In the Library with the Lead Pipe welcomes guest poster Micah Vandegrift. Micah is a graduate student in Library and Information Studies at Florida State University. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is interning at the Brooklyn Public Library. Micah’s education has focused on 20th century American culture, digital media and the humanities and he hopes to work in an art library, museum or academic library in the near future (he’s also on the market, so contact him directly if interested!). He loves hanging out on the internet and can be found tweeting, blogging and chattering about web tech trends, libraries and music pretty regularly. Contact Micah at micahvandegrift@gmail.com or Google Voice # 347-687-2096. Lead Pipe is pleased to provide a venue for the HackLibSchool project, and we hope you’ll join in!

UPDATE February 2011: The Hack Library School initiative now has a blog!

Photo by Micah Vandegrift

The “What.”

If you haven’t heard of Hacking The Academy, I’d strongly suggest you look into it. During the week of May 21-28^th a group of academics, librarians and higher ed techies crowdsourced submissions for a born-digital book. They compiled a variety of articles and blog posts focused around the theme of shared professional development resources, questions and innovations, with the goal of taking these important adaptations from across the field and centralizing the conversations in a digital space outside the institution, thus ‘hacking’ the academy. What I admire most about the Hacking The Academy project (#Hackacad on Twitter) is the fact that this group took it upon themselves to engage professional development in higher education and, utilizing social media and other technologies, craft it to their specifications. Call it DIY, curation, hacking or what have you, the point is because of the ever-increasing sociality of the real-time web people are able to interact with one another on a whole new level. When this ability is applied to the professional sphere, the possibilities are bountiful. This post is equal part inquisition and proposition that it is time for the emerging library professionals (we students) to take an active role in what we learn, need to learn, didn’t learn, and wish we had learned in library school by curating our own hack.

From what I know of librarianship thus far, as a student in Florida State University’s Masters in Library and Information Studies program, this field is highly adaptive to new technologies, and there are more than a few cases where libraries really stand out for their technological implementations, e.g. The Hub, Darien Library. Yet, as I have been scanning the social web these past months, I have come across more than a few posts from my peers wondering if they missed something in school, or offering their own posts on “what I wished I’d learned…” regarding the practicalities of librarian life. Is this indicative of blight in the system? Maybe. Is it perhaps a product Gen-Y’s increasing openness to use blogs for constructive criticism? Possibly. Is it worth a glance to see if library school is not lining up so well with the profession (a constant conversation in the field) in the eyes of recent, current students? Absolutely.

The “Why.”

Aside from having to actually find a job, the thought of being unprepared for the field is incredibly scary. Entering the profession with a degree and discovering that there are some skills or core knowledge that you missed is not the way to begin a career. I think this point gets at the heart of one of library school’s broad themes, and one that may be confusing to students; is this a professional or theoretical degree? When I chose to pursue the MLIS I did so under the assumption that I was going to gain some “practical skills” to enhance my previous M.A. in American Studies. I had no idea that social science and information theory was going to be so much of the program. The concepts I’ve learned and the skills I’ve obtained will no doubt be useful, but I didn’t feel prepared at all for the coursework, and am now starting to wonder how all of this will transfer to my day-to-day life in the field. I am interning right now in the Web Applications department at the Brooklyn Public Library, and despite being 75% of the way through my degree, I do not feel entirely confident talking about or working with the tools necessary to do the job. This is not to say that there are not plenty of students who begin the degree totally prepared and transition right into successful careers and do very well. But I can say with some confidence that these issues arise for more students than one might care to admit. Opening up conversations on this kind through a library school hack could better prepare future students, and also provide tips, advice and encouragement to those struggling through.

Then, there is an issue of identity that remains a complication. Are we “librarians”, “information professionals”, “knowledge managers”? Both Kim Leeder and Char Booth have written on this topic recently, which inspired a lot of my thoughts for this post. If working librarians are having such identity crises, what of us still in school!? Thankfully, one of my courses did introduce the idea that a spectrum of careers exist wherein the MLIS will be useful, but I am still unsure how to market myself on a job market. I will hold a Master of Library and Information Studies, and would love a useful title or phrase to promote my skill set, which will be broader than many people’s understanding of “librarian.” I tend to lean toward “Information Professional” although that still leaves so many questions and is nebulous at best. If the profession is set on the precipice of some great, inevitable change in definition, how is my course on Foundations of Information Professions going to be relevant next year when I am job searching?

Additionally, with the information landscape changing so rapidly, I find that textbooks, course syllabi and conference topics that are supposed to be authoritative are lacking valuable content related to current issues in the field and are behind the curve on engaging new ideas. For instance, I am intrigued by the concept of transliteracy, the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, a relevant and pressing topic in the field. I discovered transliteracy through following librarians on Twitter, and have yet to see it addressed in a textbook. The speed at which professional life is evolving right now due to immersive social-technological layers is, in my opinion, far more effective in preparing me for work as an information professional than a textbook that is barely two years old, of no fault to authors and researchers. It is in this kind of a space that a dynamic, participatory text edited and updated in near real-time could function.

To take this argument a step further, I would also argue the case that the professional organization(s) that we all participate in are no match for the relationships that are possible and the value that can be created through curating one’s own network via Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. To say it plainly, I am beginning to think that the staid traditions and topics of librarianship that are addressed in Library School are outdated. If so, what can be done to keep this amazing profession on the cutting edge?

Finally, as a student inundated with articles, papers and conflicting theories to weed through, not to mention any hobbies or other interests I’d like to keep up with, I find it difficult and overwhelming to dig into a professional journal, or get more in touch with recently published research, which traditionally formed the cutting edge in a field. I understand that research is important, and I agree wholeheartedly that it may appease some of my desires for an accurate sense of relevancy for my degree, but as a Gen-Y reader and a former researcher myself, often my interest is just not piqued in academic publications. I like to say that two of the most important advancements of the recent social web are the comment box and the “share” button, both of which do not exist in the majority of academic publishing (kudos to PLoS One and Shakespeare Quarterly

for some pioneering work there.) The paper to conference to journal model does not feel immediate or dynamic enough for my plugged-in sensibilities, although I recognize the value of the peer review process. I’d like to think that projects like Hacking The Academy are moving us toward content curation as a form of peer review and digital presentation as equal to analog publication. Models like this excite me about my participation in a field open to evolving technological workspaces.

The How.

On Oct. 24^th, 2008 Char Booth guest posted a “Library Student Bill of Rights” on the popular Tame the Web blog. As a guiding document, I think this is a great example of a model for change. She stated, “In full recognition that it is far easier to tear down than to build up, I leave it up to the faculty and administrators of the library school world to do something about it.” However, I disagree with her on this point. Two years have passed and the “Rights to Challenge, Innovate, Redefine” and more touted in this document are not, to my knowledge, being actively pursued or employed. I think Ms. Booth had the right idea, but placed responsibility on the wrong group. Armed now with tools to organize and collaborate, it is the current and recent students and professionals who must “do something about it.” So, in alignment with my belief in the social web, crowdsourcing and user-curation, I propose that the body of library school students should become the change they wish to see enacted.

Thus the #HackAcad connection; why isn’t there a collaborative, online text like that for Library School? There are enough people writing prolifically about their experiences in school, and through transitions to the field, that it would be easy to gather posts on a variety of topics. In fact, as I was researching this post, I came across a post by Bobbi Newman titled “So You Want to be a Librarian? A Guide For Those Considering an MLS, Current Students & Job Seekers” that sets up a great starting framework for a #HackLibSchool experiment.

There is no shortage of content already floating around the web that would fit into a web-text like this. What I propose is that we (the students, the bloggers, the Web 2.0ers) get active, curate this content, and centralize it. We are all familiar with the variety of tools that are available to make this happen, and the process for growing, contributing to and curating content will be open and adaptable to new ideas. Great with coding? Feel free to build a framework for the site. Enjoy social media? Spread the word. This is a chance to get creative, showcase your skills, and participate in something that will resonate in our field.

Practically:

• HackLibSchool will begin as a Google Doc, open to all as of today, and eventually move to its own webspace.
• Content should have a focus on library school, providing tips, insights, challenges, definitions or any other type of “hack” that a current or future student might benefit from.
• Nominations and submissions will be welcomed for the remainder of the month of October.
• Articles will be organized by relevant topics.
• All organization and editing of the document will be entirely crowdsourced, requiring participation, engagement and some level of commitment from involved parties.
• HackLibSchool can and should be a meme that exists across many networks. It can and should be a Wiki, a Delicious tag, a Twitter hashtag, a .com, a .org, a Flickr group, an unconference, etc.

Other than that, HackLibSchool has no other set parameters. I’d like this to truly be a group-owned project, and I only see my involvement as a progenitor. Eventually, a team may need to be formed to keep the project focused and forward moving. Living up to the dynamic, adaptive nature of the webtext, perhaps a quarterly review will be necessary. I shy away from nominating an Editor, but that may be a future iteration of the project. I’m open to suggestions as to how to continue this project as a seminal document for our profession.

I’d like to clear about my intentions behind this idea. This is not meant to subvert the education that library school provides, but to supplement it. Not sure of the differences between an MLIS and an MLS? Well, here are three perspectives from bloggers who wrote on that exact topic. Can’t remember the top five articles that every library student should have read? Here are two reviews and a Delicious tag to follow. Wondering what is happening right now in librarianship that can help you be better prepared for the field? Here are the most comprehensive Twitter lists, and two emerging scholars who blog regularly. I imagine this serving as a dynamic, adaptive document highlighting what one can expect from grad school, as well as some tips and ideas about the profession as a whole. (Key words: dynamic and adaptive, living on the web and allowed to change and morph as the field does over time.)

