yourself as a librarian by modeling a different standard.³

No matter what type of library you work in, there are things you can do and ways you can conduct yourself so as to be a force for positive change. If you’re committed to your institution for the long haul, here are some suggestions for staying mentally strong and healthy while you fight the good fight.

Own Your Power

You are far more powerful than you think you are.

If that sentence prompted eye-rolling, derisive snorting, or helpless wailing, you may have already given away your personal power without realizing it.⁴ According to life coach Shann Vander Leek, people give away their power when they engage in the following behaviors:

• doubting themselves
• trying to make everyone happy
• excessively seeking approval / validation
• forgetting that they know what they’re doing
• having poor boundaries
• allowing other people’s emotional chaos to control them
• failing to honor and share their truth

Be honest with yourself. Are you truly powerless at work? Or are you unwittingly contributing to the probIem?

In his two-part examination of personal power at Lifehacker, Craig Harper suggests that the desire for safety and comfort frequently trumps the desire to make positive, constructive change:

All too often our desire to live a comfortable, painless, easy and safe existence (all things driven by fear) is the very thing that kills our potential, our productivity, our ability to develop and ultimately, our spirit. It is no coincidence that we (the society) have both (1) a widespread aversion to anything that makes us uncomfortable and (2) a high percentage of people who regularly feel frustrated, unfulfilled, lost and miserable. Ironically, it is our aversion to working against resistance that stops us from growing, learning, evolving and adapting. Sometimes (in the moment) we believe it’s simply easier to just “fit in”, to compromise and to bite our tongue. While this is understandable on occasion, over the long term this kind of behaviour and thinking will set us up for unhealthy relationships, stagnation, disconnection, frustration, desperation and misery. In order to take back your power you will need to be courageous (that’s a choice by the way), you will need to be prepared to get uncomfortable (that’s where you learn, grow and adapt) and you will need to do things that may piss other people off – perhaps the ones who previously pulled your strings for their own gain.

Are you prepared to experience discomfort for the sake of positive library change? In what ways have you given away your power? Can you list one positive action you can take today to get it back?

Become a Rhetorical Ninja

Want to win hearts and minds for your grand plan to transform librarianship? Brush up on your rhetoric. You can have the best ideas in the world, but if you can’t articulate them in a way that will appeal to your opponents, you’ll accomplish nothing.

If that sounds too “nice” to be effective, you’ve probably never seen the principles of non-violent communication in action. Non-violent communication⁵, or NVC, is a way of speaking and interacting with others based on respect and compassion. Its four components–observations, feelings, needs and requests–provide a rhetorical framework for conversations that honestly air grievances without making your opponent feel attacked or disrespected.

Let’s say, for example, you feel your library’s food and drink policy is hopelessly behind the times. Framing your complaint in the NVC model makes you sound professional and rational.⁶ Observe:

1. Observation: “Chief, I’ve noticed that the new food/drink policy restricts coffee to the ground floor of the library.” (clear statement of what you want to change)
2. Feelings: “I feel frustrated about this because it puts staff in the role of substitute parents rather than librarians.” (emotional honesty with clear reasoning)
3. Needs: “We need to concentrate on helping people find good information, not changing their food habits.” (stating your requirements for a successful outcome)
4. Requests: “Can we look into modifying the policy to permit beverages with lids?” (statement of what you want / solution to the problem)⁷

Using NVC doesn’t guarantee you will always get what you want, but if your current communication strategies aren’t working, what do you have to lose? Experiment with the framework, and, as much as you can, preserve your own natural speech patterns. To learn more, click here to read the first chapter of Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Compassion.

Pick Your Battles

I’m thinking about stitching this phrase in comic sans and hanging it over my desk, just to remind myself that not everything in librarianship is a life-or-death issue. In fact, you could argue that–for most of us, at any rate–hardly anything in librarianship is a true life-or-death issue. Unless your workday routinely involves blood or fire, you are in a relatively privileged position, salary under-performance notwithstanding.

This is not the same thing, however, as saying that nothing in librarianship is worth fighting for. There is much work to be done, and it needs done passionately, with fierce conviction. Alas, being human, you have a finite amount of fierce conviction to spend at work. Ergo, the ability to prioritize your campaigns becomes crucial to your professional success, to say nothing of your overall health and well-being. If your library has a strategic plan, half your work is done for you: examining the document carefully should give you an idea what your institution’s priorities are. If you see challenges or opportunities in those priorities, you’ve got fertile ground in which to sow the seeds of change and/or dissent. If your library does not have a plan, or is between plans, try to focus on bigger-picture issues that affect all patrons, as opposed to one-shot issues with minimal impact.

Business consultant Pat Lynch, president of Business Alignment Strategies, Inc., offers some sage advice about setting priorities for picking your battles:

Particularly in times of chaos or emergency, people seem to want ‘the’ answer to setting priorities in the form of a tool or method that they can apply to whatever situation they have to address at the moment. However, setting priorities is not something that is best done ‘in the moment,’ nor does it lend itself to a single or optimal method. While there are tools that can be used to assist, the fact remains that setting priorities requires you to develop a process that enables you to deploy your time and energy most effectively. Such a process can be planned ahead of time and followed as the need arises.

In other words, the time to figure out what you value, and will champion, in your library is now, before you’re aflame with outrage. There are a variety of worksheets and matrices you can use for goal-setting, so put your information professional skills to work and find one that suits your individual temperament. Treat yourself to a tasty beverage in a quiet spot and spend some time thinking about, as my own supervisor puts it, “which hills you want to fight and die on.”⁸ The next time something happens at work that makes you see red, you’ll have rational, objective standards for helping you decide how to spend your energy effectively.

There are other ways to occupy yourself that involve anger management, good self-care, and a host of strategies that extend beyond the scope of one short Lead Pipe protest. Nor are they prescriptive: I have offered my view of where self-occupation might start, and I invite you to offer your own strategies, theories and practical tips in the comments section below. The only thing of which I am sure is that the more we can raise our own levels of self-awareness, the better equipped we will be to make the changes we long to see in our profession.

Notes
(back to text) 1. There’s no proof that he did, which makes the sentiment no less lovely – just factually inaccurate, despite its internet popularity. A librarian’s’ self-occupation almost always involves a little myth-busting.
(back to text) 2. Even directors report to a board.
(back to text) 3. Notice that I do not say “higher” or “better.” Everyone has a different vision of librarianship. One sure way to earn respect–if not consensus– for your own vision is to extend the same courtesy to others.
(back to text) 4. Sad to say, many issues with personal power and self-esteem still affect more women than men. As a woman in a predominately female profession, I find this troubling.
(back to text) 5.While I am normally hesitant to link to Wikipedia, the essay on NVC gives an excellent explanation of the technique’s strengths and weaknesses, which compensates for my personal bias toward its use.
(back to text) 6. As opposed to, say, a whiny newbie upstart.
(back to text) 7. Bosses love solutions. If your request contains a solution, your chances of getting what you want increase. If your solution contains a flowchart or bullet points, even better.
(back to text) 8. Richard Kaplan, frequent utterance. Best boss ever. Try not to be too jealous.

-Leigh Anne

Occupy “Make-Do”

How little do you need to run a library? Wait, don’t answer that. Yet.

Librarians as a group pride ourselves on our creative resourcefulness, particularly in the current economic environment. We are experts in making do with less. Less funding, less staffing, less support from city councils, college administrations, or whoever makes budgetary decisions. Libraries lose one, three, or a dozen positions and we still cobble together a facade that hides our pains from the patrons we serve. We reallocate resources madly, juggling all of our community’s varied needs, and work overtime, stretching ourselves to the breaking point. We are so passionate about serving our patrons that we just grit our teeth and smile through it. We pat ourselves on the back for how well we can continue to provide superior services when we feel like we’re being cut off at the knees. We believe that we have succeeded when no one notices (or complains) about the changes we’ve had to make.

This is admirable, but profoundly unwise. Why would anyone give us more money when we can make do with less?

I’m not the first to suggest that there is a problem here. Last week as I was working on this post, I discovered that Andy Woodworth was thinking along the very same lines, and that his post was sparked by another kindred post by Superstarchivist Laura Botts. Botts’ post attributes the problem to “Good Librarian Syndrome” (or GLS, to give it a nice medical acronym), an aptly diagnosed condition in which “[w]e can’t help helping. And we will help you until it kills us….we will ‘do more with less’ until we have nothing left to give to anyone.”

This is truly a disease. If one of my family members was showing symptoms of GLS, I would stage an intervention immediately. Imagine if your sister were putting everyone else’s needs before her own. Would you let her no-good husband run off with her life savings? Would you let her kids walk all over her until she was a run-down, quivering wreck? Heck, no! So why should we allow our sister (and brother) librarians to act this way? We shouldn’t.

The truth is, doing more with less doesn’t help anyone. Woodworth uses a pizza metaphor to visualize the situation: when others steal slices from the library’s pizza, all our patrons get smaller pieces, and everybody leaves hungry. So the question, then, is (in his words):

…if you can do more with less, how much less do you need to maintain what you have now? And what were you doing with the “more” you had before? What would a budget restoration mean under this “doing more with less” concept?

To answer Woodworth’s last question, it means that there would be no budget restoration. None. Zero. Zip. There’s simply no reason to allocate more resources to an organization that is doing fine without. The better we make do, the more we justify the budget cuts and reductions in staff that were made by others despite our protests. We’re basically saying, “Please take more of my money away. I don’t need much.” This is not the message we intend to communicate, but it’s coming through loud and clear all across the country as library budgets are being mercilessly reduced.

Let’s heed Botts’ warning and stop the spread of this disease before it kills us all. The medication I’m prescribing is an active occupation: Occupy “Make-Do.” So I call on all those who are doing more with less to cease and desist in your feverish struggles, and expose your shortcomings to the world! I call on you to do those things that librarians never, ever want to do, the things that make our patrons angry. Have you lost staff? Then it’s time to cut hours, cancel storytimes, and end book clubs. Is collection funding down? Then cancel valued database subscriptions and sell off materials to reveal our empty shelves. Let them yell. Let them get mad. Let everyone see what “making do with less” really means.

Toss all that surplus goodness aside and get a little mean. Carry a picket sign, even if it’s only in your mind. Chant some clever slogans. Something like:

I’m in a battle for literacy; where’s my military funding? Or…

A librarian’s sanity is not worth your budget savings! Or…

You’ve pushed libraries to the edge of extinction, and now we’re pushing back. Or…

(insert slogan here)

You get the idea. If we want those in power to allocate more resources to libraries, we should make it clear how much we’re hurting, and how much cuts are hurting our patrons. We should be transparent in our suffering so that everyone can see it.

So let me rephrase my original question (it was a trick question anyway). What I really want to ask is: How much do you need to run a library? The correct answer is: as much as I can get.

-Kim

Occupy the Faculty

Washington, DC — June 18, 2012 — The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), following its Annual Conference on the State of Higher Education, has made a formal request that articles published in non-open access journals after January 1, 2015 receive no consideration in promotion and tenure decisions…

Several librarians have recently called for an occupation of scholarly communication, including Barbara Fister, John Dupuis, Andy Woodworth, and Steve Lawson. We’ve also recently seen strongly worded posts from non-librarians on this issue, including one from Peter Murray-Rust, at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry (“Closed access means people die”), and one from University of Bristol paleontologist Mike Taylor providing perspective on the profitability of Elsevier and Springer.

Personally, I don’t blame Elsevier or the American Chemical Society or any other publisher for increasing the price of their publications. This is what suppliers do: they try to maximize profits. And, though I expect better of us, I don’t blame libraries (all that much) for paying ever increasing prices, or even for agreeing to keep their vendor contracts private. Well, mostly. I realize there is a lot of pressure on libraries to provide access to the highest impact literature in every relevant field, and that conducting vendor negotiations in public is likely to lead to reduced access or higher prices, at least in the short term. Longer term, if every library conducted its negotiations in public, we would almost certainly see downward pressure on prices.

Which leads me back to AAUP. For most faculty, research is the largest consideration in promotion and tenure decisions. Teaching and service matter, but there is a reason that “publish or perish” has become a cliche. So faculty do everything they can to place their work in high impact, “A-list” journals: they volunteer as reviewers and editors, and not only provide articles for free (and sign over copyright), but they often pay to have their work considered. Then they put pressure on the library to buy the publication, regardless of the price the publisher names for it, in order to ensure the health of the journal and its accessibility to colleagues.

How do we break the cycle? I think the economics of scholarly publishing resembles the situation in the National Hokey League when wearing helmets was optional. Here is New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki’s description of the conflict and its resolution:

Back in the nineteen-seventies, an economist named Thomas Schelling, who later won the Nobel Prize, noticed something peculiar about the N.H.L. At the time, players were allowed, but not required, to wear helmets, and most players chose to go helmet-less, despite the risk of severe head trauma. But when they were asked in secret ballots most players also said that the league should require them to wear helmets. The reason for this conflict, Schelling explained, was that not wearing a helmet conferred a slight advantage on the ice; crucially, it gave the player better peripheral vision, and it also made him look fearless. The players wanted to have their heads protected, but as individuals they couldn’t afford to jeopardize their effectiveness on the ice. Making helmets compulsory eliminated the dilemma: the players could protect their heads without suffering a competitive disadvantage. Without the rule, the players’ individually rational decisions added up to a collectively irrational result. With the rule, the outcome was closer to what players really wanted.

(The original Schelling studies are available in “Hockey Helmets, Concealed Weapons, and Daylight Savings: A Study of Binary Choices with Externalitie,” and Micromotives and Macrobehavior.)

Right now, the rational decision is for faculty members to publish their work in closed source journals. The universities pay the publication fees and libraries buy the journals; there is no line on faculty members’ paychecks reflecting the costs associated with the current model. And even if there were, the financial benefits of promotion and tenure more than offset these costs. But what if you ask faculty members if they like giving up copyright control over their own research? What if you ask them if they would like to have more complete access to relevant material through simpler interfaces? If appropriate incentives were in place, there is little doubt that faculty members would overwhelmingly choose to publish their work in open access publications.

The AAUP cannot make a unilateral decision to make this happen. It is not structured that way, it does not represent enough faculty members to change things immediately, and faculty members would still have to negotiate with their individual institutions. But an AAUP endorsement, along with some model contracts and discussion points, could serve as a tipping point. As more and more universities are demonstrating, making their lectures and curricula available for free to the general public is good business. It seems unlikely that many administrations would object to their faculty members’ research assuming a more public place in scholarly discourse, nor to the likelihood of paying less to scholarly publishers. Plus it would make it easier to comply with federal mandates requiring government funded research to be publicly accessible.

When the NHL adopted rules that few players advocated publicly but the great majority privately desired, it made an important concession: it grandfathered in those players who were already in the NHL. Any player could choose to wear a helmet, but only players who played their first game after the rule change were required to do so. The transition to considering only open access articles in promotion and tenure decisions could work much the same way. It would not prohibit any faculty members from publishing their work wherever they like; for the highest ranking faculty members, for whom promotion and tenure mean nothing, their incentive structure would be largely unaffected. Nor would it affect monograph-length publications, at least for now. What it would do is level the playing field for faculty who are working toward promotion and tenure, and for journals that are competing for these scholars’ articles.

