When we first started introducing guest posts, Char Booth was a name mentioned by many of us at ItLwtLP. As a blogger over at info-mational, Char has introduced ideas that are uniquely critical and thoughtful. (A good example would be Char’s guest post at Tame the Web about The Library Student Bill of Rights.) You may also remember Ellie’s interview with Char published here on ItLwtLP. Ellie got Char to  publish a piece here on Lead Pipe, and we are all grateful to host another guest whose ideas are critical, timely, and, well, awesome!

I admit it: I wrestled with this post for weeks. In the beginning, all I set out to do was ask and (sort-of) answer the familiar question, how do we redefine ourselves and stay relevant in this so-called “information age?” from the vantage point of the academic liaison librarian. I was drawn to this topic because I stare it in the face five out of every seven days I pass on this planet. Moreover, I am far from alone: So epic is our shared struggle to build productive connections with students and faculty that the Association of Research Libraries devoted an entire special report to liaison librarian roles not long ago. The need to diversify (if not redefine) is obvious: even a passing glance at the 2009 Ithaka faculty perceptions report shows that our image is indeed changing, but not necessarily into the tech-involved pedagogical and research partners we might fancy ourselves. Instead, we are becoming pinned down as e-stuffbuyers.(1)

I am not the first person to ask the question in this particular way. Faithful readers have no doubt realized that I am the fourth academic librarian in the past two months of ITLWTLP alone to go navel-gazing out of a sense of bibliotic devotion: Kim Leeder asked, “what’s it all for?” in early June, Ellie Collier dug through the library history laundry a few weeks later, and Emily Ford has been searching for her mojo since at least July 7th. But before I lose all the non-university folks, let’s take a collective step back. The perennial identity/relevance issue is by no means unique to our corner of the building. Librarians in general are entangled in self-examination and redefinition, on a search for professional identity that gets to the core of our collective self-worth. And where, you might well ask, is this leading us?

Extreme Makeover

Across focus and specialization, I have observed a curious trend. No matter whence the identity question comes, inhabitants of libraryland tend to produce iterations of the same answer: our continued relevance depends on becoming more like something else entirely. Not one something in particular, mind you, but any number of somethings. A few of the professional makeover suggestions I found, in no particular order:

librarian as plumber
librarian as researcher
librarian as super hero
librarian as mediator
librarian as trainer
librarian as unifier
librarian as video game player
librarian as folklorist
librarian as social entrepreneur
librarian as astronaut
librarian as literary agent
librarian as teacher
librarian as publisher
librarian as green champion
librarian as cultural ambassador

Phew, librarian as exhausted. (Or, perhaps… librarian as dilettante?)

In my own writing I am terribly guilty of similizing the profession, and find that the “librarians as ______” trope is a rhetorically useful opener to any old “you should, you could” post. For instance, I once managed to almost smash “librarians as intellectual swiss army knife” and “librarians as pro bono nerds on retainer” into the same sentence. While writing the current post, I found myself so wrapped up in professional metaphors that I had started to elevate them to the far more dramatic analogy duel: Not just librarians as _______, but librarians as this, or that? Are we mediators, I chewed, or facilitators? Consultants, or colleagues? Sharks, or Jets?

The answer to each of these reductionist face-offs is (of course, by design) always going to be “neither, both, c, or all of the above,” based completely on the context in which they are considered. The more combative analogizing I engaged in, the more I started to realize that the way I was asking the perennial question intentionally deflected its answer. As individuals in unique organizations that contribute to specific user bases, all of us obviously take on different roles and use our own strategies. Just because being a librarian plumber works for you, doesn’t mean that it’s going to work for me. In fact, if I walk into my classroom or department wearing an ill-fitting or poorly conceived costume, I might end up looking more like a librarian drainclot.

Shifting Our (Secret) Identities

Our dashing attempts to redefine actually illustrate something rather critical. The reason why librarians are so eminently analogizable is that so many of us are busy taking on one important role in particular: shapeshifter.  When we thrive, it is because we embed, participate, and transform in response to our environments, but never because we do everything just like all the other librarian… whatevers. In other words: The future lies not in our apellatives, but in our affordances. When you cast yourself as a librarian pilot, sherpa, or podiatrist, you are (hopefully) expressing a creative interpretation of your productive capacity that makes the most sense based on (and to) the people you support, if and when they need that particular kind of support.

This much is certain: whether innovative or traditional, the most successful strategies have everything to do with responsive specificity. Emily Drabinski, commenting on a draft of this post, called this kairos: “the ability to respond productively to the moment and its demands.” Being a librarian in this modern age is all about getting in where you fit in (also known as situating). Situating involves (a) becoming perceptive enough to tell astronaut from asinine based on where you stand, and (b) building targeted strategies that help you respond in a demonstrably useful way. This can happen organically, so long as you stay engaged with skill-building and don’t knock yourself off course by constantly telling your constituents that you just went all astronaut on them. “I’m a librarian rockstar!” and “I’m a librarian entrepreneur!” are relatively indigestible to the layperson, and are pronouncements best kept to the in-crowd (or maybe to yourself, you be the judge). If you pull your splits and space-moves with enough under-the-radar grace, they are far more likely to be recognized, appreciated, and folded into the librarian-as-something-worth-keeping-around typology (which is really what our search is all about).

E-Whatting What, Now?

The ability to fit requires serious “getting” on both sides. To illustrate what I mean, bear with me as I digress into my own specifics. I’m the E-Learning Librarian at UC Berkeley. When a colleague of mine retired last November, I also took over as liaison and selector for the Cal School of Information, a graduate program that famously dropped its ALA accreditation many years ago, becoming among the first and few programs to formally eschew (as opposed to hyphenate)  “library” (at least to a semantic extent) in pursuit of the information studies paradigm. At the time, the departure of one of the oldest MLS-granters from the ranks added symbolic fuel to an already drawn-out library v. information disciplinary debate.(2) While this post is (mercifully) not about said debate nor its attending drama, both have implications for how I get and fit my disciplinary picture. Liaising to a program that de-libraried itself some years ago some years ago is, needless to say, a fascinating opportunity for identity-spelunking.

This is not my first foray into subject waters, mind you: As a bibliographer at Ohio University I focused on communications, which I knew next to nothing about when I began (causing me no small amount of anxiety). I eventually overcame, but it was difficult during the first year to feel that I had any kind of handle on the discipline. Now at Cal, I have the luck of subject familiarity, AND the luxury of abiding interest in my area. Despite the obvious potential for chirping crickets when I come around, I have been blown away by the welcome I have received from the I School, and have run the gamut from traditional liaising – instruction, reference, consultation, and materials acquisition – to less personally charted territory such as moderating a panel at the Next-Generation Teaching and Learning Symposium and working with a project team developing a browser extension for on-the-fly research in e-texts. Hands down, supporting the I School has fast become one of the things I value most about doing my job.

Librarians as Whack, or Legit?

Not that exploring the boundaries of the librarian/ department relationship always comes off perfectly, mind you. On my own blog, info-mational, I wrote one piece about the difficulty of balancing divergent vocabularies to achieve shared aims; and another on the challenge of pitching the sometimes obscure affordances of librarianship to the more technically focused (this is the one with the nerd/swiss army knife references). Inevitably, some of my moves have been hits, others misses. An example of each: In Spring semester of 2010 I visited the my school’s doctoral colloquium twice – the first time to lead a rather ill-attended yet nominally useful research methods seminar (miss), the second to participate in the aptly named ‘Castellathon’ – a group critique of writings spanning the career of foundational information theorist Manuel Castells, who first developed the “network society” concept (hit).(3)

The latter event took a pecha kucha-ish approach. Each participant was responsible for summarizing and critiquing key chapters of an Information Age volume or other Castells book in under six minutes. I attended at the invitation of the instructor, Paul Duguid, with whom I had arranged the in-class research methods session earlier in the semester. In addition to gaining insight for collection development and general credibility purposes, the Castellathon was an opportunity for me to try a different angle: instead of trying to interlope on their already expert community using the same research help pitch that fell flat the first time around, I would try joining in their reindeer games. The discussion was excellent, and I made good connections with a few students by showing an analytical chop or two.

As-Grabbing

Lave and Wenger’s situated learning theory posits that individuals build knowledge by participating actively in communities of practice, engaging in a process of collective identity formation that facilitates their ongoing definition within and in relation to other members of the community.(4) Expertise is gained through legitimate peripheral participation, the process of starting on the edge of a community and moving toward its center through insight and relationship building (i.e., situating). This negotiated continuum from beginner to novice to expert exists in organizations, disciplines, social groups, and skill areas almost without conceivable exception.(5) Librarians’ ability to productively self-similize (e.g., find our own ases) occurs when we gain access to our communities not only by learning about them, but by demonstrating our knowledge and personalities to them. My participation in the Castells event can be read as (and was in reality) a step away from tangential affiliation and towards a more legitimate form of participation. Aware of my relatively recent introduction to their community, I was also conscious to remain somewhat apart – I did not critique a chapter as each of the students did, but read as much of the material as time permitted in preparation and joined the discussion when I felt I could contribute productively.

In an interesting twist on the situating concept, I have discovered that part of my legitimacy as a liaison librarian depends on exactly this: remaining consciously peripheral as I participate. Existing on the edge of the academy – a widely acknowledged and consistent complaint of the research librarian – is actually one of our most valuable strengths. Let me explain: In academia, situated learning and collective identity formation are far from idyllic, and are subject to the same struggles and mitigating factors as any other social construct (particularly at the graduate level). Dialectic is intentionally combative, there are power dynamics in any classroom or department, and the journey from academic edge to center can induce frustration, cronyism, and idea-jockeying. Among those for whom knowledge is either leverage or capital (e.g., students and faculty), there may be significant vulnerability in admitting an insight gap of any kind, which can translate to plain old not seeking help when it is needed. Thanks in large part to our nosebleed-section proximity to the academic horizon, not only can librarians provide a source of strategic insight into everything from evidence-based practice to open access publishing to ease the legitimate participation of our users, we create neutral spaces and services that are functionally external to the intellectual scrums happening in their disciplines. (In other words, librarian as referee, or base coach?)

Librarians as Counselors, or Confidants?

My liaison experience underscores the importance of subject knowledge and situated participation, but expertise and authentic interest are only half of this picture. What, as a librarian, is the unique contribution I bring to my disciplinary learning community? I return to the idea of neutrality: much of why we fit in is because our ability to do so is limited by design. I have found no surer way to become a useful colleague and resource than to build human connections that demonstrate generalized expertise and critical objectivity. An historical affordance of librarianship is to remain central to the intellectual life of an institution or community while existing on its objective periphery. Becoming closer to the heart and operation of a community and its output is important, but it is at the same time crucial to recognise that by virtue of existing outside the monkeyhouse, we provide a safety zone for the venting and/or triaging of academic insecurities and/or exploring ideas in a space relatively unfettered by the positioning so central to scholarly communication – Professor Duguid and I discussed this particular liaison role after the Castellathon. This is not to say librarians cannot be radical, challenging, or intellectual, it simply highlights our unique position in the pedagogical and productivity picture of higher education.

So often the challenge of being a librarian in the academy is being perceived as lacking expertise, yet so much of our worth lies in the informed generality and engaged neutrality we bring to it. I may not be expert in every topical nuance of what one of my graduate students is researching, but I have a broad disciplinary framework that recognizes subtle connections and semantic distinctions, and am aware of a host of tools, movements, and technologies that can supplement their work (and if I’m not, I know who is).  And here is where the librarian as ______ comes back into the narrative. When I am at my most successful in consultations and classes I am in part librarian as research therapist, someone to whom students, colleagues, and even faculty can let down their guard in order to expose the vulnerabilities in technology, methodology, or knowledge that can be addressed without judgment. Like psychologists, consultants, or social workers, librarians have the value structure and information resources that position us to provide informed counsel to a host of information scenarios, no matter our specialization, without imposing a particular bent.

Because we have the opposite of topical tunnel vision, librarians are extremely good at exploring angles, talking through research problems, and translating information into to one form of academic success or another. Our objectivity does not imply that we are non-critical, but we have to demonstrate that this is the case in order to remain viable. Part of fitting in a disciplinary framework is talking its talk, and I have learned that it is productive to participate in co-learning and discourse to the extent that it is possible while remaining a semi-detached confidant, collaborator, counselor, and/or confessor. Among my preternaturally technology-expert students and faculty (and despite my job title), this part of my work rarely involves leveraging very much “E”. In an almost ironic twist, it is the analog, informal, and invariably interdisciplinary conversations about technology and information that seem to have the most impact.

Another example: last semester I led a research methods session and a series of one-on-one consultations with students from a core class in the I School master’s track, INFO 203: Social and Organizational Issues of Information. Each was tasked to write a 30-odd page paper on an issue of their choosing, almost all of which covered emergent technology topics about which little hard research had yet been produced (e.g., driver distraction as a result of real-time traffic apps and consequent impact on highway safety). Every consultation/conversation was amazing, and all consisted of nothing more than two chairs, a web browser, and an enthusiastically open mind on my end. One of the most enjoyable of these exchanges fed into a masterful paper examining the concept of information overload from different subjective perspectives. In one of those it-makes-it-all-worth-it moments, the student in question forwarded his completed essay to me recently with this gem: “Again, thanks for your help. Apart from the tangible benefits on the outcome, our conversation also made the process itself a great deal more interesting and (dare I say it) fun.” (Librarian as stoked.)

As I read through his work I saw threads of our discussion emerge, ranging from educational theory to business to cognitive psychology. In this case, it was a mutual interest in exploring his topic in relation to its source bases that established the information need, and a shared willingness to humanize the interaction that built a more lasting connection. The author is in the process of submitting his paper for publication at my relentless urging [I will update this post with a link when it is available: this one will be required librarian reading].

Librarians as Don Quixote, or Sancho Panza?

Situating in increasingly specialized communities and contexts is what makes the new librarian “normal” so incessantly flexible. Liaison librarians may venture down countless outreach inroads, but we reach higher ground based on our ability to add value legitimately, appropriately, and productively. This can at times feel utterly quixotic: tilting at information windmills. Some have argued in this time of consolidation and scarcity that the insight librarians bring into information organization is becoming more diffuse throughout the academy, and the intellectual connections we facilitate in our learning communities are  supplanted by social networking, digitization, and widespread technology adoption. This line of thinking has its supporters and detractors, but no matter your angle of examination the core issue is still one of perception and relevance. Are we interpreting external perceptions of our own relevance accurately? Is this struggle simply occurring inside of us about ourselves? How can we know if those we are trying to “save” from information peril see us as wielding an increasingly unnecessary (or ineffectual) lance?

Again, the answer is c: Each of us must answer this question for ourselves in our own contexts. When you are a liaison you affiliate with a defined community of practice with characteristics that provide you with potential productive and social ins. You simply have to find the best way to positively influence the construction of your perceived identity. At the I School, I perceive that administrators and faculty do a masterful job of supporting community by both highlighting the successes of its members (take a quick look at their website to see what I mean) while merging the social with the academic. They recognize that they should neither overwhelm learners with an overabundance of activities nor divorce said activities from the work that defines the community in the first place. Meg St. John, Director of Admission and Student Affairs, says that “The ‘problem’ with Berkeley is always that there is too much opportunity, too many draws on your most precious resource: your time as a student here. We look for ways to create community building activities in synergy with other activities that are already on the books.” In all of that social and intellectual activity, there are more and less natural times for me (or any other librarian) to participate.

Not recognising that last point can risk a situation of diminishing outreach returns. We engage in communities of practice by supporting specific expertise with strategic insight, but we neither operate in vacuums nor run the place. Institutional and individual legacies precede us, and a confluence of expertise, resources, and social character unique to each learning community dictates how (and if and when) a librarian will be perceived (and received) as a resource. “Embedding” is a process that takes as much arm’s-length framework as it does fieldwork and footwork. Sometimes – for reasons totally external to yourself – there might be little opportunity or reason to push past the arm’s length. Even though I am enthusiastically welcomed, in addition to making myself understood, available, and enjoyable to work with, at times I need to make myself scarce. The most legitimate form of participation I have is in perceiving from the periphery where I can be of the most use. I am busy, they are busy, and sometimes our busies overlap and entertwine. Assert myself too much or self-aggrandize my contribution, and I run the risk of becoming more nuisance than necessity.

Librarians as Polaroid, or Digital?

In a world in which “library” threatens to become increasingly sepia-toned, “community” and “practice” are equally critical to our position in the digital picture. Another metaphorical exploitation opportunity: For years, Polaroid camera use declined precipitously. Yet, when the film threatened to disappear entirely, die-hards hollered so loud that the Impossible Project saved the last production plant in order to make the film available again for a comparably unbelievably expensive price, and the original corporation hired Lady Gaga to huckster them a completely different image. For my money, we should be shooting between these two extremes. Instead of (a) preserving a quaint legacy profession remembered wistfully by those old enough to have used a card catalog and/or fetishized by hipsters or (b) making ourselves into anything-but-librarians, we need to (c) keep doing what we’re doing, only at times a little more obviously: showing our patrons that we are, in fact, the strangers they can trust with whatever camera they happen to own to take their family picture without making a break for it. We know where the right button is, thank you very much, and we promise not to cut your head or legs off.