For those who skipped to the end for the summary – This is an invitation to participate in the redefinitions of library school, and the thus the field of librarianship, using the web as a collaborative space outside of any specific university or organization. This is an ambitious project, I know, but I have the sense that peers and colleagues are ready for this. Imagine standards and foundations of the profession that we will create, decided upon by us, outside of the institutional framework. Ideas like the democratization of the semantic web, crowdsourcing, and folksonomies allow this to exist and we should be taking advantage of it. What will the information professions be next year if we define it for ourselves today? If we had a voice in the development of curriculum, what would that degree entail? This is my challenge to you; participate or come up with a better idea. How would you hack library school?

Thank you to Trevor Dawes, Ellie Collier, Emily Ford, and Kim Leeder for reading an early draft. Your comments were very insightful and made me remember the value of collaboration in academia.

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is pleased to welcome another guest author, Markus Wust! Markus is the Digital Collections and Preservation Librarian at North Carolina State University Libraries and works on exciting projects such as WolfWalk (mobile app for exploring NC State using special collections images and geolocation data) and NC Architects (database covering 300 years of North Carolina architects and builders).

Courtesy of Flickr User The Dangler

As a librarian working in a large academic library who once considered a career as an academic researcher and whose friends are mostly academics, I always find dinner conversations between my wife and my father-in-law particularly interesting, even—or rather, especially—when the topic is work. Over the course of several years of graduate school, I became familiar with the academic environment in several disciplines and still have a particular fondness for the humanities.

Now, however, I consider myself more of a neutral observer of academia and try to use these observations to figure out how best to help the researchers and teachers that we are working with. The conversations provide ample inspiration for my work: both my wife and her father are academics, although they seem in many ways to be positioned at opposite ends of a spectrum. She is working in the United States an Assistant Professor, teaching and researching in French Applied Linguistics and Teacher Education, and currently working towards tenure. Her father is an established researcher in Organic Chemistry who recently retired as a Full Professor at a Canadian university.

So when they discuss their professional activities, I am sometimes reminded of communications between people from different countries who are speaking a common language: they can communicate with each other, but there are enough semantic and cultural differences to occasionally cause misunderstandings or communication breakdowns. In their case, they are familiar with academic vocabulary but sometimes a term might have a different meaning or carry certain nuances depending on whether he uses it in the Canadian context or she talks about it from an American perspective. He has taken the last major step in an academic’s career—retirement—whereas she still has to take one of the first—getting tenure.

Finally, there is the main problem: the divide between him, the scientist, and her, the social scientist/humanist. I am not talking about problems caused by the subject matter each of them is working on; since neither one of them can discuss variations in protein structures with the same ease as differences between theories of second language acquisition, a conversation of that sort between them is not possible. However, even the differences in research and publishing traditions between their respective disciplines are large enough to cause a lack of understanding of each other’s situation, such as during discussions about scholarly productivity. For example, while my father-in-law can rely on the collaboration within his research team and on the quick review and publishing cycle of his discipline’s research outlets to ensure a high research output, my wife is still publishing primarily as a single author and has to contend with long waiting times during the peer review process. So, while he can publish many more papers in any given period, this does not mean that she is any less productive in her research; it just takes much longer to gather and analyze the necessary data before disseminating her findings.

Such divergent viewpoints and evaluations of scholarly productivity and rigor can arise even among practitioners of disciplines that are drawing on similar research methodologies and publishing practices. A friend, who is a Sociolinguist, once told us about a conversation she had with her father, a prominent Political Scientist. When she mentioned that, for her current study, she was collecting interview data from twenty participants, he offered little more than a weak smile and pointed out that in his field, he would routinely draw on data from over 50,000 respondents, not taking into account the qualitative differences between his short telephone surveys and the in-depth interviews necessary in her field of work.

Let us return to the previously mentioned dinner conversations. The occasional professional communication problems between my wife and her father bring to mind a phrase coined by British chemist and writer C.P. Snow. In his 1959 Rede lecture at Cambridge University titled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” Snow described a growing chasm between the humanities and the sciences, which would make it increasingly difficult for the two groups to work together to address the social, political, and cultural problems of the time:

Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground. […] The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential movement. And so on. Anyone with a mild talent for invective could produce plenty of this kind of subterranean back-chat. On each side there is some of it which is not entirely baseless. It is all destructive. Much of it rests on misinterpretations which are dangerous. (Snow, 4-5)

According to Stefan Collini’s introduction to the 1993 edition of The Two Cultures, Snow was far from being the first to express concern about the split between the two streams of scholarly inquiry. He describes an 1880 lecture by T.H. Huxley at Mason College in Birmingham, England, during which Huxley called into doubt the value of a traditional classical education and promoted a greater focus on the sciences in the British educational system:

Science, [Huxley] affirmed, formed part of culture and offered a rigorous mental training, as well as making an indispensable contribution to national well-being. In tones that were to become familiar in the subsequent century, he denounced the resistance to the claims of scientific education by the defenders of the traditional classical curriculum as, therefore, both unjustified and short-sighted. (XIV)

Matthew Arnold—poet, cultural critic and Professor of Poetry at Oxford University—responded to Huxley during his 1882 Rede lecture with a defense of a humanities-based education:

Above all, [Arnold] insisted that a training in the natural sciences might produce a practically valuable specialist, but it could not turn out an ‘educated’ man: for this, literature, especially the literatures of antiquity, remained indispensable. (XV)

While the exchange between Huxley and Arnold was described as amicable, Snow would face fierce criticism, the most ferocious of which came from literary critic F. R. Leavis during a lecture in 1962. Mooney describes the public impression of Leavis’—partially personal—attacks on Snow as follows:

As one ringside observer put it, Leavis “threw Sir Charles Snow over his shoulder several times and then jumped on him…the whole thing left one with a sense of comradely sympathy for Sir Charles, as it might be for a man who had been involved in a serious motor accident.” The eminent critic Lionel Trilling added that while he had problems with Snow’s argument, there could be “no two opinions” about Leavis’s breach of decorum: “It is a bad tone, an impermissible tone.”

By reacting in this manner, Leavis might have actually given further support to Snow’s argument, at least as far as the lack of mutual understanding between scientists and humanists was concerned.

As Collini explains, Snow’s point of view was in part determined by the particular circumstances of the academic and educational environment of Great Britain in the post-World War II period. Besides associating a humanistic education with a higher social status, the British educational system of that time was designed with an emphasis on specialization by pushing “academically gifted children to start concentrating wholly upon science subjects or humanities subjects from as early as fourteen years old, to study only three of these subjects between sixteen and eighteen, and then to concentrate exclusively upon one while at university” (XVI).

Of course, specialization is a necessary factor in the development of every discipline. Given the growth of knowledge, no single individual can hope to keep up-to-date with every discussion or discovery in his or her broader area of study; the Renaissance generalists who could make groundbreaking contributions in a multitude of fields seem to be a thing of the past. This need for specialization also means that the aforementioned communication problems do not exist only between the sciences and humanities, but can also affect sub-disciplines within each of these broader categories:

But all these fields or sub-fields have increasingly developed their own concerns, methods, and vocabularies to the point where no one division is obviously more significant than all others. The theoretical economist and the critic of French poetry are as mutually incomprehensible in their professional work as ever ‘scientists’ and ‘humanists’ were supposed to be. (Collini, LV)

Now, what can be done to help reduce these communication barriers between the various fields? One important step for members of the academic and research community would be to view their work not only as contributions to their respective disciplines, but as an integral part of the larger academic enterprise:

Rather, we need to encourage the growth of the intellectual equivalent of bilingualism, a capacity not only to exercise the language of our respective specialisms, but also to attend to, learn from, and eventually contribute to, wider cultural conversations. Obviously, it may help if one’s education, has not been too specialized too early, and Snow’s warning remains pertinent here. But more important still will be the nurturing within the ethos of the various academic specialisms not only of some understanding of how their activities fit into a larger cultural whole, but also of a recognition that attending to these larger questions is not some kind of off-duty voluntary work, but is an integral and properly rewarded part of professional achievement in the given field. (Collini, LVII-LVIII)

One interesting example of what can happen when researchers from different parts of the academic spectrum decide to collaborate and find innovative approaches to furthering each other’s disciplines is study by Timothy Stinson, an English professor at my institution, North Carolina State University, and his brother Michael, a biologist at Southside Virginia Community College. In order to be able to more precisely date early medieval manuscripts, they decided to extract DNA from the parchment of manuscripts of known dates and add the genetic information to a reference database. This would then allow future researchers to not only date texts more easily, but even determine which herd served as the source for a specific piece of parchment.

So why am I writing about this on a blog dedicated to libraries and librarians? I think that there are two areas in which this topic affects us as librarians and the way we interact with our patrons. The bilingualism that Collini refers to in his quote requires an openness and curiosity towards other academic and professional traditions. As Hilary Davis discussed in a post on In The Library With A Lead Pipe (“Déformation Professionnelle,” March 17, 2010), this is something that we as librarians should keep in mind. She points out the value of leaving your professional comfort zone—e.g., by attending professional events outside of your field of specialization—in order to get a different view on problems you are dealing with or finding out about problems of which you have not been aware.

Even more importantly, libraries have the potential to improve both collaboration and communication between the various academic disciplines and help overcome at least some of the chasm that Snow and others have described. Librarians are well positioned to serve as people connectors on campus. Through their work as collection managers or library instructors, many librarians have, over the years, formed close relationships with faculty members in many different departments and colleges and are usually more or less familiar with each individual’s work. They are therefore in a better position than many faculty members to see similarities in research and teaching interests across departmental boundaries and could therefore connect possible future collaborators and, in the process, point out the benefits of involving the library in their projects.

