Introduction

Since Occupy Wall Street finally started getting mainstream media coverage, the idea of consensus decision-making seems to have permeated our American psyche. For me, it was waking up to a story on NPR’s Morning Edition that I couldn’t shake. The story featured a discussion of the group meetings and decision-making process occurring in Zuccotti Park, where protesters deliberated their need for sleeping bags (Chace, 2011)⁠. Despite the somewhat flip tone of the piece, it stuck with me.

The Occupy Librarianship trope hit the blogs a few weeks later, and we at Lead Pipe chimed in with our group post Occupy Librarianship: 5 Variations on a Theme (Bonfield, Frierson, Ford, Leeder, & Vrabel, 2011)⁠. Consensus was also on my mind at work. We had recently begun a search for a new University Librarian, so discussions about our visions for the library and qualities desired for incoming administrators had been abundant. (I even found myself wondering if we needed a human microphone in our Public Services Meetings.)

I began questioning what I thought I knew about consensus: In professional organizations and in the work places are we understanding and engaging in consensus decision-making in a way that is wholly democratic? Do we understand consensus decision-making theory? What does it look like in praxis? What potential does this decision-making process—which, in contemporary society, has been left to be practiced mostly by community action and social action groups—have for libraries?

In this piece I will discuss what I have learned about the praxis and theory of consensus decision-making; its benefits and pitfalls; and point to some examples. Then I will discuss what I think libraries can use and apply from consensus decision-making models.

What is Consensus Decision-Making?

Consensus decision-making is not a new concept or practice. In fact, it has been used for hundreds of years by Native American/First Nation groups and Quakers (Hare, 1973; InfoShop, n.d.; Rifkin, M., 2005).⁠ More recently, it has been used by anarchists; housing and food cooperatives; and other social action groups. Several publications have documented these group consensus processes, such as Martha’s Rules; Building United Judgment: A handbook for consensus decision making; On Conflict and Consensus: A handbook on formal consensus decisionmaking, and Consensus Decision Making. While each of these resources points to slightly different versions of the group decision-making process, they all follow a common thread of democratic decision-making practices. Peter Kakol (1995) designates “Equal access to political decision making for all” (para. 6) as the first of his Ten Anarchist Principles. He continues, “All those who are affected by a particular decision should be able to participate in the making of that decision” (para. 6). This sounds like what we commonly practice and understand as democracy, but it isn’t exactly what we practice.

Sager and Gastil (2006) point out that “democratic” majority rules decision-making is “…the most commonly used group decision rule in the United States” (p.2). Yet, majority-rules democracy enforces hierarchical relationships, pits sides against each other, and imposes a “pressure to conform” (Moscovici, & Doise. 1992; trans. Halls, 1994, p. 66). It creates winners and losers in each decision. Moreover, discussions preceding voting and majority-rules decisions can be greatly influenced by individuals’ social capital and authority in a group, and are tied to individuals present to participate in the decision-making process. In other words, what we have been understanding as democratic, is subject to disenfranchising individuals and re-enforcing power structures. Consensus decision-making attempts to rectify these problems.

I contend that the most common misconception regarding consensus decision-making assumes that decisions are reached unanimously. In fact, Sager and Gastil (2006) point to a difference between “consensus outcome” which implies unanimous agreement, and the “consensus decision rule,” which refers to a consensus decision-making process.

Decisions reached via consensus decision-making are rarely unanimous. Instead, consensus means that a group works toward a common goal that supports a group’s collective vision and mission. “Of course, full consent does not mean that everyone must be completely satisfied with the final outcome—in fact, total satisfaction is rare. The decision must be acceptable enough, however, that all will agree to support the group in choosing it” (Avery, Auvine, Streibel, & Weiss, 1981, p. 1). ⁠Similarly, in his book Empowerment and Democracy in the Workplace, John Dew (1997) posits “…at any time, every group member is at least 70% comfortable with each decision the group has made” (p. 118). The difference between unanimity and consensus is that unanimity supposes all individuals agree fully on the action taken, whereas consensus stresses an individual’s support of a collective mission or vision. Even though and individual may not fully agree with the tactics taken to get there, she can support the decision.

One of the dangers of group decision-making–as addressed in numerous scholarly publications from social psychology and communications—is the concept of groupthink. Groupthink occurs when groups sacrifice dialog. Individuals potentially suppress concerns and differences in order to avoid conflict and achieve harmonious consensus. This results in group decisions that are potentially contentious and not those that best support the group’s end goal or desired outcome (Dew, 1997; Mohammed, 2001; Mok & Morris, 2010; Moscovici & Doise, 1992/1994; Solomon, 2006)⁠. Consensus decision-making processes attempt to avoid negative consequences from groupthink, social capital, authority, and social hierarchies. To accomplish this, groups must work to build respect and trust. In a trusting and respectful environment, discussion and conflict can occur and groupthink can be avoided.

In fact, consensus cannot exist nor can it be achieved without conflict. In Conflict & Consensus, Moscovici and Doise (1992/1994) point to numerous studies showing that the stronger the conflict and disagreement in a consensus decision-making process, the more sticking-power resulting decisions have. Additionally, scholars have shown that the greater the conflict involved in problem-solving and decision-making, the more creative the solutions and decisions (Mohammed, 2001; Moscovici et al., 1992/1994; Murrell, Stewart, & Engel, 1993; Troyer & Youngreen, 2009)⁠. Those decisions made via consensus achieve more buy-in, and in the end result in greater success due to the collective support for decisions.

There are two interrelated aspects of consensus decision-making that must exist and function well in order for the process to be successful. First, individual participation in the decision-making process must occur. Second, conflict must arise and be resolved. Without participation and its proportional resulting conflict, consensus decision-making would not be a successful form of decision-making; the process is key to its success.

In consensus decision-making, like other decision-making processes, conflict is managed in the form of open discourse. Participants are expected to engage in active listening and respect each individual’s contribution to discussion. Moreover, consensus decision-making should center on solving problems faced by the collective, not the individual.

“Consensus decision making works best when the participants believe they belong to the group, and the group belongs to them. This group solidarity develops out of mutual trust and respect. As trust and respect grow within the group, members will feel free to express opinions and feelings, and to disagree without fear of consequences.” (Avery et al., 1981, p. 85)⁠

If members of a consensus group are not working toward the same goal, or they do not feel ownership and accountability for the success and well-being of the group, consensus decision-making will not work.

So what does a consensus decision-making process look like in praxis?

As mentioned earlier, there are many different forms consensus decision-making can take. In my research I found the process outlined in Building United Judgment, (Avery et al., 1981)⁠ to be the most thorough and appealing. The second chapter, “A Step-by-Step Process for Consensus” thoroughly outlines the process from preparation to final decision.

Like many group decision-making processes, it begins with agenda setting and identifying a facilitator for the process. Agenda items should be clearly defined and should state decisions that need to be made. After agenda items are introduced, discussion occurs. Discussion consists of individuals presenting ideas as a response to the issue at hand, concerns and opinions about the issue/proposal, and responses to what has already been said.

It is the facilitator’s responsibility to keep discussion on topic, provide clarification and rephrasing of discussion, summarize points, and ensure that all voices are heard and understood by the group. After discussion, the facilitator will test for consensus, making sure to summarize what has been most positively discussed as a solution or action. At this point more concerns can be raised and discussed, and consensus may be met, even though it may not fully appease everyone at the table. However, “…it must be one that all group members are willing to live with” (Avery et al., 1981, p. 13).⁠

In addition to the discussion process, any group member may choose to block an action or decision. “Blocking is a statement of the great seriousness of someone’s objections to a decision. In practical terms, it is a strong indication that the group requires more time to reach consensus” (Avery et al., 1981, p. 29). (For more on blocking, read Laird Schaub’s (2003) short piece: Blocking Made Easy (or at Least Easier): Taking a look at the dynamics of dissent and Mary Ann Renz’s (2006) The Meaning of Consensus and Blocking for Cohousing Groups.)

My explanation of the process is certainly an oversimplification.There are many other aspects built into consensus groups, including group building, problem solving, and even evaluation or assessment of a group’s decision-making process.

Martha’s Rules, which can be used as an alternative to Robert’s Rules of Order, is another consensus-based process. It outlines a five-step process for decision-making featuring separate steps for a “sense vote” and a “vote vote.”  “The point of the sense vote is to discover how the group feels about a proposal” (Minahan, 1986, p. 54)⁠. The sense vote asks: who likes the proposal, who can live with the proposal, and who is uncomfortable with the proposal. In contrast, a “vote vote” is to:

“…find out what those who are “uncomfortable” are uncomfortable about and then find out whether the group as a whole wishe(s) to decide by majority rule. The facilitator asks those who (are) uncomfortable to state the reasons for their discomfort….After hearing the objections of those who are uncomfortable, a vote is taken. The question is, ‘Should we implement this decision over the stated objections of the minority, when a majority of us feel it is workable?’” (p. 55)

There are numerous other variations for consensus decision-making, from the Quaker and Native American traditions to processes developed and used by small social action groups for governing meetings and decisions. Generally, consensus decision-making takes into account the reasons individuals may disagree, and embraces conflict resolution in discussions. It is more democratic and group-oriented than a majority rules process. Groups using consensus decision-making have stronger collective ties and accountability for the success of their organizations.

It can’t all be coming up roses, can it?

Photo used with permission of the artist, Faulkner Short

Chances are your work groups and teams already use some form of consensus to make decisions and govern the work of your library. Consensus decision-making is a fantastic process when it works, but it certainly has its drawbacks.

First, consensus decision-making takes a long time. For each individual in a group to voice her concerns and for group members to respond can be a lengthy process in small groups, and even lengthier for large groups. For small groups, such as Lead Pipe’s Editorial Board, consensus can work extremely well. The larger a group, however, the more likely the process is to break down into groupthink.

What’s more, sometimes decisions need to happen quickly and simply cannot wait for a consensus process. Who will make decisions that need to occur quickly? In this situation, one hopes that a decision-maker remains true to the group’s collective vision, and can respond on behalf of the group.

Another issue is that of participation and social dynamics. Group members should feel safe to talk openly about their concerns, and each individual should actively participate by speaking and listening during the decision-making process. When individuals dominate meetings or do not engage in active listening, the consensus process breaks down. Implicit in social dynamics are hierarchies, power, elitism, and privilege that can contribute to dysfunction and invisible power dynamics in consensus decision-making (Freeman, J., n.d.). Therefore, individuals need to be aware of these pitfalls, and be dedicated to creating an environment that enables consensus decision-making processes, even at times when decisions do not need to be made.

What’s more, library culture is stereotypically conflict averse. Being a service-oriented profession, library workers aim to help people, not disagree with them; so it makes sense that our culture might feel uncomfortable with conflict. Individuals may be hesitant to participate in discussions, and in doing so, open up meetings and discussions to be dominated by those who are more vocal. Due to this aversion, library groups attempting to engage in consensus decision-making are at great risk of running into groupthink.

Group composition can also hinder consensus decision-making. Groups may be comprised of a mix of administrators and workers, which, for some individuals may stymie participation and feelings of safety. What’s more, consensus may break down if all individuals who will be affected by decisions are not involved in the decision-making process. Libraries are not immune to this dilemma. How frequently do teams of administrators or professionals make decisions that impact classified staff, student workers, and others who weren’t part of the discussion or decision-making process?

External factors challenging consensus decision-making in libraries are those organizational structure imposed on libraries by their governing bodies. Cities, counties, corporations and universities—those bodies to which most libraries report—are typically structured hierarchically, with departments and committees reporting up the chain of command. Frequently libraries in these organizations mirror this structure. This does not mean that consensus decision-making cannot occur, however, the process must co-exist and function within a larger structure that may not fully support the consensus decision-making process.

It may be that your working group uses consensus to make decisions while the entire organization does not. It may happen that your team makes a decision, which is then reported up to administration. Administration may either support, modify, or rescind the decision. This might feel disempowering and you might see it as an abrogation of your group’s value within the library. In this case, it would make sense to open dialog with administration to discuss this outcome. Perhaps administration’s reasoning is strong enough, that if it were presented via a consensus process, your group’s decision may not have had the same outcome.

Despite these challenges, consensus decision-making seems to be a promising possibility for libraries.

Moving Toward a Consensus Model

Libraries are institutions that have historically been dedicated to the free and open exchange of ideas. In their current form, they work collaboratively with their communities, establishing and maintaining consortial relationships, and providing a supportive space for dissent and discourse. It is only intuitive that libraries could operate with the same machinations of open discourse and decision-making processes, much like the collective in Zuccotti Park. For libraries consensus decision-making can create strong organizations that will encounter great future successes.