-Brett

Occupy In the Library with the Lead Pipe

Like Brett and the individuals he cites, I want to occupy scholarly communication, publishing paradigms, and “interest groups” like the American Association of Publishers, the Authors Guild, and others. But others have already argued so eloquently, that I dare not join in. Instead, I‘d like to occupy an open access, peer-reviewed, creative-commons-licensed library blog: In the Library with the Lead Pipe.

The first post at In the Library with the Lead Pipe was posted three years ago this month. In our three years we’ve had eight regular bloggers, thirty-two guest authors, and ten group posts. We started building a group vision after ALA Annual 2008 and have been what I would consider a regular and successful contributor to professional library discourse. We were nominated for the Salem Press Library Blog Awards, were named in the Librarian’s Book of Lists as one of the Top Ten Library blogs, one of LISNews’s 10 Librarian Blogs to Read in 2009 and are frequently cited in AL Direct and other professional publications. We’re grateful to our colleagues for this recognition, but we don’t measure our success by awards and citations.

Instead, we consider ourselves successful because we have occupied this space, this idea, this thing; and we’ve occupied it daily. We have occupied it actively and without bounds since it was merely a notion. The passion and energy that has gone into In the Library with the Lead Pipe is plentiful and rich. As I have said many times over: this group of colleagues is the closest, most dynamic, most functional, and one of the most fulfilling professional groups to which I’ve had the pleasure of belonging.

There have been disagreements. Strong ones and plenty of them. But they have been professional and thoughtful.

We are honest with one another and decisions are made by consensus. Each individual’s voice is heard and considered. When someone has an idea, we say “make it so!” and “how can I help with that?”

At three years old this is no time for us to get lazy or quit occupying this space. We have more growing to do, ideas to consider, and venues to occupy as In the Library with the Lead Pipe. But we can’t accomplish any of this without readers, guest authors, new ideas, new takes.

Would you like to join us in this occupation? Send us your ideas, feedback, submissions, questions. Anything. Tell us how we can involve you in our occupation. In solidarity.

-Emily

Thanks to Flickr User Billingham for use of this image.

In the Library with the Lead Pipe

 
Lead Pipe has gone through some transitions. You may have noticed recent additions of regular authors Eric Frierson and Leigh Anne Vrabel. We were just featured on the very cool Librarian Wardrobe blog. We’ve also been kicking around some ideas about future directions for our little community here, trying to figure out if there are ways we can support library-related projects in addition to our blog/journal.
 

Kim Leeder (by Lead Pipe proxy)

 
Just a few weeks ago Kim started a new job as Director of Library Services at the College of Western Idaho. She’s jumping right into her new position and loving it, but she’s so busy that we’re reporting for her! Please help us congratulate and support Kim in this venture. Don’t worry, you’ll continue to hear from her at Lead Pipe.
 

Emily Ford

 
This July I transitioned from having two temporary part-time jobs to one. Yes, still temporary and yes, still part-time. I feel lucky to have a job, especially when libraries in my metro area have laid off tenured library faculty. It’s a nasty job climate out there even without economic woes. I’m grateful for what I do have.

The transition from a part-time hourly position to an Interim fixed-term faculty position has been great. I’ve been learning a lot–soaking it all up like a sponge. Instead of just doing my job(s), I’m able to be more engaged with the university community. I have the emotional energy and the time to do so and have been feeling much more like a nice and pleasant person. I’m happy to know where I am at all times and I’m sure my colleagues are, too.

The switch from institutions has also been a cultural adjustment for me. Now I’m a proud union member at a large academic institution in a state university system. Previously, I worked at a public corporation with a smaller student body, a smaller library, and a completely different organizational culture. Change is good.

To complement my work transition I’ve rotated off of a few (3 or 4!) committees, joined different ones, and even decided to change my division membership in ALA to further explore and grow my professional self.

Prior to my job change the spring and summer were busy as I worked closely with a great team of people to organize the 2011 Oregon Virtual Reference Summit. It’s a local conference that I thought was one the most engaging librar* conferences even before I served on the planning committee. I got to give a lightning talk and I’d be tickled if you watched it and let me know what you think.

Ellie Collier

 
My partner accepted a position at the University of Minnesota, so this May we relocated from Austin, Texas to Minneapolis, Minnesota and I switched jobs from Austin Community College to Normandale Community College (in Bloomington, MN). I also got married. My new position is very similar to my last one, but the environment and the student populations are different. NCC is a more focused transfer institution, while ACC had a very strong workforce program. NCC had three librarian retirements (all reference and instruction librarians), a part-timer take a full time position elsewhere and another librarian on sabbatical leave (the cataloger), so we have five new librarians and only one returning librarian (the acquisitions librarian). My new position also has far fewer librarians per student, so I’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to figure out what the typical workload had been and how we want to distribute it now.
 

Hilary Davis

 
The NCSU Libraries is in full-swing preparation for a new flagship library, the James B. Hunt, Jr. Library, set to open in late 2012 or early 2013. With much of the collection being split between several locations, I’ve been helping to strategize how to redistribute the collection in a way that (hopefully) optimally meets patron needs and complements exciting new learning and collaboration spaces.  I’ve also been lucky to be involved in our local team of librarians who are participating in the ARL/DLF E-Science Institute, with the aim to develop a strategic agenda for supporting e-science/e-research.

On the SLA (Special Libraries Association) front, I’ve assumed the role of past-chair of the Science-Technology Division this year, which means I get a chance to continue to work with some really great folks in SLA and review the division’s Recommended Practices for updates and revisions.  And I become part of the vast network of people who have stepped up to lead the Science-Technology Division, a large and diverse group of corporate, legal, government, academic, and solo sci-tech librarians across the globe.

I’m looking forward to participating in the TRLN (Triangle Research Libraries Network) Management Academy in October, presenting a talk at the Charleston Conference in November, and helping to integrate the Hunt Library with our existing and evolving library collections and services.  If you’re interested in joining the team at the NCSU Libraries, we are looking for qualified candidates for the position of Reference Librarian for the Physical and Mathematical Sciences!
 

Brett Bonfield

 
I chaired my first ALA presidential task force, Future Perfect, and presented its report to the Executive Board and to Council at ALA Annual in New Orleans this past June. You can get a pretty good sense of what we recommended by watching a short video interview with me, though the report itself is succinct, and we worked hard to make it both clear and jargon-free. While it’s nice to have completed the report, I really miss working with the other five members of the task force, Kawanna Bright, Margaux DelGuidice, Candice Mack, Ross Singer, and Rachel Van Noord, as well as Roberta Stevens (I still have no idea how she managed to make so much time for us), and hope to work with all of them again, both soon and frequently.

In its July/August 2011 issue, Public Libraries published “Getting Paid,” the first article I’ve written for a publication other than In the Library with the Lead Pipe since we started Lead Pipe almost three years ago. As of August 13, 2011, it carries a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) license. If you’re interested in the HarperCollins boycott, you might find it interesting.

I was recently nominated as a candidate for the LITA Board. If you’re a LITA member, I hope you’ll vote for me. And if you’re not a LITA member, but you’re interested in both libraries and technology, I hope you’ll join.

I’m now a few months into my second year as treasurer for the New Jersey Library Association. It’s far more difficult to understand how a professional association’s finances can and should work than I would have imagined, especially given the unpredictability of our economy. I haven’t done nearly as well as I would have liked, though grappling with NJLA’s finances has made possible one singularly energizing experience: working with Peter Pearson, President of the Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library and lead consultant for Library Strategies, on a fundraising strategic plan for NJLA. We put together a committee during the spring and early summer, and Peter flew out to meet with us in August.

I’m now a few days into my second year as a Ph.D. student in Library and Information Science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. There are more required courses than I was expecting, and fewer people interested in libraries, but the faculty and the other students are bright and interesting, and I’ve been given plenty of freedom to investigate questions I’m happy to invest time in answering. The big challenge this year is to publish and present work that’s more readily identifiable as traditionally academic. If all goes well, I’ll find out in a few days that I’ve been accepted to present at my first academic conference.

Of course, doing “real” research is one of the reasons I enrolled in a Ph.D. program. The other reason is my interest in teaching library school students, a desire to teach that Meredith Farkas put into words for me (and perhaps for a lot of us) during my final weeks in library school. This summer, I taught an on-campus course in web design through Drexel’s library school, where I was mentored by the fantastic Vanessa Morris (read parts one and two of her interview at Tame the Web) and fourteen smart, dedicated, and patient masters students. If you’re in the Philadelphia area, and you have an opening for a superstar intern, part-time librarian, or someone with a newly minted masters, please let me know.

My job at Collingswood Public Library remains incredibly fun and rewarding. In the next three weeks, we’re having a town-wide party to celebrate the Library’s 100th Anniversary, hosting the Library’s third annual 5K, and supporting the 9th annual Collingswood Book Festival. We’re also in the midst of installing new lights and ceiling tiles, trying to move to a virtual desktop environment for public workstations, and investigating grants to preserve the Library’s archives and begin the process of making the collection available digitally. It’s been an interesting summer in Collingswood, and the fall promises to be even better.
 

Leigh Anne Vrabel

 
I’ve spent most of 2011 trying to expand my repertoire as a reference librarian and contribute to the public service team in different ways. The traditional roles for which I was trained in library school have evolved almost beyond recognition, and I’m determined to keep pace with that evolution and stretch my professional boundaries, especially in collaborative situations.

Outreach figures largely into that equation.  Talking to people face-to-face about the library is still one of the biggest thrills of my job, so I’ve worked with my peers on a variety of outreach programs, including tabling local farmers markets and the wildly successful “30 Books in 30 Minutes” program.  Repeated on multiple occasions, this program involves a team of six library workers delivering rapid-fire book talks; half the fun is watching the clock to see if we can squeeze them all into a half-hour slot, and the audience eats it up, as well as checks out many of the books afterwards!  I’ve also been invited back to my alma mater to speak on the future of libraries, which just might evolve into a future Lead Pipe post.

My main responsibility, and first love, is editing the Eleventh Stack blog, which has been named a finalist in the Pittsburgh’s Most Valuable Blogger Awards.  Our competition—in the “Everything Else” category—is stiff, but it really is an honor to be nominated. Knowing that our collective hard work has earned the library a place at the table in the local blogosphere makes me want to work harder to keep the project fresh and exciting.  That’s why I’ve signed up for Podcamp Pittsburgh, an annual social media unconference.  I’m hoping to gain ideas and to network outside the profession, not only to spread the awesome, but to learn from folks who don’t think like we do.

Upcoming projects include teaching a resume writing class, being trained to help facilitate our wildly popular Gadget Labs, presenting with a group of my colleagues at the Pennsylvania Library Association’s Southwest chapter workshop in October, and helping out with a super-secret, amazing advocacy event I can’t talk about just yet.  The really difficult work, however, is all interior.  As Rilke would have it, I am “living the questions”; I have, after all, been a librarian for seven years now, and a library worker for nine.  It’s definitely time to reassess, re-evaluate, and decide what I want now, and next, from my career.  Stay tuned.
 

Eric Frierson

 
It feels like I’ve been turning dials on a control panel for life this month.  Some dials I’ve turned way down: recently, I decided to drop off of Facebook (though I have recently reactivated my account briefly to participate in a contest from the Four Seasons in Austin; I will deactivate once the contest is over), resign from a couple of committee appointments, and take a hiatus from much conference travel, including ALA Midwinter and ALA Annual.

On the other end, some dials have gone up to 11.  Like Brett, I’ve begun a PhD program, and mine focuses on leadership in libraries.  I travel to Simmons College in Boston three times a year for week-long intensive course work.  Throughout the rest of the year, I find time in my off hours to research, read, and write.  Some of what I picked up in the introductory course informed my latest blog post.  The first semester alone has proven that this degree will be the hardest, most challenging thing I’ve ever done.  It has come with frustration, confusion, and that sense of, “Man, I don’t know JACK,” but I’m a firm believer that no real learning can happen without struggle.

In the same leadership vein, Kim and I are co-editing a book to be published by ALA Editions called The Library 2025.  It will feature stories from new and aspiring library administrators and give the library world a glimpse at the vision these leaders hold.  We are accepting chapter proposals now through December, so please consider submitting a proposal.

At work, I’m lucky to be a part of an exciting transformation.  Our university recently received a gift of $13 million for a new library and learning commons.  We were given a two-year time frame in which to plan the new space, close down our old building, and reopen in the new space.  For one whole year, our library will be closed and our collections housed off-site.  When we open, we will not look anything like what we are now, and the building project is serving as a catalyst for making other dramatic changes to how we define “library” and what we do for the campus.  Our new director, Pongracz Sennyey, is guiding us towards a vision of a future library that will require new competencies and a willingness to let go of legacy services that no longer serve the campus effectively.

I’ve also spent the last year acclimating to systems librarianship.  I’m employing my computer science degree more now than I ever have, grappling with new programming languages and new tools to develop solutions for our library.  For example, I’ve recently had to learn how to use Solr and Lucene, implement Omeka, and manipulate photograph EXIF data to determine a photo’s geolocation attributes.

Thanks to Flickr user litherland for use of this image!

A few weeks ago John Dupuis, of Confessions of a Science Librarian fame, posted his Stealth Librarianship Manifesto. He begins:

This particular edition of the manifesto applies to academic libraries. The principles of stealth librarianship apply to all branches of the profession, each in particular ways. Other manifestos could exist for, say, public or corporate librarians.

However the core is the same: to thrive and survive in a challenging environment, we must subtly and not-so-subtly insinuate ourselves into the lives of our patrons. We must concentrate on becoming part of their world, part of their landscape.

And he ends by calling upon others to add their manifesto points. We at In the Library with the Lead Pipe saw this as an opportunity to respond to his list and create our own.

Read on for our differing takes.

Emily

Scholarly Communication Librarian (Assistant Professor), Oregon Health & Science University
Reference & Instruction Librarian, Portland State University

There are many things that I appreciated about Dupuis’s manifesto. What particularly resonated with me is his take on publishing and professional literature.

We must stop reading the formal library literature. That’s what librar* blogs are for. We must familiarize ourselves with the literature and scholarly communications ecosystems of our patron communities.

We must stop writing the formal library literature. That’s what librar* blogs are for. We must make our case for the usefulness of what we do in the literature of our patron communities.

What Dupuis fails to mention here is that many academic librarians MUST publish in traditional, peer-reviewed library publications while striving to attain tenure. I am not personally in a tenure-track position, so I have the liberty of not fretting over where I publish. What I have found is that the online discourse via blogs is plentiful and satisfying for me to keep up with what’s happening in libraries.  Blogging here at In the Library with the Lead Pipe offers me the opportunity to write and think critically in an open peer-review and open publishing format; it is a rich experience that creates and advocates for open discourse among professionals. I’m not so sure what “stealth” has to do when it comes to creating open discourse. Dupuis is contradicting himself.