This broader involvement in the intellectual campus life is one of many things I enjoy about working in a large academic library: in general, we are not dedicated to any single part of the institution, but the library exists to serve the entire campus community: faculty, students and staff representing every unit of the university. Although we have several branch libraries that specialize for more narrowly-defined user populations, the library as a whole is seen as a place that provides help and resources to every person on campus. In a sense, the library seems like a neutral zone where everybody can come together and get equal access to work and collaboration spaces, collections, and recreational services. It is in our best interest to expand on this aspect of our role within the campus community, even (perhaps especially) in the face of the frozen or reduced budgets many of us are facing. By establishing ourselves not just as a resource and service provider, but a collaborator in the production and dissemination of research, we can justify our existence in an age where an abundance of seemingly free external electronic resources might cause some to question the continued financial investment in our collections and services.

Libraries (of course again depending on the availability of funds) could establish collaborative workspaces that are not governed by specific departments or colleges and thus make it easier for faculty with diverse disciplinary affiliations to work together on an equal footing. Instead of assuming that “if you build it, they will come,” we should, from early on, engage our target audience in the planning of these spaces in order to make them as relevant and, at the same time, as flexible as possible. The facilities and infrastructure should be combined with qualified staff to provide the project management and technical development support necessary to support the collaborative projects, similar to what is already being done at the University of Virginia Library’s Scholars’ Lab, which was initially established to promote innovative work in the humanities and social sciences.

Librarians seem to be well suited for this task. When I was a student in the Humanities Computing program at the University of Alberta, a professor mentioned that he envisioned the program’s graduates as mediators, or translators, in digital humanities projects between academic researchers—the subject specialists—and the technical support who would be responsible for the implementation of a project’s technical aspects. Given the diverse professional and academic experience as well as technical and management skills many librarians have accumulated even before entering the library world, it seems that they would be well-suited to play a similar role when it comes to connecting faculty from different parts of the academic community and encouraging them to exchange ideas.

Besides being connectors and mediators, they could also provide vital support during the final stage of a collaborative research project, i.e., its dissemination. The more diverse the academic disciplines are that are represented in any given project, chances are that the participants’ ideas with regards to the most appropriate publishing strategies are equally as disparate. Again, librarians might be able to provide valuable support and advice on the best course of action.

Although it is illusionary to claim that we can really overcome the increasing compartmentalization of academic disciplines and the resulting communication barriers between many fields, I think that as librarians, we do not just have the opportunity, but also the obligation to encourage and enable more collaboration between different academic disciplines and cultures, such as the sciences and humanities. Not only will it make for better understanding between a father and a daughter, but it will also provide our libraries with a stronger foundation for the future and our society with a better understanding of itself.

I would like to thank Hilary Davis (IntheLibrarywiththe LeadPipe) and Babi Hammond (NCSU Libraries) for their valuable feedback on the first draft and my wife Valerie for her help in editing this article.

References:

• “About Us: Scholar’s Lab.” http://www.scholarslab.org/about/. Accessed August 29, 2010.
• Davis, Hilary. “Déformation Professionnelle.” http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/deformation-professionnelle/. Accessed August 14, 2010.
• Mooney, Chris. “The Science Lover and the Snob.” http://www.scienceprogress.org/2009/04/the-science-lover-and-the-snob/. Accessed August 12, 2010.
• Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures. Cambridge UP, 1993.
• Thompson, Andrea. “DNA May Reveal Origins of Medieval Manuscripts” http://www.livescience.com/history/090210-dna-manuscripts.html.  Accessed August 29, 2010.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Huxley
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_P_Snow
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._R._Leavis

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

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

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

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

The Librarian Identity, or Lack Thereof

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of the Real Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

35% Reference/Research Assistance

25% Information Literacy

15% Collection Development

5% Liaison

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

5% Other Duties as Assigned by Department Head

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

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

Conclusions, Such as They Are

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During the last few frenzied weeks of the academic semester last month I came across an article I reviewed quickly and put aside, but which has lingered in the back of my mind despite the fact that I can’t seem to find it again. Essentially, as a I recall, the article addressed the manner in which academic (and school?) libraries are evolving more fully into social spaces for students, along the lines of a second student union or a glorified internet cafe. The article raised the question in my mind of whether libraries, if they continue to progress in this direction, will eventually just merge into the campus student union, which also provides computers, study spaces, and food options. Do we have a greater vision, a plan for where we’re going, or are we just rolling with the times?

I spent a lot of time last fall researching an annotated bibliography on the Learning Commons that caused me to reflect on some of the same questions. In 1985 Pat Molholt published an article in the Journal of Academic Librarianship titled “On Converging Paths” in which she suggested that libraries and computer labs were likely to merge into one. At this point we can say that she was partially correct, as the job description of a librarian now overlaps strongly in many ways with an information technology job description (I am not sure the reverse is true, however). As a reference librarian, I probably spend about the same amount of time helping students with research as I do helping them with technology. At many institutions the relationship between the library and IT department are very close, and they often reside in nearby office spaces, but I am not aware of any place where they have yet been merged.

The idea of combining libraries with information technology departments is scary to many, but also a very natural step. Many libraries have their own IT departments, or rely heavily on an organizational unit to build and update their website, keep online resources correctly linked and current, provide online reference services and technology support for patrons, and host multimedia content, among other things. If librarians were more highly trained in back-end technology, think of how much further we could take many of our instructional and service initiatives! If IT professionals were trained as librarians, the same would be true.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, the Learning Commons is the latest manifestation of the 1990′s Information Commons, which was a later manifestation of the 1980′s library computer lab. First we put computers in libraries and thought that was pretty cool. Later, libraries at some notable institutions such as The University of Iowa and The University of Arizona decided to integrate their computer labs more fully by expanding the labs, providing a greater variety of software and hardware, offering combined research and technology help desks, and building computer classrooms where online research skills could be taught. That was the Information Commons.

More recently, a number of universities are beginning to build on the Information Commons concept with the goal of a “seamless learning environment” in mind. The Learning Commons includes, in addition to the usual computer labs and classrooms, student services resources such as the writing center, career services, and residence life. In some cases these are physical facilities that combine several units, in other cases they are programmatic or service collaborations (If you’re interested in learning more about this, try Learning Commons: Evolution and Collaborative Essentials or any of the other recent books on the topic). Apparently, this is the next step in our evolution: it’s like creating the WalMart of libraries where students can do their one-stop shopping for everything college.

I think this is a really interesting direction, and I’m sure many of the Learning Commons will be (and continue to be) highly successful. The goal of the Learning Commons is to identify the ways students learn today and creative a responsive environment for them. But it makes me wonder what our libraries and our jobs as librarians will look like in the future if we continue to change in the direction of merging our buildings and services with everyone else’s buildings and services. Will we even call libraries “libraries” then, or will we have more elusive names such as “Integrated Services Building”? At the ISB you can grab a cup of coffee, research and write a paper, troubleshoot your registration problems, and sign up for the dorm room lottery. I wonder if it will be the same person who can help students with all those things.

And the most important question of all: do we know where we’re going?

What Makes a Library a Library?

As I wrestle with this question, I have found interesting a conversation taking place among public and school librarians about what makes a library a library.” Sarah Houghton-Jan began the discussion early in December on the subject of King County’s new “Express Library,” an unstaffed self-serve library branch. After 95 percent of local residents said they would prefer it, King County created a “mini-branch” where patrons can pick up holds, and the library system even threw in two computers for catalog searching and a small browsing collection. Can one even call this a library? Houghton-Jan is not sure:

It raises the question–-what makes a library a library? And not just because there aren’t live staff there. There is not a full browsing collection of materials, no internet-enabled computers, no wifi, no rooms to read or study in, no programs, etc.

From her comment we might extrapolate that what makes a library a library are the things she listed: librarians and staff, a large collection, computers and internet access, study space, and programs of some variety.  But a few days later, a set of video interviews published by Buffy Hamilton from Creekview High School in Canton, Georgia, seem to disagree, at least from the teen perspective. These young people generally see the library as a place to both hang out with friends and get their work done. Out of the twelve students she interviewed (she notes eleven, but one video clip has two students), I was surprised to see that nearly half, or five students, cited “atmosphere” as what makes a library a library. What constitutes the library atmosphere was unclear.

I think the commonly cited quality among both groups of students — the library as a place to read, study, work, and/or do research — is informative, and obviously carries over into college students’ views of the library. For students of all ages, the library is a place to get out of the house or dorm room and get work done. For older students, there is some social value to the library as well. I appreciate Scott Bennett’s view of the library’s value in the modern higher educational institution:

The library is the only centralized location where new and emerging information technologies can be combined with traditional knowledge resources in a user-focused, service-rich environment that supports today’s social and educational patterns of learning, teaching, and research. Whereas the Internet has tended to isolate people, the library, as a physical place, has done just the opposite (p.3).

The library as a place that counteracts the isolating nature of the internet is something I can get on board with. And again, it reinforces the idea of the library as an increasingly social venue.

The value of the library as place appears to be alive and well, but what kind of “place” are we talking about? It seems important that we retain the “atmosphere” the interviewed students cite, but first we need to know what that atmosphere is. If our libraries morph into something else by blending with other campus entities, the qualities students enjoy might disappear. On the other hand, perhaps those qualities are so central to the library that they will persist regardless.

Vision: Do We Have It?

Being a librarian these days sometimes feels like being a passenger on a fast-moving train. We sit inside, hoping there is someone in front running the show, or hoping at a minimum that another train won’t run us off the track. But we sit looking out the side windows without having any idea what may be coming along the road in front of us. Whether or not anyone’s in charge, it can be hard to tell. Lots of people have taken stabs at predicting the future of libraries, and I can’t say with any authority (until we get there!) whether they have it right. Will we be cultural centers, wholly special collections, digital repositories, absorbed into Google, or just plain out of business?