In 2005 Barbara Fister and Kathie Martin presented their paper Embracing the Challenge of Change through Collegial Decision-Making (Fister & Martin, 2005)⁠ at ACRL, which offers a different model for libraries. In it, they describe their library’s reorganization into a flat organizational structure. “Rather than have a director we would elect a chair every three years as other departments did. The chair, as ‘first among equals,’ would add the tasks for coordinating the library’s efforts and liaison with the administration to his or her portfolio” (p. 4). Fister & Martin present a model in which their library is governed by consensus not only in faculty groups, but by classified staff as well. Of their organizational chart they say, “This new chart, two overlapping circles of responsibilities…erased the old vestiges of hierarchy lodged in nominal supervisory roles given to librarians over paraprofessionals and showed the collegial conversation extended to the entire library staff” (p. 4). Gustavus Adolphus College’s library is certainly a creative example of how librarians and library workers have engaged in a consensus model.

Despite the challenges of implementing consensus decision-making in libraries, it should be well worth it. There are a number of things you could do to try to work toward improving consensus decision-making in your library:

• Talk to your library director, your supervisor, your mentor, your colleagues about the idea of consensus decision-making and see what they think.
• Evaluate your current decision-making model. Does it work for your group? Would group members be open a more consensus-based model?
• Get training in good meeting facilitation practices for group members. You and your colleagues could learn active listening and other communication skills that contribute to successful consensus decision-making.
• Try to work on embracing conflict and productive discussions in meetings. Work toward creating a safe and respectful environment where each individual feels safe discussing her concerns in a group.
• Try using Martha’s Rules next time you hold a meeting.

Libraries can be very siloed organizations. How often are public services staff involved in cataloging, acquisitions, and electronic resources management decisions, and vice versa? What will happen when catalogers are alongside instruction librarians thinking of new approaches to resource discovery? Consensus can open opportunities by deconstructing silos and starting to create new models for library decision-making.

Libraries that successfully engage in consensus decision-making will see improvement in making decisions that best serve their patrons; more cohesion in staff and accountability; and are likely to experience more creativity in problem solving. Individuals in these libraries will most likely become more dedicated to serving the organization and working towards its shared vision and mission. The reason these changes may occur, is that the decision-making and visioning is shared—individuals all contribute to the definition of and accomplishment of goals. Individuals would begin creating and environment of respect and trust, enabling them to participate in a democratic decision-making process.

What has been your experience with consensus?

Many thanks to Barbara Fister, Robert Schroeder, Gretta Siegel, and Sarah Ford for providing perspective and thoughtful comments on this piece. Additional thanks to Erin Dorney, Hilary Davis and Brett Bonfield from In the Library with the Lead Pipe for copyedits and even more thoughts. And finally, a shout out to Faulkner Short for letting me use his image in this post. He takes stunningly beautiful photographs.

Bibliography

Paul Farmer speaks at IDEO by Global X / CC-BY

This post is adapted from a speech I gave at Drexel University’s Beta Phi Mu initiation on December 6, 2011. The text of the original is available on Scribd, and a video of my speech, which includes a brief introduction by Helen Snowden is available on Vimeo.

Greek Picnic is a reunion and gathering of the alumni and current members of the nine historically African-American fraternities and sororities. It was first celebrated in Philadelphia in 1974, where it has been celebrated every year since. For most of its history it was a well attended event, but in the mid-1990s it got to be really big. I’ve read estimates that 100,000 people would register and another 100,000–200,000 would attend some events around the city during Greek Week each July.

The City of Philadelphia didn’t seem to know what to do with this sudden influx of college students and alumni. It seemed like they just wanted to drink and party all night, and most Philadelphians seemed to see the situation as a public safety issue that should be handed over to the police. Businesses would close for the week and gate their doors and windows, so each night bored students and alumni would cruise up and down Broad Street and South Street. Sometimes things got out of hand.

What do you do with a bunch of people who just want to drink and party all night?

Which leads to my first point: Perspective.

So you have this annual crush of African-American fraternity and sorority members and alumni who want to drink and party all night. You know who else likes to drink and party all night?

Mummers.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Mummers parade, think of it as Philadelphia’s version of the New Orleans Mardi Gras parade, only it’s held on New Year’s Day. Philadelphia hasn’t always handled its relationship with the Mummers as well as it should, but on the whole we do pretty well. I think most Philadelphians agree that New Year’s Day wouldn’t be the same without boisterous people in feathers strutting down Broad Street playing banjos.

You know another group that just likes to drink and party all night?

Delegates at political conventions.

Around the same time the City had no idea what to do with all these college students and alumni who visited us each July, we were getting ready to host the 2000 Republican National Convention, the one where George W. Bush was nominated for the first time. We were building hotels and fixing up the Convention Center. Just across the Delaware River, New Jersey was rebuilding Admiral Wilson Boulevard in Camden.

The Republican National Convention lasted four days, from July 31 until August 3, and then everyone went home. Which is what you would expect. You don’t get to be a delegate without putting down roots. It’s not like the delegates were going to spend three or four nights in Philadelphia, fall in love with the city, and decide to relocate.

You know who does that? College students. When I was a first-year undergraduate at Rutgers, one of my friends from summer camp came up to visit me for a few days. I introduced him to my friends, we went to my classes together, and he transferred to Rutgers from Virginia Tech and became my college roommate.

I realize that’s just one data point. Here’s another. One winter break, I went out to visit a friend in Albuquerque. He showed me around and I fell in love with the place and resolved to move there as soon as I could. Within a couple of years I had graduated from Rutgers, packed everything I owned in my new Saturn, and I had an apartment in Albuquerque and a job at Page One Bookstore.

That’s the kind of thing college students will do. And that’s exactly what Philadelphia needed in the mid-1990’s. Its population had been declining for decades. There were thousands of abandoned houses all over the city that would eventually get bulldozed. Students at Drexel and Penn and Temple and all of its other schools would leave the moment they graduated.

The City of Philadelphia should have realized those hundreds of thousands of college students and alumni coming to Greek Picnic every July could help to revitalize things. Government officials should have been working with employers and real estate agents and mortgage brokers and sports teams and musicians and dance clubs and theaters and restaurants and everyone else who could have made them feel like VIPs. Instead, Philadelphia treated them like criminals. And Greek Picnic got smaller again.

It could have been racism that clouded Philadelphia’s perspective. But that doesn’t explain Love Park.

Love Park, which is about a block from City Hall, has been internationally recognized for almost two decades as one of the world’s truly legendary skate parks. It was the main reason Philadelphia was chosen as the site for the 2001 and 2002 X Games. So what did Philadelphia do? It started enforcing a ban on skateboarding in Love Park.

A group called Friends of Love Park proposed a popular solution that would have kept certain paths clear for pedestrians and only allowed skating after 3:00 p.m. on weekdays. A company out of California called DC Shoes offered the City a $1 million donation if it backed the plan. The City turned it down.

Again, we have this dying city with a steadily declining economy and population. As with the sudden popularity of Greek Picnic in the mid-90’s, through no planning of its own, Philadelphia got a fantastic opportunity to become younger and hipper and economically stronger. And we blew it.

I don’t mean to pick on Philadelphia. We also have examples of stepping back, getting a better perspective, and making great decisions. The Free Library’s turned its “homeless problem” into one of its greatest successes by partnering with Project H.O.M.E. Now the library’s bathrooms and its cafe are among the nicest in the city and, just as significantly, formerly homeless workers have good jobs and new skills.

Another reason not to pick on the City of Philadelphia is that all of us occasionally need help with our perspective. Drexel, for instance, specifically its library school.

Can you name the most famous and historically significant graduate of the Drexel library program?

Barbara Rose Johns Powell.

It’s a little bit of a trick question, because she’s not famous for what she did after she graduated. She’s famous for what she did before. That’s a point I always try to make to library students and new librarians, and to anyone thinking about going to library school. What you do before you get your library degree matters, which is one of the reasons ALA only accredits Masters-level programs. You’re expected to have worked a bit before becoming a librarian, at the very least as an undergraduate, and ideally a bit after as well. For instance, I was a fundraiser and web developer before I went to library school. Those skills helped me get my current job and I still use them all the time.

So here’s what Barbara Rose Johns Powell did before she went to library school.

She helped end segregation in this country.

Seriously. Barbara Rose Johns attended a segregated high school in Farmville, Virginia. On April 23, 1951, she led her classmates in a strike to protest the school’s inadequate conditions. She had turned 17 only one month earlier and was a junior in high school, which didn’t stop her from convincing her classmates’ parents to support the strike. She also went to the NAACP and persuaded them to provide legal assistance. Three years later, in 1954, Farmville’s was one of the five cases the Supreme Court considered in Brown v. Board of Education when it ruled that segregation was unconstitutional.

After marrying Reverend William Powell, and after Drexel, Barbara Rose Johns Powell worked as a school librarian in the Philadelphia public school system (she was admitted to Drexel on September 27, 1976, and was awarded her Master of Science on June 2, 1979). For her, working as a school librarian wasn’t all that different from what she’d done as a high school student. For her it was all about education. She was born on March 6, 1934, and died on September 25, 1991, just 57 years old.

How cool would it have been to have her as your school librarian? Mrs. Powell, can you help me with my paper on racism? Can you help me get over my fear of public speaking?

I also like to imagine her getting called in for one of those interrogations last spring led by attorneys from the Los Angeles Unified School District. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “A court reporter takes down testimony. A judge grants or denies objections from attorneys. Armed police officers hover nearby. On the witness stand, one librarian at a time is summoned to explain why she—the vast majority are women—should be allowed to keep her job.” Can you imagine Barbara Rose Johns Powell on the witness stand?

Mrs. Powell, can you tell us what you contribute to student education? What have you done to improve educational outcomes?

I think those Los Angeles lawyers would have had a pretty difficult time pushing Mrs. Powell aside. Unfortunately, that’s sort of what Drexel has done. Those of us who want to change librarianship for the better, and see librarianship as our best chance to change the world for the better, have a role model in Barbara Rose Johns Powell. I’d like to see Drexel start celebrating its connection to her sensibility and her legacy. I’d like to see the American Library Association and the American Association of School Librarians do the same.

So that’s perspective in the abstract. Let’s bring it home. What does all this talk about perspective have to do with you?

We’re in a rough economy. It’s a tight job market. Libraries are in transition. Google and Amazon and ebooks, oh my. The sky is falling.

That’s one way to look at it. As you might imagine, at least for you, I don’t see any of these situations as bad things.

Public libraries are counter-cyclical. Higher education is counter-cyclical. In a down economy, people use public libraries more. They go back to school. Transitions are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to make a real and lasting difference. For instance, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that ALA’s Freedom to Read Statement was originally issued in 1953, during the time the case initiated by Barbara Rose Johns was working its way through the Federal Courts. Change was in the air, just like it is now.

Which leads me to my second point: No one can stop you from doing good work.

Getting a good job and doing good work are not the same thing. They’re correlated. But it’s not clear to me which is the cause and which is the effect.

Here’s how I describe my decision to become a librarian. If I could help end deaths associated with HIV, if I thought I had the ability to further the research or reduce the harm caused by the virus, that’s what I would be doing. But I’m squeamish, vegan, and not the least bit handy. So I do what I can to help people, and I try very hard to take my work just as seriously as someone whose work contributes more directly to public health. This is what I have to contribute.

Paul Farmer didn’t have to become a librarian because he’s amazingly good at keeping healthy people healthy and helping sick people become as healthy as possible. As with Barbara Rose Johns Powell, I’m not comparing myself to Paul Farmer. But both of them are role models for me, and I hope they’ll be role models for you as well.

When Paul Farmer was in medical school at Harvard, he started working in Haiti, then the poorest country in the world. His efforts were small at first, given that he was just one person doing what he could, plus he had to divide his time between Haiti and Boston, generally six months a year in each. When he was in Boston he would borrow medicine and resources, and recruit people to help him, and slowly he built the nonprofit he founded, Partners in Health, into one of the world’s most significant international health and social justice organizations. If you gave to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, there’s a good chance you donated to Partners in Health. It’s also a great place to donate if you’d like to help people in Lesotho, Malawi, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, the United States, the Dominican Republic, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Guatemala, or Burundi. I strongly encourage you to read a book that Tracy Kidder wrote about Paul Farmer called Mountains Beyond Mountains. It tells Farmer’s story really well, and it also makes you want to to good work. And it helps you realize there’s nothing stopping you from doing it.

So what do I mean by good work? Here are my three ideals for good work:

1. You feel so passionate about it that it doesn’t feel like work.
2. It does so much good for other people that you can’t help but feel good about yourself for having done it.
3. It gives you a chance to work with people you admire.

I’ve been really fortunate to work on a lot of different projects and with a lot of different groups that meet those criteria. I worked on an open source project when I was a library student at Drexel. I helped found In the Library with the Lead Pipe, and I wrote for Library Journal and ACRLog. In the last two years I’ve worked on a couple of ALA Presidential Task Forces, and even chaired one. I’ve served on a few boards for library organizations. I’m in a calendar called Men of the Stacks that’s raising money for the It Gets Better Project to help end bullying. And, of course, I’ve gotten to help a lot of people at the libraries where I’ve worked.