But Dupuis’s push toward understanding “scholarly communication ecosystems” resonates with me. Working as a Scholarly Communication Librarian, I see the work that needs to be done within academic communities in this regard. I see the education that needs to happen with faculty to understand even what is a “scholarly communication ecosystem.” To me that ecosystem is one stymied by the tenure system and traditional publishing paradigms. But without familiarizing ourselves regarding that discipline-specific system, how are we to educate our patrons regarding changes? Regarding open peer-review? Regarding peer-reviewed open access journals? Regarding using new measures like the Eigenfactor over Impact factors? And how are we going to make the case for changes in transparency and fairness of pricing from journal vendors if we don’t understand how a discipline-specific ecosystem works? Dupuis’s call for discipline-level understanding of scholarly communications is crucial for academic librarians.

Despite my agreement with Dupuis’s manifesto points regarding scholarly communication, there are some points that I contend. My Lead Pipe colleagues have done a much better job addressing those contentions so I’ll end my piece with an offering of my manifesto bullet points for my praxis of librarianship.

• I will not be stealth. I will proudly and loudly be a librarian.
• I will not teach library instruction sessions that do not incorporate critical thinking. (Down with database demos!)
• I will not bend over backwards for my subject faculty, but I will engage with them and educate them about my profession, and in turn, learn about theirs.
• I will be open to new ideas.
• I will think critically about ideas and opportunities presented to myself and to my institution.
• I will acknowledge what I don’t know.
• I will continue to learn what I don’t know.

Kim

Librarian/Assistant Professor at Boise State University

I don’t think “A stealth librarianship manifesto” is about stealth at all. At least, not at its core.

What Dupuis’s post really is about is much simpler and more nefarious: it’s about language. It’s about the way human beings — and in this case, scientists — perceive words based less on what they really mean and based more on their own various preconceived or culturally embedded ideas about them. Like “library.” What non-librarian doesn’t picture a quiet room full of overflowing bookshelves upon hearing the word “library”? There’s your problem, friends.

Don’t believe me? Take another look at the manifesto. Ignore all those sharp and provocative bullets and skip to the bottom section of the post that begins, “A couple of final points.” Here’s where we get to the meat of the issue:

And yes, I did really start thinking about this at Science Online 2011, with some ideas here and here. I also started germinating some of these thoughts after seeing how the library sessions at Science Online 2010 worked out, see here and here, noting how the session on Reference Managers was better attended and didn’t have “library” in the title. And looking further back, it’s a fairly common theme for my blogging, for example here and here.

That’s a lot of casually tossed out “here”s: six, in fact. All that thinking and germinating, yet we readers don’t even get an abbreviated link title? Let’s pull out our magnifying glass and take a closer look at what’s going on here, one sentence at a time. I’m adding link titles to the original text in brackets. First up:

And yes, I did really start thinking about this at Science Online 2011, with some ideas here [“ScienceOnline 2011 Debrief Part 1: ebooks, blogs and stealthy librarians”] and here [“ScienceOnline 2011 Debrief Part 3: Some session ideas for #scio12”].

These two links point to past blog posts by Dupuis, both in response to the Science Online 2011 conference. “Debrief Part 1” is your basic conference debrief post, in which he comments on the fact that “science types” at this conference don’t attend sessions that have the word “library” in the title. Apparently Science Online 2011 included a very successful library session on “data discoverability” that was well-attended thanks to its avoidance of the “L-Word.” Meanwhile, “Debrief Part 3” describes Dupuis’s ideas for a future conference session he might organize to convince those science types that libraries really are great collaborators in educating students and advancing open science. Of course they need convincing since they don’t already know that libraries actually care about these issues instead of just being busy dusting off our old books. Why don’t they know that yet? Because we’re libraries.

Onward:

I also started germinating some of these thoughts after seeing how the library sessions at Science Online 2010 worked out, see here [“Science Online 2010: Scientists and librarians”] and here [“Reclaiming ground”], noting how the session on Reference Managers was better attended and didn’t have “library” in the title.

These two links point to another blog, Book of Trogool, a Scientopia science blog written by what I’m guessing are three academic librarians (they don’t seem to have filled out their bios quite yet, alas). In “Science Online 2010: Scientists and librarians,” Dorothea Salo comes right out and starts battering away at the stereotype that forms the root of our language problem. “How,” she asks, “can science libraries persist when scientists haven’t the least notion that libraries or librarians are relevant to their work?” Salo then launches into her own sort of anti-manifesto listing all the activities that aren’t going to solve the problem, a cascade of angst that clearly inspired Dupuis to create his (more positive) manifesto.

“Reclaiming ground” addresses the same problem through the lens of Steve Koch, an Experimental Biophysicist at the University of New Mexico. Commenting on his past negative experiences at his undergraduate and graduate libraries, Koch describes how, as a faculty member, he has been happy to avoid his library. Essentially his advice comes down to two points: “educate current faculty” about what libraries really do, and be nicer to current students so they like us better.

Koch is getting at something behind the rhetorical theory I’m advancing, something at the very root of the library stereotype itself: libraries have a bad rap. Libraries have the reputation of being rulemongers, fine-collecting penny-pinchers, cranky about helping students, and all-around holier-than-thou. We know this is how (some) people see us, but is all of this negativity that weighs down the word “library” deserved? Koch’s experience would say “yes,” but I would contend that as a field librarianship largely attracts a different personality type these days that is less focused on institutional policy and more focused on customer service. Don’t you agree? (You can read more on librarian personality types here, though I’ll acknowledge that it doesn’t exactly back me up on this). So in that case, we’re back to the main part of the problem being the associations that go along with the “L-Word,” and not the libraries themselves.

And looking further back, it’s a fairly common theme for my blogging, for example here [“Science in the 21st Century conference recap”] and here [“From the Archives: My theory of conferences”].

As indicated, these two links go back to previous posts by Dupuis that reflect both the originating concern of the manifesto and more context on one of  its statements. In “Science in the 21st Century,” Depuis muses on another conference experience in which it was clear that science faculty did not have the library on their “radar.” This ties in cleanly with the other links described above. The second post, “From the Archives,” provides some background to his manifesto statement, “We must stop going to librarian conferences and instead attend conferences where our patrons will be present.” As one outreach (sorry, “stealth”) tactic, going to disciplinary conferences makes perfect sense. However, it’s not going to solve the problem.

If only we could surgically trim the eons of expectation and stereotype from the definition of “library” in the brains of our patrons and leave them with a refined, sharper sense of what a library means in 2011. But how? Is it just a matter of, as Dupuis suggests, dropping the use of the “L-Word” in our work with those outside our field? What if we were to all consciously redefine our buildings and our jobs and our conference presentation titles to reflect the new work most of us do already? What if instead of saying I’m a “Librarian” I could introduce myself as a “Research Consultant” or “Information Expert” or — who knows? I can already picture the very different response that would evoke from faculty in other disciplines, as well as students.

On the institutional level it’s already happening at campuses around the country, where libraries are being replaced with “Information Commons” and “Knowledge Centers” and a whole array of other non-L-word names. Perhaps it’s just time for us — as individuals and organizations — to completely redefine ourselves. That way, we can throw overboard the negative baggage our beloved libraries have been hauling around for all these years.

Ellie

Reference Librarian (Assistant Professor), Austin Community College

I think I may be anti-manifesto in general. Or rather, perpetually and knee-jerkingly defender of whatever is under attack. I want to make it clear that I did read where Dupuis states himself that the manifesto is “a series of provocative statements not a realistic plan of action” and I appreciate the overall sentiment. But since this is a reaction piece, I have to admit, there is much I disagree with.

A number of the statements start with “we must stop” and then follow with what we should be doing instead. I agree with most of the ‘start doing’ items, but I don’t see these as either/or choices. There may be some aspect of “what are you able to give up to add in these new important things,” but I don’t think most of the items should actually be fully stopped by all librarians. I also see many of them as comparing apples to oranges. The things gained from librarian/librarian interactions are what we then use in our librarian/constituent interactions. They serve different purposes and they’re not interchangeable. For example, we can learn from our constituents what programs or services most interest them, but we can’t learn survey methodology from them. And what about all the times their personal interests conflict with our mission? We are in a profession where we have to sometimes ask, do we give them what they want, or what they need? A friend posted a quote on Facebook from a student after an information literacy session, “you should just talk not ask so many questions.” It is our deeper interactions with fellow librarians through conferences, workshops and our literature that enrich our teaching pedagogy. Twitter and Facebook can supplement that, and can build wonderful connections, but they can’t substitute.

Much of the manifesto seemed to be based on an assumption of a large staff of librarian subject specialists, which is often the case at large research institutions, but may not be. If I’m in charge of all the purchasing for my small college, or only do instruction, or cataloging which single conference has my patrons? Which scholarly publishing ecosystem do I need to learn? I would argue it’s the librarian conferences where we bring together these jack-of-all-trades elements.

I do agree with the focus on faculty in academic institutions. Study after study shows that faculty are among the first people students contact for help and libraries and librarians are at the end. We can certainly do more to work with faculty to help students.

I also agree with a main sentiment, well phrased by Bonnie in the comments to the manifesto, “Our goal is to be where our patrons are (virtually and physically), using the language that they use, speaking to them on their terms…”

My manifesto addition is:

• We must do away with “musts.”

Every situation is unique and we each need to evaluate our own community and resources. Hopefully our decisions are informed by best practices (from the library community) and user studies, but ultimately there is no one right answer.

For example, there was a time I would have agreed with Emily’s statement “down with database demos.” But I will do an instruction session with no critical thinking component because at my institution the English as a second language professor wants to bring her developmental reading students in to show them how to find books in the library catalog and to introduce them to the expectations of an academic library. I will let them know they’re allowed to bring in drinks as long as they have a lid and that they can print 15 pages a day. We will search for books in the catalog and learn how to use an LC call number to find a book on the shelf. Then we’ll walk over to the shelves together and over half the class will check out a book, leaving with something that will help them improve their reading skills and feeling more confident about their ability to do so in the future or at least more confident in approaching the friendly lady at that big desk. They come in looking like deer in headlights and leave smiling. And that has every bit as much value as working on critical thinking skills with students who are at that developmental and affective stage.

Eric

Library Digital Services Manager – St. Edward’s University – Austin, Texas

Last week, I participated in Texas Library Association’s Legislative Day, a full day of visits with state legislators to talk about issues in libraries.  We visited the offices of every single state representative in the House and the Senate. This year there’s a lot to talk about when it comes to libraries and the draft 2012-2013 biennium budget.

Long story short, state library programs including TexShare (how we can afford databases like Academic Search Complete), Interlibrary Loan, the K-12 database program, and a variety of others are completely obliterated.  We’re not talking about steep cuts – we’re talking about zero’ing out entire program budgets.

The conversations we had with state legislators and their aides made it clear why programs that are so obviously vital to us are on the chopping block: legislators have no idea what libraries are or what we do. Academic, public, school or otherwise.

To illustrate how unclear legislators are about what a librarian is, take one of our talking points about school librarians:

School libraries and certified school librarians are critical in supporting education and digital literacy. School librarians are teachers and should be recognized as teaching staff… School librarians are frontline teachers who instruct students everyday on curriculum requirements, such as how to research, locate, evaluate, cite, and use information effectively and ethically… Certified school librarians must hold a master’s degree, pass a graduate level exam on library media functions and supporting school curricula, and have two full years of classroom teaching experience.

Time and time again, we ran into legislators who believed librarians were part of the non-instructional staff in K-12 schools, adding to the administrative bloat public schools carry.

It’s no wonder libraries and librarians have taken a beating in the draft budget. Our representatives don’t understand what we do. And here we are, at the eleventh hour, trying to plead for our interests and those of our patrons, with people who are far more interested in other state matters.

The outlook is bleak for Texas libraries. We did the best we could at legislative day, but it all seemed like it was too little, too late. As Dupuis would have put it, we are not part of a legislator’s landscape. We’re barely a part of our user’s landscape.

So – what can we do to find our way into the lives of our representatives?  The best suggestion came from Edna Butts, general counsel and senior policy advisor for state senator Kirk Watson.  She said that it was great that we showed up in such numbers to support libraries, but the important voices would be those of our users.  (I then pointed out the overflowing packet of letters from elementary school students supporting their library in Senator Watson’s information packet.)

To this end, I would add the following to the manifesto:

• We must be better at articulating our own value, especially in non-library settings (the faculty meeting, the town hall, the Capitol)
• We must inspire others to fight for us by aligning ourselves with our users, not each other

This speaks to the spirit of the manifesto in that we must be “on the same side” or “of the same group” with our users.  We can’t be the “other” if we want people to stand up for what we do.  We must develop an environment where a threat to the library feels very much like a threat to its users.

Run a “What My Library Means to Me” project. Make your library their library. Do it stealth. Do it in the open, purposefully. The most important part is to do it, and share your results with a senator, a provost, a principal, a superintendent or a mayor.

Note: A big thank you to Gloria Meraz, Director of Communications for the Texas Library Association, and all TLA staff and volunteers who put together legislative day this year.  The message Gloria composed for us to share was lucid, urgent, and timely. It gave us words for what we know to be important for our state. Thank you!

Brett

Director, Collingswood Public Library, and PhD student at Rutgers University

Is anyone trying to stealthily infiltrate the librarian community? I’m pretty sure the answer is no. Why? In part, because far too many librarians think we should ignore what we’re good at (whatever that is, right?) in order to pretend we’re something else entirely.

• Nursing isn’t what you turn to when you fail at getting into medical school.
• Social work isn’t what you turn to when you fail at getting into a psychology program.
• Education isn’t what you turn to when you drop out of a PhD program.
• Librarianship isn’t what you turn to when you want to stealthily sneak onto the faculty.

These are professions and academic disciplines with a history all their own, each with a fascinating, useful, unique body of knowledge. If we can keep this idea in mind, maybe it will help us muster enough self-esteem to start reading (and talking about) our professional literature and to continue the work of making our professional organizations truly relevant.

We have a lot of work to do, a lot of questions to answer, but that work can be made easier by paying attention to the librarians who have thought about these questions already and who have contributed their ideas and their research to our professional literature. Our work can also be made easier by working with others in the profession and by bringing in people from related professions to help us along.

I don’t work in an academic library, but I have in the past. In addition, as a part-time graduate student, I currently rely on academic libraries in order to get my work done. Here’s my manifesto for academic libraries:

1. Figure out what the students and faculty need in order to do their work.
2. Give it to them.
3. Measure the results.
4. Repeat.

This is just an educated guess on my part, but I’m pretty sure that figuring out what students and faculty want and giving it to them means putting every available resource into improving the library’s website. And by website, I don’t mean just the pages in www.library.yourinstitution.edu, I mean every resource and service students and faculty access through the library website or could conceivably access through the library website. Do you want to do something stealthily that I, as a student, would find really useful? Learn information architecture, learn to program, or figure out how to negotiate contracts with the content vendors that allow programmers and information architects to present information in a usable way. I don’t need to see you at my conferences or on my turf or collaborating with faculty members or in my “patron community” and I’d really rather you weren’t “in the social networking spaces where (we) live”: I just want the library website to work.