Out of curiosity I searched the last six years of the journal Library Administration & Management for articles with “future” in the title, and found only five. Two were a two-part article on the future of libraries by Bonnie A. Osif from 2008 that summarized the variety of perspectives about library futures as represented in the literature. I must admit to being surprised to not see something more visionary in this journal. Perhaps I am looking in the wrong place. But it seems to me, and I don’t mean to criticize any of our great library leaders, that most of the “vision” I see in the library field is just an expansion of what already exists. Building on our strengths is a great thing, but it is a different thing than having a vision towards which to build our future.

Who is our Henry Ford, our Steve Jobs? Who is leading us to a place where libraries will thrive and succeed in an uncertain future? Some may argue that we don’t need visionaries to lead us, but I disagree. Most of us work day to day with our heads down, just trying to get everything done. We need leaders who have the time and space to be constantly looking ahead, watching the clouds, and anticipating the storms and sunshine to come.

Looking Forward

I don’t have the answers — only a lot of questions. It seems to me that the first thing to ask is what we want libraries to be in the future. Or would it be better phrased to ask what our students want libraries to be in the future? Do we serve our students best if we turn libraries into learning centers combined with various other campus units? From my admittedly inexperienced perspective, and considering the state of the economy, I can see this road leading us towards a place of campus mergers. Putting our instinct for self-preservation aside, is an eventual merger of the library, IT department, and (potentially) other offices desirable? Students might love it, as it will avoid their being redirected multiple times to the office that “handles that,” but will it be the best way to serve their information needs?

Of course we must balance what we want for libraries with what is possible, considering the changes in technology and learning that are still happening. We can’t predict where learning theory may take us next, but I learned while at The University of Arizona that sitting around and waiting for the future to take us somewhere is an exercise in failure. Peter Drucker and other great management gurus encourage us to take control of our future by constantly assessing our successes and failures, experimenting with new innovations, and shedding those aspects of our work that don’t measure up.

I like to consider what our libraries would look like if we tore them all down, erased our memories, and rebuilt them from the ground up. No doubt we would focus first on what our patrons need and use. Not books, that’s for sure — forget about print. Computers and software, yes, but everything will have to be wireless so buy up those laptops. Online resources for sure, but reconfigured in simpler ways. We may still buy academic databases, but now that we’re cross-trained as IT specialists we’ll build our own search engines that cross all of our various information platforms seamlessly. Our buildings will be full of flexible social spaces that can be used for teaching, gaming, group work, and just hanging out with friends. We’re not going to design around the needs of computers anymore. We’ll share building space with the writing center, coffee shop, tutoring, business center, and maybe others. Perhaps we’ll be a big educational mall. WalLibrary. LibraryMart.

Overall, our libraries are innovative and ever seeking improvement, but let’s face it: we’re turtles among a race of hares when it comes to moving with the times. We grab onto new technologies eagerly, but don’t know what to do with them or how to use them effectively. We’re just starting to understand that assessment is important. If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that as a whole we move too slowly. And while it may get us somewhere faster, riding along in somebody else’s train may or may not take us where we want to be.

I hear a little shrillness in the voices of many librarians who speak or write about the future. We argue with the world at large, insisting that not everything is available online, that libraries are not going out of business. We are insecure about our future and whether we’ll have jobs in ten or twenty years. I appreciate the optimism of those who are prepared to evolve with what comes, but I think that is missing the point a little bit. We should not just adapt to fit our changing present, but plan ahead and prepare and take the future by the throat saying, “Throw at me what surprises you will, I am ready for you!”

Who are our visionaries, who is leading this charge of libraries into the future? I’m really asking you, ItLwtLP reader, because I don’t know. I would love to hear about your vision and those you think visionary in the comments below. Perhaps if we put our heads together, we’ll start to see a little glimmer of what’s down the road for us.

Thanks to Ellie Collier, Emily Ford, and Tom Hillard for offering feedback on a draft of this post.

Outreach is dead. It’s time we put its body in a coffin, say our collective prayers and move on.
You see, for most of the summer I undertook a long series of “outreach” trips to promote and educate the public at large about a grant-funded project I’d been working on for the past year. I drove all over the state of Oregon, to the desert in the East, the rolling mountains in the South, up and down the rocky coast, and through the farm and ranch land in Western and Central Oregon. During these long trips (imagine expanses of high desert for 200 miles before you hit a rest stop or gas station) I had a lingering feeling that what I was doing was definitely NOT outreach. Instead, I was promoting and marketing a service and tool that, for the past year, I had been helping to build at my place of employ.

What IS outreach in libraries today? It became my mission to discover a succinct working definition of what we do that so many of us consider outreach, yet my conclusion remained embedded in that same violent phrase: outreach is dead. When this thought first occurred to me my brain immediately began singing the lyrics to Bauhaus’s hit Goth Rock song Bela Lugosi’s Dead. (“…Bela Lugosi’s dead/ undead undead undead/Oh, Bela/Bela’s undead…)

We need to lay rest to outreach’s physical body–that separate entity that comprises library departments and ancillary programs. As well we need to lay to rest the word “outreach,” whose separate existence inhibits and deters us from doing what we as libraries, librarians, and information professionals should be doing. Instead of integrating library promotion, advocacy, and community-specific targeted services, we have left “outreach” outside of the inclusive library whole to be an afterthought, a department more likely to get cut, or work function of only a few, such as your subject librarians. If we kill this notion, if we consider the word and the separate entity of outreach as dead, we are more likely to be able to embrace and participate in activities formerly known as outreach and incorporate this essential part of our jobs into our daily work routine.

Definitions

Before I came to the conclusion that outreach is dead, I attempted to re-define outreach as such: Outreach is marketing. If the people who you’re attempting to reach seek services from you (rather than you reaching them) it is not outreach. The agenda behind library outreach should be to offer services without monetary gain, and to identify and fill service voids for people who are not looking for them. Unsatisfied with my definition I asked my dad. His response was “I let the NSF [National Science Foundation] define that for me.” (My dad is an organic chemistry professor.) I was not convinced that a funding agency should have the ultimate say in what “outreach” activities should be or include; particularly in libraries. It was then that I decided to turn to my colleagues and professional literature to seek a good definition.

Scott Pointon (Public Libraries, 2009) refers to the following definition: “Draw a circle around the central or main library building–every library service, program, or library-related endeavor taking place outside that circle is outreach.” (5-6).  Likewise, in her introduction to the Extraordinary Outreach section of Public Libraries last winter, Nann Hilyard points to the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary definition of outreach, “noun: the act of extending community services to a wider section of the population. Transitive Verb: to reach beyond, exceed” (20). Unsatisfied with both of these definitions I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online (thanks, Multnomah County Library, for my remote access to this!) I found:

Outreach. Noun.  b. spec. The activity of an organization in making contact and fostering relations with people unconnected with it, esp. for the purpose of support or education and for increasing awareness of the organization’s aims or message; the fact or extent of this activity.

None of these definitions are satisfactory to me. And none of us define outreach in the same way. Pointon’s definition is great, but it pulls into play the struggle libraries are having with “library as place,” an issue recently addressed in The Journal of Academic Librarianship by Sennyey et al., 2009. Current library services transcend the physical boundaries of a library building. Many collections and services offered by public and academic libraries are used remotely. Users access library services from home, in their offices, and even via mobile devices. “…the bond between users and the physical library will change and if poorly managed the “library as place” will become just another campus building” (Sennyey, et al., 2009). In this way, defining outreach by physical boundaries (a body) does not reflect the wealth of services that libraries provide and undermine our community-centered work.

The OED definition is great, but to me this definition gets back to my first instinct: this is marketing, not outreach. In fact, I looked at the OED definition of marketing, and felt that the two, for our intent, are almost interchangeable.

Marketing  b. The action or business of bringing or sending a product or commodity to market; (now chiefly, Business) the action, business, or process of promoting and selling a product, etc., including market research, advertising, and distribution.

Our product is our service. To many librarians marketing can be a dirty word and outreach almost saintly. But in so many articles about outreach authors seem to refer to library service promotion as marketing anyway.  (see  Dawn Bussey’s Getting the Word Out, Eugene Jeffers’s Electronic Outreach and Our Internet Patrons, and Rebecca Donnelly’s The Misguided Relationship.) I think we should embrace marketing for what it is, and let outreach diffuse into our daily routine. Moreover, the first use of the word outreach in this way was over 100 years ago, in 1899 according to the OED. Since libraries have changed so much over the past 100 years isn’t it time we find a new way to express and incorporate community-centered work? The OED definition reminds me of a picture I snapped while on my outreach excursions.

The paint is peeling. Obviously its current physical manifestation could use some help. Likewise, when we use the term “outreach” we typically refer to an older and more traditional notion of what the word means. For us to move beyond this idea, we just might have to start using different words and detach current assumptions about “outreach” to discuss our “outreach” activities.

Differences Between Academic and Public Libraries

In academic libraries outreach seems to mean one of a few things. First, you have to reach your constituents. Some libraries have a Facebook page and some libraries tweet. You might also provide orientations to new student cohorts or you might offer satellite library services in a different building such as a dorm or a student center. Other examples could be creating relationships with faculty to provide services that support teaching as well as to their students to support course-specific learning. These examples seem to encompass much of what academic “outreach” focused activities include. To me, all of these services should not be contained within a separate body, department, or undertaken by just the “Outreach Librarian.” Instead, they are part in parcel what we do. As professionals we should all be talking about the library in our communities and fostering relationships. We should be offering satellite services and, yes, we should all have down pat our 30 second “why the library is important” elevator speech. These are essential aspects of a library and of any librarian’s job. They are not separate nor should they be contained in a different or a sole unit or entity.

Unlike academic libraries, Public library outreach programs seem much more identified by space and place. Bookmobile services, library services provided to those in jail, services at senior centers and in schools are all examples of what would fall under the “outreach” umbrella. Dawn Bussey discusses the various things that the Glen Ellyn Public Library has done in their community and outside the library’s walls (Public Libraries, 2009). But let’s face it, these services and the community-based nature of public libraries are essential to what today’s library is. It is not extra, it is mandatory and we should all be engaged and providing targeted, community-based services to our constituents.