Some of those things have depended on other people either hiring or electing or choosing me, but a lot of them didn’t.  And I feel like I see new projects all the time that I’d work on if I had the time or that I wish I’d thought of or that I’m glad someone else is doing.

• The Library As Incubator Project, a new project that highlights the way artists and libraries can work together. It was started by three students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison program.

• The Hack Library School movement is fantastic, and has accomplished an amazing amount in just over a year.

• ALA Think Tank, an open group on Facebook, has a lot of energy and ideas, and its members #makeithappen.

• Library Boing Boing is coming, and it’s coming soon. Be part of it.

• And don’t forget about the Library & Information Science Stack Exchange. It could be huge.

• I would love to take part in anything related to the Digital Public Library of America. One option would be to get involved as an editor at Library News, a new community like Reddit or Hacker News that’s devoted to libraries.

• I’m also really excited about Gluejar, a company that’s working with authors to get them to release electronic versions of their books with Creative Commons licenses. Founder Eric Hellman has already hired recent library graduate and budding library superstar, Andromeda Yelton, and he appears to have some sort of working relationship with Library of Congress librarian/programmer Ed Summers as well.

• Code4lib, an anarcho-democratic community of programmers who work with libraries, is the most interesting thing happening in the library world, and I definitely recommend that you become a part of it in a way that suits you.

• The Open Shelves Classification project is still looking for someone to lead its attempt to compete with Dewey, LC, and BISAC.  They got a lot accomplished a couple of years ago, but they’ve been dormant for a little while. If you want to prove yourself as a cataloger, that’s a great way to get started.

• Among the newer open source library projects to watch are the eXtensible Catalog at the University of Rochester and the Kuali OLE project that has a bunch of sponsors and partners. And there are another dozen or so library related open source projects that are worth learning and helping to develop or document.

What’s most exciting is that I’m just scratching the surface. There are so many things that are right about libraries today, but there are innumerable things that could be improved. And there’s nothing stopping you from doing it. Whether you have a job lined up already or you have no idea where your next job is going to be, I hope you’ll devote yourself to finding problems you’re passionate about solving, people you’re passionate about helping, and a community of like-minded peers. You just have to look at things from a useful perspective and commit to spending your time doing work that doesn’t feel like work.

It took me a long time to find work that met all of those criteria. I tried a lot of things before I went to library school. As much as I’ve been trying to do it for the previous 3,000 words, I’m not sure I’m capable of expressing how grateful I am to have found librarianship, or how grateful I am to have colleagues and peers like you as readers and, more importantly, as collaborators. The librarians I’ve met in the last few years are the smartest, kindest, most helpful people I’ve ever worked with, and I can’t thank them enough for all the opportunities they’ve given me, for how much they’ve helped me to gain a sensible perspective on how best to approach problems, and how to go about doing good work. I wish the same for you for the remainder of your career and for the rest of your life.

Thanks to Sarah Houghton, Phyllis Bonfield, and Jeffrey Bonfield, and to my Lead Pipe colleagues, Ellie Collier, Erin Dorney, Hilary Davis, and Emily Ford for their help. Thanks also to Terri Breitenstine at the Office of the University Registrar at Drexel University for confirming Barbara Rose Johns Powell’s enrollment and graduation information.

Image courtesy of Flickr user quinn.anya

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

Brett

I have a theory of gift giving:

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

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

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

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

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

A few recommendations:

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

Eric

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emily

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

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

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

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

Hilary

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

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

Erin

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

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

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

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

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is pleased to welcome guest authors Iris Jastram, Danya Leebaw, and Heather Tompkins.  They are reference and instruction librarians at Carleton College, a small liberal arts college in Minnesota.

Becoming forensic librarians

Image by smwright

“Wait, this is information literacy?” a rhetorician at our workshop exclaimed in excited surprise. “But this is so cool!” And we wanted to respond “YES!” not only from joyful pride but also out of recognition. After all, we too had had very similar reactions to our own work with information literacy, and not that long ago. We too had realized that information literacy could be different than we had originally thought (or that the ACRL information literacy standards had led us to believe). Information literacy could be more alive and integrated within the discourse of academic work. It could be more applicable across disciplines and genres and rhetorical goals. And these revelations remapped our practice.

Just two summers earlier we had pored over some sample papers pulled from Carleton College’s Sophomore Writing Portfolio submissions, debating whether we could see information literacy at work in those papers and if so, exactly what we could see. We couldn’t see the processes by which the students arrived at their final work or the assignments that prompted and guided them. All we had were the completed papers and a nagging sense of unease about what we could meaningfully say about information literacy in student writing based solely on samples of student writing.

As the hours ticked by, though, realization began to dawn. We had always said that information literacy was more than a discrete set of research skills, but when it came right down to it we had nearly always taught a set of research skills (cf Jacobs 2008, Simmons 2005, or Swanson 2004). We worked with students to help them develop researchable questions, formulate search strategies, evaluate what they find, and cite sources. We collaborated with faculty to help them design assignments that would lead students through these complex and iterative steps. These practices were good and valuable, but we now recognized them as only the beginning. Reading the finished papers themselves, we realized not only that research skills were hard to observe with any consistency, but also that we could trace the far richer information literacy habits of mind. We could be forensic librarians reconstructing our students’ understanding of the ways sources function in academic work based on the often subtle patterns left woven through the finished writing. These patterns coalesced around three dimensions, Attribution, Evaluation, and Communication, that we codified into a rubric and used to help us investigate our students’ habits of mind.

Attribution

We were surprised to find that we couldn’t really assess how well students followed citation style guidelines (one of the things we originally thought would be especially easy to see) because there are just too many citation styles and because many professors tell their students that “it doesn’t really matter as long as you’re consistent.” However, we found that we could see how well students guided their readers through the distinctions between their own thoughts and the thoughts of others and how well they helped their readers understand the nature of their sources. It became clear that teaching attribution as a habit of mind rather than citation as a rote skill would not only improve our students’ writing, but would also help them understand how sources function in academic writing in the first place.

So now when we teach, we help students understand citation as context. We emphasize that students can build contexts for themselves by paying attention to the contexts other scholars have built for them in the literature. Then we talk about how it is the students’ job to build similar contexts for their readers, and that this can help them decide what sources and citations belong in their papers. They can decide whether something counts as “common knowledge” by putting themselves in their readers’ shoes and wondering whether their readers would like to have the option of knowing more about that topic, and if so, leave them a citation to use as a starting place. Thinking of their own classmates as their “community of inquiry” we have them develop citation styles that would be instant context-building tools for their community, privileging information that matters to their classmates and leaving out extraneous identifiers. Then we explain how the citation style for their discipline performs that same function. This shift toward concentrating on the uses and functions of attribution breathes life into an otherwise stultifying topic, but more importantly it places students in the role of helpful knowledge creators rather than information compilers and potential plagiarists.

Evaluation

When we turned to the question of how students evaluate sources, the pattern emerged again. It turned out that we could tell very little about whether students had managed to uncover core resources or spread their wings beyond JSTOR. Instead, what we could see was whether or not students made compelling cases for their sources being the right sources for their papers. What’s more, once we knew what we were seeing, we could trace these same intellectual habits through papers that only included primary sources since selecting those sources is also an intellectual choice that involves matching evidence and claim. This insight helped us shift our instruction yet again.

Suddenly we realized that we could work with professors who often prefer not to include a research paper but still want to include an information literacy component in their courses, and with this realization, whole expanses of the curriculum opened up to us in ways that had seemed impossible just months earlier. We could work more closely with our language and literature departments, which place great emphasis on reading and writing about literature and far less emphasis on research. In these “non-research” classes students can analyze secondary literature that makes claims using similar types of sources to see what aspects of those sources are important to skilled scholars. We teach students to explore sources that will help them understand their primary sources well enough to see what might constitute an interesting question to ask of the source.

Even with more traditional research-based assignments, we shifted our teaching after realizing that students had been understanding the research process as one of gathering “everything” related to their topics and reporting on what they had gathered. Now we discuss bibliographies as representations of intellectual choice designed to present the most convincing claims possible, guiding the reader toward agreement with the claim by presenting the most convincing evidence possible. Bibliographies are rhetorical tools, too, not simply lists.

Communication

While all of the dimensions we identified have to do with communication, this dimension is distinct in that it focuses on how well students use the evidence that they’ve found instrumentally in the service of their own goals rather than ceding the main thrust of the paper to outside voices. In strong papers, students marshaled their evidence while maintaining their own voice and their own sense of purpose. In weaker papers, on the other hand, patch writing¹ and excessive citation signaled fundamental confusion about the sources themselves and the purposes for drawing on the works of others in the first place. Oddly, one of our most transformative findings felt the most obvious: students have to actually read and understand their source material, really integrate it into their thinking, before they can synthesize those sources into their own arguments effectively.

Of course, we aren’t content specialists. Yet, this insight helps us continuously improve how we teach familiar topics, like literature reviews. We recognized that students don’t actually know what a “literature review” means and what it is, really, that they are being asked to do in their papers. Backing up and deconstructing these as much as possible, we connect the notion of literature reviews with creativity, intellectual choice, and disciplinary conventions by showing an in-class video about originality, teaching students mindmapping, or having a class create research journals using Google Docs. Students also get a laugh out of demonstrations of bad literature reviews as conversations in which one person simply mimics or paraphrases another person. Acknowledging and summarizing previous points in a conversation is important but simply listing those points is socially and academically weak.

Looking toward the future

Reading papers and working with faculty and students in these new ways have opened up opportunities for more integrated and enlivened collaborations both with departments having deeply entrenched information literacy curricula and with departments that have not typically seen information literacy as highly relevant for their students. Emphasizing a “habits of mind” approach rather than a skill set approach, we are remapping our practice in ways that resonate more strongly with faculty and students across disciplines and courses on our campus. Information literacy is truly a “critical literacy” now, encompassing “the ability to read, interpret, and produce information valued in academia” (Elmborg 2006).

So yes, this is information literacy. And yes, information literacy is so cool.

Many thanks to our colleagues in the Carleton College Gould Library Reference & Instruction Department who together created this rubric, the design of the Information Literacy in Student Writing study, and with whom we shaped the thoughts and practices discussed here. Thanks also to Lead Pipers Ellie Collier and Eric Frierson and to Steve Lawson for helpful comments and edits.

Works Cited:

Elmborg, James. 2006. “Critical Information Literacy: Implications for Instructional Practice.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 32 (2): 192-199.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. 1999. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishers.

——, Tricia Serviss, and Tanya K. Rodrigue. 2010. “Writing from sources, writing from sentences.” Writing & Pedagogy 2 (2): 177-192.

Jacobs, H. L. M. 2008. “Information Literacy and Reflective Pedagogical Praxis.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 34 (3) (May): 256-262.

Simmons, Michelle Holschuh. 2005. “Librarians as Disciplinary Discourse Mediators: Using Genre Theory to Move Toward Critical Information Literacy.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 5 (3): 297-311.

Swanson, Troy A. 2004. “A Radical Step: Implementing A Critical Information Literacy Model.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 4 (2): 259-273.

1. Patch writing refers to the practice of gathering verbatim passages from various sources and then piecing them together, much like a patchwork quilt, with connecting words and sentences. The term was coined by Rebecca Moore Howard in her 1999 work Standing in the Shadow of Giants.

by Andrea Campi on Flickr

It’s official: we’ve entered the holiday season. Thanksgiving (and Black Friday) are safely behind us and the party invitations are beginning to roll in. It’s the time of year when we work perhaps a little less hard, reconnect with friends and family, indulge in good food and drink, and wait for the new year to arrive. Believe it or not, 2012 is just around the corner with its champagne and midnight countdowns. We are invited to reflect on what the past year has brought us: the good, the bad, and occasionally, the ugly. We share our stories of the year.

This post is my story of 2011. I hope you’ll consider sharing yours in the comments below.

Introduction

In 2011 I left my beloved reference librarian position at a large, established university library in favor of a directorship at a brand-new community college library. I should have known what to expect when the outgoing library director asked, “Have you ever worked in a startup before?” I had some sense of what starting a new library might mean, and I was aware that the place I was interviewing had only existed – both as library and as institution – for two brief years. I had worked in several different libraries in the past, including two university libraries, a public library branch and even a small college library, but all had been established long before I arrived. I knew a “startup” would be something else entirely, though I didn’t know exactly what. I expected it to be an adventure, and one I was ready to tackle.

Being aware of the facts of the situation and understanding what it would mean to live and breathe them on a daily basis, however, were two wildly different things. After the previous director referred to my new library as a “startup,” I did some literature and web searching to learn more about startup libraries, their issues and challenges. To my surprise, I found… nothing. I tried variations of search terms related to building a new academic library, but still… nothing. I did find a few things that were peripherally helpful, but didn’t apply specifically to academic libraries. For instance, ALA’s Fact Sheet, “Setting Up a Library: A Resource Guide,” has a section on academic libraries but the actual content doesn’t offer guidance to those creating a new library. Public libraries have the Public Library Start-Up Guide, and the Special Libraries Association offers a resource list with some items of interest. Sure, all libraries have qualities in common, but the details vary widely. Where was my startup guide?