Users might care little about how librarians holistically self-define in order to appear more viable in the information age, but they care considerably if we make their working, producing, and learning lives easier. This is where librarian knowledge-sharing about local strategies that do and don’t work becomes extremely useful. When we adapt this collective insight into our own section of the academy (or wherever) and its internal machinations, external perceptions of libraries and librarians transform as a consequence of responsive service and real interpersonal connections, but not the other way around. The best way to bring this dynamic into productive focus in your own context is to literally (and please pardon my use of this tired idiom, it actually works in this case) think outside your institutional box: become interested and engaged in the work of the community with which you are associated, and find the most appropriate ways to support them based on a practical, critical, library-independent assessment of their productive and social output. In this and all things, avoid overzealousness or self-fixation: Instead of being that weird jerk who won’t move out of the frame, find out what your community is taking pictures of and suss out what kind of tripod, memory card, flashbulb, etc. you can hand over when the time seems right.

Librarians as Agent Cooper, or Log Lady?

I have stared into my own navel for so long that I have finally started to see light: enough with the manufactured duels. Disc 1 of season two of Twin Peaks arrived in the mail a few days ago, neatly providing me with the professional analogy draw to end them all: Librarians as Agent Cooper, or Log Lady? Both characters are instrumental, plot-driving sages, both are somewhat cryptic, both exist on the periphery of the Twin Peaks community, both are keen environmental observers and information discoverers, and both participate (albeit in very different ways) over their beverage of choice. In my own context, I might be just as librarian-amazing showing up out of the blue every once in a while with wood chips on my cardigan as you are constantly hanging around leaving messages for Diane on your handheld device. There is only one Log Lady, and there is only one Agent Cooper. As long as each of us materializes (virtually or literally) at opportune moments in our spectacles and/or g-men ties, we can remain true to what we always have been: modestly indispensable and precisely like no one else. Remove either of us, and Bob prevails.(6)

With Lynchian circuitousness I have arrived at the most important simile of all: librarians as librarians. We have always been professional chameleons, using different tools to play different roles for different patrons in different organizations in different states and so on, ad infinitum. The more we recommend to each other that we become the someone elses we see fit, the more we risk missing that the deceptively prescriptive identity/utility question is being answered descriptively. Our new reality is like our old reality, only a little more adaptive and a lot more self-reflexive (or vice versa, you tell me). Librarian as ________ analogies are useful in exploring our response to a critically transformative time in the trajectory of our profession, but their function as metaphor should not be overlooked lest we creep too far from our own (rather amazing) archetype. Despite the ways we might recast ourselves as individuals, our collective identity can and should still revolve around a solid practical and conceptual core of “humor, verve, and grace,” to borrow a phrase from Cory Doctorow. Under shifting shapes, librarians remain the singularly knowledgeable, radically neutral, and openly accessible mavens of the information world (bless our hearts).

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Tremendous thanks to my favorite librarians-as-inconceivably-talented-editors: Ellie Collier, Emily Drabinski, Susan Edwards, Emily Ford, Lia Friedman, and Jen Waller. You made this post so much better.

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Muddy Waters, can you help me get my mojo working?

I have a problem. Several months ago I realized I’d lost my librarian mojo and since that time I’ve been struggling to reclaim it. Being the person that I am, I have been hyper-analyzing my mojo loss. I have been disenchanted at work, feeling weary and dissatisfied, and yet, it feels like it’s all out of my control. This (perhaps self-indulgent) post is a reflection on my personal struggle to understand what IS my librarian mojo, and what can I do to keep it going and get it back when it appears to have gone missing.

First, let me take a moment to describe what I mean by librarian mojo. Mojo is pretty, clear, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary online as:

“Magical power, voodoo, the art of casting spells; a charm or talisman used in casting such spells. More generally, esp. in recent use: a power, force, or influence of any kind (often with sexual connotations). Freq. attrib. and in to have (also get) one’s mojo working (chiefly fig. and allusive).” (accessed 6/21/10. Thanks, Multnomah County Library!)

Thanks to popular culture we might immediately think of Austin Powers when we think of mojo, or maybe the book by Marshall Goldsmith that was published last year. (I heard it was decent, though haven’t had a chance to read it yet.) And of course there is an entry in the Urban Dictionary for mojo.

But what does mojo have to do with being a librarian? Think about it. Librarians have bags of tricks or spells that we cast about. A trick might be our ability to find that book, in the way we are able to perform a reference interview, in the charm of checking out books to people and sharing information. We have the power to arm people with information and do so easily and quickly. We know how to think critically. We know how to teach, we are expert searchers, we have resilience and passion. So what happened that made me feel like I didn’t have my mojo, any more? I still had the same skills the same training, education and experience, but what had happened? There had been a course of events, some of which were beyond my control, that led to my dissatisfaction, frustration, and burnout at work. This loss of mojo was pretty startling for me. I am 30 years old and I have only held my MLS for 3 years.

If you do any research on the topic you will find a plethora of work written on burnout in libraries and job satisfaction. There’s also a wealth of work written about failure, mistakes, and job satisfaction outside our small world of libraries. I can’t tackle all the knowledge out there, but you’ll find some some articles listed below as further reading. Just know that they’re only the tip of the iceberg.

Systems Failure and Mojo

We are dependent on systems. We depend on systems as simple as work schedules to those as complicated as databases and other high-tech implementations. As technologies evolve our subsequent dependence on those technologies grows. Our dependence on systems makes us more vulnerable to systems failure that is beyond our control and a potential subsequent loss of mojo.

When I first started working at my current place of employ I was hired to work on a project called Oregon Health Go Local. I’d spent two years working on this project when the project sponsor, the National Library of Medicine, announced it would be phasing out all Go Local projects. (You may recall that part of this work inspired a previous post of mine about Outreach.) This is a great example of a systems or tool failure. The fact that Go Local databases would no longer exist is the loss of a countless hours of work by libraries and librarians all over the United States. It was not that the NLM made a bad decision. In fact, the NLM made the right decision based on their extensive analysis of Go Local projects (IMHO), but it was a decision that affected me and numerous other individuals. A project to which I had dedicated a lot of work and energy failed. But projects end and I was surprisingly okay with the discontinuation of Oregon Health Go Local. Even though I was okay with the end of the project, it still called into question my librarian mojo.

Power outages are another good example of a systems failure. Without power you have no online tools, no lights to even read the red books (LCSH Subject Headings in print) or your call number cheat sheet, and maybe, as Guy Robertson (2004) points out in his article “Lights Out! Dealing with Power Outages in Your Library,” the library emergency flashlight might have been misplaced. What librarian mojo do we have when we rely on technologies, even if it is the lights?

Think about this in a different context. Who are librarians and what power do librarians have to help a patron find print material without the catalog? Say I had a patron who was looking for a book about diabetic foot problems. Without walking through the stacks, one aisle at a time, I would be at a loss to find this kind of item. Why? Because I rely on the electronic catalog to help me navigate subject headings. I rely on the tools of our profession to practice my librarian mojo. My charm is that I understand how to find out that books on diabetes are shelved with the other WK835 books, not that I KNOW that books on diabetes are shelved there. I rely on tools that operate beyond my immediate control, to practice that librarian mojo. A lot of my mojo relies on the tools I use every day. (And what does this say about our librarian identities?) While a power outage or catalog downtime is certainly not the be all end all problem, I think it points to technology and tool dependence that can negatively effect librarian mojo.

The fact is, my librarian mojo has come to be dependent on the tools I use, not the skills I have. It’s a lot harder to wield my mighty skills set without the tools. And when these tools fail, I feel like I’ve failed, and, my librarian mojo suffers. It’s not that every time a little problem occurs I experience a complete loss of mojo. Librarians, by nature, are great problem solvers and find great work-arounds. It’s that all of the little failures and mistakes can build up, and after a time it can start affecting us negatively, if we let it.

Library and librarian tools that enable me to use my mojo are mostly proprietary. At work I rely on commercial software developers and commercial vendor products. I find it incredibly frustrating, that using proprietary tools like an ILS, a collection development tool, or a research database can put my mojo out of my hands. Try contacting a database vendor to ask why something is broken and to get it fixed? When it’s not working I can’t wield my mighty mojo to help patrons find that article or do that search, and my librarian mojo doesn’t allow me to fix the database myself or have a colleague do it. I think it would help if we were able to be some of these providers ourselves. We need to have library programmers on library staff to assist in being less dependent on commercial products that can hinder our librarian mojo. (Brett wrote about this a while back.)

We see this commercial dependence even more in collection development, purchasing and licensing. What happens to the mojo of librarians when libraries can no longer pay the rising costs of journal subscriptions and are possibly falling victim to unethical library vendors? For example, the University of California  is having trouble with the pricing of Nature Publishing Group publications. Due to these issues the university may conduct a boycott of the publisher, thereby not providing access to highly used titles. What’s going to happen to librarian mojo when libraries no longer have the money to buy the tools that enable us to do our jobs?

Meredith Farkas makes the distinction that via consortia we might be able to fight for more ethical practices from our vendors. But I wonder if relying on vendors is really the end solution. Can we not be tool creators and providers at the same time? Certainly not with budgets that allocate for collections and tools over personnel. We need programmers and technologies that we don’t have.

What excites me about librarianship is to advocate for people and groups who need advocates. I want to provide and make accessible as much information as possible, and commercial and tool dependence hinder me from doing as much as I want. Because of libraries’ commercial dependence and shrinking budgets I can’t do as much I would like. I feel frustrated and disheartened by the behemoth issues that face libraries and that hinder me from doing my best. I didn’t become a librarian to overcome seemingly insurmountable barriers, I became a librarian to help people.

Despite all of these possible systems failures, personal frustrations, and mojo-loss inducing situations, failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Andy Burkhardt thinks we’re experts at it. From failure we can learn to improve. In his recent article Being Wrong and Learning from “Partial Success” Walt Crawford (2010) discusses failure. He points out that we hate to talk about them and admit to our failures. But talking about and studying failure is necessary.

Lisa German (2009) suggests in her piece about project management No One Plans to Fail, They Fail to Plan, that if you fail it’s because you didn’t plan well enough. I disagree. Mostly. (BP’s recent gulf oil dilemma certainly points to a failure to plan.) I agree more with Daniel Chudnov (2008), who, in his article Failure is Always an Option, argues that failure is normal and should be embraced. Moreover, he stresses that we should PLAN on failing. For example, I could keep a call number cheat sheet at the reference desk for those times when the catalog is down or the power is out. I could download a flashlight app or WorldCat app to my phone. I could also work on recognizing when my mojo is being affected and try to reign it back to the positive side.

At some point we will make mistakes and we will fail at something. But when do we need to have contingency plans? That’s the whole concept behind disaster planning. But do we do it as much for our tools as we do for our buildings and physical materials? Where I work we have a group that’s looking at contingency planning for access to e-resources in the event of a disaster. Another example of small systems failure is when an e-book isn’t accessible. Just this morning I assisted a patron in requesting a print copy of an e-book that wasn’t working via our library consortium. If this had failed I would have helped the patron fill out an interlibrary loan request. Small failures like this are easy to work around. When we can problem solve and when we can have contingency plans in place we can diminish the blow of the failure. Still, when added up small everyday systems failures can have great impact on our librarian mojo.

That Inner Mojo and Getting it Back (Or, a lot of it is in your head.)

Most of the time systems failure is out of our control, but how we react to those failures and our general inner mojo is not. A while back Ellie wrote a terrific review of the book How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. In it she provides examples about Lehrer’s insights regarding the balance between emotion and rationality. Essentially, how we think about failure can have a lot to do with our mojo.

In my case it wasn’t just the end of one project or one system failure that resulted in my mojo loss. As is often the case it was a number of things happening all at once. Things at work were frustrating. I wasn’t liking my day to day work, I didn’t feel that any of my idealism about libraries and librarianship were being tapped or utilized. I didn’t feel like I was learning or affecting my community positively, the major project on which I had spent close to 2 years of my professional life had ended in failure, and this all culminated into a ball of the work blahs. I had lost my mojo.

Part of my blahs had to do with the disillusionment about libraries and professional work life in general. When I started working I was ready, fresh-faced, young, naive, excited, and full of ideas. After a few years of too many meetings, too much university bureaucracy, budget cuts, unstable temporary employment, and Oregon Health Go Local’s phase out I felt burned out and mojo-less. Basically, I let it get to me. And come to find out Anitra Steele (2009) mentions that “New librarians are perhaps at a higher risk of burnout than veteran coworkers. One article states this is because idealistic expectations and practice do not often coincide.”

But I love being a librarian and I don’t want to stop being one. I love that I have the education and skills that I mentioned at the beginning of this post (critical thinking, etc.). I just want my mojo back. And no one’s going to give it to me, so I’ve got to take ownership of my librarian mojo. I’ve got to start thinking differently. I’ve got to find pro-active solutions.

So what have I done to attempt to reclaim it? First, I went on ALA Connect’s Mentor Connect (a portal within ALA Connect that lets mentors and mentees find each other) and requested some mentorship and advice. My mentor helped me think about what I want from librarianship, what kind of librarian I want to be, and helped me think about what actions I could take to work toward that goal. When I expressed an interest to pursue academic library work at a more general university or at a community college rather than at a health sciences institution, my mentor encouraged me to seek out professional development opportunities that would fulfill my professional needs in this area and make me an attractive job candidate for future opportunities. In this vein I decided to remain active in ALA and cut back on my involvement in health sciences by not renewing memberships in health sciences library organizations when they are due.

I’ve also been going through a subconscious ritual of daily affirmations at work. (I’m being serious.) I have taped to my computer monitor at work a note from a co-worker (written to me in a meeting when she knew I was losing my mojo). It says,

“Don’t worry–it’s not just you. We know how good you are!”

I went on vacation during which I read books for pleasure, spent time with friends and my partner, and was even out of cell phone and e-mail range.

I went to ALA Annual where I got inspired about librarianship by talking to inspiring people and gaining a more whole library perspective than my niche in a medical school setting. I was able to chat with librarians who work in public libraries, community college libraries, small private college libraries, and this year’s class of Emerging Leaders. I attended programs that were of interest to me such as the Google Book Search Settlement Panel, and the Open Access Debate. I attended Library Advocacy Day and met with my state representatives to talk about issues facing libraries. These experiences re-energized me and reminded me why I became a librarian.

And the biggest thing of all is that just the other day, (July 1st), I started a new job description and dropped my work hours to half-time. Instead of working as a Reference Librarian, I am now Scholarly Communication Librarian. I’ll be working with the research faculty and students to provide education about the NIH Public Access Policy, issues in open access, publishing, and author rights. These new duties will enable me to be more involved with why I wanted to be a librarian in the first place: to advocate for something about which I’m passionate– equitable and open access to information.

I am lucky to have this luxury– to be able to afford to work half-time– and the leadership in my library supports this change. Working half-time will enable me to re-discover hobbies like riding my bike, gardening, cooking, and learning book arts. It will enable me to come to work refreshed and be able to HAVE that mojo that I need to do a good job. Feeling like a whole person has a lot to do with my librarian mojo and this is going to be the best solution for me to get my mojo working again.

My mojo’s not all the way back, but what I’m going to do from here on out is really celebrate my accomplishments like Robert Moran (2009) suggests in What a Great Place to Work!. I will find the things that I find fulfilling about library work and concentrate on them. I’m going to frame my degrees and hang in them in my office at work to remind myself why I’m a librarian, and aim to work towards being what I want to be. I’m going to read books like How We Decide, and Mindset: The New Psychology of Success and learn about Peter Drucker’s work (whom Kim mentioned a while back) to try to learn how to keep failures from affecting my mojo. Finally, I’m going to concentrate on that feeling described by one of my pals as “the moment when you remember what it’s like to be you when you’re happy again.”

So, dear readers. Have you ever lost your librarian mojo? Have you experienced burnout? What caused it and how did you handle it?

Extra special thanks to Laura Zeigen, Ellie Collier, and Miriam Rigby for providing thoughtful feedback on this post.

Citations and Further Readings:

Chudnov, D. (2008). Failure is Always an Option. Computers in Libraries 28(10), 20-22.

Crawford, W. (2010). Being Wrong and Learning from “Partial Success.” Online 34(3), 57-59.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House.

German, L. (2009). No One Plans to Fail, They Fail to Plan: The importance of structured project planning. Technicalities 29(3), 6-9.

Lehrer, J. (2009). How we decide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Leysen, J. & Boydston, J. (2009). Job Satisfaction among Academic Cataloger Librarians. College & Research Libraries 70(3), 273-97.

Moran, R. (2009). What a Great Place to Work! Library Leadership and Management 23(1), 47-48.

Reiter, M., & Goldsmith, M. (2009). Mojo: How to get it, how to keep it, how to get it back if you lose it. New York: Hyperion.

Robertson. G. (2004). Lights out! Dealing with Power Outages in Your Library. Feliciter 50(4), 156-158.

Steele, A. (2009). Flying with the Phoenixes: Avoiding job burnout as a librarian and manager. Children’s Librarianship 7(3), 51-52.

'Sitting on history' by grytr / by-nc-nd

Introduction

I have a soft spot in my heart for library history. I credit my library history classes for making me the academic librarian I am today. They taught me more about critical thinking, how to do research, and how to navigate an academic library than the rest of my program combined. In this post I am revisiting a particular set of topics that especially interested me while pursuing my degree – censorship, self-censorship, and librarian image-making.