Community Engagement and Marketing are Essential

The nature of libraries has changed enormously. The physical building is less important. Books are less important. Due to these changes libraries will become obsolete in today’s current market where information needs are created and fulfilled by (my favorite “frenemies”) Google and Facebook. People purchase books from Amazon, they read blogs, wikis and other online commercial (and non-commercial) information sources. But libraries have what they don’t and we need to let our users know this. We have the ability to be in our communities, to engage them and offer specific targeted services. Our engagement with our communities can be the defining aspect of what a library is to any given community—and that sounds a whole lot like what one “outreach librarian” was doing or one “outreach department” does in the old “outreach” paradigm. I am not trying to undermine the importance of marketing, advocacy, or library services. Traditional “outreach” services should be an integrated part of what we do, not an aside, a tacked on item.

Problems We Face in Death

Just because libraries need to change and have changed does not mean that the politics of our respective institutions and governing bodies have. Many institutions, such as my own, have “outreach” outlined in their missions. Institutions might use “outreach” to exemplify their worth for grant or other funding sources, which frequently require “outreach” activities be incorporated into funded projects. (Much like my dad’s example and my recent travel around the state of Oregon.)  We need for our city governments and our library and university administrations to advocate for libraries and library services in the manner I have described.  When crucial administrative decisions get made, for example to open a new campus, build a new building, or to add a new degree program at a college or university, libraries and their services need to be represented. If we have successfully advocated for our constituents by providing them with quality targeted, community-centered services, they will advocate for us. In the end, we might be able to provide those essential library services without being restricted by traditional “outreach” departments or initiatives.

Another issue facing libraries and library staff is training. How are we going to train library staff to provide those 30 second elevator speeches? Who will take the lead to ensure that circulation staff, reference staff, and others know how to engage in the services we’ve been calling outreach? If we expect everyone to engage in this work, staff need to have the skills and knowledge to be able to do so.

Finally, outreach is usually considered a separate department, when marketing and promotion of outreach activities within institutions get delegated to separate “marketing,” “communications,” or “public relations” departments. Wouldn’t it be best if the two were integrated? These departments often produce and distribute printed and written materials such as press releases, brochures and flyers, or craft an organizational mission statement. This kind of community engagement remains essential. We must learn to embrace marketing and collaborate with our marketing and communications departments for our community-centered services to achieve their potential.

The Undead

Kill your notion of outreach. We should demolish the body of outreach, but keep outreach activities alive. We should disallow outreach a separate body, but fold its spirit into our daily work and activities, for it is this spirit of work that is the very kernel of what makes a library. Let’s use different words to talk about what we do. (Please, if you have a suggestion on a new term to replace “outreach” leave a comment!) Let’s work to engage our administrators and our institutions in changing the attitude and political structure surrounding “outreach.” Let’s bridge the divide by collaborating with community and institutional partners to create and promote services. Let’s make sure library staff has the training to be able to give an elevator speech about why the library is important to community. Finally, let’s reshape our attitude and view community-based library services as essential; as the core of what keeps libraries strong and relevant to our communities.

Thanks to Gail Kouame for providing her thoughtful feedback to this post. Also thanks to Lead Pipe Colleagues Derik Badman, Ellie Collier, and Hilary Davis for their edits and feedback. Additionally, thanks to my office-mate, Andrew Hamilton, who is a great springboard for ideas.

References and Further Reading

Adams, T. M., & Sean Evans, R. (2004). Educating the educators: Outreach to the college of education distance faculty and native american students. Journal of Library Administration, 41(1), 3-18.

Aguilar, P., & Keating, K. (2009). Satellite outreach services program to under-represented students: Being in their space, not on MySpace. The Reference Librarian, 50(1), 14-28.

Bussey, D. (2009). Getting the word out. Public Libraries, 48(1), 20-21.

Connell, R. S. (2009). Academic libraries, Facebook and MySpace, and student outreach: A survey of student opinion. Portal: Libraries & the Academy, 9(1), 25-36.

Donnelly, R. (2009). The misguided relationship: Learning from outreach experiences. Public Libraries, 48(1), 24-25.

Hilyard, N. B. (2009). Cultivating support for library advocacy. Public Libraries, 48(3), 16-19.

Jeffers, E. J. (2009). Electronic outreach and our internet patrons. Public Libraries, 48(1), 21-23.

Pointon, S. E. (2009). Library outreach is the future! Public Libraries, 48(2), 2-5, 24.

Sennyey, P., Ross, L., & Mills, C. (2009). Exploring the future of academic libraries: A definitional approach. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 35(3), 252-259.

Welcome to another guest post at ItLwtLP. This time we bring you thoughts from Carrie Donovan, an instruction librarian at Indiana University Bloomington. Enjoy!

#307: Authenticity by assbach / CC-BY

Once upon a time in libraries, you could call yourself a good teacher if you spent more than 30 minutes planning a lesson, if you wowed students with your search savvy, or if nobody fell asleep during your presentation. With the growth of instructional initiatives and influence across libraries of all kinds, however, expectations for librarians to develop teaching expertise have heightened. Librarians who teach now find themselves faced with the demand to connect with students, to make libraries and information literacy knowledge meaningful, and to create learning opportunities that are memorable and long-lasting. Such a shift in expectations calls for teacher behavior that is purposeful, mindful, and rooted in the self. Transformation of this sort does not come easy, nor does it happen magically. For those in search of a true teacher identity, authenticity will serve as the best guide.

In order to create the dynamic and engaging environments that are becoming the norm among library instruction and information literacy programs, librarians rely on the participation and interest of their audience to co-construct learning. This type of dialogue requires an open and honest classroom environment in which the librarian is a facilitator and guide for learners as they discover the world of information. In asking students to be present and participatory, we must respond by bringing our own professional and personal wealth of knowledge and experience to the conversation. Putting away the “persona” of teacher and disclosing more of the personal will allow for meaningful interactions with students, increased student involvement, and memorable classroom experiences. From Roger Schank (1990), we learn that keeping up our end of this dialogue means introducing our experience and our emotions into teaching opportunities in surprising and story-driven ways. Based in real-world experiences, stories allow us to share with each other, while also making sense of the world around us as we interact with it. The Schankian application of storytelling to create a direct connection to students’ dynamic memory can also be useful for teachers in the quest to become more personable and approachable to students.

The Paradox of Teaching

Talking about bringing your real self into the classroom is one thing, doing it is another thing entirely. Especially when one considers the following paradox: as teachers, we employ many of the techniques of actors, but in order to be most effective, our teaching must not be artificial. For anyone who teaches regularly, it’s easy to recognize the aspects of teaching that are similar to acting: the preparation, the practice, the warming-up of vocals, the nerves, the sweaty palms, and the vulnerability that comes with setting oneself up for approval or disapproval. In addition, teachers, like actors, often summon a charm or dynamism from within, in order to exude a presence and authority over the purpose and direction of the content for their audience.

After library instruction, I’ve had students say to me, amazed, “Gosh, you really *love* the library, don’t you?” Okay, so maybe I’m a much more enthusiastic person when I teach than I am otherwise, but I’m hopeful that my teacherly self, while a slightly more dynamic version of myself, still comes from an authentic place. If I can surprise, intrigue, or engage students because I present the shiny side of myself when teaching, I’ll do it. Becoming the most special and charming version of one’s self takes some preparation, of course, one cannot just go into the classroom cold. You have to warm up, just like actors and athletes. For example, I had a ritual with my former office-mate that entailed jazz hands and dance moves as a precursor to teaching. Nowadays, my graduate assistant and I joke about putting on our “instruction face,” which usually involves eyebrows up and a big smile. The confidence and giddiness that comes with these warm-up activities can help quell the nerves and fears that sometimes haunt teachers.

Most librarians, even those of us who are devoted to teaching, will admit that many of the same challenges that actors face in terms of stage fright also plague teachers from time to time. After ten years of teaching in libraries, I almost always feel anxious and frightened prior to any type of instruction. To overcome my fear of public speaking as a novice teacher, I started using sarcasm as a coping mechanism. Sarcasm, I have discovered, does not translate well to the classroom setting and put me in complete opposition with my authentic self. Letting go of this crutch has not been easy, but it has been necessary to the successful development of my teacher identity. Without that barrier between myself and the students, teaching and learning experiences have become more open and egalitarian, so that now we share in the vulnerability and the anxiety, as well as the benefits and opportunity that come with it.

While I still rely a lot on sarcasm outside the classroom, I no longer use it to appear fearless. In fact, I think fearlessness among teachers is highly overrated. It’s the adrenaline that comes with my stage fright that is almost like a drug to me, it keeps me coming back into the classroom. Having acknowledged that it will most likely always be a part of my teacher identity, I can now use the rush and the motivational force of my fear to become better at my craft. R.W. Hanning (1984) compares the experience of stepping into the classroom (the start of the performance) to stepping over a threshold and in doing so, we must face our fears and meet the challenges that await us.

Although there are many elements of teaching that are similar to acting, that is not to say that we should seek to be entertainers. Neil Postman warns us about this in his book Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979) as he discusses the use of multimedia and technology in the classroom. While librarians have some of the best technology tools to teach and to aid in our teaching, we can be true to our teacher identities by relying on our primary instrument, ourselves. We should never be phony or rely too much on props or personas, but instead, we should strive to find the authentic place within from which to direct our teaching. That authenticity will evolve and change depending on the topic, audience, and situation of the day. As teachers, we should be willing to accept the risky nature of this activity and embrace the tension that exists between teaching from a place of authority, while also sharing of ourselves in such an authentic way that we become vulnerable.