It looked like I was on my own. I knew I would, at least in the beginning, be able to draw on the one-person library community, as I would at first be the only librarian in a place with one other full-time staff member. But my situation was unique, as my discussions with the college administration made clear, because my charge was to grow the library collection, services, staff, and space. I wasn’t coming on board at a typical one-person library; I was there to create and build a whole new organization. The opportunity I had accepted was something rare and special, and it came without training wheels.

The Institution

I live in the Treasure Valley of southwestern Idaho, a region inhabited by roughly half a million people who, until recently, never had a community college of their own. In 2007 voters approved a measure to create the new College of Western Idaho (CWI) and the first courses were offered in 2009. By the time I arrived in 2011, enrollment had leaped to approximately 5,500 FTE, outgrowing all predictions and stretching the existing staff, faculty, and services to the maximum. It is clear that there was a great need for a community college in my area, and it is equally clear that the faculty and staff of this new institution have a serious but thrilling responsibility to take CWI from startup to full-fledged college. A major focus is gaining accreditation from the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, a lengthy, intensive process that has only just begun.

The library of which I am now director can best be described as a “one-room schoolhouse.” With only 4,000 print books and 17 computers, it fills what is essentially a large classroom in our main academic building. Upon my arrival it possessed a single-page website that emphasized databases offered by our accreditation partner, the College of Southern Idaho, and our state consortium. While that list of resources is considerable, its online presentation concealed the depth of resources offered. Furthermore, databases required either a login from the partner institution or a generic password students had to request by phone or email. To top it off, I am the first individual with an MLS to be employed here. The prior director, who clearly worked hard to build what infrastructure we have, retired shortly before I arrived, leaving few notes or records to get me started.

At present my library is neither impressive nor sufficient to support the needs of the college. This fact is vividly apparent to me, the students, the faculty, the college administration, and our accreditors. Turning the situation around by drawing on all my creativity and resourcefulness to build a library that CWI and I can be proud of is my great challenge. In my first four months on the job I have been stretched as a person and a professional, in ways I never anticipated. I have found joy in this work, and have trudged through a variety of challenges. And yet the adventure has just begun.

The Joys

I have often said that I love being a librarian because it is the first job I’ve ever had where I never get bored. Prior to my switch to CWI, I worked for four years as a reference and instruction librarian at a mid-sized university library. This was my first professional position and I enjoyed learning the ins and outs of my job, building relationships across campus, and becoming an expert in my liaison areas. By the end of year four, however, the days sometimes slid by a little more slowly. I started to wonder whether there was more to being a librarian than continuing along the same (albeit pleasant) path. Without realizing it at first, I was ready for more. I was itching for new responsibilities.

I got my wish. Without any previous administrative experience I was suddenly the expert and decisionmaker on everything library. In my first few weeks at CWI Library I was variously asked for advice on copyright and course packets, requested to write a five-year strategic plan, offered the opportunity to hire students, temps, and a new librarian, invited to teach Communications students about research, and faced with making sense out of a stack of invoices. I had to figure out how to unravel a dysfunctional ILS, come up with a plan to address our time-consuming password problem, and advise college leadership on what a community college library for 5,000 students should look like. From coasting through a job that had become predictable and comfortable, I had launched into a world where my brain was whirring so energetically that it almost seemed possible that smoke might begin emanating from my ears. When friends asked how I liked my new job, I emphasized the joy of being in a role where I was again learning new things every day, if not every hour.

Along the same lines, perhaps the best thing about directing a small library – and a new library on top of that – is the fact that you have to be an all-around everything librarian and manager. You have to be ready and willing to embrace every aspect of the job, from cataloging to collection development to reference to budgeting and planning. There’s no room for specialization, and no time for it. While this is certainly not a situation that would appeal to everyone, for me it was as natural and as joyful as coming home. Not only do I have variety in my work, I have V-A-R-I-E-T-Y in all caps and with a few exclamation points thrown in at the end. (!!!). The days fly by like speeding jets and I have to remind myself to take breaks and to leave at a reasonable hour in the evening.

While any small library offers the pleasures of variety and generalization, what they don’t all offer is the joy of building something brand new. There is not much that is more motivational than knowing you’re part of creating something of value, something glowing and important that will serve the educational needs of future generations. The word “legacy” comes up with some frequency among the staff and faculty at CWI, as we are all cognizant of the responsibility and privilege inherent in building a new college. I have never worked with a more passionate, energetic, or dedicated group of people.

Last but certainly not least is the joy of self-determination; switching roles from that of a cog in the machine to that of presiding mechanic. Administration comes with a ream of heavy responsibilities, as others had warned me, but no one had ever told me how much fun it is to run a library. If my generation is known for its administrative-aversiveness, as I believe it is, then listen up all my fellow X’ers: Don’t knock it ’til you try it! I’ve always daydreamed about someday starting my own business, but was never sure what business it should be. “If only one could start a new library the way people start a business,” I used to think. I figured that no one gets that chance in libraries, since any organization needing a library had one already. Happily, I was wrong.

The Challenges

Making the switch to a small, startup library isn’t all rainbows and kittens, of course. While the work has its notable pleasures, I am also working harder than I ever have in my life. The pluses I described above each have their delta partners, though (rainbows again) I believe that they are all are manageable challenges and, ultimately, climbable obstacles. Still, it took about three months before I could sleep through a night without waking in the wee hours to make “to do” lists, and I continue to frequently lose sleep while mentally wrestling with some problem I need to solve at work.

Admittedly, my greatest challenge as a new director is my lack of expertise. I have only been a librarian since 2006, and my knowledge is primarily public service-related. It is no small thing to suddenly be responsible for an entire library, and particularly one that needs to be grown in every direction. How does a new librarian learn enough quickly to take charge of budgeting, hiring, managing, whole-library collection development, selecting a new ILS, negotiating database and journal contracts, and etc. etc.? The buck stops, as they say, with me, and there is no one to whom I can or should defer.

It is, sometimes, entirely overwhelming. Longtime small-library directors out there, I salute you. (And if you happen to have a support group, I would love an invitation).

Learning how to prioritize those substantial and growing “to do” lists has been another great challenge, made greater when it requires balancing tasks against each other that seem equally critical. What is more urgently needed: building the collection or facility planning? Getting a usable ILS or figuring out how to install EZProxy so students can actually log into resources from off-campus? Budget planning or hiring a new librarian? There’s so much to do that taking one step forward on each project every week seems like a great accomplishment.

To make things more complicated, space is an ongoing problem both in our library and in the college at large. My library’s two full-time staff, two part-time staff, and three work-study students all share office/staff/kitchen space that would more reasonably house two people. We work in very close quarters and are constantly (and unintentionally) interrupting and distracting each other from the tasks at hand. It can be challenging to get things done, though we are fortunate to have a wonderfully collegial team that makes the situation more bearable.

One thing I didn’t anticipate in making the leap to a small library was the isolating effect of moving to a place with a very small staff. I had become accustomed to having a large, varied team of colleagues in my university library jobs, and losing the creative energy of that dynamic and the support it provided on a daily basis has been difficult. I am lucky to have developed a wonderful network of colleagues both locally and nationally, but I do miss the daily interaction and banter that I once enjoyed.

I can’t conclude this section of the post without mentioning work/life balance. I’ll admit it, I’ve bragged a bit in the past, in previous jobs, about how well I have managed to maintain equilibrium between my personal and professional lives. Call it kharma or just desserts, but my balance has tipped dramatically since my job title switched from “librarian” to “director.” I once became impatient with people who didn’t answer their email within a day, but now I struggle to keep up with my own inbox. I skip lunch, work late, hit the gym, and get home shortly before bedtime. I am wagging my own metaphorical finger at myself, vowing regularly to “work on it.” I will get better at this.

Conclusion: Lessons Learned (and Learning)

At a dinner party recently, I ran into an acquaintance, a faculty member who chairs her academic department. She politely asked how I liked my new job, and I gave my usual answer about how much I love it, though I am working harder than ever before. Knowing she also had administrative duties, I added, “and I hope at some point I’ll be able to sleep through the night again.” To my surprise she entirely empathized, saying that it took her a long time before she got over the same late-night worrying and list-making that I had described.

“It’s not just me then?” I asked, relieved.

“Not at all,” she responded quickly. “It took me a long time before I could accept that I simply can’t get everything done.”

My first thought was, Oh yes I can, but I pushed it aside long enough to recognize the wisdom in her words. She didn’t mean she wouldn’t try, but sometimes things would slip through the cracks or get finished after the deadline. And that was okay. In fact, it was entirely human.

I’m a get-it-done personality type: when I see things that need to be accomplished my natural response is to put my head down and push through without stopping until I’m finished. That approach just won’t work here, as I have never before faced a challenge as substantial, complex, and long-term as building a library. This will require an approach more akin to that of a distance runner and less that of a sprinter, and after running three marathons I’d like to think I’m psychologically prepared for the shift in perspective. I will need good pacing, regular breaks, and ongoing training. But perhaps most important of all, I will need to be patient and persistent to arrive at this finish line in one piece and smiling.

As 2012 arrives, I’ll still be running.

Many thanks to Ellie Collier, Karen Downing, and Emily Ford for their valuable feedback that helped shape this post.

by drp on Flickr

Introduction

This Lead Pipe post is about two libraries attempting to reinvent services, collections, and spaces as the walls of their buildings come crashing down. Rather than embarking on phased construction projects, the library buildings at both St. Edward’s University and Millersville University will be completely shut down for a period of one and two years, respectively. Co-authors Eric Frierson, Library Digital Services Manager at St. Edward’s and Erin Dorney, Outreach Librarian at Milersville discuss renovations as catalysts for change, experimentation and flexibility, and distributed/embedded librarianship. These facets contribute to the identity crisis librarianship has struggled with since the Information Age began – only exacerbated by unique circumstances. The conversation below is one example of the kinds of real questions being proffered to librarians at both institutions:

“I don’t mean to sound disrespectful,” began the biology professor, “but if we can do without a library for a whole year, what does that say about the library?” An awkward silence settled over the science faculty meeting before the librarian was able to pull together a response.

“You’re right. The library as it exists now – the print collections, the reference desk – these may not be required elements of a thriving university library. This renovation project gives us the opportunity to re-examine what a library does on campus, what things we don’t need to do, and what things we could start doing that we haven’t done before.”

This post will not cover the new, technologically-situated, collaborative learning spaces which will exist following the renovations, but rather discuss how renovations can bring organizational change that has the potential to shape the library of the future. It is our belief that the pace of change our libraries have adopted should become the norm at all libraries.

St. Edward’s University

St. Edward’s University is a private, Catholic institution in Austin, Texas. It is home to over 5,000 students and is situated on a hill overlooking the lower Colorado River, boasting gorgeous views of the Austin skyline. Enrollment has nearly doubled in the past ten years, and the campus master plan has made the grounds and buildings cohesive, beautiful, and a delight to explore. The library, however, has been a 30-year anomaly with its white stucco, rounded-edge shell.

(Current St. Edward’s University Library Building)

During the summer of 2011, the university received a gift of $13 million from Austin-area philanthropists Pat and Bill Munday for the creation of a new library and learning commons. The only catch is that construction must be complete within a period of two years. This aggressive timeline demanded the selection of an architect almost immediately, and the library, along with its partners in the new commons, needed to have the plan for the new space completed within a few short months.

Because the project involves renovating existing square-footage and building a new addition, almost all physical resources – including collections – will be need be removed from the building for one year. The print collection of 170,000 books will need to be aggressively weeded and stored off-campus, inaccessible during the project. Only a few hundred high circulation items and the media collection will remain on campus. Seventeen staff members will find a new home in Mang House, a three bedroom residence with kitchen and a laundry room. The 100 computers and public use furniture from the old library will be dispersed throughout existing campus locations.

(Mang House – The temporary location for St. Edward’s University’s library.)

The librarians are not sure what Mang House will be like. For so long, they have identified public services with the desk that sits near the front door of the old building. There is no space for a robust reference desk in the temporary location; instead, staff will have a smallish living room with a fireplace. For an entire year, the library will exist without a reference desk, a print collection, or dedicated computing and study spaces. “If we don’t have those things… who are we, exactly?” asks Frierson and countless others.

Millersville University

Millersville University is a regional comprehensive Pennsylvania state school with a 2010 FTE of approximately 6,970 undergrads and 583 graduate students. As a state institution, campus buildings are only eligible for renovations on a strict schedule. Originally allocated $7 million from the state for basic infrastructure updates, the library and university administrators have successfully increased that amount to $25 million based on additional state allocations, university support, and private donations.