As far as I’m concerned, any effort to go stealth is wasted. The problem isn’t with our public relations. The problem is with our product.

Leigh Anne

Senior Staff Librarian, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

Did someone say “public library manifesto”?  Where to begin?

Dupuis is correct when he states that a manifesto for public library workers might look very different. Many of the problems with which he takes issue are not relevant to public library workers because of the nature of our institutions. Most public library workers, for example, do not gain any sort of professional favor for presenting at conferences or serving on committees. Participation in these activities does not net us better wages, promotions, or tenure, and is not work that is routinely valued in the public library sphere, unless one currently occupies a management position or has self-identified as “management material.” In fact, it is all too frequently seen as busywork that takes reference librarians away from the day-to-day operations of the library.

Whether or not this is an acceptable state of affairs is for wiser, more experienced heads than mine to determine. However, given the current state of public librarianship, here are the revisions I would make to Dupuis’s manifesto. May they initiate a spirited conversation about the professional work of the public librarian, and the best way to support it.

• Public library workers must be selective about which conferences they attend and which professional associations they join, supporting only those that specifically support our particular needs and concerns.
• That being said, public library workers must make an honest attempt to reform unsatisfactory professional associations before giving up on them.
• Public library workers must have an elevator speech for their job/institution and be willing not only to deliver it at the drop of a hat, but to tailor it on the fly based on the particular needs and interests of the audience.
• Whenever possible, public library workers must collaborate with academic and special library workers to create interdisciplinary services for the community they collectively serve.
• Public library workers must blog, using their real names, and with full support from their institutions. Our unique voices and experiences are still, sadly, underrepresented.
• Public library workers must re-imagine what professional literature could be, and actively seek out opportunities to write for publications, print and digital, that our patrons are reading.
• Public library workers must make an honest effort to explore leadership and management opportunities before rejecting them as unsuitable.
• By the same token, public library workers must firmly reject any such roles and opportunities they have tried and found wanting/inappropriate, for whatever reason.

While there are a great deal of factors over which we have no control, I reject out of hand any theory of public librarianship that smacks of self-pity or victim mentality.There is so much that we are already doing quite well. We routinely partner with non-library organizations in our communities to host programs, especially for children and seniors. We actively court teen clientele and try to understand their unique perspective. We use social media wisely, for the most part, and our reputation for defending the freedom to read is legendary. I refuse to believe we cannot apply the same spirit and fire to the cultivation and development of our collective professional identity.

Or, to put it another way, time to take the logs out of our own eyes before tackling the specks that trouble our patrons. At the very least, we should be conscious of those thoughts and behaviors that prevent us from constructing a solid professional identity, and initiate conversations on these matters, no matter how difficult that might seem in the context of our institutions as currently constructed.

Full disclosure, dear colleagues: I am writing my portion of this post on my own time, at an ungodly hour on the night before it is due. I do this not because I am a martyr, or because I hope someone influential will see the essay and be impressed by my dedication to our profession. I do it because I refuse to accept the tired old dichotomy that shunts scholars into one arena and practitioners into another. It is not enough to serve the public. We must have a theoretical-rhetorical model that serves our own best interests, and makes it easier to explain our value to a culture that delights in questioning it. We must have a body of professional literature that is meaningful and vibrant. And, above all, we must have library workers who actively and consciously explore their gifts and abilities, then select appropriate vehicles for expressing those abilities.

Public library workers of the world, unite and write! You have nothing to lose but your stereotypes.

By ian boyd on Flickr

Introduction

Let’s start off with a little background and context, just in case you haven’t been glued to the news to catch every nuance of the WikiLeaks story. The Guardian has a helpful timeline of the saga to get you (at least partially) up to speed, and if you don’t like theirs, there are plenty of others. Overall, the various issues and plotlines in the WikiLeaks story make it so complex that it’s highly challenging to summarize. The simplified version would go something like this:

Once upon a time, a young hacker (Julian Assange) decided that the world would be a better place if there were no secrets and all information were shared. He founded an international organization of tech-savvy activists (WikiLeaks) to create a protected, anonymous platform where individuals could safely share secret information and expose corruption. The organization was successful and began to expose all kinds of formerly secret information to the world. Unfortunately, the world was not entirely happy about it. The governments who had created the secret documents got angry and began to point fingers. The United States accused and arrested a young man (Bradley Manning) who they thought had betrayed them, while American politicians began to speak out against the organization. The U.S. government wanted to arrest the organization’s leader (again, Assange), but couldn’t figure out exactly what he had done wrong.

Suddenly, bad things began to happen to the organization. Companies that provided internet hosting, financial services, and other support for the organization began to close its accounts. Other tech-savvy activists with strong opinions about freedom of information (Anonymous) began to attack the websites of the companies that had closed the organization’s accounts. Next the Swedish police announced that they wanted to arrest the organization’s leader for taking advantage of two women. The women accused the leader of doing bad things to them, changed their minds, and then changed their minds back again. The U.S. got in line to prosecute him because he had made them look bad. Finally, the organization’s leader was arrested in London and a wacky liberal dude (Michael Moore) paid his bail so he could stay with a British friend and await trial (for what, we’re still not entirely sure). Most recently, the organization’s leader announced that he’ll be writing a book to cover his legal costs. Stay tuned for next year.

That brings us up to the present day. It is far from over, but a few Lead Pipers wanted to join the fray and weigh in on the situation from the librarian point of view. So here goes…

Kim on Information Activism & Scale

Considered as a historical document, the WikiLeaks “About” page reads something like the American Declaration of Independence. It describes as underlying principles of the organization a belief in “the defence of freedom of speech and media publishing, the improvement of our common historical record and the support of the rights of all people to create new history.” It quotes Thomas Jefferson in the assertion that “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” It refers directly to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and specifically to Article 19, which states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” And, like those rebels who produced the Declaration of Independence, the organization behind the document is now facing the consequences. Within the past month WikiLeaks accounts have been closed or suspended by an increasing list of companies including Amazon, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, Bank of America, and Apple. EveryDNS.net pulled their primary domain, wikileaks.org, offline (though not to worry, they have seemingly endless mirrors of the site). Not to mention the sexual assault allegations filed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Sweden. Right or wrong, it’s an astounding modern tale of David v. Goliath on an international scale.

What’s a librarian to think? We, of course, have our own declaration, the Library Bill of Rights, which asserts that libraries “should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.” It’s interesting, though not surprising, that one of the computer wallpaper options offered on the WikiLeaks “Support” page uses the same phrasing as a well-known library blog, “Information wants to be free.” Meanwhile, in the recent YouTube release of the Swedish television documentary WikiRebels, the term “information activist” was used several times to describe Assange. Evidenced in part by yet another rhetorically related library blog, I expect that many librarians would consider themselves information activists, if asked. In a post on The Young Librarians Series blog, Leah White defined an information activist as “a vigorous advocate of knowledge gained through study, communication, research or instruction.” Assange says that the people behind WikiLeaks, “believe a richer intellectual and historical record that is fuller and more accurate is in itself intrinsically good, and gives people the tools to make intelligent decisions.” While librarians don’t handle classified government documents on a daily basis, there’s a clear connection between the philosophy of WikiLeaks and that of our libraries. Information creates a knowledgeable citizenry, and a knowledgeable citizenry makes better choices.

Yet all libraries are clearly not on the same page when it comes to WikiLeaks: the Library of Congress, mother ship of all U.S. libraries, blocked access to the controversial website from its computers, though they apparently reinstated it later. Even the most opinionated information advocate — in fact, Assange himself (based on the change in WikiLeaks policy to edit later documents) — acknowledges that if the release of classified documents may cause harm to individuals named in those documents, there may be limits to how much information is good information. There is a line where information may shift from empowering to dangerous, and WikiLeaks has been walking that line. Still, the crux of the issue is whether an organization should have the right to publicly release leaked documents, which boils down to freedom of the press. When is it okay to censor a media organization? There’s no easy answer to that question, particularly when you consider an organization that exists outside the laws of any particular nation.

Complicating the issue, the most fascinating aspect of the WikiLeaks controversy is the fact that it’s a completely new phenomenon. Documents have been leaked in the past, both in the U.S. and in other nations, but they’ve been leaked to newspapers and other media on a smaller scale. The scale was smaller in large part because it took time to photocopy documents and send them to journalists, and once the documents had been leaked newspapers could only publish a certain amount at a time. The internet changed that playing field. What we’re seeing with WikiLeaks could never have happened before, and neither United States nor international law was prepared to deal with it. In an interview with Daniel Ellsberg, Assange’s predecessor commented:

This is the first really large-scale, unauthorized disclosure leak since the Pentagon papers. There has been nothing like it in the 40 years in between…. I couldn’t have released on this scale 40 years ago. In fact, I couldn’t have done what I did do without Xerox at that time. Ten years earlier I couldn’t have put out the Pentagon Papers.

WikiLeaks has gained so much attention not just because they are publishing classified documents, but because technology has made it possible for them to publish mind-boggling quantities of classified information without going through any traditional media outlets. Assange has coordinated with various international newspapers, but those papers have played the game on WikiLeaks’ terms. Furthermore, WikiLeaks is publishing this information without being subject to the laws of any individual nation, as their organization is distributed around the world. Most fascinating of all, behind Assange and WikiLeaks is a virtual guerilla army of the techno-savvy who have repeatedly–and with some success–attacked the companies who have taken a stance against WikiLeaks. We’re looking at a scenario in which the Web is like the nineteenth-century American West, and Assange is the new sheriff in town.

Eric on Transparency

If WikiLeaks has taught me anything, it’s the value of creating a culture of transparency. To be transparent is to have the ability to make decisions with clear objectives and reasoning and to be prepared with justification for one’s actions.

That’s the real value in transparency: you’re held accountable for your actions, and knowing that, you think critically before acting. You don’t want to make a mistake that will be seen by all, so you make sure your choices are sound. You make fewer poor decisions because you know what you do is in the open. Best of all, in a transparent society, you are ready to answer the “Why?” questions that will be asked after you’ve make a decision. Even if you make a mistake, you will have your reasoning to explain your actions.

On the Library of Congress’s blog, Matt Raymond shares the LOC’s statement on the decision to block WikiLeaks:

The Library decided to block Wikileaks because applicable law obligates federal agencies to protect classified information. Unauthorized disclosures of classified documents do not alter the documents’ classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents.

This is the equivalent of saying, “Them’s the rules.” It’s an easy out for government agencies. If the White House says so, then that’s the way it’s going to be. There’s no apparent critical thinking. There’s no reasoning. There’s simply following the rules.

I’m the father of a toddler. It’s much easier for me to say “Stop drawing on the wall with permanent marker” and put my kid into a timeout for defying that order than it is to get my kid to understand why drawing on the walls is a bad thing. After all, the kid will stop once put in a timeout. There’s no need to explain to him why his actions were bad–he just knows that there’s a punishment associated with that behavior and that’s enough to get him to stop. His toddler brain isn’t ready for critical thinking; it just responds to a negative stimulus.

At some point, he’s going to develop the capability to think for himself and solve complex problems. His vocabulary will shift from predominantly “NO” to predominantly “WHY?” My parenting strategy had better be ready for this. If I lay down rules like “Don’t dunk the kitty in the bathwater,” I had better be prepared with good reasons for why it’s a bad idea.

That’s much harder to do. It’s ridiculously easy to get my kid to follow rules now. As he grows, he’ll become more defiant if he can’t make sense of the rules of the house. This means I’ve got to be more transparent on why the rules exist; if I can’t come up with a good reason, I have to be willing to admit that they might not need to exist at all.

That’s the situation the Library of Congress was put in. It is enforcing a rule that has no apparent reasoning, and the American public is not a bunch of toddlers. The LOC needs to articulate the reasons for their actions. Perhaps they need to demand that the White House provide reasoning for its rules before following them. Simply citing a message from the White House is not reasoning.

Like the librarians who defied the PATRIOT Act by deleting circulation records and fighting the law in court, it’s time for the Library of Congress and any others who are told to ‘protect’ classified information to demand reasoning. It’s time for our government to be able to articulate why WikiLeak’d documents need protection in a way they helps us understand the decisions that are being made.

That said, I can’t claim that WikiLeaks should or should not be blocked. I haven’t read the vast majority of them, nor do I have the diplomatic or military expertise to know what would be a breach of security that would put real lives at risk. I do expect that the American public should demand reasons for civilian deaths in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Because they are embarrassing” is not a reasonable explanation for their protection. We need to know because the actions taken by our military and government are on the American public’s behalf.

Transparency is hard. It requires time to think deeper about decisions, to be prepared with an articulated reasoning for one’s actions, and to communicate reasons to the appropriate audiences. It also means that when you make a mistake, you learn from it.

Leigh Anne Throws the Books at You

And now for something completely different: the role of print artifacts in a digital scandal.

In a case of dueling memoirs that simply cries out for Aaron Sorkin’s input on the inevitable feature film, both Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks co-founder, Daniel Domscheit-Berg (a.k.a. Daniel Schmitt) have acquired publishing contracts for their version of what one could call WikiLeaks Genesis.  Yes, you read that correctly:  two people who leveraged social technologies to turn world politics upside down are now seeking both commercial gain and cultural legitimacy in the form of traditional print books and conventional publishing channels. This is what happens, apparently, when you upset Amazon, MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal: you’re forced to spread your message via an outdated medium that is (I hear) dying.

I shouldn’t joke; it’s not funny. And yet, in some ways it is. It’s just not “ha-ha” funny. Perhaps it’s more akin to that uncomfortable laughter that settles over a party when someone expresses controversial opinions in mixed company. Once more the question arises, a question some librarians thought long-settled: what is the appropriate role and value of a physical book in a 21st-century library environment?

Random House/Knopf/Crown certainly sees value, to the tune of $1.5 million for Assange, who vows to pour it all back into WikiLeaks. In the temporary absence of pre-pubs and review copies, librarians are left solely with their ethics and policies as the basis for decision-making about books that are certain to fly off library shelves, if purchased. But is popular demand enough, in this situation? Does the permanence of a physical text imply inevitable inclusion in a physical library?

Put on your collection development hats, librarians, and ask yourself some questions.  Will you purchase Schmitt and Assange’s books for your collections?  At least one pundit claims Assange’s writing shouldn’t be published at all. How would you respond? Does your library own Assange’s prior work, Underground? If not, will you purchase it now? Other texts of cultural relevance have sprung up in both digital and print formats; will you purchase these?

To take it a step further, what is the relationship (if any) between your library’s collection development policy and its intellectual freedom policy? What portions of the ALA Code of Ethics are relevant to this discussion?  How many replacement copies will your library purchase if the works are stolen?  How would you respond to a library user’s complaint about the purchase? How long will these works be relevant to your collection?  At what point, if any, should deselection occur? How will you make all these decisions?

I ask questions rather than dictate conditions because I prefer to judge a book by its covers, as well as what lies between them. In fact I cheerfully volunteer to review both memoirs so that the library community may have the published professional review we so frequently fall back on as necessary for our collection decisions (Google me, Random House: I’m born digital!). While I personally fall firmly in the camp of those who believe information wants to be free, our own admiration of–or disdain for–the politics of WikiLeaks is not enough of an objective standard by which to make these choices.  One of our roles as librarians is to collect and preserve the cultural artifacts spawned in the wake of current events, be they memoirs, newspaper articles, blog posts or podcasts…provided we take the time and effort to craft a professional rationale, and ensure that the works meet its requirements.