Becoming Authentic

OK, so, how does one do this? Can authenticity be learned? The answer is both yes and no. We’ve all had great teachers and memorable learning experiences that shape our construct of what good teaching should be and what it looks like. What makes authenticity in teaching so elusive and slippery is that we cannot simply adopt those approaches as our own and expect them to work just as well. Instead, we must know ourselves well enough to identify our own personal qualities and wisdom and allow those to shape a unique approach to teaching that is true and relevant for us, that comes from a place within us that is real.

Teacher personality has been identified by several studies as a powerful component to effective teaching, more important even than intelligence, in some cases. When associated with personality traits, Laursen (2005) measured authenticity by looking at the extent to which teachers view students as fellow human beings, whether or not the teacher hides behind a detached persona, and how often/much teachers view themselves, as well as students, with intentions, emotions, and interests that are uniquely their own.

The difficult truth that must be acknowledged is that some teachers have a charisma and, as Malcolm Gladwell labels it, withitness, that is innate; thereby giving a natural spark to their teaching. For those of us who are accustomed to expecting results from hard work and practice rather than talent or personality, good teaching is also achievable, but it may not come as easily or inherently. But for those who want to try, the rewards are immeasurable. Just watch any film about teaching to understand what I’m talking about.

In his book, The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer (1998) discusses identity as the evolution of all the forces that come together to form a person, including: background, culture, experience, and anything else that shapes the self. Recognizing that we bring all of these aspects of ourselves to everything we do, including our instructional activities, is key to finding your teaching identity. Librarians have pursued neutrality for a long time in their provision of organized and accessible information and knowledge, but this philosophy does not serve us well in the classroom. As teachers, we must acknowledge that neutrality is unrealistic and unattainable, and by seeking it we are only doing a disservice to our learners. If we define learning as the ability to think for oneself and information literacy as the knowledge and skills to be thoughtful consumers and creators of information, then we should embrace our teaching as an opportunity to help learners recognize, understand, and question perspectives and ideologies that they encounter in information seeking.

Critical theory, as described by Powell, Cantrell, and Adams (2001), provides an excellent framework for integrating one’s teacherly identity into instruction in order to create opportunities for enhanced student learning and empowerment. Letting go of the notion that information is neutral and that we should teach information literacy or library instruction from a neutral position will allow us to provide a context to our teaching based on experience, perception, and meaning. For teaching to be memorable and meaningful, it must come from the true self and from a willingness to share the beliefs, values, and perspectives that shape it. Espousing this type of behavior in ourselves will encourage our learners to examine what shapes their identity, thereby creating opportunities for learning surrounding the questions and curiosities that arise as a result of self-disclosure, self-awareness, and self-examination.

Patricia Cranton, author of Becoming an Authentic Teacher in Higher Education (2001), presents strategies for understanding the “Self” in order to arrive at a personal and professional identity that intersects at teaching. In addition to reminding us of all the attributes that are indicators of great teachers, Cranton offers step-by-step approaches for identifying ways of discovering and disclosing your authentic self in the classroom and how to live with the benefits, as well as the fallout. Some of these steps include: understanding values and experience, merging self and teacher, telling your story, connecting with students, and knowing your critics. I like Cranton’s text as a complement to Palmer’s, as it is less inspirational and more practical. Sometimes librarians need that.

Sounds easy enough, right? To be authentic, just know yourself and be yourself! Right! However, there are many ways that this can go wrong. Students may not be accustomed to having teachers who are forthcoming with the personal aspects of themselves. They may misinterpret a teacher who is approachable as someone who is attempting to “be a friend”. Successful teaching still depends a great deal on relationship-building and students may feel annoyed or alienated by teacher self-disclosure. As with any relationship, teachers and students must seek a balance through trust-building and negotiation that allows for a teacher’s identity and authority to co-exist with students’ learning expectations and goals.

Despite the dangers and difficulties, it has been my experience that most students are open to recognizing teachers as being whole people who possess knowledge, experience, and interests that extend beyond the realm of the academy. I was pleased to see this corroborated in two studies. In 1994, Goldstein and Benassi looked at in-class participation by students and the effect of teachers’ self-disclosure on it. Upon examining students’ participation in class discussion, the number of questions asked, and the willingness to express opinions and feelings in class, the study concluded that teacher self-disclosure was positively correlated with the amount of class participation by students. Similarly, a recent study conducted by Mazer, Murphy, and Simonds (2009) looked at teacher self-disclosure in the social networking site, facebook. These researchers found that instructors who strategically share personal information (e.g. photos, interests, quotes, status, etc.) positively influenced their students’ perceptions of the teacher’s credibility, specifically competence and trustworthiness. Allowing students the opportunity to recognize similarities between themselves and their teachers, in addition to seeing teachers as people, with lives beyond the classroom, could contribute to the creation of the types of open, honest environments that encourage dialogue, participation, sharing, and ultimately – learning.

Beyond Teaching

Knowing and incorporating one’s authentic self into other areas of work can also result in great success. In leadership, librarians who stand for something and communicate their values demonstrate integrity and credibility. Robert Evans, in Educational Leadership (2007), describes the characteristics of authentic leaders as: vision, personal ethics, and belief in others. Just as when you think of great teachers you’ve had, you can probably also think of great leaders you’ve worked with who not only have a strong sense of self and inner direction, but also share it openly with those around them. This awareness and disclosure of self establishes a culture of honesty, trust, and fairness that is central to creating a common vision and shared commitment in any organization.

Down to You

Authenticity. Something that is so central to the success of one’s craft could take an entire career to cultivate, without ever truly reaching the pinnacle of achievement. But, librarians out there, if you’re anything like me, you revel in your teaching escapades because they are the one aspect of the job that is challenging beyond all expectation, shaking both body and soul, and making you all-around better and stronger. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But teaching, like so many things that are worthwhile, will break you down before it charges you up. It offers up the sweetest rewards for those who are willing to take the hardest hits. Nobody could do it really well without the reality and rawness that comes with self-disclosure, which can be at times a breathtaking walk on a tightrope and, at others, a freefalling leap of faith.

Librarians who are bold enough to develop their inner teacher will connect more deeply with learners and participate more fully in the learning process. Our authenticity will extend beyond classroom encounters to influence the teaching practices of our library colleagues and impact the instructional role of our libraries. With the potential to enhance student learning and increase the relevance of libraries to the teaching and learning continuum, authentic teachers have the opportunity to guide and lead our profession to new heights. As we pursue this path to teacherly identity, let’s be truthful, take risks, and follow our hearts. Remembering all the while, of course, that teaching is not about us, it’s about our students and their learning, as well as our libraries and their future.

If you’re a teacher who has sought out or achieved authenticity, please share your experiences, comments, failures, and successes. I look forward to hearing from you.

Recommended/Further Readings:

• Cranton, P. (2001). Becoming an authentic teacher in higher education. Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Co.
• Elmborg, J. (2006). Critical information literacy: Implications for instructional practice. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(2): 192-199.
• Evans, R. (2007). The authentic leader. In The Jossey-Bass reader on educational leadership (2^nd ed.). (pp. 135-156). San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
• Gladwell, M. (2008, December 15). Most likely to succeed: How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job? The New Yorker, 36.
• Goldstein, G. & Benassi, V. (1994). The relation between teacher self-disclosure and student classroom participation. Teaching of Psychology, 21(4): 212-217.
• Hanning, R.W. (1984). The classroom as theater of self: Some observations for beginning teachers. ADE Bulletin, 077, 33-37.
• Laursen, P. (2005). The authentic teacher. In D. Beijaard, P. Meijer, G. Morine-Dershimer, & H. Tillema. (Eds.). Teacher professional development in changing conditions. (pp. 199-212). New York: Springer.
• Mazer, J., Murphy, R., & Simonds, C. (2009). The effects of teacher self-disclosure via facebook on teacher credibility. Learning, Media and Technology, 34(2): 175-183.
• Palmer, P. (1998). The courage to teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Postman, N. (1979). Teaching as a conserving activity. New York: Delacorte Press.
• Powell, R., Cantrell, S.C., & Adams, S. (2001). Saving Black Mountain: The promise of critical literacy in a multicultural democracy. The Reading Teacher, 54(8): 772-781.
• Schank, R. (1990). Tell me a story: A new look at real and artificial memory. New York: Scribner.

Recommended Viewing:

• Dead Poets Society
• Emperor’s Club
• Finding Forrester
• The Karate Kid
• Miracle Worker
• School of Rock
• Spellbound

I would like to thank Emily Ford for inviting me to reflect on my teaching identity in order to write this piece and for being an inspiration to radical librarians everywhere. Also, thanks to Randy Hensley, who first challenged me to tap into my authentic self at ACRL’s Immersion program in 2003 and to my friends Jennifer & April who have been my instructional support system (and cynical touchstones) ever since that time.

Special shout-out goes to all the IU-SLIS Instruction Assistants and students in S573, past and present, who make teaching and discussions surrounding teaching a pure joy (especially Rachel Slough for her endless enthusiasm and willingness to serve as my reviewer on this project).

This post is dedicated to my mom, Gloria Donovan, the most authentic teacher I’ve ever known.

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is pleased to welcome another guest
author, Lisa Carter! Lisa has just recently been appointed as Visiting Program Officer to work with the Association of Research Libraries Special Collections Working Group. Read more to learn about her vision and thought-provoking ideas about the future of special collections…

I’m beginning to think that what’s wrong with special collections and archives[1] today is that they are considered special.  They are set aside, revered and left as the last great mystery the Library holds.  The collections themselves are special in that they are rare, unique, fantastic and archaic and they do need special handling and care.  However, our regard for these materials has enabled us to treat them so differently that they are not accessible. We have locked these materials up in our processes and our delivery services, which has kept them out of the mainstream of information available to knowledge seekers.  They are only rarely seen as part of the knowledge building conversation[2] and it is because of how we (as librarians and archivists) treat them and present them.  We treat them as special in the sense of “separate,” “extra,” “having special needs” instead of special in that they are what make our library special as “distinctive signifiers,” “our enduring core” and “our unique contribution to the world of knowledge.”