(Millersville University Library – Under construction for two years)

This intense renovation project will take 2 years to complete, gutting the interior of the 11-story building to replace all major systems (including heating, cooling, lighting, fire protection, vapor barriers and elevators). The library had to be emptied of all people, books, microfilms, computers, shelving, and furniture, down to the last piece of signage and window shades in order to allow construction to move at a quicker pace and ensure the safety of staff, visitors, and physical materials. Over 300,000 print items have been placed in storage off-site, where, similarly to St. Edwards, the books will be inaccessible to students and faculty members.

(Millersville University – The temporary library @ Gerhart Hall)

For the next two years, the campus will rely on a temporary library in Gerhart Hall containing approximately 10,000 items and less than a quarter of the study and computing space that the old library provided. There is no traditional reference desk and most of the librarians are distributed across campus, embedded in offices within academic buildings that align with their liaison areas. Similarly to the situation at St. Edwards, this period of massive change calls into question everything an academic library has traditionally been known to provide and represent.

Renovation as a Catalyst

From a librarian’s point of view, temporarily disconnecting from the building provides an opportunity for a clean slate. Many legacy processes are tied to institutional history and specific circumstances. To put it another way, buildings come with baggage. Libraries make exceptions, create lengthy policies, even determine resources and services based on prior experiences. Concern has been voiced by librarians (particularly those new to the profession) over the “way we’ve always done it” mantra that sometimes infiltrates institutions, marking this steadfastness as resistance to change that will leave libraries irrelevant to their constituencies. Ross and Sennyey (2008) describe some library services as holdovers from an era that has disappeared, “making our professional assumptions seem as foreign as a medieval manuscript in chains” (146). Included in these assumptions are services that are tethered to user needs that no longer exist.

The situations at St. Edward’s and Millersville are unique in that the renovations are not incremental. At both institutions, the scale of construction will shut down the entire space – not just one floor at a time. There are no branch or specialized libraries to absorb collections, services, or personnel. Business simply cannot proceed as usual – the status quo has become impossible to maintain. The libraries at St. Edward’s and Millersville have an opportunity to let go of legacies in order to better meet the needs of their respective campus communities.

Warehouse for Books

One assumption under interrogation is the idea of a library as a warehouse for print books. Neither institution is a research library attempting to collect and preserve all of the world’s knowledge. Millersville has a collection development policy stating that theirs is a “teaching collection” which directly supports the university curriculum. With limited physical space and budget, items not used are transitioned out of the collection and replaced by more accessible materials relevant to institutional learning goals. The renovation at Millersville has prompted the library to increase its number of electronic books and databases in order to support campus research needs.

At St. Edwards, the massive renovation project has provided the library with an “excuse” to look holistically at the print collection. One year ago, the library owned 170,000 volumes. Through the first weeding project in the library’s long history, staff managed to reduce that number to 130,000. In the new building, space allocated for stacks can house approximately 90,000 books, meaning staff have some ways to go before boxing up the collection. Because librarians can’t guarantee that the library will hold the same number of print volumes in the future, the space needs to have a flexible infrastructure in order to be used differently.

It is possible that after two years of adjusting to primarily electronic scholarship, faculty and students may shed some of the traditional stereotypes held about libraries as warehouses for books. Although collection assessment and strategic reallocation initiatives at both St. Edward’s and Millersville were primarily designed to help students and faculty survive the lengthy renovation periods, this may in fact become the de-facto standard for content development for the foreseeable future. Preliminary findings of ebrary®’s 2011 Global Student E-book Survey  revealed that while E-book usage and awareness have not increased significantly in 2011 compared to 2008, the vast majority of students would choose electronic over print if it were available and if better tools along with fewer restrictions were offered. Reflecting global trends like this, libraries are moving towards an increase in electronic holdings and are reorganizing space within their buildings to emphasize engagement with content, not simply storage.

Rethinking Reference

In addition to addressing changes in content and collections, the renovations at St. Edwards and Millersville provide opportunities to experiment with (or without) certain longstanding library services. At Millersville, the two years without a building have been internally referred to as “a big experiment” in order to test out new ideas and determine which existing or new services are brought back into the new library.

Traditional reference is one service currently being investigated for transformation. Staff at Millersville decided not to install a reference desk inside of the temporary library in Gerhart Hall. In fact, there are no librarians located within Gerhart Hall, only staff and student employees. For just-in-case research questions, the library has developed a stand up, self-help kiosk where users can walk up to a dedicated computer and instantly chat/IM/email a librarian or pick up the phone and call. To assist, student employees working at the circulation desk are being trained on a referral system where they can lead students to the kiosk or direct them to specific subject librarian.

Staff at Millersville have expanded their suite of virtual research help options for just-in-time questions. Librarians take shifts providing assistance through phone, text, email and chat/IM (11-8 Monday through Thursday, 11-4 Fridays, and 2-8 Sundays). Another facet has been initiating at least three consistent office hours during which subject librarians will be available in their office for research consultations or appointments.

Inspired by Austin’s Coolhaus Ice Cream Truck use of Twitter to notify customers of their current location, St. Edward’s is considering heavier use of social media to inform students and faculty where reference assistance can be found. While still in the planning stages, the general idea is for librarians to check in using Foursquare or Gowalla at various campus locations with a note about how long they will be there.  This check in will automatically propagate to the library’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and show up on the website in a rolling feed of library news and updates. In this scenario, even users who do not connect with the library through social media services will still benefit from the check in.

Librarians who station themselves around campus will be equipped with a netbook or a tablet computer with a keyboard and have the ability to print to any campus printer. The hope is that fully mobile librarians with high-end technology and the ability to help wherever the student may be will begin to shape expectations of students.

Traditional reference desks are often immobile and, in some cases, emphasize the power disparity between the knowledge seeker and the knowledge holder (either purposely or inadvertently). In these situations, it may be difficult for libraries to experiment with new methods of interacting with users, either face-to-face or digitally. It is easy to fall back on what is known, what is safe. The removal of these structures for renovation purposes is described by Dorney as an “almost cathartic experience,” providing a sense of freedom to test user and librarian reaction to innovative avenues of service.

Professional Identity & Relevance

While impact of these two renovations on their respective campus communities is an area ripe for discussion, the projects have also released the internal floodgates. Both institutions are witnessing discussions relating to professional identity and the library’s relevance/value within higher education. Often, anxiety accompanies these conversations, a natural reaction for any passionate professional.

At Millersville, staff is distributed on and off campus. There are librarians in academic buildings, staff in Gerhart Hall, librarians and staff at the off-site storage facility, and student employees everywhere in between. The way library work is accomplished is changing dramatically. Employees are beginning to rely more and more on technology to assist in everyday activities. Where resistance to change may have before existed for initiatives like video conferencing or using a wiki to share documentation, individuals have been forced out of their comfort zones to grow as a high-functioning team of professionals.

In the case of St. Edward’s, questions abound about how group dynamics may change when seventeen staff members are forced to exist within a cozy, three-bedroom house for one year. Without personal offices, librarians there may have a completely different experience in terms of collaboration and it is inevitable that all interactions will reach new levels of intensity, for better or worse.

Though the St. Edward’s library website already provides a great deal of services and resources, it will become even more apparent that it is the primary means of interacting with the library.  David Lee King writes that “the library’s website IS the library,” and the absence of a robust, physical presence will solidify that perception. It is time for as much – if not more – effort to be placed on our digital assets than our physical spaces.

On Failure & Flexibility

It would not be apropos to conclude this article without mentioning the importance of flexibility and freedom to fail. Both authors have found that it is often the best laid plans that have disintegrated while spur-of-the-moment ideas have taken off like wildfire. There is no ultimate road map to ensure success.

At Millersville, for example, the old library was the tallest, most heavily-trafficked building on campus. Assuming that the next largest building for student gathering was the newly-renovated Student Memorial Center, librarians set up a “Research Blast” table in a high-visibility area. The plan was to have multiple librarians available in shifts with computers and informational handouts to help students with their research questions. Staff promoted the one-week event heavily, using Facebook, QR codes, emails, posters, word-of-mouth. Librarians wore bright green tee shirts saying “Ask me about the library” and were proactive, making eye contact and greeting students as they passed.

The librarians barely received one research question the entire week. It turned out to be a great opportunity to answer questions about the library – what’s in the temporary library, where can I go to print papers, what is the new library going to look like, when is it the project going to be done? But librarians certainly weren’t helping students locate or evaluate peer-reviewed articles, analyze sources, or brainstorm search strategies. It was a failure in one aspect and a success in another. The freedom to fail and flexibility to adapt accordingly is paramount to initiating change.

St. Edward’s has the benefit of learning from Millersville’s two-year experiment before knocking down their old building. If students are not using roaming librarians to ask research questions, then where are they asking those kinds of questions?  Studies of student research behavior suggest that faculty members, teaching assistants, the writing center, and course readings and websites are frequently sources students turn to for help (Foster & Gibbons, 2007; Head & Eisenberg, 2009). Though liaison librarians continue to inform faculty and teaching assistants about the services that will be available during construction, reaching students through course websites is another avenue worth exploring.

Currently, all Blackboard course websites at St. Edward’s University have a link labeled “Ask a Librarian,” which links students to the general reference assistance page. However, most students do not understand how librarians can help. To improve this Blackboard presence, librarians have written a short javascript widget that will link students to course or subject-specific pages designed to be an in-context landing page for library resources and services. In other words, if a student clicks on “Library Resources” from a course in the school of business, he or she will be directed to the research guide for business students, not the generic library homepage.

Exploring new options takes staff time and creative thinking; some projects will fail, but the spark of innovation provided by challenging circumstances may result in new and improved practices that last well beyond the transition period into these new buildings.

Conclusion

As economist Paul Romer once said, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste” (Rosenthal, 2009). In the cases of St. Edward’s and Millersville, the crisis of being without the library as one cohesive place provides librarians with an opportunity to initiate change. Without the baggage of the past, libraries can look holistically at the their portfolio of services, determining which to continue investing time and resources into. Others may have simply run their course, poorly designed from the outset or dated for serving a new generation of scholars.

Measuring the success of these experiments is often difficult. Due to the magnitude of change (moving from one centralized building to many distributed/embedded locations), neither St. Edward’s nor Millersville can simply compare usage statistics to the those of the old library. Because these libraries are focusing on interacting with users in new ways, measures have to be more comprehensive, taking both qualitative and quantitative aspects into account. In some cases, this will be longitudinal data. Both authors are hopeful that what is learned during these experiments outside of the library will be brought back into the new libraries in order to support the university community at a higher level, showcasing our professional growth and relevancy.

For each traditional library aspect that is re-envisioned, time and resources are made available to investigate new and innovative ways to interact with information. While keeping the history and mission of the academic library close to heart, librarians need to initiate honest, open, and difficult conversations and take immediate action towards readying academic librarianship for a new era.

In her fall 2010 convocation address to the university community, Millersville University President Francine McNairy stated: “…Indeed, the Ganser building will close, but the University library will not. You might think that the library is at the intersection of Frederick and George Streets, but it is actually at the intersection of scholarship, innovation, creativity and collaboration. And that’s the road to our future.” It is possible that upon moving back into each of these new libraries, the resources, services and spaces provided to users may look completely different. When individuals inquire about the risk of becoming irrelevant after a year or two without a building, perhaps that is the opportunity for librarians to inform their communities that the library is much more than bricks and mortar, and we are in the midst of fundamental shifts regarding our impact on students and learning.

Embarking on extensive renovations like those discussed here bring unique opportunities to initiate change within libraries, but they are not the only way to prepare for the future. The authors are issuing a call to action: How would you change your library as if you had a year without the historical baggage of a building? Take those plans and run with them – there is no reason why you have to wait for the bulldozers.

Many thanks to Melissa Gold for her feedback on this piece. Thanks also to Lead Pipers Hilary Davis, Leigh Anne Vrabel, Ellie Collier, and Emily Ford for edits, comments, and thought provoking questions.

References and Further Readings

Association of College and Research Libraries (n.d.). Value of Academic Libraries Report. Retrieved November 8, 2011, from http://www.acrl.ala.org/value/?page_id=21

booth, c. (2010). Librarians as __________: Shapeshifting at the periphery. Retrieved November 5, 2011, from http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/librarians-as-__________-shapeshifting-at-the-periphery/

ebrary® (2011). ebrary Surveys Suggest Students’ Research Needs Unmet, Results to be Presented at Charleston. Retrieved November 8, 2011, from http://www.ebrary.com/corp/newspdf/ebrary_2011_Student_Survey.pdf

Foster, N. F., & Gibbons, S. (Eds.). (2007). Studying students: The undergraduate research project at the University of Rochester. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries. Retrieved November 8, 2011, from http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/digital/Foster-Gibbons_cmpd.pdf

Frierson, E. (2011, July 8). Course-specific library links in Blackboard, Moodle, or any LMS you can name [blog post]. Retrieved November 8, 2011 from http://thirdpartylibrarian.wordpress.com/2011/07/08/librarylinksinlms/

Head, A. J., & Eisenberg, M. B. (2009). Lessons learned: How college students seek information in the digital age. Project Information Literacy First Year Report with Student Survey Findings. University of Washington Information School. Retreived November 8, 2011 from http://projectinfolit.org/publications/

Millersville University Library (n.d.). Millersville Library Renovation Information. Retrieved November 6, 2011, fromhttp://blogs.millersville.edu/newlibrary/

King, D. L. (2005, September 22). Website as destination [blog post]. Retrieved November 8, 2011 from http://www.davidleeking.com/2005/09/22/website-as-destination/

Rosenthal, J. (2009). On Language – A Terrible Thing to Waste. The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved November 8, 2011, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02FOB-onlanguage-t.html

Ross, L., & Sennyey, P. (2008). The library is dead, long live the library! The practice of academic librarianship and the digital revolution. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 34(2), 145-152.