Having discharged our responsibility to our patrons, what is our responsibility to ourselves as library workers?  The most wonderful thing about the decision to publish print memoirs of the WikiLeaks affair is that it forces librarians on both sides of the “print vs. digital” skirmishes to review their positions. Rather than continuously predict the death of print, why can’t technophiles concede that there are weaknesses in the digital publishing model that the traditional publishing model can supplement? Late adopters, for their part, now have the opportunity to learn, in a format they prefer, how digital activists like Assange and Schmitt are shaping the future, and why the tools they use have such critical implications for information storage and retrieval. There is a happy medium to be found here, and I’m confident that library workers can use the WikiLeaks scenario as a framework for questioning our assumptions, understanding our philosophical differences, and crafting a professional discourse in which opposing viewpoints coexist peacefully, rather than at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.

In a delightful episode of serendipity, I’ve been reading Tracy Hickman’s novel, Song of the Dragon, between bouts of researching and writing this post. One of Hickman’s tribes is a race of elves called the Iblisi, whose function is to preserve the true history of the Rhonas empire, regardless of what fictions the various court factions cook up to gain favor with the Emperor. The Iblisi work secretly and silently, and few citizens of the Empire understand their work. However, without them, the Empire would crumble into utter confusion. So it is with librarians in the age of the 24/7 news cycle: we are here to manage the constant flow of data, and provide manageable frameworks for storage and retrieval. Sometimes that’s a book. Sometimes it’s a blog post. And sometimes, it’s a photo of questionable taste but cultural relevance. As long as the professional discourse about formats is rooted in logic, ethics and standards, I will be satisfied.

Battle on, WikiLeaks.  Battle on, librarians.  And may the odds EVER be in your favor.

Note: For those interested who will be in San Diego next week, you may want to join in on the ALA Midwinter discussion.

Image by Flickr user Mark Stosberg / CC-BY-NC-SA

A few weeks ago we asked you for your suggestions on what you’d like us to cover in future posts.

Two comments asked us to talk about upward mobility.

Kathleen says:
I’d like to see a post on planning for upward mobility in the library world… Training to schedule, additional education, how to find a mentor, etc. Thanks!

Danna says:
I agree with Kathleen – a post on upward mobility in the library world would be interesting and informative.

This one actually provoked a fair amount of internal debate. Some of us took a literal approach to the topic and had knee jerk negative reactions born from a strong aversion to management, some of us jumped in with practical advice, and some twisted the topic a little to discuss personal and professional growth without a focus on promotion. We figured since we had such strong and differing opinions, you might too.

Read on to see some of our thoughts on upward mobility and please share yours in the comments:

Introductions & Institutional Differences

Some of us felt particularly influenced by our personal circumstances and wanted to share those up front.

Ellie (Reference Librarian, Austin Community College): Just as an introduction, I’m approaching this more from a personal growth and leadership perspective rather than a strictly ‘moving up the ranks’ perspective. At my institution we have a fairly flat structure. Each of our eight campuses has a Head Librarian and nearly all the rest of us are Reference Librarians. (There is also an E-Resources Librarian and a Library System Administrator.) Head Librarians trade in some of their reference desk hours and collection development responsibilities to take on more managerial tasks as well as a bigger role in system wide decisions, but we are all on the same set faculty salary scale which is based on level of education and years of experience. There are a number of opportunities to lead committees and other projects and my institution is very supportive in providing professional development.

Kim (Reference and Instruction Librarian, Boise State University): I don’t feel that I know much about upward mobility, nor that I really want to. The term just conjures up images in my mind of pants suits and power lunches, both of which I have some aversion to! It’s true that I’m aiming for tenure and promotion at my university, but of course that’s also my only alternative to finding a new job in a couple of years (no tenure = end of contract). Of course I try to do my job well and perhaps I foster ambitions of “someday” being a dean or director, but I think of that in a very abstract, it-would-be-good-to-be-the-boss sort of way. Would I want to give up the opportunity to work individually with students and see their a-ha moments, to instead spend that time balancing budgets and meeting with potential donors? I’m really not sure.

I haven’t sought out any leadership roles or mentorship programs, though I’ve been lucky to have mentors who have encouraged me to do things like apply for Emerging Leaders and run for chair of ACRL’s University Libraries Section. I’m happy to take charge when the need is there, but my true nature is more of a backstage type. I’ve never thought of myself as UN-ambitious, but when you toss around terms like “upward mobility” I just can’t garner much enthusiasm. I aspire to participate in our field and make a difference on my campus, but I just don’t know if I would ever want to run the show. I’ve read that it’s a characteristic of my generation to be averse to taking on management roles, though I wonder if that’s because we — let’s say Generations X and Y here — have a different perspective on how management should work.

Derik (Web Developer, Springshare Inc.): Upward mobility is something I never looked for either. No desire to manage or lead. I don’t even like delegating work (I’d rather just do it myself, which was problematic when I supervised student workers). But, I did start as a student worker, became a “para-professional”, then an actual librarian, and now I’m a web developer. It’s been upward in the sense of increasing enjoyment of the work, freedom, and pay. For the most part, I achieved all this mobility through two means: volunteering and self-education. More on those below.

Emily (Scholarly Communication Librarian, Oregon Health & Science University): Well I don’t feel upwardly mobile at all, even though, unlike Derik, I do have a desire to manage and lead. I just accepted my 5th temporary librarian position since August 2007, when I earned my MLS; and just hope that there’s another job out there down the line when my current contracts end. Working temporary job after temporary job is frustrating and challenging, as made evident by my mojo post. I work hard to remain positive about these challenges and I hope to form them into opportunities for future growth in the profession. What I experience now will inform where and how I grow. Even though my positions aren’t propelling me into an official leadership role, I am growing professionally in each temporary contract position.

Hilary (Assistant Head of Collection Management for Engineering and E-Science, North Carolina State University): Being upwardly mobile doesn’t necessarily mean that you manage other people – you could be faced with event management (e.g., welcome back week for students), project management (e.g., acting as a project leader or project contributor), or team management (e.g., acting as a coordinator for a group of people who have no formal accountability over each other). Serving on committees or task forces within professional library organizations (e.g., SLA, ALA) are great ways to build experience with event, team, or project management. Even if you’re not leading the project, event or team, while you’re participating, pay attention that what seems to work and what doesn’t seem to work. Learning management skills by watching others is a great way to soak up both good practices and to lean away from not so good practices.

Brett (Director, Collingswood (NJ) Public Library): I think there are elements of upward mobility that appeal to all of us. I don’t think I’ve met anyone in the field who isn’t interested in any of the following, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t met anyone who’s interested in all of them, either.

• Job security
• Promotion
• Higher pay
• Management responsibility
• Greater operational responsibility
• Greater autonomy
• Opportunities to teach, select material, work with interesting technology, etc.
• Do more good for the people you’re already working with
• Do more good for more people already in your general constituency
• Do more good for the profession
• Work at a more appealing employer
• Work with people you like and admire

For me, the thing that motivates me the most is doing more work for people already in my general constituency. It drives me crazy that there are people who live in my town who don’t have library cards, even though they’re free (or, more precisely, they’ve already paid for them). I feel as though I’m failing them. This particular motivator might not always be closely associated with upward mobility in many librarians’ minds, but I see a very clear connection. In order to reach my neighbors who aren’t using the Library, I need to have a higher profile with more people and with the right people. I need to be invited to the right events, raise more money, and make sure the library is more visible. I need to gain a greater understanding of what they want and find ways to deliver it. For instance, we may need a new building or to acquire a parking lot. I’m not sure we’ll manage it, but these are the kinds of things upwardly mobile librarians accomplish. As near as I can tell, accomplishing them pretty much by definition makes you upwardly mobile in other librarians’ opinion.

I’m also motivated to teach (MLS students, which is why I’m working on my PhD), to do more good for the profession (I want librarians to have a greater depth and breadth of skills, especially in technology and fundraising, and I want us to take more interest in the history of librarianship), and I want to work on cool projects with people I like and admire. I think this last piece is too often overlooked: one of my favorite reasons to get up each day is the possibility of working with colleagues, both at MPOW and across the country.

Mentorship

Ellie: When I started at ACC I was assigned a mentor. This was a reference librarian who had been with the college many years. I was very lucky that he was (and is) incredibly kind, intelligent, generous with his time and knowledge, and fast to reply. However I also paid attention to who else seemed particularly successful in our system and frequently turned to them for advice as well. I also had a chance to be assigned as a mentor to a new hire and the experience has been just as rewarding. I definitely learned at least as much from my mentee as she did from me and that bond has continued. As we both grow professionally we continue to share what we’re learning with each other.

Lastly, I have been lucky enough to have the support to travel to a few national conferences, where I found mentors from outside my institution, mostly through attending social functions and through friends of friends. And mostly from thinking someone seemed cool and smart and starting a conversation with them.

Emily: I used to be anti-mentor–mostly because of my perception of traditional mentor/mentee relationships. I have always perceived traditional or formal mentoring as entrenched in power structures of which I’d like to not be part. Seeing formal mentoring as pairing people in positions of high power with people who had relatively little to none. This made (and still makes) me uncomfortable and I never sought out a mentor relationship in this vein.

However, I decided to try it out when ALA Connect unveiled it’s mentoring network, Mentor Connect. Now I’ve established relationships with three people via that tool, one mentor and two mentees. My mentor is someone who has merely acted as a sounding board, asking leading questions and helping me remain accountable for my personal goals. My mentees are two library science students (well, one recently graduated) who have sought guidance in choices for school and their future careers. I’ve tried to emulate the positive model and experience I’ve had with my mentor, asking reflexive questions, and just enabling my mentees to have an ear when they need it.

I have other informal mentor relationships with former supervisors, colleagues, friends, parents, my massage therapist, and numerous other people whose opinions and advice I respect and admire. I think unlike the traditional model of mentor and mentee relationships, I rely on my vast network of people who have diverse experiences and backgrounds to assist with particular situations and advice as I need it. (Just-in-time mentoring?)

Hilary: SLA also has various mentoring programs within its divisions (groups of members focused on a particular facet of librarianship, such as the Science-Technology Division) and chapters (groups of members brought together in a common geographic area, such as the North Carolina Chapter of SLA). When I first joined SLA, I signed up to be a mentee within the Physics-Astronomy-Math (PAM) Division. I had an enjoyable, yet very informal experience working with a librarian and SLA member who helped me get my bearings with collection management and collection building for the physical sciences.

Image by Flickr user kool_skatkat / CC-BY-NC-ND

Training/Education/Gaining Experience

Hilary: Some of the ways one can gain some training/prof development to either prepare for upward mobility or to give one some good perspective of what it’s like for managers is to partake of opportunities such ALA’s Library Leadership and Management Association (LLAMA) group offered last year. A series of webinars led by Pat Wagner covered topics such as as techniques to guide decision-making, empowering library staff and library managers without the use of micromanagement, and how to develop and implement strategic planning.

When I was working as a library assistant, I would jot down notes about “what not do to” when/if I ever got into the role of managing others. We’re all human and humans sometimes act without thinking things through completely. Looking back on my experience as a library assistant (as someone who now manages other professionals), I always have this fear that I am not providing the kind of leadership and guidance that I wish would just come naturally. As a new manager, I expect my approach to management will change over time and will improve with experience. Most of the folks who I formally supervise have been librarians far longer than I and are completely competent at what they do. My current approach is to make sure that I communicate as best as I can with them about what projects or initiatives are coming down the pike that will impact their work or to anticipate how their expertise and experience could benefit a new project or initiative. I try to model my actions/intentions off of the more experienced librarian experts/colleagues to help guide my decision-making, communication skills and ways to empower others around me. I expect that I’ll always strive to be a better manager throughout my career, no matter what stage I’m at.

Ellie: I think the number one thing you can do is let people know what you want to be doing. I was very lucky in that I was continually asked this. I started part time with my college doing very basic website cleanup. My supervisor took the time to ask me what my goals were and I told her I wanted to work as a reference librarian. A new campus was opening soon and needed hourly reference librarians and my supervisor suggested me.

If you’re hoping to move up within your own institution, your supervisors will be the best people to help you figure out what trainings are available that will gain you the skills they want you to have. If you’re hoping to move up outside of your institution, I would probably start by reading job descriptions that appeal to you and see what you’re missing and look for opportunities to fill those gaps. Many higher positions require a certain number of years experience with increasing responsibilities or a certain number of years experience managing. Are there opportunities in your current position for you to lead a committee or supervise interns or student workers? The ideal situation is to have support from within your organization to help you, but if that is lacking, I think Hilary and Emily pointed to some excellent ALA resources for a more self directed approach.

Derik: I volunteered for committees and projects a lot at my previous jobs. This gave me the opportunity to learn and become more knowledgeable in the workings of the library. I ended up doing instruction sessions while still in library school because I volunteered to help out when my library was short-staffed. And the more active you are on (on diverse projects) the better your resume will look when you do job searching.

Even more so, taking on projects that forced me to learn new skills, is what lead me to my current job. From building my own website to doing some heavy customizations on an open source ticketing system, I learned tons (in these cases, html/css/javascript/php/mysql) by having a project and then learning my way to a solution. You can learn a lot by reading, but unless you really put it to a directed goal, you’re not likely to get as much from the experience.

Kim: The thing that troubles me most about upward mobility in our field (any many fields, I’m sure) is that success by traditional definition is always going to involve a tradeoff. In order to move up the ranks you have to be willing to give other things up: like the ability to spend time with family, or to live in a certain location. Does more responsibility have to mean more hours at work? It shouldn’t. Or if you’re dedicated to living in a certain place — and I think this applies to Emily’s frustration above — it’s going to be much harder to find that full-time position and move up the ranks than if you’re willing to toss all your belongings in a truck on a regular basis. In Libraryland, moving UP usually means moving AROUND to a variety of institutions in a variety of places as you step up the ladder. How much are we willing to give up to move up? These are the questions we have to ask ourselves.

Of course, it doesn’t always work that way, right? There are people who manage to advance their careers in their desired locations and still maintain their life/work balance. There are people — like Brett — who manage to find the seemingly perfect position in the perfect location for them. Perhaps we need those people to offer us some insight into that true kind of upward mobility, the kind that allows you to rise in both your personal life and career, simultaneously. If you’re one of those (possibly mythical) people, please be sure to comment below.

Since we began this blog nearly two years ago, we have collaborated every few months on a group post to which we all contribute. So far the topics of these posts have been ours, but we’d much rather have them come from you. For our next group post and, we hope, for subsequent group posts, we’d like you to ask the questions.

What burning questions or concerns do you have about libraries, librarianship, and librarians?

• For us to address
• For us to investigate
• Or that you’d like to toss out to the Lead Pipe readership

We’re also interested in hearing your ideas for any of our future posts:

• What topics would you like to see in future articles?
• What are we doing well?
• What would you change?
• Is there anyone you would like to see publish a guest post?
• Who would you nominate as a new regular Lead Pipe blogger?