It seemed to me as I went through my program, that one aspect of library school that was particularly stressed was instilling the values of the profession. My introductory class posed mental exercises meant to make students think about privacy, access to information and their own personal biases. “A young girl wearing black with many piercings comes in looking for a book on suicide.” “A disheveled man with a beard comes in asking for books on bomb making.” While the introductory class told me what a proper librarian would do in those situations, the library history classes told me why the profession took a stance in the first place.

Louis Robbins summarized the rise of the librarian as intellectual freedom fighter in her abstract to “Champions of a cause: American librarians and the Library Bill of Rights in the 1950s”:

“The library profession’s understanding of the Library Bill of Rights—and, in fact, American librarianship’s understanding of itself—is a product of both contemporary political discourse and of the American Library Association’s pragmatic responses to censorship challenges in the 1950s. Between the 1948 adoption of the strengthened Library Bill of Rights and 1960, ALA based its ‘library faith’ on a foundation of pluralist democracy and used social scientific ‘objectivity’ to try to fend off challenges to its jurisdiction. When the McCarthy Era brought challenges to the very premises of pluralistic democracy, however, librarians responded by becoming ‘champions of the cause’ of intellectual freedom” (Robbins, “Champions” abstract).

While reading about this time period I also learned about the Fiske Report. From 1956 to 1958, Marjorie Fiske conducted a study of book selection and censorship practices in California. The fear generated during the McCarthy Era lead the American Library Association to issue a number of statements declaring librarians the defenders of intellectual freedom. In contrast, Fiske’s report showed that some librarians were not so quick to stand up for this belief, if they held it at all. Born out of the fear generated by the political climate of the period, Fiske found the echoes of McCarthyism present during many of her interviews. This is unsurprising, as the Hollywood blacklist was still in effect and McCarthy himself had only just begun to fall from favor in 1954. Some of the interviewed librarians may have even lived through WWI and helped to remove German language books from their libraries or complied with requests for names of patrons who asked for books on explosives (Starr). However, the report uncovered several important themes that ran much deeper than current politics. This post will discuss the Fiske Report, its origin and findings, and its lasting implications. My goal is to share a bit of library history in the hopes that it will grant some perspective and elaborate the complexity and nuance of the issues raised.

Background

Between the two World Wars, “the American library profession experienced a reawakening of debate regarding freedom of access. Traditionalists advocated the guardianship of community values by restrictive collection policies, and progressives favored collection development that was once again neutral and actively representative of all points of view” (Starr). In 1939, ALA adopted the first Library Bill of Rights, based on a policy of the Des Moines, Iowa Public Library, possibly as a response to the controversy surrounding Grapes of Wrath (Chadwell 20). Another potential impetus was the challenge put forth by Bernard Berelson, “Librarianship must stand firmly against social and political and economic censorship of book collections; it must be so organized that it can present effective opposition to this censorship and it must protect librarians who are threatened by it” (qtd in Starr).

In 1940, ALA formed its first Intellectual Freedom Committee. However, it was not until 1948 that ALA adopted what is presently known as the Library Bill of Rights (Chadwell 20). In 1953 ALA issued The Freedom to Read. The statement defined the profession’s “responsibility for making available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those the majority might label unconventional or unpopular” (Chadwell 22). With these documents ALA was strengthening its public position as defender of intellectual freedom. However, Thomison said in the ALA-sponsored A History of the American Library Association, “it was abundantly clear that the profession was not united in its bill of rights” (145). Thomison explained “at the time of its adoption, the Library Bill of Rights had been received with no objection. The Intellectual Freedom Committee was also accepted with no problem. The attitudes of some librarians, however, began to change as the two began to function” (144). This was evidenced by letters to ALA Bulletin, Library Journal, and ALA headquarters indicating extreme dissatisfaction with the current trends in literature. Thomison offered Forever Amber, with its preponderance of sex, as an example:

“The book’s popularity, and the problem of to buy or not to buy, was grist for many discussions, letters and speeches. In a number of cases, it is difficult to discern the difference between censorship efforts by the public and book selection by the librarian. The result was often the same, and in many cases the reasoning seemed very similar” (145).

One explanation for this discrepancy was that “librarians’ relatively new role as activists in the cause of freedom of inquiry had only partially overtaken their role as guardians of public taste and morals” (Robbins, “Censorship” 74).

The Intellectual Freedom Committee was paying attention. “As early as the 1953 Westchester conference, IFC leadership – worried about the effects on school and public librarians of loyalty programs, investigative committees, and the many widely publicized censorship conflicts – had proposed that research on the topic might be undertaken” (Robbins, “Censorship” 95). With a grant from the Fund for the Republic and the sponsorship of the School of Librarianship of the University of California the project was conducted from 1956 to 1958, headed by Marjorie Fiske.

Marjorie Fiske was a distinguished sociologist and teacher at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, in the Department of Sociology and the School of Librarianship. “Often working with large interdisciplinary teams of social and behavioral scientists, she sought a method that would allow the research subjects to ‘speak for themselves’ in the final results” (Kiefer).

In her introduction to her report Fiske explained:

“The impetus for this study developed from the questions librarians and others concerned with the freedom to read asked themselves about the effects on library policy and practices of the investigations of national and state un-American activities committees, state education committees, and the widely publicized book-centered conflicts which have taken place in California since the end of World War II. The study itself was viewed as controversial both inside and outside the profession of librarianship. Nearly two years of discussion and persistent effort on the part of the Intellectual Freedom Committee and a special planning committee of the California Library Association, as well as the faculty of the School of Librarianship of the University of California, were required before the decision to undertake it was finally made” (1).

Findings

When the study finally did proceed, Fiske’s team conducted 204 interviews in 26 communities with school librarians and administrators, and municipal and county librarians. The end result was Book Selection and Censorship: A Study of School and Public Libraries in California. In it, Fiske pointed out that at least as far back as the Elizabethan era people have been concerned with the dilemma of quality versus demand (or education versus entertainment). This dilemma is something which librarians have continually struggled with in their book selection process. “Two-thirds of the public librarians who contributed to this study used the words quality and demand as they discussed library objectives, and by far the greatest weight was to be found on the side of demand” (Fiske 11). This orientation was often justified on the grounds that public libraries are supported by taxes and thus should provide what is most requested. It also helped to lighten the librarians’ task load by spending less time researching potential purchases. They could more easily justify their budget with higher circulation figures and, “book selection becomes ‘a snap’ – the desk staff pass along patron requests, you read the newspapers of the area, visit the bookshops to find out what is popular, and if you miss something a patron wants you can always dash out and buy it” (Fiske 13). Fiske also noted that librarians spoke only briefly about how they know their community’s needs. Based on these vague comments, Fiske pointed to a need for reliable methods of determining community needs and interests as well as the absence of systematic efforts towards appraisals of current holdings.

The debate between quality and demand lead to the concept of balance. Within the context of library schools the term “balance” was most frequently used to describe a well-rounded collection. “Prescriptions for building basic collections for public or school libraries illustrate this concept by recommending definite proportions for various categories of subject matter with little regard for community differences” (Fiske 15). Fiske found that the term “balance” carried a professional sanction for public librarians, but that upon further examination the term turned out to be “a semantic convenience embracing a great variety of rationales for book selection” (15). In fact, many librarians used “balance” to express the goals of whatever aspect of book selection they found most difficult. For some it meant weeding old books, for others it meant providing all sides of an issue, or it could have meant a balance between actual and potential wishes of the patrons. One librarian said, “We talk a lot about balance, but it is really a semantic absurdity. What it boils down to is that you provide as much as you can of what anybody wants” (Fiske 16). This sort of approach revealed that book selection practices were frequently found to differ from professional theory and established standards. Fiske also reported wide variance in the use and perceived value of written book selection policies.

While Fiske viewed avoidance of controversial books to be the equivalent of self-censorship she explained that the librarians interviewed did not speak of censorship because they have “adopted an even more positivistic semantic philosophy” (Fiske 63). Instead of worrying about whether books were controversial the librarians interviewed said that “library materials must be in ‘good taste,’ they must be ‘suitable’ or they must be ‘appropriate.’ In school libraries or public library systems, the equivalent was likely to be the irreproachable statement, ‘Our materials must supplement the curriculum’” (Fiske 63).

The report also discussed the discrepancy between theory and practice as it pertains to controversial materials. Although close to half of the librarians interviewed in Fiske’s study expressed unequivocal freedom-to-read convictions,

“when it comes to actual practice, nearly two-thirds of all librarians who have a say in book selection reported instances where the controversiality of a book or author resulted in a decision not to buy. Nearly one-fifth habitually avoid buying any material which is known to be controversial or which they believe might become controversial” (Fiske 65).

However, Fiske found that librarians who had received professional training in librarianship were more likely to disregard the controversiality of materials when making their selections than librarians who had not had professional training. “Even more decisive than professional training is length of work experience. Librarians relatively new to the profession tend to be much less restrictive than their more experienced colleagues” (Fiske 68).

Fiske found that in 82 percent of the circulating libraries studied, restrictions were placed on the circulation or distribution of materials. The most common forms of restriction were moving the items to the librarian’s office, placing the materials on reserve so that they have to be specifically requested, and placing questionable materials under or behind the front desk. Additionally, nearly one-third of the circulating libraries reported that controversial items had been permanently removed from the collection. The librarians interviewed practiced self-censorship to avoid controversy and external censorship.

Librarians did not feel they could turn to either their state or national professional association for help against censorship. Two-thirds of the school librarians belonged to the School Library Association of California (SLAC), almost half belonged to the California Library Association (CLA) and more than three-fourths of the municipal and county librarians belonged to CLA. Despite this involvement, the most common complaint was that, “the two state groups (the CLA and the SLAC) do not come to grips with controversial issues either on the local or the state level. Members do not feel that they will be backed up by the profession in the event of local controversy” (Fiske 104). Thomison backed up this fear in his history of the American Library Association. “What was the recourse when the Library Bill of Rights had been violated? What could be done to help the librarian under attack? The answer unfortunately was very little. The only force was moral force” (Thomison 145).

Fiske found a general lack of self-esteem among librarians which also inhibited their ability to take a stand against censors. “Our respondents believe that the public holds both librarians and libraries in low repute. On the whole, they share the public’s allegedly low opinion of the profession” (Fiske 109). An analysis of the observations about what kinds of people librarians believe themselves to be found that “Four negative traits were mentioned for every positive one” (Fiske 110). While they admired within themselves a respect for ideas, knowledge, and intellectual freedom, they did not feel strong enough individually or professionally to assert these qualities “in the face of public disapproval or indifference” (Fiske 110).

Reactions

Fiske first reported her findings at a symposium entitled “The Climate of Book Selection: Social Influence on School and Public Libraries.” Robbins explained that “the findings Fiske unveiled at the symposium were widely reported in the press….Major library journals, however, were strangely silent on the report in 1958” (98). Fiske’s book, Book Selection and Censorship, was published in 1959 and awarded the annual Library Literature Award sponsored jointly by the American Library Association and the Canadian Library Association (“News and Notes” 692).

Various reviewers latched on to different aspects of the report. Eleanor Smith wrote in Library Journal that the report’s finding that librarians tend to be timid and were self-censors was not entirely surprising. However, “This is embarrassing to librarians as professional status seekers because it may overshadow the more positive findings of the study: When librarians are threatened by real outside censorship, they usually offer strong resistance” (Smith 223). She went on to argue,

“The fault, if it is a fault not to live up to the Library Bill of Rights in serving the public, lies within the librarians themselves for the most part, as these interviews clearly show. They seem to lack confidence in their ability to select the best books as well as the courage to defend their collections” (Smith 224).

David Sabsay claimed that the report “is a serious indictment of our philosophy and our integrity which we cannot ignore” (Sabsay 222). He said that Fiske’s report proved that it is not simply timidity that causes instances of self-censorship, but a lack of understanding of the purposes and goals of librarianship. However, Leon Carnovsky, in his review argued that the library bill of rights and policy statements “are slender reeds…not enough to protect a librarian when his professional existence may be imperiled” (Carnovsky 157).

Others focused on policy, blaming Fiske’s findings of the discrepancy between theory and practice on a lack of written selection policy. “This inconsistency is hardly surprising when one discovers the conspicuous absence of rules and policies on book selection” (Jahoda 151). In his editorial in the ALA Bulletin, A. L. McNeal, then Chairman of the ALA Intellectual Freedom Committee, suggested that first and foremost, “In order that the librarian at the local level may have full support it seems desirable to have well-established, written book selection policies, which are understood by his staff and known to his board or governing body” (McNeal 359).

Some reviewers looked to library education as the answer to the issue of librarians’ self-censorship. “In the long run, it is to the improvement of formal education for librarianship that we must look for an upgrading of the profession, and therefore of the professional image” (Sabsay 223). Asheim suggested that Fiske had overlooked changes in library education over the years. “The education being given to younger librarians stresses professional responsibilities rather than skills and techniques” (540). However, he did allow another possibility, that being “the librarians with longer practical experience have become worn down and discouraged by the lack of support from their communities, and even overt attack and repudiation by their supervising authorities, in the matter of freedom to read” (Asheim 540).

A review from a sociology journal defended the librarians, “Whatever faults these California librarians might have – and Fiske spells them out clearly and sympathetically – they often do a better job than their community would prefer” (Lee 303).

While there were mixed reactions to the results and questions about what to do about them, most contemporary reviewers gave the work high praise and recommended it to a wide variety of readers. In Public Opinion Quarterly Marie Johoda wrote, “Miss Fiske’s book will undoubtedly be read with profit by librarians and sociologists. I wish it one additional group of readers: high school and college teachers might find it a most stimulating text to acquaint their students with the ideas and difficulties of democratic institutions” (152). In the American Journal of Sociology Lester Asheim said, “While this study is primarily concerned with the librarian and his attitude toward the collection of materials which is his charge, it throws a good deal of light on the American educational system and on the temper of our society” (540). And in Social Problems Melvin DeFleur wrote, “This is a carefully prepared, readable account of a major social problem. It should be of considerable interest to the educated layman, the civic leader, the educator, students of occupational sociology, community organization, mass communication and especially to librarians themselves” (94).

Fiske’s report had shown the profession that, at least in California, its proposed ideals were not consistently in  practice. Surprisingly, there was little discussion of the report beyond the initial book reviews. While Fiske’s study was at least in part initiated by ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Committee, I was unable to find any ALA response to the study in my search of the library literature other than McNeal’s ALA Bulletin editorial. A History of the American Library Association, 1876-1972 does not mention the Fiske report. In fact, in its summary sections on intellectual freedom it skips from 1953 to 1967.

Words speak louder than actions

While ALA may not have addressed the Fiske Report head on, it did continue to support intellectual freedom, publishing the Robert B. Downs-edited The First Freedom: Liberty and Justice in the World of Books and Reading in 1960. Downs was president of ALA 1952-1953 and a vocal advocate for intellectual freedom throughout his career. The First Freedom was produced as a response to McCarthyism’s lingering effects. Downs explained that the book was made up of the “most notable writings in the field of censorship and intellectual freedom over approximately the past half century” (qtd. in Robbins, “Censorship” 102). Robbins very aptly points out how the juxtaposition of Fiske’s Book Selection and Censorship and Downs’s The First Freedom epitomized the dichotomy of the library profession’s varying degrees of acceptance of and adherence to the Library Bill of Rights. “Fiske’s book testified that librarians were not putting into practice the code of freedom….Downs’s The First Freedom, on the other hand, exemplified the celebrated public role that ALA had achieved in the defense of intellectual freedom in the 1950s” (Robbins 102-103).

ALA has continued to build the reputation of libraries and librarians as defenders of intellectual freedom and crusaders against censorship. In 1967 ALA Established its Office for Intellectual Freedom. In 1972 Busha conducted a survey examining the attitudes of mid-western public librarians toward intellectual freedom and censorship based on Fiske’s work. He came to much the same conclusion as Fiske did 14 years earlier. He reported “that mid-western public librarians did not hesitate to express agreement with clichés of intellectual freedom but that many of them apparently did not feel strong enough as professionals to assert these principles in the face of real or anticipated censorship pressures” (Busha 300).

In 1982 ALA launched Banned Books Week in response to an increase in book challenges. “BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them” (“Banned”). This campaign highlights librarians’ role in fighting censorship. “Fortunately, while some books were banned or restricted, in a majority of cases the books were not banned, all thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and members of the community to retain the books in the library collections” (“Banned”). Yet, in 2002 Ken P. Coley published Moving toward a Method to Test for Self-Censorship by School Library Media Specialists. Studying public high school libraries in Texas, he found that “over 80 percent of the schools in the study show signs that self-censorship has occurred during the collection development process” (Coley).

These studies show that while our public image may have evolved radically over the last 60 years, our private practice still struggles with the same issues of social and community pressures, personal values and professional purpose.

Conclusion

ALA as a professional organization has declared strong support for intellectual freedom. However, it is important to remember that this is a relatively new turn of events.

“The truth hurts, but the concept of intellectual freedom simply did not spring forth, Athena-like from the head of Zeus, as a fully-formulated principle of American librarianship. In fact, intellectual freedom as a significant principle of librarianship is a recently-evolved concept…When our profession set out to formalize its beliefs, it often did so in reaction to particular issues and events” (Chadwell 20).