As librarians and archivists redefine ourselves and better articulate how we add value, as we break down long established barriers in our processes, spaces and services, we need to include our most unique collections.  We regularly leverage quickly evolving trends in the information environment by refocusing on the needs and preferences of our users in the context of very real competition and economic difficulty.  In this framework, libraries can embrace their special collections and archives as a locus of distinction, experimentation and core value.  The time has come for libraries to integrate special collections into the flow in every aspect of our work.

Distinctive Signifiers

Libraries and librarians are constantly increasing their coolness quotient. American Libraries declares that “The Bunheads are Dead” and celebrates the diversity of backgrounds and work we all do to help people discover information. By adding learning/information commons and coffee bars, participating in social networks, or hiring technically oriented, experimental, responsive, and adaptable information professionals, libraries strive to stay relevant.  Special Collections areas and the librarians and archivists working in them are similarly adapting to change, focusing on users and experimenting with technology[3].  In many cases, however, they are going at it independently, because they are in separate departments with the special materials.

Today’s archivists and librarians aren’t just cool because we have mad technology skills, because our place has the best coffee and sweet comfy chairs or because we are über-helpful.  We also have the coolest stuff.  What is fundamental to our shared purpose, critical to our central mission, and key to our very identity is our ability to connect our communities to knowledge and the raw materials that inspire knowledge; and those resources exist concretely in our collections.

“As we increasingly share a collective collection of books, it is the special collections that will distinguish our institutions.”[4] The rawest representations of human endeavor and the building blocks of new knowledge are the rare materials and primary sources in our special collections and archives.  These collections are often developed around niche interests and grounded in localized expertise.  They not only address the specific informational needs of their constituency, but also distinguish their institution in the larger research community.  African-American cookbooks are collected at the University of Alabama; Willa Cather‘s manuscripts, letters, and photographs can be found at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; video and audio records in the Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis Dance Collection are hosted at Ohio University; and digital assets of teaching and research are held by MIT in DSpace[5].  Public and special libraries also hold collections unique to their communities that distinguish them around the world. The Boston Public Library and the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are just two high-profile examples.  These libraries stand out from their peers because of their particular collections.  As Nicholas Barker remarks in his introduction to Celebrating Research, “To be unique in some definable way, however recondite, makes [a library] the object of an attention that it would not otherwise attract.”

Connecting our users to information captured in our collective collections is the shared central challenge in our information-laden, dynamic, instant-gratification environment.  As professionals working in libraries with special collections and archives, exposing our singular collections is our unique contribution to the broader world of knowledge.  We must do this in the context of trends in the field, including enhancing teaching and learning, increasing efficiency and productivity in creating access, and seizing opportunities presented by technology.

Improving Teaching and Learning

Information seeking is personal.  Users can be motivated by the paper that is due the next day, a group with which they identify, or a personal experience or interest.  In her November 5, 2008 post on this blog, Ellie Collier discusses “sticky ideas” and the value of simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories.  Special collections and archives contain locally relevant, unique materials and are a rich source for those kinds of stories.  In an academic library, the university archives holds materials from the past that reflect today’s student experience.  A public library can connect materials about the immigrants’ lives in the 1900s with the situation of modern-day migrant workers’ families in their community.

Primary sources and other research materials from special collections can get learners thinking critically about how a source relates to their own information seeking (and generating) behavior.  How is a pioneer’s diary about her experiences on the Oregon Trail like a student’s use of Facebook to document her service trip to Costa Rica?  What is the difference between the actual text of JFK’s address at Rice University on the nation’s space effort and your local newspaper accounts of it, and how does that compare to watching President Obama’s inauguration speech on YouTube and watching CNN’s analysis of it the next day?  By leveraging and analyzing special collection materials to enhance learning experiences, the context of information creation, analysis and transmission can become highly personalized.

As you contemplate your next discussion with your users about “the many types of useful information [and] how and when to use them”[6] and engage them in an information source’s “back story,” consider using special collections materials to make your point.  Librarians, faculty and archivists should collaborate on instructional opportunities to ensure that all kinds of information sources are considered during research.  Integrating special collections into the classroom experience and at the reference desk can significantly enrich the library’s contribution to teaching and learning.

Streamlining the Creation of Access

In a time of tightening budgets and web-based information seeking, libraries are reenvisioning the role of and activities around resource description.  This shift could directly impact the availability of special collections and archival materials.  In Karen Calhoun’s 2006 report on The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools, she talks about strategies for keeping cataloging relevant including leading resource discovery by developing information systems that “surfac(e) research libraries’ rich collections in ways that will substantially enhance scholarly productivity worldwide.”

On the Record, a report from the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, provides concrete recommendations for the library field.  These include redirecting resources to enable discovery of special collections; creating basic-level access to all unique materials; focusing on practicable, flexible and user-centered description; integrating special collections into discovery arenas; and sharing special collections’ metadata and authority records[7]. To me this is a clear call to action to redirect cataloging resources to expose hidden special collections and archives, and to integrate discovery of these materials alongside that of our other collections.

While the broader library world considers directing more resources to exposing hidden collections, the archival community is also working to get more collections into the hands of the users more quickly.  In 2003, ARL published the white paper Hidden Collections, Scholarly Barriers, which notes that “the cost to scholarship and society of having so much of our cultural record sitting on shelves, inaccessible to the public, represents an urgent need of the highest order to be addressed by ARL and other libraries.”  Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner’s article “More Product, Less Process” takes the archival community to task for the problem of hidden collections.  They suggest that archivists “give higher priority, in practice, to serving the perceived needs of our collections than to serving the demonstrable needs of our constituents.”  Many in the archival community are refocusing their processing work to expedite access by undertaking only necessary arrangement, minimal preservation steps and sufficient description to promote use.

This new focus has cut to the core of activity in Special Collections and Archives. Some Special Collections have focused on creating collection-level records for all collections, processed and unprocessed, for their library catalogs.  Others are facing the challenges of providing access to minimally processed or unprocessed collections, such as materials security, researcher frustration and processing on-demand.  Archivists are setting aside perfection and learning to embrace the inherent messiness of archival records in order to put access first.  This places the onus back on researchers to find specifics and meaning in massive collections.  We are redefining ourselves from gatekeepers and interpreters of history to facilitators of access[8].

If we could combine the transformation that is taking place in our cataloging departments with the transition in archival practice, libraries could create a revolution in access.  The result will be an explosion of unique descriptive information that could be used to discover distinctive collections worldwide.  The original cataloging skills (analytical and descriptive) that catalogers have honed on circulating library materials can be redeployed (with minimal retraining) to assist with the arrangement and description of significant amounts of unprocessed collections.  Aptitude for manipulating, managing and reusing structured metadata can unlock the unrealized potential of our Encoded Archival Description finding aids.  Catalogers’ understanding of data normalization and metadata mapping can pull data out of home-grown archival description tools and deposit it in places where it can be manipulable and discoverable in user-friendly access systems.  By reenvisioning the work in cataloging and in archives, libraries will be able to offer greater discoverability for their most precious resources.

Web 2.0

Enhanced discoverability can only be truly realized when libraries develop tools that expose the descriptive work of catalogers and archivists to the surface of the Web.  This is where those tech-savvy information professionals come in.  Many special collections librarians and archivists are trying to open online dialogs about their materials with users.  Archives blogs are growing in number (check out the Society of North Carolina Archivists’  blogroll for a sample from North Carolina).  However, blogs’ reach still tends to be limited to existing users or those who seek out the archives and exposure is only on highlighted collections.

The Next Generation Finding Aids research group at the University of Michigan is exploring “new online collaborative technologies, such as filtering and recommender systems, [to] allow for new methods of interacting with and experiencing primary sources.”  Statistics from their test bed, The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections, demonstrate that even a project with a very limited (but passionate) user base can result in significant attention and engagement, particularly when it comes to users contributing descriptive information about materials.[9] Meanwhile the Triangle Research Library Network (TRLN) in North Carolina is investigating whether indexing Encoded Archival Description metadata in its shared catalog can bring combined discoverability to archival collections as it has for circulating materials.  Early challenges have exposed the differences that exist in archival descriptive practice that will need to be overcome to enable cross searching of archival finding aids.

Addressing the challenge from another direction, libraries are realizing increased access after two decades of digitizing their special collections and archives.  Digital copies of selected items are available in a wide variety of institution-based digital repositories and content management systems.  Many of these efforts have been “boutique” or highly focused projects to digitize cherry-picked items.  Just as item-level preservation has been identified as an unsustainable practice in “More Product, Less Process” (MPLP), selective digitization projects have left “our vast collections represented by a relatively small number of gorgeous images, lovingly selected, described, and presented in deep web portals.”[10] If we are to truly explode access to special collections materials, we need to take a less discerning approach to digitizing.

Following on MPLP, libraries are now beginning to test models for mass digitization of special collections materials.  Shifting Gears: Gearing Up to Get Into the Flow, an essay reflecting on the Digitization Matters forum, encourages libraries to scan for access, scan on demand, scan whole collections or representative chunks, describe scanned items minimally, and focus on quantity and discoverability.  In addition, the authors suggest that “increasing access to special collections needs to be programmatically embedded across the enterprise.  Continuing to give these activities ‘special project’ status implies that providing access is not mission-essential.”  The bottom line: exposing special collections is not a Special Collections problem; it is an enterprise-wide opportunity.

A few institutions have taken on the challenge.  The Smithsonian Archives of American Art received a Terra Foundation for American Art grant to digitize entire collections “with equipment designed specifically for increased levels of production” and to describe materials in aggregations rather than at the item level. The University of Wisconsin Digital Collections has developed a streamlined production model that has reduced their digitizing costs from $1.53 per page to $0.33 per page[11]; however, in usability testing they found that students “reported wanting MORE not LESS metadata.”[12] Experiments with providing digitized images with minimal metadata embody the sacrifice made when choosing quantity over quality.