We’re strong believers in the power of constructive criticism, so don’t be easy on us — be honest. Chide us, challenge us! Please send your questions, suggestions, and any other thoughts to us by Wednesday, September 1, and we’ll have our responses for you in our September 15 post.

Feel free to use any of these venues to talk back to us:

• Comment on this post
• Tweet it – http://twitter.com/libraryleadpipe
• Facebook us – http://www.facebook.com/pages/In-the-Library-with-the-Lead-Pipe/88022844848
• Use the contact  form – http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/contact-us/
• Contact any of us directly. Our contact information is in our bios, which are linked at the right of the screen and on the authors page.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Ellie Collier

I’m the one who suggested the topic and I probably have the least to contribute on account of it. I’m really very interested in reading all the responses and hope many of you take the time to leave your favorite conferences (and why) in the comments.

I’ve always had a good time at ALA and typically walked away with new friends and new ideas, but I’m looking to try a smaller (and hopefully more cost-effective) conference next year.

I had a really fantastic time a our first annual Library Instruction Round Table (LIRT) regional summit. It was free and included lunch. And I’m not even a member of LIRT! (I did offer to head a table talk topic, so I was kinda/sorta a speaker.) One nice thing about the LIRT conference was that it was all local librarians. I either knew, or knew someone who knew nearly everyone there.

I have also been going to the Texas Library Association annual conference regularly for the past four years (as long as I’ve been a professional librarian). I’ve spoken at the last three TLA conferences and I know that has definitely made it a more interesting, engaging, and rewarding experience for me.

Conferences I’ve attended:

• ALA Annual (3)
• ALA Midwinter
• TLA (Texas Library Association) (4)
• Library Instruction Round Table Regional Summit

Conferences I’m considering:

• ACRL
• CIL
• LOEX
• TCCTA (Texas Community College Teachers Association)
• code4lib (but I don’t think I’m quite tech savvy enough)

Hilary Davis

I’ve had the opportunity to attend a decent array of library conferences over the past six years, some as an MLS student, but most as a new-ish librarian. I’ll highlight a few conferences that have had strong influence on my development as a librarian and that I would recommend to other librarians. My first library conference was either the Federal Depository Library Council Meeting or the LITA Forum—I can’t remember which came first. I was still getting my MLS out of the way when both of these came to town (St. Louis, MO) and I wanted to take the opportunity to find out what they were like compared to the botany and evolution conferences that I had attended as a biology grad student (aka, life before librarianship). For the Federal Depository meeting, I was joined by a few fellow MLS students and faculty who tucked us under their wings and gave us the inside scoop on what the big issues were, how to read between the lines and introduced us to their librarian colleagues. Their insights made it much more interesting than it might have been to our untrained eyes. As such, the Federal Depository meeting has been the most contentious conference that I’ve been to in the 5-6 years that I’ve been going to library conferences. Those government docs librarians really know how to get into a debate! So, if you’re looking for some intense discussion, I’d suggest adding a Federal Depository Library Council Meeting to your conference plan in the near future.

The LITA Forum was completely different. I didn’t know anyone at this conference—none of my fellow MLS students attended and if any other faculty in my program attended, I didn’t see them there. While I didn’t get to benefit from the insights of a steadfast LITA member, I did participate in an unusual way. In exchange for helping out with the sessions, I got a reduced registration rate. I was one of those people who collected session evaluations and reported A/V problems to the facility staff. While I couldn’t always devote my full attention and let everything just sink in, the sessions that I got to attend were all new to me and as such, were pretty foundational to my entry into librarianship. I remember attending one of the early sessions by Nancy Fried Foster (the anthropologist who collaborates with Susan Gibbons at the University of Rochester on studying how students work) where I took the opportunity to meet Cliff Lynch, one of my libraryland heroes. This LITA Forum was also where I attended my first dine-around (I don’t think we had dine-arounds at the botany and evolution conferences) and as luck would have it, ended up splitting pitchers of beer with my future colleagues at the NCSU Libraries—Andrew Pace, Steve Meyer and Steve McCann (none of whom are still at the NCSU Libraries). It was a fortuitous conference. I would most certainly attend another LITA conference in the future; it’s just that my particular focus has shifted from an open playing field (in 2004) to collection management and collection assessment and it’s not always easy to justify attending conferences outside my specific area. The LITA Forum I attended was a smaller affair—the venue was easy to navigate (all in one spot) and the number of attendees wasn’t overwhelming. It was easy to rub elbows/beer steins with smart, inventive librarians and library visionaries.

My conference/professional organization of choice has been the Special Libraries Association (SLA). As a student, I joined the local chapter of SLA (St. Louis Metro Area Chapter) and met some super helpful mentors who I’ve continued to keep in touch with through the years. Whereas other organizations wouldn’t give me the time of day as an MLS student (namely, ALA), SLA saw me as a positive asset to their organization and began grooming me immediately. So, naturally, I’ve been a loyal SLA Annual conference attendee since 2005 (Toronto) and am now the lead in planning for the Science-Technology Division (of the SLA) sessions at the upcoming SLA Annual Conference in New Orleans in June. Don’t be mistaken in thinking that SLA Annual conferences only focus on corporate librarianship. SLA is one of the most diverse organizations and includes academic, public, and government, as well as corporate and solo librarians. When they get together to carry off a conference, good things can happen. Yes, I’ve been to some mediocre conference sessions at SLA, but I’ve also been to some astounding sessions. I always bring back a notebook of new ideas and new ways of seeing things. SLA Annual conferences have been my way of filling in the gaps of what my MLS program omitted and of keeping my professional training up to snuff. SLA offers loads of pre-conference training programs (some half-day, some whole-day) and while they do cost an arm and a leg ($300-400 average each), SLA has a healthy set of travel awards and stipends to help offset the cost burden. MLS students and new librarians should, in particular, pay attention to these funding opportunities as there are many to apply for. I can’t say the same great things for the SLA Leadership Summits that I’ve attended. The SLA Leadership Summit events are open to all SLA members, but are mostly meant for SLA leaders (i.e., division/chapter chairs and presidents, secretaries, treasurers, chair-elects, etc.). Some of the programs aren’t very compelling (they usually bring in a motivational speaker who has no idea what librarians do to talk to us about things like loyalty and persuasion—a little too much tipping of the Kool-Aid for my tastes) and make some days seem to last into infinity. The upside is that the networking and individual division/chapter planning opportunities are excellent. Again, another chance to rub elbows/beer steins with creative people, renew friendships, and meet new colleagues. So, my advice is to include some SLA Annual conferences in your future. They’re not nearly as big and overwhelming as ALA Annual and are much easier to navigate and run into people who you want to build professional relationships with (and there are no book cart drill team competitions).

The other conference I want to highlight is the Charleston Conference (next one is November 3-6, 2010). This is an excellent, intimate conference for those who have any deep or fleeting interest in collections, acquisitions, and scholarly communication. Unlike any other conference I’ve been to, the Charleston Conference has a truly unique and distinct personality. It always occurs in Charleston, SC, and is planned by the same (at least some of the same) inventive folks. This is the only conference that I’ve been to that has skits between the consecutive keynote sessions in the mornings. While it’s a little weird at first, it’s kind of refreshing. I love the themes of the Charleston Conference as well—”Anything Goes!” for 2010, “What Tangled Webs We Weave” for 2007, for example. This conference is smaller than SLA Annual and is always in the same venue (the Francis Marion and the Embassy Suites across the courtyard), so if you’re a repeat attendee, it’s easy to plan for lodging and dining (of which there are some amazing options in Charleston). This conference is also one of the rare instances where library product vendors/publishers truly participate in the conversation. Rather than just exhibiting their wares, you can find vendors/publishers presenting on the same topics as librarians, having the same debates and struggling with the same issues—just from their perspective. I’ve found this to be really enlightening and helpful in my career as a librarian. So, by all means, put the Charleston Conference at the front of your wishlist of conferences to attend.

Speaking of wishlists—there are many other conferences within libraryland that I’d like to attend (and haven’t yet had the opportunity to attend). The Library Assessment Conference is one that I’m really looking forward to attending one day. My job is pushing me to learn new ways to assess the use, access, and composition of our collections and my sense is that this conference could help offer some helpful strategies. I’d also love to attend Computers in Libraries one day. I’ve heard so many great things about this conference. There’s an interesting-looking intimate conference taking place in June (abutting the SLA Annual Conference this year) that I’d love to be able to attend: the Science Bootcamp 2010 in Lowell, MA. This year, the topic is on E-Science and preparing librarians to help researchers who work in an E-Science landscape. Outside of libraryland, I’d like to one day attend an Emerging Technologies conference (EmTech) sponsored by MIT as one of those conferences that cut across disciplines to showcase what’s coming in terms of tech trends.

Conferences I’ve Attended:

• ACRL
• ACS (American Chemical Society) National Conference
• ALA Annual
• ALA/ACRL Institute of Scholarly Communication
• ALA Midwinter
• ARl/CNI Fall Forum
• ASIS&T Annual Conference
• Charleston Conference (2)
• DASER (Digital Archives in Science & Engineering Resources) Summit
• Federal Depository Library Council Meeting
• LAUNC-CH (Librarians Association UNC-Chapel Hill) Research Forum
• LITA
• North Carolina Serials Conference
• SLA Annual (5)
• SLA Leadership Summit (2)
• TRLN (Triangle Research Libraries Network) Annual Conference (5)
• Numerous webinars, local workshops/seminars

Conferences I’m Considering

• Library Assessment Conference
• Computers in Libraries
• Science Bootcamp 2010
• Emerging Technologies Conference (EmTech)

Brett Bonfield

I really love ALA Annual. It’s the one time I feel like I get to be a no-modifier librarian. Not a public librarian or a library director or a library techie or whatever: for those few days, I feel like a capital L, Librarian. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I feel like a multi-modifier librarian—whatever I want to learn about is available.

Some examples:

• I’m crazy about Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) programming. No matter the room size, their presentations are always efficiently run, with well prepared and informative speakers. Annual is the one time I get to see ALCTS presenters doing their thing.
• I always try to drop in on small or smallish committees and discussion groups. I just pick out an interesting-sounding group or discussion topic and play fly-on-the-wall while they talk shop.
• Watching ALA Council deliberate is fascinating.

Though, of course, the best thing about Annual is seeing people I only get to see once or twice a year and meeting people for the first time, especially people whose work has influenced my thinking about how I do my job.

My other favorite conference is code4lib, which is sort of the anti-ALA Annual. It’s single-track, which means everyone is in the same room most of the time. It’s small, it’s cheap, it’s specialized, and the presentations are short—just twenty minutes for the more formal-ish presentations, with plenty of time for five-minute lightning talks as well. During presentations, everyone in the room has a laptop in front of them and chats about what the speaker is saying, so just about everyone is participating most of the time, even if there’s disarmingly little eye contact.

For me, the most notable thing about code4lib is that it’s amazingly democratic: code4libbers vote on everything. Prior to the conference they vote on the keynote speaker, presenters and presentations, and where the conference will be. During the conference, they vote on things like which groups should get the larger rooms during break-out sessions. It’s really wonderful to see people treat each other that way. And, despite the fact that many of them are friends who only see each other once or twice a year, they work very, very hard not to be cliquish.

Of course, as with other library conferences, the participants are amazing librarians (even if many of them don’t have library degrees and a good portion don’t work in libraries) and the presentations are interesting and useful. More than any other conference I’ve attended, code4lib made me want to learn well enough to keep up with everyone else—to have something useful to contribute to every project that anyone discussed, because all of them were fascinating. It probably won’t ever happen, but the prospect of knowing enough to present at code4lib is a constant source of inspiration.

Though I no longer belong to SLA or go to the conference—while there are many public librarians who belong to SLA, I think ALA and PLA provide more to me in my current role—I believe strongly that SLA Annual is the one conference every library school student should attend. To quote Hilary, “SLA saw me as a positive asset to their organization and began grooming me immediately.” No matter what area of librarianship you think you want to go into, no matter where in the world you think you’ll work, SLA has something to offer. That is, it’s big enough to be comprehensive but small and efficient enough to feel as though people know who you are and what you’re capable of contributing. In addition, I think it’s smart of SLA to bundle membership in the national association with membership in your local chapter.

Conferences I’ve attended:

• ACRL
• ALA Annual (3)
• ALA Midwinter (3)
• code4lib
• New Jersey Library Association (2)
• PLA
• Pres4Lib
• SLA Annual
• Virtual Academic Library Conference of New Jersey

Conferences I’m considering:

• Access
• American Communication Association
• Charleston Conference
• Computers in Libraries
• Library History Round Table
• LITA Forum
• National Communication Association
• National Diversity in Libraries Conference
• SXSW
• Various TEDx conferences
• Various user conferences (especially if we end up using Evergreen to manage our inventory)

Emily Ford

Even though I’m pretty active with some ALA committee appointments and have attended ALA a few times, the conferences that I’ve found most useful and engaging are not ALA. They are Online Northwest and the Oregon Virtual Reference Summit. Both of these are more local or regional conferences, and presentations and panels are generally creative, doable, and foster future collaborations in one’s locality without the mess of the ALA bureaucracy to get in the way. Plus, they both have the ability to attract some great keynote speakers. (Full disclosure: I’m on the planning team for this year’s Virtual Reference Summit.)

The Oregon Public Health Association Annual Conference is a good conference in one of my library liaison subject areas. The first time I attended (during election season two years ago) the conference had a very deep political bent and wasn’t crouched with speak of “neutrality” (as we often do in our professional library communities). During lunch speakers told us how to vote on local ballot measures. I didn’t agree with all of the choices, but I was glad to hear what the organization officially thought. In fact, it made me even more want to attend the conference in the future.

In the future I’d really like to attend a HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) conference. This group does some innovative deep (and critical) thinking about technology and learning; and HASTAC attracts professionals, academics and students from all disciplines. The problem is always finding and making the time to engage. On the whole, I’m hoping to find more regional conferences that are more participatory and enable me to take action with my new ideas when I get back to work.

Derik Badman

I must really love Computers in Libraries (CIL) as I’ve been there every year since I became a librarian except the first. Though, honestly, I mostly end up going because I present there (the most recent three times I’ve been there) and so they pay the registration. Plus, it’s in DC, so its drivable for me (I’m not much of a traveler). CIL is hit or miss for me from a learning view point. It’s often too simplistic for my techie tastes. But, because it’s fairly small and has a lot of repeat attendees, it’s great for socializing and networking. I always go to it excited to see friends again, and I always come back from it with new friends. The more I go to conferences, the more they are a social event rather than an educational experience. Most conference presentations are not the most efficient (or enjoyable) way to access the information being offered (exception, of course, for excellent and skilled speakers or for sessions that take advantage of the room of participants), so the real draw is just hanging out with other people in the field. And those connections lead places, be it personally or professionally. That was my general impression of the one ALA Annual I attended. The socializing was rewarding, but the presentations and meetings themselves felt much less worthwhile.