Robbins also reminded us that “In the early days of their profession librarians themselves preached the need to protect their readers by carefully screening what they made available to them” (“Dismissal” 161). When the Library Bill of Rights was strengthened in 1948 it was done in resistance to a coercive notion of Americanism, in opposition to censorship and out of librarians’ desire to guard their professional prerogatives in book selection and collection building. It established as its foundation the values of pluralistic democracy – values of diversity, tolerance, and openness. “These values were not universally accepted, however, not even by all librarians, many of whom could not relinquish their role as protectors of taste and morals in exchange for the role of guarantor of access to ideas” (Robbins, “Dismissal” 161).

In her 1960 review of Fiske’s book, Margaret Kateley said,

“This volume should be in the office of every head librarian and school administrator. It should stimulate further research into the character of the library as a public institution. Aspects of the problem particularly deserving of attention are the public image of the library and the status of the librarian, criteria for book selection, the personnel shortage in libraries, factors influencing financial support of libraries, and administrative problems of school libraries” (Kateley 136-137).

These concerns sound alarmingly contemporary.

My goal with this post was to share a bit of library history in the hopes that it would grant some perspective and elaborate the complexity and nuance of the issues raised. Unlike many of my other posts, this is not a call to arms, but a call to reflect, to remember that things haven’t always been what they are today, that even today they may not be what you assume, and that there are many grey areas worth exploring.

Thanks to Tristan Boyd and to my Lead Pipe colleagues Brett Bonfield and Emily Ford for their helpful comments on this article.

Works Cited & Further Reading

• Asheim, Lester. “Book Selection and Censorship: A Study of School and Public Libraries on California.” American Journal of Sociology 65.5 (Mar. 1960): 539‑540.
• “Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read.” American Library Association, 2010.
• Benemann, William E. “Tears and Ivory Towers: California Libraries during the McCarthy Era.” American Libraries 8.6 (June 1977): 305‑309.
• Busha, C. H. 1972. “Intellectual freedom and censorship: The climate of opinion in Midwestern public libraries.” Library Quarterly, 42.3: 283-301.
• Carnovsky, Leon. “Book Selection and Censorship: A Study of School and Public Libraries in California.” Library Quarterly 30.2 (Apr. 1960): 156‑157.
• Chadwell, Faye A. “Intellectual Freedom, An Evolving and Enduring Value of Librarianship.” Oregan Library Association Quarterly 8.1 (Spring 2002): 18‑23.
• Coley, Ken P. “Moving toward a Method to Test for Self-Censorship by School Library Media Specialists.” American Library Association, 2002.
• DeFleur, Melvin L. “Book Selection and Censorship: A study of School and Public Libraries in California.” Social Problems 8.1 (Summer 1960): 93‑94.
• Fiske, Marjorie. Book Selection and Censorship: A Study of School and Public Libraries in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959.
• Jahoda, Marie. “Book Selection and Censorship: A Study of School and Public Libraries in California.” Public Opinion Quarterly 25.1 (1961): 150‑152.
• Kateley, Margaret A. “Book Selection and Censorship: A Study of School and Public Libraries in California.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 331 (1960): 136‑137.
• Kiefer, Christie W. “Marjorie E. Fiske, Psychiatry: San Francisco.” 1992, University of California: In Memoriam. Ed. David Krogh. Berkeley: University of California Academic Senate, 1992: 47-48.
• Langland, Laurie. “Public Libraries, Intellectual Freedom, and the Internet: To Filter or not to Filter.” PNLA Quarterly 62.4 (1998).
• Lee, Alfred McClung. “Book Selection and Censorship: A Study of School and Public Libraries in California.” American Sociological Review 25.2 (1960): 303.
• McNeal, A. L.  “Editorial.” ALA Bulletin 54 (1960): 359.
• “News and Notes.” Public Opinion Quarterly 24.4 (1960): 692.
• Robbins, Louise S. Censorship and the American LIbrary: The American Library Association’s Response to Threats to Intellectual Freedom, 1939‑1969. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996.
• ‑ ‑ ‑. “Champions of a cause: American librarians and the Library Bill of Rights in the 1950s.” Library Trends 45.1 (1996): 28-49.
• ‑ ‑ ‑. The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship and the American Library. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000.
• Sabsay, David. “The Challenge of The ‘Fisk Report’.” California Librarian 20 (1959): 222‑256.
• Smith, Eleanor T. “Self‑Censors.” Library Journal 85.2 (1960): 223‑224.
• Starr, Joan. “Libraries and national security: An historical review.” First Monday 9.12 (2004).
• Thomison, Dennis. A History of the American Library Association, 1876‑1972. Chicago: American Library Association, 1978.

Three years, twenty committees, twelve hundred instruction sessions, forty thousand monograph purchases, and half a million reference questions later, I’m at the point in this librarian job where I have enough experience to know how to get things done, and also enough to wonder, “What exactly am I doing?” The more you know, the more you know you don’t know, as they say.

I exaggerate the numbers, but the above four things do seem to encompass the majority of what I do from day to day. Of course there’s a wide variety of additional tasks that fill up my time in the office, from updating my library’s Facebook page to presenting at conferences. All these things combine into the work portion of my life. Is it a good job? Undoubtedly. Is it fulfilling? Usually. Fun? Sometimes. But I can’t help but wonder what it’s all for.

The danger of the summer lull, particularly for academic librarians — but perhaps for others, too — is that after the frenetic pace of the regular semesters, we suddenly have time to reflect. I call it a “danger” because it’s much easier to speed through life and work without asking too many questions. Questions can get you into trouble if you don’t like the answers. But then a little trouble isn’t always a bad thing.

My spring semester ended about a month ago. Immediately after finals I went on a lovely long vacation, and now I’m back at work, waking up early thanks to jet lag, and taking a little time to think and ask questions. After all, this year was my midpoint in moving towards tenure at my institution, a circumstance that required me to submit formal documents to my colleagues so that they could offer constructive feedback about my progress in this position. It seems fitting, now that I have been evaluated by others on my librarianness, that I do a little review of my own and decide what being a librarian means to me.

The Librarian Identity, or Lack Thereof

One of my favorite things about being a librarian, and an academic reference and instruction librarian in particular, is the variety: the variety of tasks and duties I’m responsible for, the variety of people I interact with, the variety of information and topics I deal with on a daily basis. The average day in the life of an academic librarian is notoriously difficult to pin down, since the list of potential tasks accomplished in a single day is seemingly endless. I enjoy knowing that every day I do something a little bit different and yet it all somehow fits under my job description.

On the other hand, it makes me wonder if my job description should be quite so broad. Not that mine is different from those of identical jobs in other places; it’s not. I greatly enjoy the many types of tasks that cross my desk on a daily basis, but I see a red flag, too, in the sheer yawning chasm of work before me. In the back of my mind is the nagging concern that my work might be oversized, unfocused, and possibly on the edge of unmanageable. Yet if I wanted to narrow it down to a few critical tasks, I’m not sure I could; too much else would be neglected or would get in the way. So I find myself asking, what’s at the core of it all? What is the real work of librarianship?

This last question brings to mind a poem by Gary Snyder, “I Went Into the Maverick Bar,” in which the main character of the poem adapts his appearance to fit in with the customers of a country bar in New Mexico. The real work of this poem, the work of coming to terms with place and identity, is far larger than any job, but if we shrink it down and tweak it slightly (with apologies to Mr. Snyder), the nature of the poem is still applicable.

Yes, I’m calling librarianship my “maverick bar.” Not literally of course, since our workplaces in no way resemble the bourbon-and-beer scene in the poem, but I have the sense sometimes that librarians are a little bit like those folks in the bar – a little displaced, not quite sure who they are or what they should be doing. Every culture has a life of its own beyond the individuals, and our library culture, too, is not quite native to where we now live. Libraries were built for a print-based culture of collecting and preserving, but that culture has shifted dramatically around us while we continue to dance, a little awkwardly, to the band.

Our search for identity is clear to me as the source of many younger librarians’ efforts over the past several decades to combat the “librarian stereotype.” Any culture that is so intent on making a sharp break from the recent past makes me suspicious.  I’m unable to accept that the inherent nature of librarianship has changed dramatically, even if it sports a nose ring and carries a smartphone. Then there are the varied, insistent, even desperate initiatives to redefine our buildings in ways that will continue to appeal to library users, campus administrations, trustees, and boards of directors. I’ll be first in line to admire these new buildings and renovations, with their polished work spaces and bright, airy environments, but these new buildings may simultaneously advance us even further on the path to identity crisis. They include less and less of any particular thing that one would identify as characteristic of a library. After all, what purpose does a bookless, wholly electronic library serve that distinguishes it from an overblown student center? In this article from the Mercury News, note the paragraph:

Libraries are the very heart of the research university, the center for scholarship. But the accumulation of information online is shifting their sense of identity.

Shifting their sense of identity to what, exactly? The article doesn’t say.

These days we’re better at knowing what we’re not (bun-wearing shushers) than putting our finger on what exactly we are and what we’re here for. Perhaps it’s this insecurity that causes librarians to try to do so many things all at once. We leap into social networks, digital repositories, and online services; we reconceive our collections; we become publishers as well as collectors; we reach out to our communities, campuses, and potential donors, stretching ourselves thin; we digitize; we redefine our jobs, and redefine them again; we rebuild, restructure, rearrange; we stand alert, ready for anything. And even when we are self-conscious enough to acknowledge our situation, we still don’t have any answers. In a blog post more than a year ago Bobbi Newman pointed to this problem, but rather than offering solutions she ends with the (admittedly potent) line, “We’ve got to change, and I mean really change.”

The urgency and the need for change is clear to all of us; what no one can seem to put their finger on is how to change. And that leads to more identity crisis and more desperate grabbing at the technologies, tools, and strategies that might work in the short-term. We’re running on the information hamster wheel; we simply can’t do everything. And rather than try to do it all, it might be better if we do, well, nothing for a while. You don’t tell someone hyperventilating in panic to run some sprints, do you? No, you give them a paper bag or some distraction, speak calmly, and encourage them to sit down, relax, and put their fear aside. Similarly, what libraries may need to do is stop, take a breather, release our fears of irrelevance and ask our patrons, campuses, administrations, donors — and yes, ourselves — what is our real work and what does it look like in 2010 and beyond?

If indeed libraries have become irrelevant in the age of the almighty Google — and I don’t think we have — wouldn’t you rather know than keep panting along on the hamster wheel, accomplishing nothing?

In Search of the Real Work

What librarians do have is a set of core values that serves as the backbone of our identity and draws together even those working in nontraditional positions. Increasing access to all types of information and all perspectives while protecting intellectual freedom and privacy; these are the values that unite us. I think every library student gets (or should get) a little rush upon first discovering the ALA Library Bill of Rights and realizing the larger issues that play a role in this field. If we boil it down, the major value expressed in this document is intellectual freedom, the full and equal access to all types of information for everyone. In my mind, this is one of the most critical roles a librarian can play. (Though I have heard some debate on this; for more, stay tuned for Ellie Collier’s post later this month).

The values that guide librarians don’t address the core tasks that cement these values to our daily lives in the field. While I would like to believe that my primary responsibilities reflect these values, I don’t knowingly achieve any goals related to intellectual freedom in my daily tasks. There is some gap between what I stand for as a librarian and what I do in practice, as all idealism shrivels a bit in the face of reality. I must please my boss, my tenure reviewers, my students, my campus administration. At a minimum, I hope my theory and practice don’t contradict each other.

I wonder, too, if there are common tasks across all librarians’ various job types, professional organizations, and institutions. I can’t think of any other career that has so many different manifestations of what work in that field might look like. I’m not sure whether to call it flexibility or lack of focus. Just think about the various titles that librarians work under: Emerging Technologies Librarian, Copyright Librarian, First-Year Services Librarian, Digital Initiatives Librarian, as well as all the ones that are more traditional and familiar. Not to mention librarians working in other information-related organizations that aren’t libraries.

A considered look backwards at the librarian’s primary roles throughout history is interesting in the effort to make meaning out of this. In “Tracing the Archetypal Academic Librarian,”  Stephen E. Bales compares academic librarian job duties during two periods of early history with those of today. After reviewing the activities that took place in libraries during the time of Assurbanipal (roughly 600s BCE) and Alexandria (200s BCE), Bales concludes that most of the primary roles of librarians have not changed over the course of several millennia: librarians from all periods of time have been involved in these tasks: identifying, selecting, acquiring, organizing, retrieving, conserving, and conducting some sort of scholarship. Bales is not the only one to note that librarianship, historically, has taken place largely behind the scenes, and this was still the case in the late eighteen hundreds.

No longer. Bales’ insights might be helpful if not for the fact that I do very few of these things as part of my daily work as an academic librarian in 2010. Not many librarians I know do much of this at all. In fact, the two things I spend a large proportion of my time on – outreach and teaching – didn’t even make the cut in Bales’ listing of major roles. Certainly in former millennia librarians had no interest in sharing their collections; documents were reserved for elite and wealthy scholars. Nor does Bales mention professional service outside of scholarship, which is a tremendous time commitment for many academic librarians. In my opinion, Bales’ historical assessment of librarian duties doesn’t really cut to the “real work” of the field today.

To gain a more modern perspective on the priorities of a librarian position, we can review evaluation documents from institutions that break out task areas into particular percentages. For instance, I happened upon a handbook from Florida International University Libraries (pdf) that prioritizes the work of an information services librarian in this manner:

35% Reference/Research Assistance

25% Information Literacy

15% Collection Development

5% Liaison

15% Non-Scheduled Activities (service, conferences, professional development)

5% Other Duties as Assigned by Department Head

While I don’t advocate trying to break down one’s work schedule according to this sort of math (think of all the grey areas), it does make it clear that answering questions and teaching are by far the top two responsibilities at this institution. That sounds about right to me. Of course, if we look closely at each of those categories we can see that they each encompass a wide range of more specific tasks. “Information Literacy,” for example, might include teaching (one-time workshops, for-credit courses, and perhaps additional sessions), assessment of current instruction, planning for future instruction, creating promotional and informational materials, etc. Although it’s just one priority area, I’m sure it could fill a full-time librarian’s work schedule all on its own.

It’s clear to most of us working in academic librarian positions – and probably all librarian positions – that the full array of responsibilities and duties our jobs encompass are simply not achievable in a regular work week. In case we thought it was just our imaginations, the University of California at Berkeley conducted a workload survey of their librarians and received 31 responses that indicated overwhelmingly that getting the work done is more than full-time commitment. It’s no surprise that Berkeley librarians largely felt obliged to work some evenings and weekends to keep up; even those in smaller institutions do the same. This makes it even more important to identify what our real work is, and to prioritize tasks in a way that empowers us to accomplish it.

Conclusions, Such as They Are

There’s not much discussion in the literature of librarianship, so far as I can tell, to answer my rather philosophical question about what our “real work” is. I have located books and articles about job duties and priorities, some of which I mentioned above, but little that attempts to dig to the core of our professional beings. Historically, I could argue that the real work revolved around collecting and preserving documents in the interests of greater knowledge. Today, although that is one piece of the work most librarians do, it has certainly been deemphasized.

The more I consider this question, too, the more I doubt that it could possibly have a rational, scientific answer. I relive that grad-school rush upon reading the Library Bill of Rights, which is about as real as anything I could point to in this field. I think about the deep, true gratification I enjoy when I manage to connect an interested, intellectual person with new information that contributes to their perspective on a topic. I think about my colleagues in academic libraries, and about my colleagues in public, school, and special libraries. Isn’t it true, in the end, that our real work is more about values than tasks?

And that greatest value of all, even beyond any document compiled by any professional association: Knowledge, with a capital “K.” I see no work in librarianship more real than the collection, protection, and dissemination of Knowledge, and the empowerment of others in means to acquire it. Although libraries historically were more about hoarding Knowledge than sharing it, our work has not otherwise changed much over the millennia. The internet, while making information more widely available, has simultaneously obscured true Knowledge and increased the importance of our real work.

This revelation doesn’t directly help me manage my workload and organize tasks, but it does help to keep me theoretically and emotionally grounded in my job. My real work is Knowledge. If I hold that goal in mind, the details of how I accomplish it on daily basis begin to fall into place. Some of my duties, like teaching, support Knowledge directly. Other tasks, like tracking reference questions, are not tied to that higher goal but are necessary for the reality of my workplace. If I want to continue in my job, I can’t just stop doing those less crucial tasks, but I can prioritize my efforts and save the best of my energy for the real work of librarianship.

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Readers: I don’t speak for every librarian, just myself. What are your thoughts about the “real work” of librarianship? Your comments below are welcome.

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Author’s Note, Or, A Confession and Suggestion for Further Reading: I’m embarrassed to say that I was unfamiliar with (or had forgotten) “The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians” until after writing this post, but now that I have I strongly encourage anyone who is thinking about the real work of librarianship to read them. The document is an excellent, timeless vision of our field, and I nod to the wisdom of those who conceived it.

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My thanks to the entire cast of ItLwtLP as well as Eric Frierson and Rachel Slough for their invaluable feedback on drafts of this post. I have never before had so many helpful and insightful responses to any single piece of writing, and I hope the results reflect it.