St. Edward’s University (2011). St. Edward’s University Receives $13 Million from Pat and Bill Munday. Retrieved November 5, 2011, from http://think.stedwards.edu/marketing/blog/post/st-edward%E2%80%99s-university-receives-13-million-pat-and-bill-munday

Photo by Marion Siegel (we think)

Introduction

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

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

Occupy the Research and Practice Divide

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Eric

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

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

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

Occupy yourself.

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

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

Own Your Power

You are far more powerful than you think you are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Become a Rhetorical Ninja

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

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

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

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

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

Pick Your Battles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Leigh Anne

Occupy “Make-Do”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(insert slogan here)

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

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

-Kim

Occupy the Faculty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Brett

Occupy In the Library with the Lead Pipe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Emily

Thanks to Flickr user marfis75 for use of this image.

The Authors Guild won’t give up. Their settlement agreement with Google Books was rejected by Judge Chin on March 22nd and will now be going to trial. But that’s not enough for the Authors Guild. The organization seems bound and determined for copyright legislation to occur, and for that legislation to change copyright law to be much more conservative and restrictive for libraries. In concert with their Australian and Quebecois counterparts – the Australian Society of Authors and the Québec Union of Writers – the Authors Guild has filed a legal complaint against HathiTrust, an organization of partner libraries that is collaboratively sharing and archiving millions of digitized works.

The filed complaint cites HathiTrust as making the “largest copyright infringements in history” (Rosenthal, E. H. & Goldman, J. S., 2011).   Furthermore, the complaint argues: “Rather than heeding the Court’s words, and allowing Congress, acting in the interest of all communities, to determine the requirements and safeguards that will govern the use of digital libraries and orphan works, Defendants have instead proceeded on their own authority, ignoring the interests of copyright holders” (Rosenthal, E. H. & Goldman, J. S., 2011). It further claims that HathiTrust has exploited works by surpassing the rights allowed of them in Sections 107 and 108 of copyright law– Fair Use and preservation, respectively.

James Grimmelmann offers a nice, succinct explanation of the claims on his blog.

“The complaint alleges that the universities and HathiTrust are violating copyright owners’ rights by scanning, duplicating, and distributing their books. It doesn’t ask for damages, but it does request a declaration that what the defendants are doing violates the law. It also seeks an injunction to stop them from further scanning or displaying the books, and to “impound” the digital copies — i.e. have them held in escrow where the defendants can’t get at them.” (Grimmelmann, 2011)⁠

Essentially, the Authors Guild complaint is bringing to the fore the very aspects of copyright law that permit libraries to perform their day to day functions.

I cannot claim to fully understand the nuances of copyright law, nor can I suppose that I understand everything about this case (I am not a lawyer).What I can claim to know is that events such as this shake up our profession and challenge how we think about the work we do in libraries everyday. It renders to the forefront of our minds questions such as: How we will be able to provide unfettered access to information that has yet to be created? Will legal issues halt our work and at what cost to our patrons? At what cost to society as a whole?

In light of this case and in the current copyright climate– which seems rife with tension between creators, content providers and libraries– the library community needs to be thoughtful about how to grow into an unknown copyright future.

Before I continue I’ll provide some brief background regarding the parties involved in the case.

The Parties

HathiTrust & Universities

HathiTrust was born out of libraries’ collaboration with Google to digitize books. Those libraries who loaned Google books received digital scan and metadata files from Google. Some of the libraries working with Google had an agreement with the company that they could create a digital archive accessible to their communities. From this, HathiTrust was created.

Begun and spearheaded by University of Michigan Libraries, HathiTrust began with member libraries coming from Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) institutions, University of California, and the University of Virginia. Since its inception in 2008,  HathiTrust has grown to include over 50 library members. Member libraries can contribute content to the digital library.  Some collection highlights of HathiTrust  include a collection of 19th century Cookbooks and Hebrew and Yiddish Public Domain book titles held by Stanford University. Moreover HathiTrust has recently come to agreements with discovery service vendors EBSCO, Serials Solutions, and OCLC to make full-text searching a part of these respective discovery service tools.

Works contained in the HathiTrust Digital Library include orphan works, those in the public domain, and works still under copyright protection. HathiTrust has measures in place for users from different institutions to authenticate and have permissions to view in copyright titles. Guests or users from institutions that do not own a physical copy of a copyright protected title, do not have permission to view full text of those works.

HathiTrust had scheduled to make several hundred orphan works available to users on October 13th. University of Michigan Library has postponed their release of orphan works (which were to only be available to users whose home libraries own the physical item) due to flaws in their system of determining what works are orphans. For example:

“In a post on its blog this week, Authors Guild representatives noted that author J.R. Salamanca’s 1958 novel The Lost Country was on the list. Librarians did not elaborate on how the book made the orphan list. A record search shows that the book was copyrighted in October, 1958, and was renewed in December 1986—seemingly a month late to keep the book’s 28-year copyright from lapsing. But, in one of many quirks in the complex copyright laws, books copyrighted between 1950 and 1963 have more time to renew, until December 31of the 28th year. The book has been long out of print.” (Albanese, 2011)

There have been other cases on the list of orphan works for which individuals were able to readily find copyright holders. One would surmise, however, that should HathiTrust be notified that a copyrighted work had been made public, HathiTrust would have processes in place to disable public access to that content. (HathiTrust does have a take-down policy.)

In addition to naming HathiTrust as a defendant in the case, the lawsuit names five universities. They are: University of Michigan, University of California, University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University. Grimmelmann points out in his blog post that “All of the named universities except for Indiana have announced their plans to participate in HathiTrust’s Orphan Works Project. The other members of HathiTrust, including Universities that are participating in the Project (e.g. Johns Hopkins and Florida) but are not Google Books Library Partners, are not named as defendants” (Grimmelmann, 2011)⁠.

The Authors Guild

The Authors Guild is an organization of writers whose mission is to provide copyright advocacy work on behalf of its members. In addition to suing Google for the Google Books Search, it has been a party in lawsuits against Dialog, Gale, and others.

Current Authors Guild President Scott Turow is featured as a library advocate on a poster produced and sold by ALA. Moreover, his editorial of February 15th this year decries budgets cuts to libraries. It is ironic that he is such an avid library supporter, and yet his organization is asking for HathiTrust to cease its operations.

In a letter to Authors Guild members, Turow addresses the guild’s stance on copyright. His language borders on hysterical.

“The Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “safe harbor” for online service providers has turned out to be an exploitable gold mine for unscrupulous online enterprises. That safe harbor allows these rogue enterprises to profit from services that encourage and conceal the trafficking in stolen books, music and movies, while disclaiming responsibility for that illegal traffic. The DMCA safe harbor has turned copyright’s incentives inside out, encouraging massive, global investment in piracy technologies and services.” (Turow, 2011)

What Turow seems to be implying is that, in addition to allowing easier copyright infringement, the HathiTrust system is encouraging online providers to take advantage and to make a profit, and then claim that they are not responsible.

Although in his letter he cites libraries as positive examples of how copyright can function. “Our great research libraries, holding the carefully crafted thoughts, composed over billions of hours by many of our nation’s finest minds, are ample proof that copyright has succeeded brilliantly” (Turow, 2011).  Although Turow is a self-professed library advocate, he does not seem to understand that, in practice, libraries and librarians make all attempts to respect and protect copyright. The lawsuit against HathiTrust appears to lump libraries into this category that Turow repeatedly refers to as “pirates.”

HathiTrust already has measures in place to protect copyrighted works via authentication. In general, libraries and librarians work hard to respect copyright law. Usually authors and libraries are on the same side, wanting to ensure access to works, but also respecting copyright law. So where is the breakdown between the two?

The Authors

In addition to the Authors Guild and other author associations, eight individual authors are named plaintiffs in the lawsuit against HathiTrust. They are: Pat Cummings, a children’s book author; novelists Angelo Loukakis, Roxana Robinson, Danièle Simpson, and Fay Weldon; André Roy, a poet; James Shapiro, Columbia University professor and scholar; and  biographer T.J. Stiles.” Each of these authors except for Fay Weldon, are executive board members or are governmental representatives in their respective organizations. But there are two of these authors whose other associations are compelling to me when thinking about this particular lawsuit.

James Shapiro

James Shapiro is a professor at Columbia who is a prominent scholar on Shakespeare. He is a member of the Authors Guild Board of Directors and he is the only academic author named in the case. Columbia is also home to Dr. Kenneth Crews, Columbia’s Copyright Advisory Office Director, and the Columbia University Library, which is a HathiTrust member.

Columbia University Libraries were one of the first institutions to join the HathiTrust (aside from founding institutions University of California and CIC institutions) in 2009. Columbia’s Copyright Advisory Office’s “central function is to address in an innovative, creative, and pragmatic manner the relationship between copyright law and the work of the university community” (Columbia University Copyright Advisory Office, 2011). Shapiro has one work cited in this suit, Oberammergau. In fact, the imprint of the book as seen in Google Books, shows him as copyright holder.

The relationship between copyright law and university professionals is a complicated matter. Many institutions have policies that indicate the university is sole copyright holder for many works created under the auspices of teaching and university related work. This is called “work for hire.” For other works, such as scholarly writing and contributions, most universities consider authors the copyright holders of those works. Columbia is not an exception. “By longstanding custom, faculty members hold copyright for books, monographs, articles, and similar works as delineated in the policy statement, whether distributed in print or electronically. This pattern will not change. This copyright policy retains and reasserts those rights” (Columbia University, 2000).

It will be interesting to see how this tension between one of Columbia’s prized faculty members and a HathiTrust member institution plays out. Has Shapiro put himself at odds with his academic community via his ties to the Authors Guild and this lawsuit?

This situation at Columbia is a great opportunity for library outreach to authors, and to provide copyright education programming. It would be interesting to hear a panel debate regarding academic authors’ understanding of copyright, their views on the HathiTrust lawsuit and the book publishing industry. Since Shapiro is a named author in the case, he is surely not able to engage in programming in this way. At the same time, other faculty may be open to participating and engaging, in consort with the library, the Scholarly Communication Program and the Copyright Advisory Office.

Other libraries may want to seize this opportunity to engage with academic authors and their communities. Hosting a public debate between an academic author who sides with the Authors Guild and one who does not, might be of interest to a community.

Angelo Loukakis

Angelo Loukakis is the Executive Director of the Australian Society of Authors, another of the plaintiffs in the suit. Loukakis is also represented by HarperCollins Publishers in Australia. Yes, the same HarperCollins that has instituted a 26 loan cap on ebook licenses. While Loukakis probably has nothing to do with his publisher’s restriction of ebooks, I am speculating that in the publishing realm, the publishers’ and now the authors’ attitudes subscribe to the rhetoric of  pirates and piracy, as we saw in Turow’s letter.

Bullying?

I can’t help it but this whole thing is making me think of the It Gets Better campaign. The big dogs are bullying the little guys, and the little guys are just trying to be who they are and do what they do.
I usually cheer on authors and other creators who actively pursue protecting their copyrights. It’s how we librarians work with academic authors, advising them to keep their copyrights when publishing in academic journals and negotiating with publishers for more favorable license agreements. (Favorable license agreements allow authors to keep their copyrights, instead of transferring all copyrights to a publisher.) It’s what libraries do when they take on the publishing role as academic journal publishers or repository managers. A good example of this is Pacific University, where several open access journals are hosted on the library’s repository infrastructure. It is in these ways that libraries work with authors to show respect for and assist in copyright issues. One of the main differences that I see between this kind of work and the lawsuit, however, is the distinct lack of academic or scholarly authors represented by the Authors Guild.

Here’s an example from outside the library world that makes me cheer on the creator. Bijijoo (not everything on this site is safe for work), an artist and a friend of mine, is pursuing NBC for their repeated infringement of his copyrights. Bijijoo is not in consort with a guild or an interest group. He is a humble artist attempting to pursue his rights. He just wants the recognition, and as his first letter states, he just wants to give Tina Fey a painting that depicts her holding a ham. Oh, and he wants NBC to acknowledge their copyright infringement. Bijijoo is a little dog who’s not afraid to stand up to the pack.

In the HathiTrust case, the Authors Guild is coming across as as a bully. An organization that represents authors’ monetary interests and an almost hysterical fear of piracy, is going after university libraries. To me this smells of a case of the big dogs going after the runts.