Pres4Lib, an unconference about presenting that was held at Princeton Public Library in NJ, was a really positive experience. The very small size (we could all fit in one room) and the focused theme helped increase the social interaction and the informational content, as did the participatory pre-conference scheduling (attendees suggested topics ahead of time on a wiki). I’d like to go to more events like it, where everyone is encouraged to participate and everyone is there because the specific theme is of interest to them. Too many conferences are so broadly planned as to offer only sporadic interest, though, on the other hand, the serendipitous discover is less likely in a focused theme. Library Camp East was also an unconference, but it had no theme and thus, I thought, floundered a bit more in deciding what would be the focus of discussion.

I have the feeling I’ll need to find more local conferences to attend, as the travel costs of doing elsewhere are hard to take. Though, now that I’m not officially a librarian (or working in a library), maybe I won’t be attending conferences at all. Time will tell.

Conferences I’ve Attended:

• ALA Annual
• ALA Midwinter
• ACRL (2)
• Computers in Libraries (5)
• Library Camp East
• Pres4Lib

Conferences I’m Considering:

• I’d really like to get to code4lib, especially now that I’m actually working as a programmer.

Kim Leeder

I have to admit that I’m feeling a little intimidated by those lists above! Although I’ve been attending ALA Midwinter and Annual regularly since about 2005, that’s pretty much all I’ve attended on the national level during my career thus far. I haven’t even — gasp! – been to an ACRL conference. It’s not due to a lack of desire, that’s for sure. It comes down to geography: unlike my fellow Lead Pipers I’ve been living in rather remote areas of the country where traveling is just more time-consuming and more expensive. Try booking a flight to Boise, Idaho, and you’ll see what I mean. In the end I just can’t make a good argument for spending either my library’s or my own money on more than the two ALA conferences in a year, especially in these times. I did have the opportunity to participate in last year’s ACRL virtual conference, which was better than nothing. If that is anything like other virtual conferences, though, I think they have a long way to go before they can compare to the real thing.

I’ve attended the state library associations’ conferences in the places I’ve lived as a library student and librarian: two conferences convened by the Arizona Library Association in the mid-2000′s, and two Idaho Library Association conferences annually since 2007 (Idaho is a big state so each year they hold a state-wide conference and a variety of smaller conferences for regions in the state). I like being part of my state association; it makes me feel more connected locally. I particularly enjoy networking with others in my area and I appreciate the fact that every type of librarian and library staffer is gathered in the same room to share their unique areas of knowledge with each other. I learn a lot about what school and public and special librarians do at the state conferences, which keeps me tuned in to the larger issues that affect us all. I also appreciate the opportunity to give presentations, an opportunity that can be difficult to come by on the national level.

I’m not going to list my “conferences I’ve attended” and those I’m considering, since the first list would be woefully short and the second would be woefully long. I accept the fact that living in the wide open spaces of the interior West means I have fewer opportunities to attend conferences, and as a result I seek out other ways to participate in the field. My committee work fills the void, as does the opportunity to connect virtually through this blog, through Facebook, and through a variety of webinars.

Please join the conversation by sharing your conference experiences (or coping mechanisms) below in the comments.

We thought the New Year would be a good time for us to get together and do another group post; what do we want for 2010? Comment on this post and tell us: What do you want for 2010 in your library, in libraries in gen eral, or in the profession?

Ellie

On a purely personal level, I’d like to get a fantastic response rate on the environmental scan my library will be performing this spring semester. On a broader level I’d love to see more libraries performing their own user studies and publicizing their results. For pie-in-the-sky I want catalogs magically fixed.

Emily

I’d love to see a radical expansion of Public Access Policies (like the NIH Public Access Policy) that are responsible to researchers, archivists, librarians, and the public. As a matter of fact, the Office of Science and Technology Policy is currently taking public comment regarding expansion of Public Access Policies. If we can give good feedback to inform the shape of future Public Access, then maybe we can have a Public Access model that works for everyone involved: researchers who want to disseminate their work, librarians who help people find that work, libraries that can consult on creating repositories, publishers that remain important in the peer-review model, and the public that funds the very research at stake.

Brett

I want to see some Amazon Libraries. To me, the idea seems so obvious I can’t believe it hasn’t yet happened: a full partnership between Amazon and a subset of public libraries–maybe a group of independent municipal libraries, or perhaps entire library systems.

The legal arrangements would take some doing, but I think it would be worth it for Amazon. FedEx purchased Kinko’s, and UPS purchased Mail Boxes Etc., in order to have a large, trusted network of brick-and-mortar retail outlets. Amazon could benefit from a similar arrangement by appealing to in-person, impulse, and last-minute shoppers, and it could also reduce its warehousing and last mile expenses. For example, it could begin offering free shipping on any purchase for customers willing to pick up their items at a local library, a common practice among retailers such as REI and Nordstrom. Amazon could then raise the minimum for free home delivery from its current limit of $25. I don’t think a new minimum of $50 or even $100 would be unreasonable–after all, if these customer want their purchases shipped for free all they have to do is visit their local public library.

As beneficial as this arrangement could be for Amazon, I think it could be even more of a boon to participating libraries:

• Amazon’s website is more usable than any library website I’ve ever seen;
• Library operations, especially our collection development activities, are inefficient and expensive–and we still don’t have useful predictive statistics, which can cause long waits for popular items and encourages us to rely heavily on ILL;
• Library cataloging is very good, but it’s frequently slow, and we almost always duplicate effort.

By partnering with Amazon, libraries could outsource many of these activities to an organization that is among the world leaders in each area. Amazon would manage its partner libraries’ technical infrastructure and material-related operations; in exchange, libraries would handle all in-person transactions and customer service. Depending on availability, cardholders would have the option to borrow or buy popular items–and could still rely on their libraries to offer reference services, training and programming, and other activities library users have come to expect. The cost savings for participating libraries, plus the revenue they could earn by selling some items instead of just lending them, would help these libraries become far more solvent.

The only obvious danger would be to privacy, but that could be handled by storing circulation records on-site and purging any personally identifying data before it is uploaded to Amazon. That is, assuming people want to maintain their anonymity. For those who don’t–that is, for those who want to use their Amazon login in place of a library card–they could enjoy Amazon’s tailored shopping experience at the library they know and love.

Hilary

Pie-in-the-sky for libraries in general:  I’d like to see augmented reality apps (demo using Layar) to be developed for use in libraries to expose collections and services.  The NCSU Libraries is nearly there with its WolfWalk application.

As a practical application for libraries in 2010, I hope to see the implementation of a more effective way to manage collections, especially licensed content like journals and databases, alongside things like usage patterns and return on investment analytics.  Keep an eye on the ambitious efforts from OCLC (have some spare time? check out this video presentation) and the OLE project to see who gets there first.

Related to the profession, I hope that SLA can recover from its name change initiative (identity crisis perhaps?) and continue to advocate for its members in an intentional, strategic, valued, and thoughtful way.  In an historic vote to change the name or keep the name, the process made members think about what it means to be a member of a professional organization – defining expectations, questioning SLA’s motivations – and it fractured the member pool soon after the organization reached its 100 year-old birthday.  SLA has been my professional organization of choice, and I hope that 2010 is a year of renewal and momentum in the right direction for SLA.

Kim

Well, since you asked… all I personally want for 2010 is to be granted tenure: magically, early, and without all the hassle! (Just kidding.)

Just as pie-in-the-sky, though, here’s my wish:

All I want for 2010 is a national referendum requiring that true research skills be taught as part of the K-12 school curriculum, including lessons on how to distinguish different types of online and print resources, how to find authoritative research, and how to be a critical information consumer. I would like to see students in my classes who understand that not all information is good information. I would also like to see colleges and universities embrace the national movement in research instruction (that I just invented) and apply it to the higher education curriculum so that all college students learn advanced research skills as they broaden and advance their educations. I would like to see us raise a new generation of information savvy American citizens who think critically about the information they receive as they move through our diverse, opinionated, and complex world.

If I may be granted a second wish, I wish for the American Library Association to find its way in reinventing itself as an association, and as a set of associations, that might better support and inspire librarians and libraries around the country.

Help Wanted, No Bullshit by Sekimura / CC-BY

This week we decided to do a “collective wisdom” post about job hunting mistakes. This is an issue affecting every librarian, whether you’ve got a job, you’re in the market, or you’ll begin looking five years down the road. We’ve all made errors in selecting jobs to apply for, drafting our cover letters and resumes, and during interviews. Once we realize what we’ve done, we promise ourselves never to repeat them again and create strategies that work for us. Many of us have also been on the other side of the table, interviewing great candidates who are amazingly well prepared, and also some applicants who fail to put their best foot forward. This group post is our way of pulling together our collective experiences as both interviewees and interviewers and offering up some practical advice to our readers. We welcome your thoughts, advice, and questions.

Plan Ahead!

Before you look for a job, while you’re still in school or if you’re getting curious about another facet of the library profession, it is most advantageous to you to schedule informational interviews. Ask engaging and meaningful questions to show your curiosity about the institution/organization. Ask about work duties, ask about the organizational culture. Really get a feel for the place and decide if it’s something to keep on your list for a place of employ in the future. When it’s all said and done, write thank you notes to the people who took the time to speak with you. They will remember you when you return for an interview and in the future you can talk about this experience in your cover letter. If it’s not some place you want to work, you can still occasionally email these people and “update” them on your professional life. You never know, they might have some inside skinny about jobs in that area. Currently, I am employed in a library where I conducted an informational interview two years before I eventually landed an actual interview at the institution. Colleagues with whom I work everyday are people who received thank you notes from me while I was still in graduate school. -Emily

As You Consider Applying

Don’t worry about your inexperience. While many hiring employers look for applicants with experience in the job for which they’re hiring, some don’t. I, for one, would rather hire someone who demonstrates the desire and capacity to take on a new job. They bring a fresh perspective and an eagerness to learn that those hired laterally often don’t. -Joan Bernstein

Don’t apply for a job for which you have no qualifications. You are wasting the time of the people reviewing resumes and your own! They may remember you, and when they do it might be a time when you are qualified. Sadly, by then you may have annoyed the wrong people. -Derik

Along those same lines, think hard before applying for a job for which you are extremely overqualified. Many libraries won’t hire someone with an MLS for a non-Librarian position. There’s less of a danger of inciting quite as much ire, but it’s still a waste of their time and yours. -Ellie

Don’t go out for jobs without learning about the organization first. For the most part, the people who have hired me, and, to some extent, the people I’ve hired, are people I know. It isn’t that I’ve ever benefited from nepotism, at least not that I know of, or hired folks because I knew them, but the dynamics of filling open positions, even in the best of times, encourages employers to be risk averse. There’s usually high demand (many current and potential applicants) and low supply (usually just one or two open positions), and there are significant opportunity costs associated with making the wrong decision. The way to reduce a potential employer’s sense of risk is to get to know them in advance, or, at the very least, make sure mutual acquaintances advocate in your behalf. I look back at the times I attempted the job application equivalent of cold calling and shudder. -Brett

Don’t forget about your needs. Focus on yourself and your future working life. If you know you don’t want to commute an hour and half in the car each way to work every day, don’t apply for a job that would require this commute. Likewise, if you know you are qualified for a position but it sounds like you’ll hate the work, don’t apply. It’s tempting to make these sacrifices, especially in our current economy and with the seeming scarcity of library jobs in certain markets (like Portland), but it’s just not worth it. You’re better off poor and happy rather than miserable at your job or hating your commute. (I’ve done both and have vowed never to do either again.) -Emily

Don’t develop an emotional attachment to a job listing. This seems to have occurred most often for me when I applied for a job that seemed perfect, usually because I hadn’t done my networking, so I romanticized the position and employer. Emotional attachments also seem to accompany the reach applications, the feeling of, “it would be great if they hired me,” rather than the, “I’m going to be really great at this job the moment I start.” -Brett

Application Materials

Don’t use valuable space in your cover letter to summarize the job description/announcement or rehash facts from your resume. The people reading the letter know what they are looking for, so you should focus on why you are the person that fulfills those qualities. Show them how, with narrative that won’t be found on your resume: details, story, analysis, anything that might be relevant, interesting, and positive. -Derik

I agree with Derik that it’s a bad idea to summarize the job description in the cover letter, but on the other hand if you don’t address every job requirement listed in that description and explain how you meet it, you’re also missing out. Your search committee members may be reviewing one hundred or more applications, so you can imagine how tempting it is to look for excuses to eliminate candidates from the pool. The cover letter can easily be a make or break element in that initial application review. If you don’t manage in the first page of the cover letter to make it clear how well you fit (and hopefully, exceed) all the requirements of the job in question, your application may get tossed into the backup pile pretty quickly. -Kim

But don’t bank on your cover letter either. Personally, I read every cover letter that comes in and place an extreme amount of importance on applicants’ writing skills. I barely skim the resumes. But I know others who do the opposite. Make sure your resume is just as perfect and tailored to the specific opening. Don’t bank on your beautiful resume formatting either. Chances are you’ll have to put it through some terrible online form that will destroy it. When that happens to me I always clean it up as much as humanly possible for the form, which usually means removing all of the formatting, and then email a PDF. Speaking from the hiring side, I’ve only ever received the ugly forms, so either no one else is sending a follow up email or HR isn’t forwarding them. Take the time to make the online submission look as nice as you can. -Ellie

Don’t pretend it’s all about you. The “cold call” application also seems to lead to other mistakes I’ve made myself and see all the time in others: telling employers why you want a job or how it will benefit you rather than demonstrating how well you understand the organization and how useful you’ll be in helping the organization achieve its aims. If they don’t know you already, it’s natural to try to introduce yourself (see also: the only thing I’ve ever learned from Seth Godin). In my opinion, introducing yourself is almost always a mistake. Don’t say anything about yourself until you’re asked, in person, and you’re sure they’re really interested. And then keep it brief, something I’m not good at, especially when I’m nervous or eager. -Brett

Don’t overestimate your qualifications. One of the strangest resumes I ever received came from a plumber who applied for the Head of Reference position. I guess “MLS degree” didn’t mean anything to him, so he thought it couldn’t be important. While this is an extreme example, I think it’s important to not over-analyze your qualifications. Obviously, you should be in the right ballpark, but even if you’re not sure you’re the perfect applicant, go ahead and give it a shot. It’s the employer’s decision who to interview; don’t do that job for him by ruling yourself out. -Joan Bernstein

Don’t lie or exaggerate (excessively) in your cover letter. You may get called on it and look the worse for it. If you claim something is your research interest, be ready to answer questions about that interest with some modicum of intelligence and enthusiasm. -Derik

Don’t write application materials in times of emotional duress. This might seem pretty simple to most people, but I recently had the experience of submitting a job application at a very emotional time. In my case a family member had just passed away and the application deadline, which I had been keeping in the back of my mind, got completely forgotten. I awoke one morning (the day before the deadline) and gasped as soon as I had opened my eyes remembering in shock that I hadn’t yet drafted a cover letter for the position. Hurriedly I pieced together a draft over my lunch break and spent my evening hours “refining” the cover letter before I printed the application then drove it to the institution in order to get the application in on time. Two days later I revisited the materials out of curiosity and was ashamed to see what I had written. Sentences in my letter were missing prepositions, sentences were incomplete. To make a long story short, I should have passed on this job application opportunity and taken care of my emotional self over hurriedly applying for a job. At the very least, I should have had someone else read the cover letter before I pressed “print.” -Emily