Courtesy of Flickr User DavidDMuir

When I asked Selden Lamoureux, Electronic Serials Librarian at the North Carolina State University Libraries, “what are the most challenging issues for electronic serials librarians today?” we launched into a fascinating conversation about a topic that hits at the core of what it means to work in library acquisitions these days. Selden’s response was:

“The list is long and ranges from things that are the natural consequences of a dramatically altered publishing landscape (such as the need for new management tools), to problems largely of our own making. It’s within this second category that I find one of the more insidious problems for large academic libraries: fantasy pricing.”

Over the course of many weeks, the following interview-style Q&A unfolded. Selden is one of those people who have spent years cultivating intelligent and cooperative relationships between libraries and publishers. She is one of the founders of SERU (Shared E-Resource Understanding), a framework for eliminating the need for extensive and sometimes painful license negotiation for electronic resources such as e-journals, e-books and databases. Her invaluable contributions to librarianship have been recognized by her peers via awards such as the Coutts Award for Innovation in Electronic Resources Management and the John Merriman Award to support attendance at the UK Serials Group Annual Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland in April 2010 (volcanic ash cloud, included). Selden is an active leader in NASIG (North American Serials Interest Group) and ALA’s ALCTS (Association for Library Collections and Technical Services). The opinions and statements that follow are based on Selden’s experiences and come from the perspective of an acquisitions librarian working in the context of a large academic research library. Her insights may not reflect the experience of acquisitions librarians in other kinds of libraries, but hopefully give you a flavor of the state of serials acquisitions in the broad scale. Please share your thoughts, opinions and questions in the Comments section that follows this post.

Question: What is “fantasy pricing”?

Answer: Fantasy pricing is the practice of establishing a journal’s subscription price that, for the most part, appears largely divorced from production and distribution costs. In the print environment, journals had production and delivery costs that determined a minimum price. Electronic journal pricing is almost always based on the price of the print, but for electronic journals, the cost of delivering the content is cheap and there is little relationship between what it costs to produce and deliver the electronic journal and the asking price for its subscription. How do I know this? When a publisher can claim its collection of journals is worth more than $2 million, and also claim that the average price a library pays for all that content is less than 15% of the value of its titles, then something is amiss in the way that publisher values its titles! [Note: What Selden is saying here is that it doesn’t make sense that a publisher would claim that their journal collection is worth $2 million while also stating that libraries only pay 15% of that cost – why would a publisher sell their journal collection at such a loss if the value they claim is so much higher? Either the collection isn’t worth $2 million or the publisher is really desperate to make a sell.]

Question: Why is there such a difference in the stated value of the journal collection vs. the cost to libraries?

Answer: When pricing for online content is based on a library’s print subscription spending commitment, large research libraries, with their historically large number of print subscriptions, pay a disproportionate amount for electronic journal content. If all libraries shared in the savings, I wouldn’t object. But what happens in practice is that libraries wind up paying wildly different prices for the same content, pricing that is all out of proportion to differences among their institutions.

An especially egregious example: One publisher offered a library consortium access to their complete collection of journals online. The consortium contained library members that ranged in size from large ARL (Association of Research Libraries) libraries to small institutions of under 5,000 students. The difference in price for the exact same content was 32 times at its most extreme. In terms of actual dollars, it meant one institution was asked to pay $1.5 million, while another paid $47,000 for identical content. If the value of the content is truly $2 million (let’s say, in this case, it is purported to be valued at around $2 million), then both libraries are getting a bargain; but if the value of the content is closer to the average cost (15%, or $345,000) then the larger library is paying too much and the smaller library too little. The publisher could never have offered the smaller libraries this same access to print journals, because the cost of printing and delivering the journal would have been prohibitive. Clearly, the negligible cost of distributing electronic journals is what makes this possible. [Note: Our reviewers pointed out that if patrons of the larger libraries use journals 32 times more than smaller libraries, then it might be somewhat justified that the larger libraries should pay 32 times more for the same content. We haven’t seen statistics to back this up consistently, but it is an interesting perspective to note. Additional cost for supporting higher capacity usage doesn't necessarily kick in until there is a very large number of uses and a publisher needs to invest in additional server infrastructure. There is still no good metric for identifying the value of a "use." ]

Question: What is the impact of this pricing disparity on larger libraries?

Answer: One problem is that these business models lock in historic spending commitments of libraries at the same time that they disallow or severely limit libraries’ ability to cancel subscriptions. When library budgets are flat, the only way to subscribe to new journals is to cancel previous subscriptions. If, however, a library’s spending level for a given publisher’s journals is fixed, and the annual increase is fixed, and the ability to cancel is restricted, then the library budget equilibrium is broken.

Another problem exists in the inherent inequality of having no “real” price for a journal. There is a tradition, established long before there were electronic journals, of asking larger libraries, with their larger budgets and more extensive research needs, to pay more for content than smaller institutions (e.g., the Carnegie Classification was often used to establish tiered pricing for content). In those days, however, the disparity between costs paid by large research libraries vs. small academic libraries was never as disproportionate as it is now. [Note: Selden isn’t suggesting that tiered pricing models are disagreeable; just that the growing disparity is much more difficult to justify.]

These days, the ambiguity of how to value (and therefore charge for) electronic subscriptions not only compounds the pricing disparity between large universities and small colleges, but also between institutions of relative parity where there are different historic spending patterns. In the same consortial example cited previously, there happened to be two large universities with very similar student populations and PhD programs. One was an up-and-coming university that had grown rapidly in the last few years; the other was the flagship university with a long, storied tradition. In this example, where the two institutions were nearly identical in their current academic profiles, the flagship university was charged nearly 2.3 times the cost for the same content, since pricing was based primarily on historic spending commitments. Noblesse oblige cannot begin to explain this pricing disequilibrium.

Question: How did this kind of business model come about? What are the advantages for publishers?

Answer: This is a model that is often referred to as the “Big Deal,” and it’s not hard to see what its advantages are. For publishers, there were (and still are) real costs associated with the transition from print to electronic publishing: a web presence had to be established, a journal delivery platform created, and people had to be hired who had the necessary skills to build the new access and delivery system. Once those costs were met, other costs came into the picture such as the cost of maintaining online access (unlike print, where the commitment stops once an issue is delivered), managing complex access levels, providing extra user services (e.g., table of contents alert services), customer service for authors, libraries and patrons, and reporting of metrics such as usage statistics. For publishers, there was a lot of risk and uncertainty. [Note: There is considerable debate about the actual cost of electronic production of articles within the scholarly communication marketplace. The costs of electronic production are not what are being brought to light here – rather, it’s the disparity in what is charged to one library versus another library for the same content and the contradiction of average charges to libraries vs. the stated value of a publisher’s electronic journal portfolio.]

One strategy that minimizes the risk to publishers’ bottom lines is to lock in library spending at historic print spending levels, lock in an annual inflation cap (i.e., an annual price increase), and limit the ability to cancel subscriptions. That way, a publisher guarantees a predictable annual income and predictable revenue growth. Under this model, since large university libraries were often the biggest consumers of print journals, they are the customers who now provide the biggest online revenue.

The revenue from smaller college libraries which have not traditionally been able to afford (or necessarily have much interest in) the journals then becomes bonus income because the base line cost for the content has already been covered by the large libraries, and distribution costs (after covering the costs of technical infrastructure for production and maintenance with a core customer base of large academic libraries) become relatively small.

Question: What were the advantages for libraries?

Answer: Just as publishers were experimenting with electronic journals, so were libraries. A decade ago, we didn’t know how library users would react to electronic journals. This model offered us access to a lot of content for a price that was within range of what we were already spending. The carrot was that we would lock in our spending commitment and receive access to hundreds of new titles (of course, the stick was if we canceled, we’d lose access to all those new titles; there was very little middle ground). In addition, there was the promise of electronic journals eventually becoming cheaper than print, and we were willing to experiment with new business models in the short term as we all figured out the shape of the future.

Question: Why is fantasy pricing such a problem now?

Answer: If library budgets did nothing but grow, just as the price of journals do, I suppose there wouldn’t be a problem. But that’s not the case, and has never been the case. In addition to publishers minimizing risk by locking in library spending, there is a trend for more and more publisher mergers. When I follow the trajectory of the past several years, what I see is a future with a handful of publishers, delivering the same online content to every library, at a price that absorbs each library’s entire budget. Simple. We all get the same content, and we each pay all our budgets to have it, whether my budget is $100,000 or $10 million. If all library needs were the same, that might be a desirable model despite its bizarre pricing scheme, but libraries needs are not uniform, and libraries need the ability to customize their content. If pricing were more in line with actual production, distribution and support costs for the library market, I would bet that my library would see considerable cost reductions for commercial journal content.

Question: And what would the smaller academic libraries do if pricing were more in line with actual production and distribution costs? Wouldn’t their costs increase?

Answer: Perhaps costs to smaller academic libraries would increase. But, maybe they could rely on previous methods of sharing resources, and use Inter-Library Lending (ILL) for the content their budgets cannot afford to cover. That’s what we’ve all done in the print environment; that’s what we continue to do now. Perhaps it’s one of the strategies for sharing information that ought to survive in the electronic environment.

Question: What’s the future of scholarly journal pricing models?

Answer: There are a lot of things happening in the production and dissemination of scholarly content that are competing with the commercial publishers (e.g., institutional repositories, open access initiatives, non-journal publication venues), so I expect there will be many solutions – eventually. For now, however, libraries are still investing large percentages of their budgets in commercially produced content. What I’m hoping for is a short term solution. And because my perspective is that of someone at a large academic library, I’m most interested in changes that alleviate their problems first! I would like to see publishers redistribute the cost of their Big Deals; shift their pricing models toward a model that is closer to the actual cost of the journal; and pass some of the savings realized by low distribution costs to the large academic libraries which have been their best customers for years. Another offer they can make, while prices are inching closer to costs, is to offer the large research libraries something they value which smaller institutions traditionally don’t care about: ownership of the content (perpetual access to the digital content even if the subscription is canceled) rather than leased access (whereby access is lost if the subscription is canceled).

Question: What do you think are the chances that publishers will move away from fantasy pricing?

Answer: It won’t be easy! If there had been a pricing model at hand that was clear, fair, and low risk publishers would be using it already. This is not an easy problem to solve. There’s the added difficulty that most publishers still have print production costs as well as electronic format costs. What I’ve seen recently that makes me think we may be about to turn a corner, however, are a few publishers who are candid that their interest is in keeping library spending levels stable, and they are not so tied to which particular journal titles are delivered. I think this has been true for a long time; they are just now more comfortable in expressing this. If, in fact, we move away from the all or nothing Big Deal to a more nuanced exchange of dollars for value, some of the equilibrium will have been restored. [Note: Publishers and libraries alike are still trying to figure out next steps. We don't know the true impact on journal value of things like web publishing platform enhancements, server maintenance, expanding online customer service, electronic article submission and editorial processing systems, electronic resource management systems (ERMS), access verification tools, etc. The road ahead isn’t totally clear, but there are some things coming into focus as a result of good faith collaborative negotiations between libraries and publishers.]

Question: Any final thoughts?

Answer: I find myself caught in the tension between my impulse to provide a service (access to information) to as wide an audience as possible, and my desire to be a good steward of my institution’s financial resources. I don’t want to see small institutions lose access to commercially produced online journals, but I don’t want my institution to underwrite the bulk of the cost for that access. A difference of 3,000% between what libraries are asked to pay is absurd. Large academic research libraries are paying too much for electronic content. Pricing needs to move out of the fantasy realm and anchor itself closer to production and delivery costs appropriate for the academic library market. [Note: Selden and I didn’t discuss open access publishing models in any depth in the framework of these interviews. Open access publishing has played a significant role in the many debates about journal pricing; however, as long as scholarly communication continues to rely on traditional publishing being coordinated through external publishing organizations and corporations, libraries will continue to deal with the consequences of journal valuation models and disproportionate pricing tiers.]

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to Ellie Collier (In the Library with the Lead Pipe and Austin Community College) and Victor Lao (Springer) for their thoughtful review and feedback on previous drafts of this article. Their comments/feedback on the content in this article represents their personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employers.

Andrew Carnegie by cliff1066 / CC-BY

A few months back, someone emailed In the Library with the Lead Pipe asking if we could recommend an online course that could give her an overview of library responsibilities. She was about to start working at a K-12 school and, though she had no library experience, part of her job included running the library.

An aspect of librarians’ déformation professionnelle is the mistaken idea that people who don’t work in libraries realize there are library-specific degrees. Those of us who have earned our degrees want the world to value them the way we do, especially if we’re still paying off student loans. Wouldn’t you be just a little bit disappointed if all of your master’s degree coursework could be summarized in a single online course? And if it could, wouldn’t that make us sort of stupid for wasting all that time and money learning the art and science of librarianship?¹

Another part of our déformation professionnelle is that we make assumptions about other professions that are similar to the one our correspondent made about librarianship, especially professions that don’t typically involve degrees or licenses, such as fundraising. It isn’t that we don’t appreciate the importance of getting donations: since I started working as a librarian, the topic my colleagues in the profession have been most interested in having me teach them about is fundraising. I’ve spent much of my professional life in fundraising, so it’s a natural request. But what many people don’t seem to realize is that it’s just as difficult to summarize what fundraisers do as it is to summarize what librarians do.

This article is not intended to be a complete summary of fundraising. Instead, it’s meant to put you in the right frame of mind to help your organization raise more money. And it’s intended for everyone who works in libraries, not just the people whose job description usually includes fundraising. I hope we all agree that everyone who works in a library needs to work together if the library is going to function most effectively. For instance, everyone should be able to answer basic questions and communicate important policies. Fundraising is the same way: it’s not going to work nearly as well if only one person in the organization, or one department, is solely responsible for cultivating and stewarding donations.

There are multiple economies

Many people assume that nonprofits raise less money in bad economies. This isn’t necessarily the case; in fact, it’s possible that the opposite is true. G. Douglas Alexander, co-author of Essential Principles for Fundraising Success, wrote a 1991 article in which he pointed out that contributions increased during World War II, the 1974 recession, and the 1982 recession. In a 2008 study, “Fundraising in a Cold Climate,” Dennis O’Connor and Deirdre Hatch cited work by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University and the Association of Fundraising Professionals that found the same pattern: in most bad economies, nonprofits raised more money.

There seem to be many reasons this happens. In part, we seem to band together during hard times. People, and even countries, with very little discretionary money will send aid to victims of earthquakes, tsunamis, and terrorist attacks. We’ve all heard of poor communities coming together to support one another: it’s become a Hollywood cliché.

In addition, while many states and municipalities are eviscerating library budgets, the stock market, though volatile, has enjoyed a significant recovery in the last year or so. On March 6, 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average descended all the way to 6,627; on April 23, it reached 11,204. Along the way, many people made quite a bit of money. Certainly not everyone: plenty of people sold low, and plenty of others lacked the funds or insight to invest during the recovery. But the idea in fundraising isn’t to raise an equal amount of money from everyone: it’s to raise sufficient funding from people who are interested in supporting your work.

If people want to help you but don’t have money right now, make sure they still feel appreciated and informed and, if they’re interested, provide them with other meaningful ways to contribute. If people have money but aren’t interested, you’re not likely to change their minds. In general, it’s best to focus your fundraising efforts on people who have the ability and inclination to contribute.

We like winners

Many people with enough discretionary money to make sizable financial contributions have accumulated their savings by working hard, making decisions that turned out well, and avoiding risk. As Warren Buffett likes to say, “The first rule of investing is don’t lose money; the second rule is don’t forget Rule No. 1.”

This is one of the ideas that people who are unfamiliar with fundraising often fail to appreciate: your desperation makes donors less likely to contribute. In the US alone, there are thousands of great causes and nonprofits. It simply doesn’t make sense to donate money to a desperate organization when you have so many stable organizations to choose from that are also doing great work.

In addition, it’s awfully hard for a library to paint a bleak picture without coming off as disingenuous. If I didn’t believe libraries were important, I wouldn’t have gone to library school, but there’s no way the funding cuts we’re facing can compete with the World Bank’s estimate that “1.4 billion people in developing countries are living in extreme poverty, on less than $1.25 a day.”

How can we justify supporting libraries when hundreds of millions of people go hungry each day? When preventable diseases are decimating whole populations? I happen to think Andrew Carnegie was right: libraries are a great way to support economies while also furthering democracy. And I think Bill and Melinda Gates have analyzed the situation intelligently—an opinion shared by Warren Buffett, who donated the vast majority of his fortune to the Gates Foundation. For the most part, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spends its money on health and poverty, primarily in developing countries. But in the US it supports libraries and education, and it supports libraries in Europe and South America as well. This isn’t just a humanitarian decision, this is an economic decision.

We want you to ask us for money

One of the questions I’m asked most frequently by my neighbors in Collingswood: “Do you take donations?” They mostly mean books, but the principle applies to financial donations as well: unless you ask people to contribute, they don’t know that you need the money. It doesn’t have to be a hard sell. It can be as simple as, “Have you ever thought about making a contribution to the library?” or asking them if they’re aware that a friend of theirs has included the library in her will—assuming that you’ve asked the friend if she’s comfortable with your disclosing this information. In general, people are happy to agree to this request. If they care enough to contribute, they generally care enough to want other people to contribute as well, and they’re very aware that their example can encourage others to support the library; if you ask them, you’re likely to find out that it was someone else’s contribution that inspired their donation.