This case is exemplary of a mindset regarding copyright that is becoming more widespread. Publishers like HarperCollins have locked down ebooks; Amazon hasn’t yet published their ebooks in epub format (Perlow, 2010); orchestras can’t perform Shostakovich; and groups like the Authors Guild, the American Association of Publishers, and numerous others point to a fearful climate surrounding copyright. To this end, I wonder to what extent the Authors Guild (or any other representative organization) actually supports individual authors’ interests. Siva Vaidhyananathan commented on Grimmelmann’s post:
“James, Thanks for this. But please don’t call the Authors’ Guild “the authors.” We authors have never and will never be represented by the Authors’ Guild. Siva”

It is unclear whether the Authors Guild as an organization, considers itself a big dog. Certainly, as the preceding quote by Vaidhyananathan indicates, authors alone do not. As with any large membership organization, the Authors Guild operates under the guidance of a board, executive director, and legal counsel. Certainly within our own profession, our organizations have taken action or made statements with which we, as individuals, disagree. The question remains, to what extent does the Authors Guild represent members’ interests? Have they gone too far and will there be a movement from membership to leave the organization?

What actually happens in the HathiTrust Digital Library?

I wanted to see exactly what happened when a user of the HathiTrust Digital Library looked at a record for a copyrighted book. I used an example by Pat Cummings (one of the plaintiffs and the Author Guild’s Secretary).

Search Results for Pat Cummings Books in HathiTrust

Record View of C.L.O.U.D.S. in HathiTrust by Pat Cummings

Text Search of C.L.O.U.D.S. by Pat Cummings in HathiTrust

As you can see from the screenshot above, a search of the text of C.L.O.U.D.S. does not show snippets of the book. See the snapshot from Google as a comparison.

C.L.O.U.D.S. in Google Books

Another example of HathiTrust content is that of something in the public domain. Just this week I helped a patron find a digital copy for The Seven Golden Odes of Pagan Arabia in HathiTrust Digital Library. The patron wanted to download and print the book, but we discovered that we did not have sufficient rights to download the entire digital copy, although we could view the entire text.

These restrictions mirror what happens in physical libraries and with their borrowing policies. A patron unaffiliated with my institution is welcome to read through a book in the library building, but unless she pays to become a public patron of the library, she may not borrow materials.

Some Discrepancies

Several of those who have already written about this new lawsuit, have pointed to a discrepancy in what the Authors Guild sees as the purpose of copyright law. In her editorial Francine Fialkoff points to this discrepancy. “It’s also a subversion of copyright law, which protects library fair use. Despite the extensions of copyright protection over the past couple of decades, copyright was never meant to protect authors or inventors indefinitely. Instead, as Fister reminds us, it aims to promote the public good, “the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” “What is more troubling to me,” she says, “is…that copyright is being read as a one-sided right: for authors…as a moral right, not as a balance of interests recognized by law”” (Fialkoff, 2011).

Part of what is so frustrating about this lawsuit is that libraries and library collaboratives would not exist without the creative works produced by authors, musicians, and other creators. And likewise, many authors advocate for libraries.  Just look at the Authors for Libraries partnership via ALA.   Librarians and the Authors Guild agree that copyright law does not address the multitude of uses or technologies prevalent in our societies. Take, for example, the now classic ebook problem. A library purchases an ebook, but it has a limited number of loans. Similarly, print books are loaned until they become too damaged by dog teeth, coffee spills, loss, or disasters. While physical books are by no means permanent, their tangible nature instill in us a comfort of the illusion of perpetuity. So, is buying an ebook and loaning it to patrons until irreparably damaged or lost (not via DRM, mind you) a violation of copyright law?

Copyright law is, by its nature, subject to multiple and layered interpretations. The minute we legislate and create more distinct copyright rules, libraries will potentially be more restricted in how they are able to provide their services. Does the Authors Guild really want to restrict libraries’ ability to provide good service and access to authors’ works? Do authors want to engage their readers and create rich intellectual experiences? When will the bullying stop?

The phrasing used by Turow in his letter to members represents fears driven by money. It points to the effect of digital content on the market and authors’ purported monetary losses.

“One is tempted to call it a vast underground economy, but there’s nothing underground about it: It operates in plain sight, as I will describe. Money suffuses the system, paying for countless servers, vast amounts of online bandwidth, and specialized services that speed and cloak the transmission of stolen creative work. Excluded from this flow of cash are the authors, musicians, songwriters and the publishers who invest in them.” (Turow, 2011)⁠

Turow’s letter concentrates on the evils of file sharing and the networked nature of information in a global age. In light of the HathiTrust lawsuit, is the Authors Guild equating the libraries with BitTorrent?

So what are we to do?

Because of the nature of their work, libraries are those institutions that push copyright to its limit. The HathiTrust lawsuit presents us with the opportunity to re-examine copyright in our daily work lives. What DO you know about copyright? What is your institution’s policy? Are you making use of Fair Use? Individual librarians may feel ill-prepared to answer these questions, so it’s a perfect time to seek out your local Scholarly Communication Librarian and Access Services Librarian to refresh our memories.
Last year a copyright slider showed up in my inbox and every other librarian where I work received one as well. This seems to be an affordable way to show your employees that you expect them to be able to practice their craft.

Now is a good time for library schools to respond to libraries and the current copyright climate. Library school students who learn about copyright law as applicable in library work, will be better prepared to address issues facing them in their professional lives. I’d be willing to bet that no ALA accredited library school requires students to learn and show proficiency in understanding copyright in libraries. Our profession would be better off if they were.

When I was a student I took a  1.5 credit workshop on copyright– and it was a small class. You may not be passionate about understanding copyright, just like some are not passionate about cataloging, but anyone who wants to work in a library who claims to not want to know about copyright will be ill-prepared for her career in libraries. It’s like wanting to work in a library because you don’t want to work with computers and you want to work with books instead. Understanding and teaching about copyright is part of what we do, and, on the whole, we do it poorly. Usually there’s only one or two people in a library who feel comfortable answering questions in regards to copyright. In academic libraries those who work with course reserves usually know, but does anyone else? Sometimes the extent of copyright education in libraries is the sign by the photocopier asking patrons to respect copyright. Guess what? Our patrons probably don’t even know what that really means. Should we not be empowered to teach them?

The Library Copyright Alliance has stated that “The case has no merit, and completely disregards the rights of libraries and their users under the law, especially fair use” (Band, 2011). This will be a long legal procedure, especially if the Google Book Search suit is any indication. But that probably doesn’t ease the feeling of vulnerability and helplessness that you may be feeling in response to this suit. What if my library gets sued? What if it doesn’t? What if, ultimately, HathiTrust prevails and large scale digitization projects become ubiquitous?

We need to continue our good work with passion and vigor. We can continue to use Fair Use to its full extent to provide access to materials to our library patrons. We can continue to make copies of copyrighted works for preservation purposes. We can continue to improve our patrons’ access to works online.

I am certain that the current copyright climate and the tension between authors, publishers, and libraries will change. I remain optimistic that the original intent of copyright, the public good, will prevail.

Many thanks to Jill Emery for her thoughtful questions. Thanks also to Lead Pipers Hilary Davis, Leigh Anne Vrabel, and Eric Frierson for edits, comments, and thought provoking questions. And thanks to Jake Shivery, who, despite not understanding librarian-ese, provided final copy edits.

References and Further Readings

Two Years Ago by Leah the Librarian / CC-BY-NC

For new library school gradates, or for more seasoned librarians ready for a change, entering the job market can be an intimidating, frustrating experience. We hear that there are no jobs available, and that the few libraries that do advertise new openings are inundated with applications.

Perhaps less publicly, we also hear administrators express concerns about a lack of good candidates for important positions, and we notice some jobs being advertised for months or being re-posted, sometimes more than once. We notice ALA’s estimate of over 122,000 libraries in the United States, as well as its estimate that academic, public, and school libraries employ over 150,000 librarians (ALA does not estimate the number of librarians who work for special libraries, vendors, or other employers). It may also be worth noting that, although U.S. unemployment as a whole remains relatively high, employment rates appear to be stratified by education level: in 2010, the average unemployment rate among people with Master’s degrees was 4%.

Because we do not yet have access to reliable, real-time data, we are left with imperfect, occasionally confusing information. No one knows the actual employment rate among librarians or how satisfied librarians are with their jobs. Nor do we know how satisfied administrators are with the librarians they employ or the applicant pools for positions they hope to fill.

By looking at the past and the near future, and by studying the process of conferring Master’s degrees on prospective librarians, we can begin to think about strategies for ensuring that we, both individually and as a profession, are taking an efficient approach to matching libraries’ needs with the supply of library workers.

Should library schools admit fewer students? Is the admissions process sufficiently selective? Are library school curricula and graduation requirements too similar or too distinct? Are they providing their students with the skills they need in order to get hired and do useful work? Should there be licensing exams for librarians? What data would we need to collect in order to come up with useful answers to these questions?

I hope this essay makes a contribution to that discussion. My original idea for it was to build on existing analyses of ALA-accredited library programs, adding my own observations based, in part, on my status as a somewhat recent library school graduate (Drexel University, September 2007), first-time adjunct professor (I taught a course at Drexel’s library school this past summer), and potential faculty member (I am a Ph.D. student at Rutgers University’s library school).

That will have to wait for the second part of this essay. Before discussing how library schools might better serve public interests and their students’ needs, we need to make sure we have reliable data about current library programs. The rest of part one is devoted to the story of that data.

The Librarian Job Market: Projections

According to the latest data (2008) from the Department of Labor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were 159,900 librarians and in 2018 there will be 172,400, a projected growth rate of 7.8% (between 7% and 13% is considered average). The anticipated number of job openings due to growth and replacement needs is 54,500, with 12,500 openings attributable to new jobs being created and 42,000 due to attrition.¹

We have been hearing about the graying of the profession for a long time, a factor that will contribute significantly to roughly one quarter of all current librarians leaving the profession by 2018. Who will be hired to fill those positions? What qualifications will they be expected to possess?

Right now, 84% of librarian jobs require a Master’s degree, 13% require a Bachelor’s, and 2% an Associate’s, and new job postings appear to indicate an increasing expectation that applicants will have earned a graduate degree in a library-related field. According to Nazi Torabi’s review of research by Robert K. Reeves and Trudi Bellardo Hahn, most current employers are requiring an MLS or MLIS, though even a Master’s degree is not sufficient. In addition, writes Torabi, “experience, either through internships, co-op programs, or part-time or full-time employment, is essential for new graduates seeking employment.”

As mentioned above, the BLS expects employers to need 54,500 new librarians in the ten years spanning 2008 to 2018. We can represent that need as requiring 5,450 new Master’s-level graduates per year (54,500 divided by 10).

If library schools were to continue conferring 5,478 degrees per academic year, which is the average number of MLS and MLIS degrees they awarded from 1997-98 through 2006-07, there would be roughly as many new librarians as new jobs for librarians.² Based on the years the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) makes available for comparison, 5,478 Master’s-level library degrees per year would be near the midpoint given library schools’ relatively recent history:

• 1970-71: 7,001
• 1975-76: 8,037
• 1980-81: 4,859
• 1985-86: 3,564

One concern, at least for recent and future library school students, is that library schools have already begun conferring more Master’s-level degrees. The number of degrees conferred increased every year between 1999-2000 and 2007-08. In addition, in the two academic years following the ten years included in the average above (1997-98 through 2006-07), Master’s-level graduates from library schools numbered 7,162 (2007-08) and 7,091 (2008-09). That not only makes the job market especially competitive for recent graduates, it also means, if the number 54,500 was correct, that library schools should aim to graduate roughly 40,320 for the eight years remaining in the BLS ten-year projection, an average of 5,040 for the academic years 2009-10 through 2016-17.

There are several problems with the information presented so far in this essay. Before continuing, it seems worth discussing three primary issues.

1. Unlike medical schools, which faced pressure not to produce an oversupply of physicians, there appears to be no pressure on library schools to graduate only as many librarians as will be needed to fill vacancies

As with the job market as a whole, a limited level of unemployment among degreed librarians increases employers’ ability to hire selectively among the most qualified candidates while simultaneously decreasing salaries. When they produce more librarians than are needed, library schools make libraries happy by vetting, and providing initial training for, a more highly skilled, cheaper work force.

The key for library schools is to avoid granting so many degrees that the entry-level market for librarians becomes significantly more competitive than comparable job markets. If a disproportionate number of potential applicants perceive librarianship as offering worse prospects than comparable alternatives, then it becomes increasingly likely that the overall number of library school applicants will decrease and that library schools will have to compete with each other more aggressively for the most highly qualified applicants.

Although library school students are already graduating into a difficult job market, it seems at this point to be no worse than the job market facing law school graduates. While the salary potential for the most highly qualified new librarians is nowhere close to the salary potential for the most highly qualified new lawyers, the risk is nowhere near as great in terms of the amount of debt encumbered by the average student or the time commitment required to complete school. On a risk-adjusted basis, it is entirely possible that library school is a safer decision.