Don’t use the same resume without revisions. Your resume should be tailored to the job that you’re applying for. It’s critical to take the extra time and attention to showcase how your skills and experience meet the job requirements as described in the position description. And remember that the job requirements are usually ordered from most critical to least critical in terms of reviewing applicants as a good fit for a position. So, if strong communications skills is a requirement that is listed first, make sure you pay particular attention to showcasing what you can bring to the position in terms of your ability to communicate effectively orally, in writing, and in interpersonal communications. If the position description requires experience or expertise with certain programming languages or software and you have that experience, be sure it makes it onto your resume. If your qualifications match the position requirements, then you’ve made it that much easier for the search committee to identify you as a qualified candidate. Make sure that there are no spelling errors, that you’ve elucidated each acronym (where appropriate), and if you have gaps in your work history, be sure to clarify why they exist in the cover letter. -Hilary

Don’t experiment with unusual organizational schemas in your curriculum vitae or resume. The search committee is going to be reviewing a whole lot of resumes and it helps them to be able to easily identify your educational background, work history, and other qualifications. If you decide that, say, grouping your past jobs by state sounds like a good idea, you’re going to drive them nuts unless there’s a really good reason to do so. And that’s just not a good foot to start out on. -Kim

But don’t be scared to try something different if it really makes sense in your particular situation. I came to librarianship from another career and with no library experience. I included a paragraph towards the end of my resume highlighting how my prior experiences explicitly related to the current position’s requirements, then briefly listed the job titles and dates. As I gather more library experience, that will come off, but at the time it showed that I was an experienced professional already and eager to apply those skills to a new field. -Ellie

Once you’ve decided to apply, here are my tips, based on my experiences from the other side of the table:

• Don’t get the name of the library wrong. Hint: use the name as shown in the job posting.
• Don’t be late! Apply on time—by posted end date.
• Don’t ignore instructions. If asked to apply by e-mail, don’t show up in person with your resume.
• Don’t omit a cover letter. Cover letters are important. Include one. It shows that you are literate (hopefully) and it spotlights the strengths that make you suited for job. You, not the hiring manager, have a stake in identifying what sets you apart from other applicants.
• Don’t generalize. Make the cover letter, and resume, position-specific. Generic applications don’t show much commitment on your part, and they communicate laziness.
• Don’t randomize your resume. List most recent experience first. The hiring manager wants to know what you’ve done recently, as well as seeing a pattern of career progression.
• Don’t be vague. Be specific about your past responsibilities and accomplishments. Don’t exaggerate, but don’t be too modest, either.
  -Joan Bernstein

Screening Phone Call with HR

Don’t ignore HR. This is where you have an opportunity to ask questions about the position and the timeline of the search committee process. And this is where you show who you are and your enthusiasm for the job. The people who call you are typically going to be very skilled in listening for how easy you are to talk to, how forthcoming you are with answers to questions, if you’re nervous or if you’re holding back. They bring this information along with your expressed level of interest back to the search committee. If you’re in a hurry to get the phone call over, it will be noticed. Be genuine, be honest, be open, and be cheerful. -Hilary

Phone Interviews

Don’t be concise! If your phone interview runs less than a half hour, chances are you didn’t give your interviewers a good flavor for who you are. It’s incredibly difficult to make conversation with invisible people you’ve never met, and it’s doubly difficulty to put the required energy into selling yourself to them on top of it all, but if you don’t you’re going to find yourself back at square one. Think of the phone interview less as an interview where you get grilled by the search committee and more as an opportunity to state your case. Prepare your message in advance: identify two or three main points you want your interviewers to remember about you and fit those points into whatever questions you get. Make the phone interview do what you want while still answering the questions. It’s extremely challenging, yes, but if you can pull it off you’re likely to stand out. -Kim

Don’t freak out. When the people interviewing you on the other end are all in a room together with a speaker-phone, its downright freaky. There are awkward pauses and sometimes you can’t tell whether you’ve lost the phone connection. And you wonder to yourself if they are making faces at each other based on your responses. In my dark, dark past, I royally screwed up a phone interview and I will probably never apply to work at that organization again because of it. I under-prepared and got lost in my responses. However, I learned from it and modified my approach. First, don’t plan on conducting the phone interview in a setting where you’re worried that you’ll be disturbed (is someone likely to knock on your office door?, is it possible that the fire alarm will go off?). Stay home or go someplace where you are sure you’ll be left alone. If you’re using your cell phone, make sure you’ve got solid battery life. Second, take the advice in the section on “Interview Preparation” below and practice responding to interview questions. Write out your responses and practice them out loud and get them so well-ingrained that you can spout them out at a moment’s notice. I was so scarred from my previous horrible phone interview experience that I wrote my responses on single sheets of paper and color coded them based on the topic so that I couldn’t lose track of what I wanted to say. I practiced these backward and forwards, and on the morning of my next phone interview I taped them up on the walls of my apartment and practiced them again. This phone interview went super—I had a new method that worked and I had regained my confidence in being able to conduct a great phone interview. Bottom line: over-prepare for phone interviews. And remember, the people on the other end of the line also probably hate phone interviews too and those awkward silences are because they are writing notes to themselves or are trying to negotiate who responds next without talking over each other. -Hilary

Interview Preparation

Don’t be a generalist. Look up the mission statement of the library and/or institution of which it is a part. Be prepared to answer why you want to work in that particular type of environment specifically (e.g. academic, public, community college, etc.), not just libraries in general. Ask for the names of the hiring committee, find out what you can about them, and whenever possible apply what you’ve learned. Some academic hiring committees will have non-librarian faculty on the hiring committee. A particularly impressive applicant tailored her information literacy presentation to a specific assignment on that faculty member’s syllabus. Even if you aren’t able to get that specific, be sure to tailor your presentation to the appropriate audience. A presentation on advanced search techniques in a mostly graduate level science database is not going to score you many points with a community college committee. I also have to agree with the others who have mentioned preparing questions for the committee, and not just logistical questions about benefits or when you’ll hear back. You want to know if you’re going to like it here, too. Ask them what they enjoy most about coming to work each day at this particular institution or what they think the biggest challenges facing them are in the next year or so. -Ellie

Don’t interview cold. This is important: you must, absolutely must, review the materials that you sent in with your application (resume, cover letter, references, etc.) and make sure that you have the key points about each experience or qualification ready to leverage to answer the interview questions. Just as it is vital that you know your own resume and cover letter forwards and backwards, it’s also critical that you know the job requirements and that you have prepared key talking points about how you meet each of the requirements. There are tons of librarian interview question sets on the web (Google “librarian interview questions“): use them to prep yourself. Write out your responses to the questions, then say your answers out loud. Practice with a trusted friend or relative. Be prepared to use examples from your past work/classroom experiences to help illustrate what you can bring to the position or to help you answer a question. If you’ve got a list of the people you’ll be meeting on your interview, do a little investigative work on the web and see what projects and initiatives they’re involved with both at the organization that is interviewing you and in the profession as a whole (e.g., are they active in LITA, ALA, Code4Lib, SLA?). Knowing a little bit about each person will give you some insight into what is compelling to them and that will give you an edge in how you respond to interview questions and what kinds of things to chat about when you are walking with a search committee member between sessions or over lunch. And, by all means, prepare questions to ask—write them down and take them with you (Google “questions to ask in an interview” if you need ideas). You will be asked if you have any questions during your interview and if you don’t have any questions for them, then it tells your potential employer that you’re really not that interested. -Hilary

Seconding Hilary here, in particular—have answers prepared for all the standard questions along with an example from a real life situation. There are a chunk of questions you are almost guaranteed to be asked, don’t let them be the ones that stump you. -Ellie

Don’t treat every library as if it were the same. Do your research about each place you interview, and know at least a few unique projects or initiatives that characterize them. If you can drop specific references during your interview you’re going to impress the heck out of them. Wow, they’ll think, this person really wants to work here. And that’s what your interviewers want to find—the person who fits their position and their organization. -Kim

Interviewing

Don’t wing it. Look sharp—business casual or suit attire are expected. Iron your clothes or get them pressed. Wear kick-ass shoes. Get a fresh hair cut. You need to feel good about how you look and on an interview day, this is absolutely critical. Get sleep so that you have energy. There’s nothing worse than having to interview a candidate who looks tired, acts tired, and is slumping in their chair. Shake people’s hands and be confident when you do so. You want these people to like you so you need to offer them a genuine, welcoming, warm handshake. Shake everyone’s hand in the room, or at the very least, give recognition to everyone in the room. Have a pencil and notepad ready if you feel you need it, but don’t write in it excessively while you’re being interviewed. And don’t write down everyone’s name when you’re introduced to them during an interview session. You can always request a list of the people that you met with from your HR contact at the end of the day if you really need to have an inventory of the folks who interviewed you. If someone asks you a question, look them in the eyes when you respond. If your gaze is all over the place or is focused on the paper in front of you, that tells the people who are interviewing you that you either aren’t confident in your response or that you have poor interpersonal skills. If you’ve practiced what you’re going to say and how you’re going to present yourself, then you should be able to look each person in the eye and express your genuine self. Never, never denigrate or complain about someone at your current or former place of employment. Seriously, this is a red flag to your potential employer that you have no tact, no professionalism, and no respect. Thank each interview group for meeting with you and smile at them! It’s surprising how often nervousness will cause a candidate to keep their face unwelcoming and “frowny”—if you smile, they will smile back at you and you will feel good. Simple as that. -Hilary

If you are doing a presentation as part of your interview, don’t make boring slides: lots of text, lots of bullet points, ugly pre-made templates. Often, a presentation is a time during your interview when you will be seeing the largest number of people at once. Catching their attention is important and that won’t happen if you are reading bullet points off a long sequence of slides. Show creativity, if not originality, or at least steal from someone who shows creativity or originality. -Derik

Don’t be shy! The interview is the only chance your interviewers get to see you in action, so pull together all your reserves of extroverted energy and make the most of the opportunity. Be prepared with a list of questions and topics for small-talk to ensure that there is no dead air during your meetings. And for goodness sake, show interest in your interviewers! The easiest way to fill up awkward pauses is by asking them about their jobs and projects. -Kim

Don’t tell the committee you’re nervous. Of course you are, everyone is, you don’t need to draw attention to it. If your nerves are acting up so badly that you’re stumbling over the questions excessively, ask to take a moment to collect your thoughts, take a deep breath, a sip of water and continue. -Ellie

Don’t be late. If you are chronic late-runner, the interview is not the time to let that quality shine through. -Emily

Here are my tips for when you are called for an interview:

• Don’t come in unprepared. Study the institution’s Website. Google the institution and the person who’s interviewing you. This will demonstrate that you prepared for the interview and will distinguish you from other applicants.
• Don’t act disinterested. Be ready with good questions. You are a better candidate if you are able to engage the hiring manager in discussion. I always appreciated questions that I had to think about before I answered. This showed interest in the position and depth of thought—two definite pluses in a candidate.
• Don’t ever badmouth past employers in an interview. I always thought that if I hired that person, maybe someday he’d be saying that about me!
• Don’t forget to follow up with a thank you note. It’s common courtesy, and also an opportunity to reemphasize your skills and interest in the position.
  -Joan Bernstein

References

Don’t only keep in touch with your references when you need their help. Your references will be more willing and able to provide good information about your work if they have a personal stake in your well being. Send them an e-mail at least a few times a year to let them know how you’re doing, what projects you’re working on, etc. even when you’re not looking for a job. -Emily

Don’t leave your references unprepared. Obviously, you want to ask people who you trust will say good things about you to be your references. When you apply for a job and you send your references’ names and contact info as part of your application, make sure to tell your references that you’ve just applied for this job. Better yet, tell them before you send in your application materials. Maybe they have colleagues at the organization to which you’re applying and can give you some insight to help you better craft your resume and cover letter. By all means give your references the heads up and make sure they have the resume (and maybe even the cover letter) for the job that you’re applying to as well as the job description. Tell them why you’re interested in this particular position. You want to prepare your references for being interviewed about you! Don’t leave them empty-handed or surprised when they get a call from an interviewer. Imagine the kinds of questions that they could be asked (Google “references interview questions” if you can’t imagine what these would be) and feed them potential responses by telling them about how you qualify for the job, what you like about the job, and what you like about the organization to which you’re applying. -Hilary

Don’t give lame references. If the people you list on that page are not past supervisors, professors, or other professionals who can really speak intelligently about your strengths and skills, you’re only hurting yourself. The people on your references list should easily match up with your education and work experience listed on your CV or resume. -Kim

The Offer

Don’t underestimate your value. That’s one error I hope never to make or have to deal with again: not knowing your price. Knowing an organization and its expectations doesn’t just mean knowing that you’re going to be an asset, it means knowing how much of an asset you’re going to be. It means getting a starting offer for what you’re worth (and accepting it happily) or being willing to walk away if you don’t get an offer that meets your demands. There’s nothing worse than colleagues who whine about their salaries except, perhaps, being the one who’s doing the whining. -Brett

After You Land the Job

You’ve just landed a plum job. A nice little bump in pay, something more aligned with your interests, a city you’ve always wanted to live in. Time to file the resume away and unsubscribe from all of those pesky jobs RSS feeds that were taking up all of your time?

Nope.

Odds are, this isn’t the last job you’ll ever have. And if you wait until two weeks before the application is due to get yourself ready for the next job, you’ll find you’ve got a lot of last minute scrambling to do.

Many library job applications include essays and a brief window of time in which to apply. Prepare the basics in advance, and when you’re ready to apply you can focus on customizing your application. Have a master resume on hand, something that you update every few months with new accomplishments (while you still remember them). Rather than including a general summary of duties, pull highlights from your monthly reports that reference specific projects.

It’s a good idea to keep an eye on job postings, even if you’re not on the market. You’ll be in a better position to identify trends, compare salaries, and track which skills potential employers are seeking. You’ll also have a better sense of what you’re getting yourself into. A month or three of scanning the want ads when you’re searching for a new job gives you a snapshot of the current atmosphere. With a year or two of trend watching under your belt, you’ll spot signals that are more subtle or nuanced. Why does McLargeHuge Library repost the same position every eight months? Why does TinyTown Library have such high turnover?

By keeping your ear to the ground, you’ll be in a position to act on a good opportunity when it catches your attention, rather than settling for the best you can get when you’ve realized it’s time to move on.  -Heidi Dolamore

Guest contributor bios

Heidi Dolamore lives in San Francisco with her cat, bicycle, and unpaid library fines.

Joan Bernstein recently retired as director of the Mount Laurel Library (NJ). She has spoken, written, and consulted nationally on subjects including the merchandising of public libraries and privacy protection in the library. She served as the president of the New Jersey Library Association from 2006–2007. She can be contacted at joanbernstein@verizon.net.