Also, and this often surprises those who are new to fundraising, sometimes people are insulted if you don’t ask them for money, especially if their friends are supporting the library. Even if they aren’t currently able to make a donation, they don’t want people to know it. What if you were walking through the exhibition hall at a library conference with two friends and Tim Spalding tried to interest both of your friends in LibraryThing for Libraries but completely ignored you? Regardless of how interested you were in the product, wouldn’t you wonder why he didn’t think it was even worth asking you about it?

Two quick anecdotes about asking people for money:

1. I started my fundraising career as a phone canvasser. Back in the early 90’s, I was one of those people who would interrupt your dinner and ask you to renew your support. At the close of the conversation, after we’d agreed on how much you would give, donors would often ask if I was so insistent with everyone I called. “Of course,” I’d say. Their inevitable response: “Good.” If they were giving the most they could, they wanted me to make sure that everyone else did the same.
2. Soon after I started my current job, I asked someone who has been connected to the library for years if there were any foundations or other potential donors who hadn’t yet supported the library, but who seemed like good prospects. Yes, he said, the secretary for a small area foundation has an office in town. The foundation had been around for many years, but no one from the library had ever solicited a gift. A few of us wrote letters of interest to the foundation, and, after initially turning us down—our inquiry coincided with the stock market’s 2009 low point—we were surprised a couple of months later by a $5,000 check. And so was a neighboring library, one that hadn’t even asked for a contribution. As it turned out, all we had to do was ask.

We really like to be thanked

The way I learned it, the fundraising relationship with donors cycles through three stages:

Cultivation → Solicitation → Stewardship → Cultivation → Solicitation → Stewardship, etc.

Cultivation is what you do before asking for money. Preparation is everything.

Solicitation is the ask itself. A colleague of mine would refer to proposals—one form of solicitation—as the icing on the cake, but cultivation was the cake itself. She also likened proposals to contracts: they simply made official what the two parties involved in the transaction had already agreed on.

Stewardship was the majority of what I did, full-time, for five years. Acknowledging gifts and maintaining correspondence with donors is important. It leads to cultivation, just as cultivation leads to solicitation, but it is distinct from either of them. Most donors contribute because they believe in the work you do, but many of them will not contribute again if they are not acknowledged appropriately. Once they have given, they feel connected to you in an emotional way. They feel hurt if you don’t appreciate the fact that they chose you over the thousands of other organizations they could have helped, and over the family members and friends they could have given gifts to instead. They want to feel like insiders not because they think they’ve bought their way in, but because they care so deeply about your work.

A good rule of thumb: if you don’t have the time and resources to steward a gift properly, don’t ask for it in the first place.

Our sense of privacy is different from your sense of our privacy

When I worked in stewardship at the University of Pennsylvania, there was another department called Research which consisted of about a dozen people whose sole task was to assess donors’ and prospects’ wealth so the people whose job it was to make individual solicitations knew how much to ask for: too much or too little and the potential donors could be insulted or, at the very least, end up making a gift that was much smaller than they were willing and able to give. No one is going to say, “You only want one million dollars to name that building after me? I was prepared to give you five million.” If you ask for one million, they’ll assume that’s all you need.

The Internet already existed at that point, but this was before Google, let alone Facebook: privacy was a lot easier to protect at the time. Even then, the researchers had about twenty bookshelves of material to consult, along with numerous databases. Our prospects knew they were being researched, but they didn’t mind then and people in similar situations don’t mind today: being marketed to is just part of what happens when a certain amount of money passes through your hands. In a smaller town, it doesn’t have to be all that much money. At a major university or hospital—organizations that do a lot of fundraising—it’s generally a bit more.

Not only professional fundraisers pay attention to these sorts of gifts, but other donors do as well, which is why one of the activities donors get involved in during the stewardship process is contributing information about their peers’ wealth. It’s one of the ways donors became insiders: Who just bought a new house or yacht? Who collects antique cars? Who is becoming an angel investor or venture capitalist? Who joined what board? Did you see the new donor listing in this year’s opera program? So-and-so moved up to the highest support level!

This isn’t to say that it’s acceptable to share any information without a donor’s permission. If anything, fundraisers are more aware of confidentiality than librarians. But if a donor wants her name connected to a gift or project, she usually wants people to see that connection everywhere.

We don’t think like you do

“Fitzgerald’s preoccupation with money and those who have it was a far more complicated business than is often understood. Whether he ever actually said that “the rich are different from the rest of us” is a subject of endless dispute, but if Hemingway did say in rejoinder, “Yes, they have more money,” then he missed the point. Fitzgerald understood that the rich live in a bubble the rest of us cannot enter….”
Jonathan Yardley

Librarians are frugal. I think part of it has to do with our salaries, which most of us don’t think qualifies us as rich. I think part of it also has to do with the fact that many of us can’t help but think about money in increments of how many books we could buy instead. Pay out of my own pocket to attend two ALA conferences a year? And spend over a hundred dollars in annual dues? Do you know how many books I could buy with that money?

Most of us can’t imagine what it would be like to buy a book and think nothing of its expense, let alone imagine buying as many as we want without having to go without something else we care about. It doesn’t cross our minds to get on a plane and fly to another city and pay for a hotel and fly back again without thinking about the money involved. It’s a fundamentally different relationship with money than I’ve ever experienced or ever expect to experience. But there are plenty of people who live this way, and they don’t make all that much more than I do. Once you have enough to meet your basic needs for housing and food and health care, once you can afford your clothing, and once you have enough in savings for retirement, everything else is play money. And there are plenty of people in that situation. They may not live in my town, but maybe they grew up near the library; if they’re well off now, there’s a pretty good chance they made use of the library when they were young and have positive feelings about it. Maybe they want to help other kids growing up like they did have similarly positive experiences.

What people with means don’t want is to have to justify their wealth, not any more than you want to have to justify yourself to someone living on less than $1.25 per day. But what plenty of them do want is something useful to do with their surplus money and, if they have it, their surplus time as well. During the cultivation process, when you’re communicating with donors, don’t try to justify their gifts in a way that would make sense to you. As much as you can, put yourself in their position. Figure out what motivates them. Perhaps, and this can work surprisingly well, by asking them. Think of it as a reference transaction: “If you were to support the library, what would be a best case scenario for you? What would you want to see happen?”

We don’t know what you know (and we don’t want to have to learn it)

Have you ever heard a teenager give a speech in public? They stare at the paper in their hands and read in a voice that’s somehow both choppy and sing-song, as if they learned to speak by listening to their GPS read them Dr. Seuss stories. The same thing happened in an acting class I took one summer. For no apparent reason, we all transformed ourselves into Joan Crawford. Acting!

When we write proposals or other correspondence with donors, we often seem to do the same thing, and probably for the same reason: fear. We want so badly to be judged fund-worthy that we write awkward sentences. And we want so badly to be succinct that we use abbreviations that are unfamiliar to our readers, over-explain simple concepts, and under-explain important ones, such as how the money, if granted, will be spent by your library. Sprinkle liberally with jargon and you’ve got yourself an unreadable mess.

A quote ascribed to Albert Einstein’s is a useful one to keep in mind: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Your job isn’t just to explain it simply, your job is to ensure your donors can explain it simply as well.

I’ve had colleagues who would go to great lengths to keep things as simple as possible. One proposal writer, a former journalist, went so far as to advocate using words of Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin origin because they tended to be shorter and more familiar. A more common practice among fundraisers: show everything to someone who is unfamiliar with the topic. If it doesn’t make sense to them, it probably won’t make sense to the donor.

Facts are boring

Clarity is useful, but it can be overdone. For instance, go to English Literature PowerPoints at World of Teaching. Pick a PowerPoint for a book you like, perhaps To Kill a Mockingbird. Imagine presenting this PowerPoint to people who haven’t yet read the book. Imagine how much coffee they would have to drink to stay awake during your presentation.

I think most really effective fundraisers and fundraising organizations have learned to tell stories rather than list facts. One person who’s helped organizations where I’ve worked make the transition into storytelling is Andy Goodman, who provides an overview of the process on his website. He calls it, “Storytelling as Best Practice.”

For some fundraisers, and some donors, there’s a quicker path to getting past the facts. Make everything personal. From Dale Carnegie’s summary of his influential book, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936):

Six ways to make people like you

If you can remember all six and make use of them, you’ll raise more money and be a better librarian. But if six rules are too many, you can summarize Carnegie’s message in a single word, as fundraiser Jeff Brooks suggested in what may be my all-time favorite blog post on any subject, “The easy way to write a fundraising letter”:

Dear [name]:

P.S. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You.

It’s about relationships

The standard way to segment donors is into three general categories:

1. Corporations and Foundations
2. Individuals
3. Planned Giving

In every case, contributions come from people. When possible, you want to get to know the people who decide whether to support your library.

There are steps to take in each case. In researching and cultivating corporate donations, ideally you get to know the people involved with making contributions, such as the owner of the company, the head of the division you’ll be working with (if that’s how the corporation is set up), and also the community relations person or team that coordinates grants and volunteers. Corporations generally want a return on their investment, such as associating the company’s name with organizations that fit its charitable mission or team-building activities like volunteer activities for their service days.

Foundations generally have fewer employees than corporations, but may have just as many people involved in approving donations, so it’s really useful to get to know everyone who has a say in whether your solicitation is funded. Foundations are usually guided closely by their mission, and they tend to be especially regimented in vetting the organizations they support. The grant process can be highly involved, and occasionally the reporting and other stewardship activities can be so much work you wonder if the grant was even worth it. Foundations are this demanding for a reason: more than any other class of donors, they want to make sure they’re supporting a stable organization, one that will use their funds appropriately but will not grow to depend on them. Foundations generally like to supply seed money or support for special projects, and they don’t want an organization or a project they’re funding to collapse once they shift their support to other organizations and projects. Getting to know people who work for the foundation, or who sit on its board, is a useful way to make those assurances. So is coming up with projects that are likely to become self-sustaining.

Individual donors fall into subcategories: annual giving and major donors. People who are annual givers donate relatively small amounts more or less each year. It’s generally not a lot of work to keep them happy, just so long as you don’t break any unwritten rules of the contract: make them feel important and special by learning their names and interests, and by acknowledging their gifts effusively and appropriately. Once people start giving annually, usually they keep giving about the same amount each year or maybe a little more. Developing a stable base of annual support is within the reach of most libraries. Most organizations solicit annual donations via letters, emails, brochures, newsletters, websites, or phone banks, which means the solicitation itself is often somewhat impersonal, or at least less personalized.

Major gifts—and each organization decides on its own what qualifies as a major gift—are the ones you solicit in person. Some people are capable of making major gifts annually, but the typical major gift is unique, such as a large, one-time sponsorship of a program or a room. Often, a lot of people are involved in cultivating this gift—remember, donors like to be insiders—but the solicitation itself should generally be made by whoever is at the top of the organizational hierarchy, perhaps accompanied by a peer or fellow donor.

Planned giving is the umbrella term for bequests, annuities, and trusts—all ways that people who don’t think of themselves as wealthy can make substantial contributions to organizations whose work they want to support. The one most of us know best is bequests, the practice of providing for an organization in your will.

It seems like every few months we read about another person who lived frugally and gave no appearance of substantial savings, who surprises everyone by leaving millions to their local library. These are heartwarming stories, and also nice reminders not to make assumptions about who is capable of making major gifts and who is not. But they’re also lost opportunities. I want every library to say thank you to its donors while they’re still alive. If you’re able to foster a culture of planned giving at your library, perhaps by establishing a “society” or annual dinner for people who have provided for the library, you can acknowledge generosity in person and also encourage others to make similar provisions.

Other ways to get people involved in planned giving, such as encouraging them to establish charitable gift annuities, usually require libraries to partner with community foundations. For instance, donors who set up annuities are making a gift that pays them interest while they’re alive and leaves whatever principle isn’t spent during their lifetimes to an organization they wish to support.

Finding a community foundation or other partner to guarantee an annuity usually isn’t terribly difficult, and many donors like annuities as investments because the rates are reasonably competitive, especially when coupled with the tax advantages, and they get the satisfaction of knowing they’ve made a potentially large gift to something they care about. The main things holding back most organizations is a lack of knowledge about planned giving, a fear of acknowledging donors’ mortality, and a lack of patience with a fundraising method that, though clearly worthwhile in the long run, may not deliver immediate gratification.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing

Imagine you’re at the reference desk. A student approaches and says he needs ten authoritative sources for a paper he’s working on. You show him how to use the catalog and he finds two useful sources.

“Why bother?” he says. “I need ten sources.”

Undaunted, you show him how to use Academic Search Premier. He finds four good sources.

“That won’t work,” he says. “I need ten sources.”

So you take him to the bookshelves. You pull the more recent of the two books off the shelf. You show him how to read its bibliography and make interlibrary loan requests for the books and articles that aren’t immediately available.

“How long will that take?” he asks. You tell him it might take up to a week. He leaves, convinced that libraries and librarians are a waste of time.

I’ve had conversations with librarians about fundraising that felt sort of like this scenario. I would like to tell people that starting a fundraising program today will close their budget gap by December 2010 and provide their community with a new library by May 2012. It might work that way, but that would be atypical.

What’s more likely is your fundraising program will build slowly, and at first it may take a lot of time, and it may not be fun, and you might make a mistake or two. You will probably have someone decide not to fund something even though you’ve presented them with a compelling case: great cultivation and cogent solicitations tilt the odds in your favor, but in fundraising there are no guarantees. Though in the long term I think it’s worth it. And in the short term, I think fundraising is a lot more fun if you set reasonable expectations for yourself.

You are all individuals

We all probably have internal lists of the libraries we most admire. Some are in wealthy communities, where many people don’t really need the library but love and support it anyway. Some are in less affluent communities, where many people wouldn’t have access to information without the library, and grantors do their part to make sure superb library services are available. Some are in big cities. Others are in small towns. Some are independent libraries and some are part of a large system.

There are plenty of reasons fundraising might not work at your library, or why you may not want to be part of your library’s fundraising efforts. But there’s probably someone out there with a library a lot like yours, who could have the same reasons you do, but who instead is helping to raise funds and make the library more successful than it would be otherwise.

It may not seem worth it at first, but if you work at it steadily, if you refine your own story, you’ll develop your own set of donors and your own unique donor culture. We’re all different, but we’re not that different. If we celebrate those differences, if we give donors plenty of reasons to feel good about supporting us, they’ll respond.

Thanks to Ka-Msiyara Corbett, and to my Lead Pipe colleagues Derik Badman, Ellie Collier, and Emily Ford for their helpful comments on this article.

1. My response:

   That sounds like a very interesting job. Here at In the Library with the Lead Pipe, we’ve all become librarians the traditional way: we went to library school and got a Masters in Library Science. That’s certainly not the only way to do it, nor is it a requirement—it just means that any advice we offer is based on a best guess, not on our own experience.

   Here are some resources that might be useful to you:

   • Library Journal’s recent article, “How to Become a Librarian” and http://www.becomealibrarian.org/ — both are traditional/get-a-library-degree focused, but both contain good resources for anyone interested in doing library work.
   • SLA’s Solo Librarians Division. SLA has a pretty good international membership base, and it has created a home for people in the situation you’ll be entering: solo librarianship.
   • Ask the question you just asked us on Ask MetaFilter. The MetaFilter community excels at finding good answers to questions like yours. Plus, MetaFilter is moderated by an unaffiliated librarian who just happens to be one of the smartest people in the field.

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.

FDR HS Hallway 4 Students 1976 a by Whiskeygonebad/Anthony Catalano / CC-BY-SA

Brooke Shields is a descendant of Louis XIV; Emmett Smith is seven percent Native American; and Matthew Broderick’s ancestor fought at Gettysburg. We learn these things courtesy of a new television show called “Who Do you think You Are?,” which follows the rich and famous as they trace their family trees. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the show is how each celebrity reacts to revelations about familial connections. It fascinates me that people who are believed to have everything consistently indicate that some dimension of their lives is incomplete and that learning their family history adds something invaluable to their identity. This is what history does; it gives us more of ourselves and we know and understand how we came to be who we are today.

Everything has antecedents, even blogs. In this article you’ll meet one of In the Library with the Lead Pipe’s second cousins, twice removed, an adolescent known as the Young Adult Alternative Newsletter (YAAN), published from 1973-1979. What familial traits does YAAN share with In the Library with the Lead Pipe (or blogs in general)? The essence of blogging – the need to be heard, to connect, to share and communicate – is something that has deep roots. Other characteristics include humble beginnings, a desire to challenge the status quo while inspiring the growth of the field, and the need to make connections with people of shared interests. In the Library with the Lead Pipe’s stated mission, “To explore new ideas and start conversations; to document our concerns and argue for solutions,” also works as an elegant summary of YAAN’s purpose, as stated in Volume 1, Number 1:

This is the first in a series of newsletters to get YA librarians in touch with each other, learn what’s going on around the country, and (hopefully!!) be a motivating factor to increase YA services, local and national (PUSH, PUSH, PUSH)—climb on the bandwagon, here goes … (Starr, 1973, p. 1).