2. Economic projections are notoriously difficult

Projecting what will happen tomorrow is incredibly difficult, let alone what will happen next year or over the next decade. But selecting 2008 as the initial year for a projection may have been especially inauspicious given what happened that year: a decline in U.S. gross domestic product, along with the start of an unemployment spike and a stock market crash. Projections are worthwhile in that they help to provide some direction, and there is no reason to believe the Department of Labor projections were based on anything but the best available information. But, as librarians well know, sometimes the best available information will only get you so far.

3. Figuring out how many people graduate each year from an American Library Association-accredited program with a Master’s degree in a library-related field is surprisingly difficult

I thought this would be the easy part of this essay. With the help of a Presidential Task Force on Library Education, ALA’s Committee on Accreditation updated its Standards for Accreditation of Master’s Programs in Library and Information Studies in 2008 and released a statement of Core Competencies in Librarianship in 2009; it also released a revised second edition of its Accreditation Process, Policies, and Procedures in 2011. As is demonstrated in a Library Journal article by Norman Oder on the Presidential Task Force on Library Education and in the Committee on Accreditation’s own Standards Review blog, many within the information professions take the accreditation process seriously, and there can be significant debates surrounding accreditation policy.

ALA’s Office of Accreditation helps to vet applicants for the External Review Panelist pool, and also supports the accreditation process by maintaining a directory of currently accredited programs, as well as a list of all programs accredited since 1925. However, no one at ALA officially knows how many students graduate each year from the programs it accredits. When I asked for this information, I was directed to ALISE, the Association for Library and Information Science Education, which produces an annual Statistical Report.

The ALISE reports, which are compiled from questionnaires submitted annually by each accredited program, provide a great deal of data and analysis. However, I discovered a few problems when I tried to make use of ALISE data for this project:

1. It is proprietary and accessible only to ALISE members. Though the University of North Carolina provides public access to the Statistical Reports for 1997-2004, several of ALISE’s more recent reports are inaccessible to me, despite my connections to Rutgers and Drexel. Fair use seems sufficient for me to share the data I most care about—the number of graduates from each of the accredited library programs for each of the past ten years—but there is no reason to assume most readers would be able to verify any claims I make about the data.
2. It appears to be inaccurate. The individual number of graduates for each accredited program, when summed, does not equal the number given as the overall total for reports covering the 1999-2000 (off by 8), 2000-2001 (off by 13), 2001-2002 (off by 19), or 2002-2003 academic years (off by 9).
3. It is incomplete. The 2007 report, covering the 2005-2006 academic year, is unedited and unreleased, while the data for the 2008 report has not yet been compiled from that year’s questionnaires. The ALISE web page for its Statistical Reports lists both as being “for future release.”
4. It does not match the data the schools reported to the National Center for Education Statistics. Moreover, in some years it is higher and other years it is lower, so it does not seem to be differing in a predictable way (such as NCES including data from non-accredited programs).

• 1999-2000: 4,877 (ALISE “total”) or 4,885 (ALISE sum) vs. 4,577 (NCES)
• 2000-2001: 4,953 (ALISE “total”) or 4,940 (ALISE sum) vs. 4,727 (NCES)
• 2001-2002: 4,923 (ALISE “total”) or 4,904 (ALISE sum) vs. 5,113 (NCES)
• 2002-2003: 5,175 (ALISE “total”) or 5,184 (ALISE sum) vs. 5,295 (NCES)

IPEDS Data: Annual number of graduates from each ALA-accredited program, 2000-01 through 2009-10

For these reasons, it does not currently make sense to use ALISE data as the basis for answering questions about the relationship between library schools and the library job market. Fortunately, an alternative to the ALISE data is available through the NCES Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) Data Center.³ IPEDS uses Classification of Instruction Programs (CIP) codes, which for the most part are extraordinarily useful in figuring out how many people graduated from each of the ALA-accredited library programs in each of the last several years. The last three CIP code revisions—1990, 2000, and 2010—have the same code number for Library Science, 25.

Among accredited programs, all report graduates for the Library Science classification except the University at Albany-SUNY, the University of Michigan, the University of Missouri, and the University of Puerto Rico. I have written to each of these schools and included their information in the following table.

Some Observations About the Data

My goal for this essay was not to engage in detailed statistical analysis. Rather, I wanted to verify that useful data is available for free from a readily accessible source, a necessary step before progressing to part two of this essay. However, before discussing part two, it seems useful to make a few observations about the data and ask a few questions that may eventually lead to useful information.

• If you rank the largest classes for each school by size, the top ten graduating classes between 2000-01 and 2009-10 are:
  1. 465 (San Jose State University, 2009-10)
  2. 456 (San Jose State University, 2006-07)
  3. 448 (San Jose State University, 2007-08)
  4. 437 (San Jose State University, 2008-09)
  5. 359 (University of North Texas, 2006-07)
  6. 356 (University of North Texas, 2009-10)
  7. 338 (San Jose State University, 2005-06)
  8. 315 (University of North Texas, 2008-09)
  9. (tie) 308 (San Jose State University, 2004-05)
  10. (tie) 308 (University of North Texas, 2007-08)

  All ten classes appear to be primarily attributable to two administrators. Ken Haycock was director of the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University from 2005 until 2010, and Herman L. Totten has been dean of the University of North Texas School of Library and Information Science since 2005.

  This raises two questions: Is it a good thing for the profession for administrators to be able to position their schools as outliers in the production of ALA-accredited Master’s degree recipients? And if it is not, are there remedies that would avoid creating even greater issues than the problem they would be intended to address?

• It may be interesting to see if the number of graduates from a program relates to its perceived quality, a measure readily available through U.S. News:
  

  U.S. News ranked 50 master’s degree programs in the United States that are accredited by the American Library Association. The rankings are based solely on the results of a fall 2008 survey sent to the dean of each program, the program director, and a senior faculty member in each program.

  The questionnaires asked individuals to rate the academic quality of programs at each institution as outstanding (5), strong (4), good (3), adequate (2), or marginal (1). Individuals who were unfamiliar with a particular school’s programs were asked to select “don’t know.” Scores for each school were totaled and divided by the number of respondents who rated that school.

• Does the recent increase in the number of library school graduates seem to correlate more closely with endogenous factors, such as the iSchool movement or the increasing emphasis on online education, or with exogenous factors, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics study or broad economic trends?

Looking ahead to part two

The significant variation in the number of students in accredited library programs, along with the rapid increase in the number of students who receive their library training without ever meeting one of their professors in person, harks back to library education at this point in the last century. Melvil Dewey’s personal influence began to wane after the first few years of the 20th century and Andrew Carnegie was already very actively funding libraries, leaving something of a void in library education just as demand was increasing. There were few training programs we would think of today as library schools, so many of the people hired to work as librarians received their education through correspondence-based programs.

In 1919, the Carnegie Corporation hired Charles C. Williamson to assess library education and make recommendations for how it might best support libraries and their users. In 1923, he published what is generally known as the Williamson Report, though its official title is Training For Library Service A Report Prepared For The Carnegie Corporation Of New York.⁴ Williamson’s findings and suggestions led to the Carnegie Corporation funding the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago, which conferred the first Ph.D. in Library Science, and played a pivotal role in establishing the standards for library education that arguably remain in place today.⁵  As noted above, ALA began accrediting library schools in 1925.

Working together, ALA and the Carnegie Corporation were increasing demand through advocacy for libraries—specifically, by funding new libraries—and also through advocacy for librarians by investing in their educational resources: new schools: dedicated, better trained faculty; modern textbooks; and updated, evidence-based curricula. Meanwhile, they were decreasing supply by adding de facto regulation in the form of library school accreditation, a limitation on supply that continues today. From the Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010-11 Edition entry for librarians:

A master’s degree in library science (MLS) is necessary for librarian positions in most public, academic, and special libraries. School librarians may not need an MLS but must meet State teaching license requirements…. States generally have certification requirements for librarians in public schools and local libraries, though there are wide variations among States. School librarians in 20 States need a master’s degree, either an MLS or a master’s in education with a specialization in library media. In addition, over half of all States require that school librarians hold teacher certifications, although not all require teaching experience. Some States may also require librarians to pass a comprehensive assessment. Most States also have developed certification standards for local public libraries, although in some States these guidelines are voluntary.

These are not the only conditions minimizing competition and protecting working librarians from termination. Librarians may also belong to a union, earn tenure (or quasi-tenure), or hold Civil Service commissioned positions. While occupational licensing among librarians is not as organized as it is in fields like medicine or law or the financial industry, it may be worth investigating if librarianship could benefit from more licensing or less, and, if any licensing at all is beneficial (either to the public, to librarians, or both), how it might best be organized.⁶

Finally, it seems worth investigating who is educating librarians and how the educators have themselves been taught. Library science is part humanities, part social science, and, at times in the past, and perhaps in the near future as well, part information science, and even computer science. Figuring out how these tensions might be balanced has everything to do not only with producing an appropriate supply of new librarians, but also ensuring these new librarians have the requisite skills to meet the demands of the marketplace.

Thanks to Nicole Cooke, and to my Lead Pipe colleagues, Emily Ford and Leigh Anne Vrabel, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. And thanks to Emily for helping me with the final draft as well.

1. To find this data on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, go to Selected Occupational Projections Data: Search by Occupation, enter Librarians as the keyword and choose “Job openings due to growth and replacement needs, 2008-2018” as the variable.
2. These figures are derived from data found in the National Center of Education Statistics Digest of Education Statistics for 2010 and for 2009, “Master’s degrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, by field of study: Selected years.” For 2010, the source data is found in Table 283, and for 2009, it is in Table 272.
3. From the IPEDS Data Center home page:
   • Select Compare Individual Institutions.
   • On the resulting page, select Publicly Released Data, then select Continue.
   • The field labeled Institution Name on the next page also accepts either individual UnitIDs for schools or a comma separated list of UnitIDs. Download this list of UnitIDs for all schools that had ALA-accredited programs between 2001 and 2010, enter its values into the Institution Name field, and chose Select. If you choose, review the list for accuracy against the earlier linked current directory and historical list of ALA-accredited programs, then choose either Check All or check the box next to individual institutions and select Continue.
   • You will be presented with a list labeled My Institutions. Select Continue.
   • On the resulting page, select the plus sign next to Completions to see a list of variables, and under it select the plus sign next to Awards/degrees conferred by program (2000 CIP classification), award level, race/ethnicity, and gender – includes new race/ethnicity and award level categories, and under it select the plus sign next to Gender – 2002-03 to 2008-09. For Step 1, select the check box next to any or all years between 2002-2003 and 2008-2009. For Step 2, select both First Major and Second Major and choose Save; select Library science (option 25) under CIP Code – 2000 Classification and choose Save; and choose Master’s degree under Award Level code and choose Save. For Step 3, choose Grand total. Then choose Continue near the top of the screen.
   • You will be presented with a list labeled My Variables. Select Continue.
   • Decide if you want Institution name only or if you also want the UnitID (I recommend the former), if you want short or long variable names (I recommend the former), if you want to view your report on screen or download it (I recommend the former first, followed by the latter), and if you want imputation and status flags. There is also an option to include a name for the table. Select Continue.
   • Adjust accordingly. Data earlier than 2002-2003 is available, but uses 1990 Classifications for its CIP code and is listed under a different variable. There is also early release data available for 2009-2010, but it requires a free login, which can be obtained by contacting IPEDS through its help desk.

4. See also:
   • Vann, S. K. (1971). The Williamson reports: A study. Metuchen, N.J: Scarecrow Press.
   • Williamson, C. C. (1971). The Williamson reports of 1921 and 1923: Including Training for library work (1921) and Training for library service (1923). Metuchen, N.J: Scarecrow Press.

5. Richardson, J. V. (1982). The spirit of inquiry: The Graduate Library School at Chicago, 1921-51. Chicago: American Library Association.
6. See:
   • Kleiner, Morris M. (2006). Licensing occupations: Ensuring quality or restricting competition? Kalamazoo, Mich: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
   • Kleiner, Morris M. and Krueger, Alan B. 2010 “The Prevalence and Effects of Occupational Licensing.” British Journal of Industrial Relations. 48(4), 676–687.
   • Kleiner, Morris M. 2011. “Occupational Licensing: Protecting the Public Interest or Protectionism?” Policy Paper No. 2011-009. Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
   • Winston, C., Crandall, R. W., & Maheshri, V. (2011). First thing we do, let’s deregulate all the lawyers. Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press.

Thanks to Flickr User Billingham for use of this image.

In the Library with the Lead Pipe

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

Kim Leeder (by Lead Pipe proxy)

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

Emily Ford

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

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

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

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

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

Ellie Collier

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

Hilary Davis

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

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

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

Brett Bonfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leigh Anne Vrabel

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

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

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

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

Eric Frierson

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

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

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

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

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