YAAN was created, lived, and ceased in the 1970s, before blogs—or even widespread access to or interest in personal computers—existed. The Internet was known as ARPANET and was used by a limited number of military units and higher educational institutions, and the World Wide Web still waited to be born. Professional development for librarians consisted of twice yearly ALA conferences (which people may or may not have had the funds to attend—sound familiar?), perhaps a state or regional conference, professional reading, and for really pressing needs, the telephone or letter, delivered by the U.S. Postal Service.

Like its cousin In the Library with the Lead Pipe (Bonfield, 2009), YAAN was born at a conference when a group of young adult librarians at the 1973 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Washington D.C. sat late into the night discussing their work. This conversation was priceless since many of them were isolated in their home libraries by the unique (and mostly unappreciated) nature of their clients (teens), and a professional environment in which “developmental opportunities” were limited to picking through mainstream publications such as School Library Journal and Wilson Library Bulletin for the few articles and stray columns dedicated to work with young adults (YAs). According to author and former YA librarian Patty Campbell, it was a “very lonesome business” working with teenagers in public libraries (P. Campbell, personal communication, May 25, 2009).

Carol Starr, at that time the teen librarian from Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, was so excited by the conference conversations that, upon returning home, she powered up her IBM Selectric typewriter and wrote three pages of single-spaced text about conference news, YA programs, and membership in the Young Adult Services Division (YASD). A few short weeks later, she mailed the first issue of the Young Adult Alternative Newsletter (YAAN) to approximately 300 teen librarians in “any city of any major size whatsoever” (C. Starr, personal communication, January 22, 2005).

Starr’s passion for serving teens and connecting her fellow YA librarians resulted in a publication that was a veritable buffet of YA programs, free materials, success stories, and affirmation. Over the years YAAN’s content evolved from bite-sized news bits to longer feature articles and guest editorials. Every issue included reports of or ideas for programming, updates on YASD (which would later become YALSA) division news, recommended professional resources, and free materials that could be sent for or shared between readers. In contrast to most youth publications of the time, there was evidence of Starr’s decidedly feminist political leanings – and the occasional curse word. According to Mary K. Chelton, noted YA services expert,

Top of the News and School Library Journal and everything—they simply weren’t specific enough and personal enough. There was an idiosyncrasy to YAAN that gave it a personality all its own. You didn’t have to write in a box, there wasn’t a style manual necessarily, and as long as you weren’t screaming obscenities you could say anything you pleased … you felt like you were talking over the back fence to people (M.K. Chelton, personal communication, June 4, 2009).

That openness and inclusiveness, much like blogs, was pronounced and deliberate. Starr wanted to mirror the radical practitioner approach to YA services. “Rather than go through ALA and have it run by people in their 40s, entrenched in their ways, we wanted to have more control … we could publish it ourselves and we owned it” (C. Starr, personal communication, January 22, 2005).  Like blogs, which build on the interaction between the creators and readers, original material came from library front lines, energizing and affirming practitioners who discovered they had valuable information to share. YAAN served as a catalyst for creating a large, reflective community of practice, and much of the material in YAAN is an exchange of “here’s how I did it, how did you do it” correspondence. Many contributors were leaders—or later became leaders—in the field. Julia Losinski, Dorothy Broderick, Regina Minudri, Mary K. Chelton, and Patty Campbell, all winners of the distinguished Scholastic Library Publishing Award (formerly the Grolier Award) for outstanding contributions to work with children and young adults, all were contributors to YAAN.

YAAN had approximately a thousand subscribers across the United States and Canada and Chelton declared that, “until [Starr] started the Young Adult Alternative Newsletter, I never realized what a national community of practitioners would mean intellectually or politically … [she created] a vehicle for an entire generation of YA librarians to communicate with each other” (Chelton, 2007, p. 32).

Starr produced YAAN with a little help from her friends. She typed and mailed the first three issues herself from Wisconsin, but when she moved to a new YA position with Alameda County Public Library in California, she was able to get a bit of institutional support. Starr paid her secretary, Marilyn Mansouria, to type the newsletter and, while she was at it, Mansouria added embellishments and dividers that made YAAN at once more decorative but also easier to read. Supervisor Regina Minudri allowed Starr to use library facilities to print it; Don Nunes and Carol Yuen were briefly credited with help on design and production; and Mike Smith, a family friend, was given credit for original artwork. Other artwork came from Forest Grove (California) nursery and elementary schools. Paper, printing, and postage costs for YAAN were also offset by subscriber fees, which were $3.00 per year in 1973 and rose to $5.00 ($6.00 if billed) by 1979, but YAAN was mostly a labor of love. Any extra money generated by YAAN subscriptions was used, according to Starr, to help other fledgling newsletters such as Inside/Outside, and Women Library Workers, which became Starr’s next project. She remained YAAN’s sole “employee.”

In the same way that blogs reflect the immediacy of the times in which we live, YAAN was very much a publication of its time. The 1970s were a dynamic and dramatic period in the development of young adult services in public libraries. Federal funding initiatives from the 1960s created opportunities for new buildings and collections, and the social upheaval that continued into the 1970s encouraged libraries to expand or create new services—among them more specific services and collections for teens. This funding and increased social awareness coincided with the first young adult literature “golden age,” when books such as A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich (Childress, 1973), The Chocolate War (Cormier, 1974), and Forever (Blume, 1975) made their appearance. There was strong motivation to be socially conscious and public libraries, ever rooted in their communities and society at large, developed outreach services and collections that reflected a broader spectrum of the general population.

Experimentation and reform was particularly welcome among young adult librarians, whose client group was actively pushing for change. According to Patty Campbell, teen librarians “were in sync with what was happening that decade. We were ‘with it,’ and we were looking at the kids to find that out” (P. Campbell, personal communication, May 25, 2009). Miriam Braverman, in her 1979 book, Youth, Society and the Public Library, indicated that YA librarians became “sensitive to the culture and concerns of youth, broke through the constraints of the ‘conventional wisdom’ in young adult work, and developed exciting and original programs and services” (p. ix).

YA librarians scandalized fellow staff members by collecting films such as About Sex and Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer, (Starr, 1975, p. 4) and circulating educational comic books about sexually transmitted diseases. Innovative programming from across the country included opportunities for teens to make films, discuss rock music, and learn about health issues (VD, acne, diet) and drug abuse. When I interviewed former YA librarian and noted booktalking expert Joni Bodart, she recalled conflict at her California library over water “couches”—they weren’t allowed to call them water ”beds” – in the teen rooms. As blogs have had to do, YA librarians also had to earn credibility while they celebrated their divergence from the mainstream. Bodart crowed,

We started in the 60s, and in the 70s we were all outrageous and it was hard to convince average librarians that we were worth something … We were very proud of the fact that we were unconventional, that we were different, free (J. Bodart, personal communication, May 25, 2009).

Mary K. Chelton noted that

[t]hose of us who had not come out of children’s services … were desperate to free ourselves of the sort of hidebound excessive deference kind of crap you got in children’s … [they] wouldn’t know a real kid if they fell over them.  They loved children’s literature and that was it, and it drove us crazy. No matter what we did we were always seen as irreverent non-deferential outcasts (M.K, Chelton, personal communication, June 4, 2009).

YAAN’s publication was greeted with a swift and affirmative response. Editor Starr noted that the first issue generated an additional 300 names for her mailing list. San Diego YA librarian Nathalie Gushikuma gushed, “Isn’t it nice someone knows I exist?” She appreciated YAAN’s informal appearance and liked that “others have the same questions I do about YA work and are trying to get answers that we can all see” (Gushikuma, 1973, p. 7).

Its message was heralded by reviews and recommendations in professional journals, both alternative and mainstream. In the 1976 joint issue of Booklegger Magazine and Emergency Librarian that focused on library education, Carole Leita listed YAAN among titles of the “library free press … a network of free-speaking library periodicals which you can use to keep in touch with reality—and hope.” Readers were encouraged to “take a walk on the wild side” (Leita, 1976, 24). Emergency Librarian, in another issue that same year, called YAAN “irresistible to those struggling in an attempt to serve YAs” (“Small Mags,” 1976, p. 24). Wilson Library Bulletin, a mainstream journal, called YAAN a “lively alternative … [a] peppy informative newsletter … written in good socko style” (“Librarians Monthly,” 1974, p. 356).

Even Top of the News, the official journal of the Young Adult Services Division of ALA, whose job it was to publicize and support youth services, indicated that YAAN had

already done more to generate ideas and reinvigorate the mutual supportiveness which has always characterized the YA field. It has also raised the expectations of many librarians who have felt the need for the newsletter on YA services, and who now hope that YAAN will not only continue to meet this need, but that it will also expand and become a forum for the debate of issues as well (Varlejs, 1974, p. 437).

YAAN continued to inspire a new generation of YA librarians throughout its seven-year run. Mary K. Chelton used it as a resource in her YA service classes at Rutgers, and as a model for an internal newsletter in her day job with the Westchester County (New York) library system. YASD included YAAN in a 1976 packet of basic materials it marketed as the YASD Survival Kit. Professor Larry Amey, who along with his students created the Canadian publication, Young Adult Hot Line, declared that

The Young Adult Alternative Newsletter (YAAN) pointed the way toward a new model for youth service … the yellow-colored, long-format newsletter was packed with descriptions of exemplary and original YA programs, tips for practicing librarians, and avant-garde advocacy for teens. YAAN was outspoken, hard-hitting, and committed. It was practically the only publication available in the field at the time, and it was eagerly read by subscribers across North America. YAAN provided the model for the newsletter I created … (Amey, 2002, p. x).

YAAN was arguably one of the most important professional education tools in a young adult librarian’s arsenal. Diane Tuccillo calls YAAN a predecessor to modern blogs and Web sites, saying it was “one of the earliest forms of networking … a real foundation for what we ended up with now” (D. Tuccillo, personal communication, May 22, 2009). Its content was fresh and contemporary, timely and specific for a particular audience. Like today’s blogs, it was able to target a particular user group and successfully engage and motivate that group. In fact, one 1978 article identified YAAN readers as “the vanguard in young adult services” (Kingsbury, 1978, p. 22). According to Joni Bodart, “YAAN was ‘us’; all the others were ‘them’ … If something came up in YAAN, somebody was speaking the ‘real’ truth, he or she ‘knew where it was at’” (J. Bodart, personal communication, May 25, 2009).

YAAN ceased publication on November 15, 1979, primarily because of a change in the editor’s interests. While Starr was doing YAAN, she also co-edited the Women Library Workers Newsletter with Carol Leita, and as we sometimes see in the blogosphere, she left her first ‘child’ – “with some sad feelings and a sense of needing a ‘new challenge’” (Starr, 1979, p. 1) – to focus on expanding her second. Another factor in her decision was her commitment to battling Proposition 13, which dealt a major blow to libraries in California in 1978. (For a quick snapshot of the effects of this tax law on libraries, check the California State Library’s assessment, done in 1979, which appears as an ERIC opinion paper.) Starr, who had moved from YA services to directing her own library, felt that

from all of my young adult work, things that I’d been preaching about to my young adult librarians about going out and getting involved in the community … it was like, well, here was a different local thing and I needed to work on that (Starr, personal communication, January 22, 2005).

She didn’t desert YA librarians, instead directing them to Voice of Youth Advocates (VOYA), created by Dorothy Broderick and Mary K. Chelton in 1978, noting that its appearance meant “the YA librarian will continue to have a publication devoted solely to YA needs” (Starr, 1979, p.1).

Teen librarians practicing today are largely unaware of YAAN, in spite of the fact that much of the model of programming and services practiced today finds its roots in the 1960s and 1970s, and its energy in the pages of this publication. Part of the issue is that YAAN is difficult to find. According to WorldCat there are about twenty libraries in the world that admit having copies of YAAN, some of them probably only partial runs. I came across it in 2004 and was fortunate enough to interview Carol Starr in 2005. Out of the kindness of her heart she sent me the first five issues and I was hooked. There is some scholarly interest in it, so hopefully it will find its way into the digital world, where everyone can experience, in 1970s parlance, the ‘real thing.’ Starr, herself, is alive and well and still living in California, having retired from library work in 2007.

As in the case of Shields, Smith, and Broderick, we may not know what is missing until it is shown to us. That’s my hope: that by exploring the history of the development of teen services in public libraries, and writing about it for all sorts of audiences, I can add value to the good work being done today. I also hope that by making connections between the past and present —as in the case of YAAN and its newer shinier cousin In the Library with the Lead Pipe—I’m helping to keep the history alive, demonstrating its relevance to today, and inspiring future generations of librarians to be the next history we write.

This essay contains content previously published as “Dare to Disturb the Universe: Pushing YA Books and Library Services—with a Mimeograph Machine,” in the Winter 2010 Issue of The ALAN Review, and is reused with permission of NCTE, the publisher of The ALAN Review. Thanks to my on-site reviewer, Dr. Rachel Fleming-May, Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences, and to Brett Bonfield for his initial interest and insightful reading of a draft of this article.

References

Amey, L. (2002). Foreword, Hot, hotter, hottest: The best of the YA Hotline reprint V. Howard (Ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.

Bonfield, B. (2009). So you want to write about libraries. [Weblog entry.] In the Library with the Lead Pipe. December 2, 2009. (www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2009/so-you-want-to-write-about-libraries/) Accessed April 4, 2010.

Braverman, M. (1979). Youth, society, and the public library. Chicago: American Library Association.

Blume, J. (1975). Forever. New York: Bradbury Press.

Chelton, M. K. (2007). Remembering YALSA: The view of “The oldest living YA librarian.” Young Adult Library Services 6(1), Fall 2007, 32-4.

Childress, A. (1973). A hero ain’t nothin but a sandwich. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. 1973.

Cormier, R. (1974). The chocolate war. New York: Knopf Books for Young Readers.

Gushikuma, N. (1973). Letter to the editor, Young Adult Alternative Newsletter, April 1, 1973, 7.

Kingsbury, M. E. (1978). Those who do … & those who teach. School Library Journal, 25(3), November 1978, 22-5.

Leita, C. (1976). Liberated fronts. Booklegger Magazine 3(13), January/February 1976, and Emergency Librarian, 3(3), January/February 1976, 24-5. (Joint publication)

Small Mags. (1976). [Column] Emergency Librarian 4(2), November/December 1976, 24.

Starr, C. (1973). Young Adult Alterative Newsletter 1(1). 1973: 1.

Starr, C. (1975). Selected films for young adults 1975. Young Adult Alternative Newsletter 3(2), March 15, 1975: 4.

Starr, C. (1979). Young Adult Alternative Newsletter 7(4). 1979: 1.

Varlejs, J. (1974). Young Adult Alternative Newsletter. Top of the News 30(4), June 1974, 436-7.

Young Adult Services Division. (1977). Directions for Library Service to Young Adults. Chicago: American Library Association, 1977.

Librarians are always struggling to convince someone of something: convincing voters to say ‘yes’ to a library bond; persuading a library director to invest in a text-messaging reference tool; trying to get students to use library resources instead of Google. One of the most effective ways to be successful is to learn the art of “making it their idea.”

In his book, The Education of an Accidental CEO, David Novak (2009) illustrates a crucial idea in advertising a product:

You can tell people to go out and buy something, but that doesn’t make them do it. But if you appeal to both the head and the heart in a compelling and relevant way, then people will come up with the idea to buy of their own accord (p. 44).

Novak goes on to describe how Nike uses minimal language in its commercials, never telling viewers to buy their shoes. Instead, they fill the screen with images of professional athletes performing amazing feats in their products. The idea is to let the customer come to the conclusion that Nike shoes will help them accomplish their athletic goals.

In fact, very few advertisements tell people explicitly to do anything. They present information that leads customers to come up with the idea of buying their product on their own.

Convincing people by “making it their idea” isn’t unique to marketing. In Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up (Bing, 2003), there’s a chapter devoted to “convincing the elephant that it was the elephant’s idea” (followed by “Getting Drunk with the Elephant” and “Frightening the Elephant with Mice”). Though done with a little more tongue-in-cheek panache, this book highlights the usefulness of the concept in leadership and management.

Why does this approach work so well? Business people might argue that “making it their idea” is an ego boost managers need in order to act on something. However, educators have long understood the value in letting people come to their own conclusions, and it has less to do with ego than it does with the way the brain learns. People feel a rush of pride when they come up with ideas, solutions and concepts for themselves and see the value in what they have just learned much more clearly than if they had simply been told a good idea. When it comes to seeing the value in libraries and their resources, we need to leverage a mode of teaching that allows students to experience information literacy concepts in this way.

The Learning Cycle

In The Learning Cycle, Ann Cavallo and Edmond Marek (1997) describe a teaching technique used in science education that presents students with deliberately confusing or confounding situations. With minimal instruction, students try to make sense of these situations based on prior knowledge, observation, and experimentation. At its core, the learning cycle method embodies the nature of science and helps students develop critical thinking skills.

Cavallo (2008) describes an example of the learning cycle, illustrating how it works. In an activity called “The New Society,” a small subset of a class is sent outside while the instructor tells the remaining students that they are a new society with three simple rules:

1. They can only say the words ‘yes’ and ‘no.’
2. They only respond to people of the same gender and ignore those of opposite gender.
3. Regardless of the question, they always respond ‘yes’ if the questioner is smiling and always respond ‘no’ if the questioner is not smiling.

The students sent outside (called ‘the anthropologists’) are asked to find out as much information as they can about this new society that has recently been discovered on a remote island.

As the anthropologists move about the classroom, they are confronted with confounding answers. They quickly discover the first rule through their initial observations. The second rule takes more time – often students will develop hypotheses and test them on students leading to the discovery of the second rule.

The third rule is much more difficult to figure out. Students feel frustration, anxiety and impatience. Proclamations of “They’re lying!” and “They answer randomly!” are flung about until they finally figure out the third rule.

Throughout this process, the teacher simply provides guiding questions when people get stuck, on occasion reminding them how scientists find things out by making hypotheses and testing them out.

Two results of this lesson for students: utter joy or relief from solving a frustrating problem and experience working in a confusing environment but inventing a solution to a problem themselves (without the instructor providing the answer).  The joy or relief is what builds a love of learning into the experience, and the act of inventing a solution is critical thinking in action.

How People Learn

While many of us have been told that active learning and critical thinking are vital for our information literacy programs, very few of us understand the ‘how’ and even fewer the ‘why.’

Active learning is important because it more closely models the way that humans learn. Experiments carried out by Piaget (1973) and other noted educational psychologists (Renner & Marek, 1988; Inhelder & Piaget, 1969) indicate that all learning begins with data collection (called assimilation in Renner & Marek, 1990).

This assimilation can be the observation of a phenomenon or reading of new materials. In many cases, the new data is incongruous with the learner’s current view of the world, and they can’t make sense of it.

The next step in learning is trying to make sense of the new information (called accommodation in Renner & Marek, 1990). Critical thinking skills are developed during this phase as learners make sense of the new information by inventing rules, testing hypotheses, and changing their world view in light of this new data.

In this stage, they are no longer just memorizing information or learning a series of clicks; rather, they are actively inventing new ways of understanding the world and taking ownership of the knowledge they’re creating.

The final step is called organization (Renner & Marek, 1990), and this is when they use their newly created knowledge and skills to solve other problems, and figuring out where else their new knowledge can be applied.

The learning cycle instructional method – giving students a new situation, asking them to make sense of it, and serving merely as a guide in their process – models the way people learn, and as a result, generates authentic, meaningful learning experiences for students. Compared to lectures or demonstrations where students are told what the answers are and then perform exercises that verify that what they are told is correct, they are making the new knowledge out of their own ideas.

Library Instruction as Science?

Modeling instructional activities after the way people learn is vital for making learning experiences that ‘stick.’ Typical library instruction involves copious amounts of “click here, then click here, and once you’re there, click here.” There’s little discovery or invention of core information literacy concepts. Students are told how to use information resources, told how to use citation styles, and told the consequences of unethical use of information. How can we make discovery of information literacy concepts more… scientific? Can students invent information literacy concepts on their own, given a scenario and a librarian as a guide?

Let’s take peer reviewed journals as an example. At its worst, library instruction on this topic is equivalent to “Check this box for peer reviewed articles in your results. It’s what your professors want.” This kind of instruction not only goes against the way people learn new ideas, but also undermines the importance of the peer review process by reducing it to “because your professor wants it.”

Active learning can be used to get students to explore issues of peer reviewed journals and have them compare them to magazine or popular literature. While this introduces the element of discovery and active learning, it’s only discovering the difference between the two types of publications, not the importance of the peer review process. If a librarian in this class room tells them why peer review is important, even after this activity, it’s still telling, not students discovering.

Instead, I develop learning cycles that reflect how people learn. In this instance, I give students a situation where they don’t have an answer but must work together to solve a problem. I tell students they have decided to start a magazine and they want to publish the best, newest research done in educational psychology (or whatever field they’re majoring in). Unlike TIME or Newsweek, their articles should be useful for researchers who are pushing the boundaries of knowledge in their field. They plan on sending out a call across the Internet asking for people to send in their best papers for the magazine.

I then ask the students to come up with a method for judging how good a paper they receive is and let them go to it. As they come up with criteria (e.g., “It has to be undiscovered knowledge” and “It must be based on sound evidence”), I ask how they, as college students, will be able to tell what’s good and what’s not. Who is qualified to answer those questions? How will they, as the editors, use these people?

As they work to create this new publication, they will be inventing peer review. Peer review will be an idea that they came up with themselves. They may call it something else, but the core purposes of peer review will be in their responses. As a library instructor, my goal is to guide them with questions that challenge their thoughts, and finally, give it the label of ‘peer reviewed’ once they’ve established the concept.

This lesson models how the mind actually works.

There Isn’t Time!

Learning cycles, like the one described above, take lots more time. It would have taken at most two or three minutes to explain peer review and have students tell you why it is an important feature of scholarly research. However, if students don’t invent it, it’s much less likely to stick.

The learning cycle on the other hand would take twenty or thirty minutes. Librarians don’t have the luxury of time!

There are some solutions. In an article for the Texas Library Journal, Jeremy Donald suggests a model of library instruction that offloads most of the technical details to online tutorials and learning modules (see “Step 6” in Donald, 2010). This enables library instruction to devote needed time to the learning cycle.

Donald’s model requires librarians to think about the instructional needs of student in a different way. Rather than think linearly about what skills and knowledge students need to have, think about the tasks they need to do in order of difficulty or complexity. What parts of the lesson will be most confusing and most important? Identify one or two concepts, and plan on spending at least half of your time on those topics, including time students explore new tools and ideas independently and running learning cycle-style lessons.

The rest of the time is devoted to brief introductions and answering questions. This type of model not only creates the time needed to run meaningful, engaging lessons on key topics, it forces library instructors to identify what those core topics are, the first step in developing good learning cycle lesson plans.

Developing Learning Cycles

With that said, the first step in developing a learning cycle lesson plan is to identify those core concepts students should learn. For example, for a lesson on plagiarism, some of the topics that may come up are:

• What is plagiarism?
• What are the penalties for academic dishonesty?
• How do you effectively use quotes or paraphrasing?
• How do you cite articles using a specific citation style?

Of these, I see the second (academic dishonesty policies) and the fourth (mechanics of citation) as topics that could easily be off-loaded to online tutorials or even printed brochures. There’s no need to spend time in class covering these topics, short of connecting students with resources to learn more about them and their importance.

The other two are great topics for learning cycles. I usually approach these topics from a personal perspective: how did I come to understand these concepts myself? What’s important about them? How can I create situations or activities that will lead students to invent the concepts on their own?

At its core, avoiding plagiarism means giving credit for someone else’s work. How can I get students to come to understand this concept without simply telling it to them?

Before I tell students what the class is about, I ask them to take out a sheet of paper and be prepared to write down the first word or phrase that comes to mind after I say a secret word. When students are ready, I shout, “Plagiarism!” They scribble words and phrases down then I ask them to hold up their papers. Words associated with malicious cheating usually crop up: stealing, dishonest, and sometimes lazy.

I then ask them to take on the role of summer school teacher with an imaginary group of low-performing students in an English class. They are told they’ve received a paper from a student written fairly poorly, but right in the middle, a sentence or two of pure academic gold. What happened? When they say “Plagiarism!” I ask them to describe the actual events and student actions that led up to this. I ask them to think about student motivation and behavior, and I prompt them with questions like, “What was going through the student’s mind when they pulled in these sentences into this document?”

What results is astounding. Students describe quite innocent situations: perhaps the student didn’t know that copy-and-pasting information without quotes was wrong; maybe they couldn’t find an author on the website and assumed you didn’t need to cite anonymous sources; or perhaps it was malicious cheating.

Usually students don’t view this situation as the latter. Instead, they’re forced to revise their own definitions of plagiarism based on the critical examination of the scenario they were presented with. Plagiarism is no longer cheating or stealing… so what is it?

Again, these discussions take time, but they’re valuable experiences that students will be able to apply in more situations.  In these scenarios, students are employing critical thinking skills – they are working through problems by discussing them with peers, proposing potential solutions, and evaluating their own and others’ responses. There’s more to a learning cycle than rote memorization of the concepts the instructor intends to teach; instead, it’s problem solving.

Conclusion

Library instructors should develop a “less is more” philosophy. There is real value in spending time on learning cycles because it does more than just pay lip service to active learning and critical thinking – it helps students develop them.

Faculty members and students alike may be anxious if they don’t get the step-by-step instructions they’re used to from the library session. Combating this expectation is our challenge. Donald (2010) also addresses buy-in and collaboration as a way of preparing faculty members for these kinds of drastic changes to the typical library session.

Appropriately, Donald says, “They are likely to wait to hear your ideas before introducing their own, and they may re-state an idea of yours as one of their own. This is to be encouraged, as it signals their investment in the collaboration and its outcome” (2010, 129). How’s that for “making it their idea?”

For a visual representation of Jeremy Donald’s instructional design model, see his slides from a recent Texas Library Association webinar, titled “Technology & Information Literacy Instruction: A Model for Active Learning Environments” at http://bit.ly/cpt6ON.

Thanks to Michelle Millet, Ellie Collier, and Kim Leeder for their feedback on this post.

References

Bing, S. (2002). Throwing the elephant: Zen and the art of managing up. New York: HarperBusiness.

Cavallo, A. M. L. (2008). Experiencing the nature of science: An interactive, beginning-of-semester activity. Journal of College Science Teaching, 37(5), 12-15.

Donald, J. (2010). Using technology to support faculty and enhance coursework at academic institutions. Texas Library Journal, 85(4), 129-131. Retrieved from http://www.txla.org/ce/Collaboration/Donald.pdf.

Inhelder, B. & Piaget, J. (1969). The psychology of the child. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

Marek, E. A. & Cavallo, A. M. L. (1997). The learning cycle: Elementary school science and beyond. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Novak, D. (2009). The education of an accidental CEO: Lessons learned from the trailer park to the corner office. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Piaget, J. (1973). Psychology of intelligence. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams and Co.

Renner, J.W. & Marek, E.A. (1988). The learning cycle and elementary school science teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books.

Renner, J.W. & Marek, E.A. (1990). An educational theory base for science teaching. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 27(3), 241-246.

Wrong Tool, Right Idea - Courtesy of Flickr user HikingArtist

Déformation professionnelle is a French phrase, meaning a tendency to look at things from the point of view of one’s own profession and forget a broader perspective. It is a pun on the expression “formation professionnelle,” meaning “professional training.” The implication is that all (or most) professional training results to some extent in a distortion of the way the professional views the world.
– Wikipedia

Sometimes it’s hard to step outside of your own mental model to achieve transformative thinking. Writers get “writer’s block,” software programmers experience “anti-pattern,” and we all find ourselves thinking “I’m in a rut” every now and then. In fact, it’s easy to get stuck in seeing the world only through the eyes of your profession: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail,” (Maslow, 1966). Librarians are certainly not immune to this way of thinking – even with all of the resources for inspiration at our fingertips, we fall prey to routine, to thinking about our problems from the perspective of a librarian. Stepping out of the mental models of our profession to achieve transformation and to come up with new ways to solve problems is difficult. How do we overcome these trapped ways of thinking?

A great way to revitalize is to try new things such as attending conferences outside of your own discipline or comfort zone. I was a virtual attendee of a conference that is completely outside of my comfort zone: the 8th Annual Blender Conference held in Amsterdam (Oct 23-25, 2009). Blender itself is a collection of open source software tools for 3D application development. How did I hear about this conference? My neighbor happens to be the proud father of one of the presenters who was attending his first professional conference, delivering his first conference presentation and making his first trip overseas. He did a pretty good job (click on the presentation by Wray Bowling about digital puppetry). The sessions were streamed live and have also been posted online for asynchronous viewing.

At the Blender Conference, I saw real-world applications of augmented reality created using Blender along with other software tools. I’m not a programmer or anything close, but what I learned from the conference is that augmented reality is being employed by people who aren’t necessarily high-level programmers and that the techniques are being used to develop tools for mobile phones. This technology is already being employed in marketing tv shows, selling real estate, and beyond. In libraries, we’re struggling to find ways to expose and deliver our collections and services to users wherever they may find themselves and within whatever technologies they may be using. There are a few examples of augmented reality being developed for library book-finding use cases, but they’re pretty crude. The concept is clear though – these are examples of applications that could be translated to libraries in use cases such as making it easier to find content on the shelf, find the expert librarian who can help you with your literature review, find the bathroom locations on each floor of in the library, the current open study rooms, etc. Through attending the Blender Conference via streaming video, I also learned that this open source software is being used in modeling road safety conditions, guiding robots during medical procedures, improving fire safety in buildings, engaging chemical engineering students with 3D animation, and in creating digital puppets that act in real-time using common video game controllers. Could libraries potentially benefit from being able to model moving whole collections, staff and service points between buildings, studying use patterns of physical spaces layered on use of virtual space? While I am not a programmer and I don’t have the skills to apply ideas from this particular non-librarian conference to my local setting, I see possibilities that could be tapped to solve some of our problems and generate innovation in our work.

Attending conferences outside of library-land also shows us how other disciplinary cultures work – how they run their professional gatherings, how they engage in training, how they organize networking events. For example, at the Blender Conference, they play cool music between sessions (when is the last time you heard cool music between sessions at ALA or SLA?). They developed great camera angles for simultaneously displaying the speaker, their slides, the audience, and any gadgets they brought with them to demo. How often have you been frustrated by the lack of visuals when reviewing videos from conference presentations either in real-time or after the fact? Perhaps getting ideas from other conference cultures can give us some ideas about how to help minimize déformation professionnelle within our own conference experiences. Attending non-library conferences could also give us some insight into how non-librarians conceive of the role of libraries, how they interact with information, how they approach research, what they think about copyright, etc. – all of the things that we care about in terms of connecting our users with what they need/want – straight from the source.

Another option for minimizing déformation professionnelle is to participate in unconferences. Many unconferences were established to counter the routine of conventional conferences. Remove the traditional sponsored sessions, eliminate registration fees, collect people interested in discussing shared interests, and you’re left with good ideas generated out of good conversation. “At traditional conferences, the most productive moments often occur in the corridor between meetings; at unconferences, attendees like to say, it’s all corridor” (Craig, 2006). Library-land has seen its fair share of unconferences as well. Derik Badman wrote about attending Library Camps – experiences that are in the spirit of stepping away from the traditional meat and potatoes library conferences. “The unconference offers an agility not found in a formal conference. Attendees make the decisions of what the discussion topics will be, allowing for not only a greater sense of participation (how very 2.0) but also a greater chance of currency” (Badman, 2008). Library-centric unconferences might get you closer to getting away from the trap of déformation professionnelle because the lack of structure can open up opportunities for exploring issues or ideas that might have otherwise fallen through the cracks of pre-established session themes and schedules. A colleague recently described his experience attending a camp with a broader perspective than just the library scope. THATcamp is a digital humanities unconference attracting everyone from scholars to educational technologists to artists and granting agencies. He described a memorable experience from THATcamp that was based on a 3-minute lightening talk by a student who used 3-D software to simulate how light fell on an ancient Roman mosaic over 2000 years ago. This idea alone could be translated to creating applications for students to interact with the unique special collections held by our libraries and museums.

The next time you find yourself in a professional rut, whether self-imposed or brought on by your local library or the profession overall, consider attending a conference outside library-land. Other ways to broaden your scope and breathe new life into your work could include stretching your professional reading regimen a little via listservs, blogs and published literature. I’m an on-again/off-again subscriber to a listserv about plant and animal taxonomy where they have been discussing issues related to open access publishing and intellectual property rights. Through this listserv, I get an insider’s perspective on how these issues impact this particular group of researchers and scholars. A colleague of mine subscribes to a commercial publication called “CPU” which focuses on trends and intersections between computer science, computer engineering and cognitive science. He gets insights from the computer science field in terms of how they consider the impact of computers on e-books, and where their visionaries see the profession and the computing industry headed. Much of these insights can give fodder for good ideas on how to shape the future of our profession as well.

Take time to invest in broadening your perspectives and open yourself up to possibilities of learning something that you didn’t already know. Start by keeping up with the conferences, events and reports that the visionaries (e.g., Clifford Lynch, Stephen Abram, Joan Lippincott, Andrew Pace, TAIGA Forum members, David Lankes are some that come to my mind) stay up-to-date with and follow the trail. What’s the risk? You might learn something new and you might be able to inject a new idea or tool into your own library setting and, perhaps even in the profession.

What ways have worked for you in keeping your professional mind open? Please share your strategies below in the Comments section.

Some conference examples to try:

• TED Talks
• Past Blender conferences (2009 videos – scroll down to find the videos from October 2009)
• Online News Association
• EmTech/Emerging Technologies Conference – offers some complimentary videos from the 2009 conference
• Free Culture Conference (already occurred, but look for free online streaming of sessions next year)
• PaidContent 2010 (already occurred, but look for free online streaming of sessions next year)
• THATCamp

Thanks to Markus Wust (NCSU Libraries) and Ellie Collier (IntheLibrarywiththeLeadPipe) for their helpful edits and feedback of earlier drafts of this article.

References

• Craig, Kathleen. 2006. “Why ‘unconferences’ are fun.” Business2.0 Magazine.
• Maslow, Abraham. 1966. The Psychology of Science: a reconnaissance. Harper and Rowe, 168 pp.