The Library of Congress found that enlisting users in the description of materials may counteract the initial lack of rich item-level metadata.  As reported in For the Common Good the Library made two collections of photographs available online in the Flickr Commons, inviting users to contribute enhanced descriptions.  According to the report, “7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos by 2,562 unique Flickr accounts. ….  More than 500 Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) records have been enhanced with new information provided by the Flickr Community.”  With engagement like that, why agonize over description and subject headings?  The ability of users to connect with collections on this personal level also increases their sense of ownership and relationship to history.  Knowledge-building is borne out of this kind of personalized learning.

Additional archives-based efforts to expose unique collections in the Web 2.0 environment are listed on the ArchivesNext blog.  To most effectively contribute their distinctive building blocks of knowledge to the broader research environment, however, libraries cannot relegate digitization and discovery innovation to special projects in Special Collections.  Alongside realigning the description and data-structure expertise provided by catalogers, libraries must apply the technical, programming and development proficiency in their information technology departments to this challenge.  The expertise cultivated in reference, instructional, outreach, and collection-management staff is also critical to insuring that these efforts are relevant in addressing users’ needs.

Convergence

For libraries to contribute effectively to knowledge-building in their communities, the constructed partition that has set special collections aside as “special” must be dismantled.  It is time to integrate the selection, description, research service and technological activities in every library with those needed to connect users to our most distinctive, unique collections.  Libraries must recognize that while the collections are special and even have special needs, the talents and skills needed to expose them are found library-wide.  Additionally, many special collection materials are now born digital and do not require physical segregation in our traditional Special Collections units.  Further, enterprise-wide effort is even more critical to born-digital collections’ exposure and survival.  Users just want the best information for their task and they want it to be available all in the same place.

The Research Library Group outlines a continuum of collaboration in libraries, archives and museums (LAMs) that begins with contact between two entities, moves through cooperation and coordination to collaboration and eventually arrives at convergence.  As LAMs move through the continuum, they grow towards shared investment and risk, but realize more profound benefits.  When collaboration becomes convergence, shared activity becomes infrastructure.[13] In today’s libraries, we need convergence around special collections that erases our existing silos.

Special Collections and Archives may sense a loss of their unique identity during such a transformation.  Partners in other library units may resist activity previously outside their purview. Yet sharing responsibility for our distinctive, valued and unique collections will raise the profile of the whole library and, most importantly, benefit our users.

Special collections reflect our enduring identities by defining who we were, informing what we will become, and distinguishing our communities.  As critical components in the knowledge conversation, special collections must be integrated with other resources, and exposed in the same venues and pathways.  As collections that each library can uniquely contribute to the overall research and learning environment, they must be mainstreamed and acknowledged as mission-critical.  It is only the collections that are special in Special Collections, not the work of making them accessible and not our users.  For the sake of our users and our libraries we need to stop treating them separately.

What you can do:

• Selectors, collection managers and branch librarians, talk to the curators in Special Collections and Archives about how you can help with strategically targeted collection building efforts. What makes a relevant, distinctive collection in your community?
• Catalogers and metadata experts, discuss the metadata generation, manipulation and transformation needs for special collections with lead processors. You’d be surprised at how much assistance you can provide but be prepared to face big challenges and quantities.
• Access and delivery services, you can’t imagine the expertise you can share regarding collection maintenance, security and tracking until you have that cup of coffee with the reference staff in Special Collections.
• Reference and information services, engage your Special Collections colleagues in your instruction activities. Consider cross-training on the reference desks, offer to cover a reference shift in Special Collections. Special Collections and Archives folks, rotate into service on the main reference desk.
• Information technology, imagine the opportunities! There are databases, finding aids and home grown systems to integrate, improve and streamline. Let Special Collections offer you a challenge that will make managing server space and device inventories look easy.
• Digital initiatives, if you want content, we’ve got content. Allow Special Collections to be your playground for implementing new, cool tools. We’ve got digital objects coming out of our ears. Can you get them onto desktops, mobile devices and course management systems?
• Special collections and archivist colleagues, share your most interesting challenges, be willing to let others muck around in your stuff, be articulate and practical about your needs and think creatively about what you have to offer your colleagues in return.

Thanks to Josh Ranger and Bill Landis for their ideas, feedback and careful reading of a draft of this piece and to Hilary Davis and Kim Leeder from ItLwtLP for their encouragement, questions and suggestions for each version. Thanks to Hilary and Brett Bonfield for last minute technical assistance.  Special thanks to Ben Carter who stayed home to provide technical support and thwart bad behavior plugins.

[2] For an interesting discussion on the knowledge building conversation and the library’s role in participatory networks, read the Information Institute of Syracuse’s technology brief Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation for ALA.  Not only do they envelop special collections as key aspects of the conversation but they also address the importance of innovating technology “at the core of the library.”

[3] For more on reenvisioning archival identity, see Mark Green’s inaugural presidential address for SAA “Strengthening Our Identity, Fighting Our Foibles.”

[4] Quoted from Ricky Erway’s “Supply and Demand:  Special Collections and Digitisation” for Liber Quarterly, 2008.  Many variations of this sentence have been appearing in various commentaries since the publication of ARL’s anniversary publication Celebrating Research with Nicholas Barker’s persuasive introduction.

[5] These collections (and more) were highlighted by their institutions as distinctive signifiers of their collections for ARL’s Celebrating Research:  Rare and Special Collections from the Membership of the Association of Research Libraries in celebration of the Association’s 75^th anniversary.

[6] Quoted from Ellie Collier’s “In Praise of the Internet: Shifting Focus and Engaging Critical Thinking Skills” In the Library with the Lead Pipe, January 7, 2009.

[7] Found in Recommendations 2.1.1-2.1.5 on pages 22 and 23 of the Library of Congress’s On the Record.

[8] The self identification of archivists as “gatekeepers of history” is interrogated by Barbara L. Craig, in “Canadian Archivists:  What Types of People Are They,”, Ann Pederson, “Understanding Ourselves & Others:  Australian Archivists & Temperament,” and Charles R. Schultz, “Archivists:  What Types of People Are They?”  Provenance 14: (1996).

[9] For more on the Polar Bear Expedition Project, please refer to the article by Magia Ghetu Krause and Elizabeth Yakel, “Interaction in Virtual Archives: The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections Next Generation Finding Aid” American Archivist 70:2, Fall – Winter 2007, pages 282-314.

[10] Quoted from Ricky Erway and Jennifer Schaffner’s Shifting Gears:  Gearing up to Get Into the Flow from OCLC Programs and Research, 2007.

[11] Which Joshua Ranger told us at the 2006 MAC Fall Symposium.

[12] Reported at the SAA Meeting in 2008 and in a handout to OCLC’s Member’s Council in February 2008. While the work at the The Smithsonian Archives of American Art is groundbreaking in scope and methodology, Ranger’s work explores how any library can make an effort towards quick and dirty digitization and the ramifications.

[13] For more on the collaboration continuum see Beyond the Silos of the LAMs: Collaboration Among Libraries, Archives and Museums by Diane Zorich, Gunter Waibel and Ricky Erway for OCLC Programs and Research, 2008.

All Gizah Pyramids. Image from liber's photo stream.

“…i [sic] only renew [my ALA membership] out of a sense of professional obligation, and also because of the fear that i’ll [sic] put it on my resume and get busted as not being a member.” –c-dog

Membership in the American Library Association means professionals are bound together by the tenets of librarianship. Technically, this means we commit to these tenets in the form of dues payable to ALA. Being a recent library school graduate I am new to ALA membership as well as organizational involvement. However, I find that the previous statement points to perils inherent within ALA that could, if not addressed, lead to the organization’s downfall.

This is not a problem that has gone unnoticed by many within the organization. This year, I was part of the ALA Emerging Leaders program–a program intended to create more active ALA members and participants. In this program six Emerging Leaders projects centered around membership recruitment and retention issues within ALA and its various divisions. Other membership and participation initiatives include current ALA president Jim Rettig’s member participation initiative, not to mention the New Members Round Table (NMRT). Drawing on my Emerging Leaders experience, I would like to further examine ALA membership structures and provide suggestions that will help to topple this perceived “professional obligation” of ALA membership. We need to create an inspired and invested community of librarians and professionals who will feel proud to be an ALA member and to serve their organization.

In order to understand my suggestions, it’s important I provide some background on the current ALA climate and membership. There seem to be three general categories of ALA members, in the form of a pyramid. The base level, level 1, consists of those who pay dues and who have minimal investment in ALA as a professional organization; the middle and smaller group of individuals, level 2, consists of those who pay dues, attend conferences and are nominally to marginally involved in the organization; and the tip of the pyramid, level 3, consists of those who pay dues, belong to divisions and serve on committees. As I understand it, the shape includes the largest amount of members in level 1 and the fewest amount of members in level 3.

The basic problem with current membership and participation initiatives is that they do not target the largest population of ALA members, level 1. Members in level 1 are those who are most apt to say they are “professionally obligated” to pay their dues. Instead of bringing the movement to members, initiatives like the Emerging Leaders program, Jim Rettig’s “Craigslist of opportunities for members to get involved in ALA”  and the NMRT are initiatives that pro-active, motivated individuals will seek out. If we were able to mobilize level 1 ALA members by bringing community and participation to them, we could create a larger sense of community investment as a whole and dispel those attitudes of membership as “professional obligation.” Over time, this model of community investment would lead to a flattening of the ALA membership pyramid—changing the shape of ALA membership into one that is a globe of overlapping and active communities. In order to create this membership model, ALA, its members and leadership should investigate how to involve level 1 members in association activities and thereby create an organization comprised of a richer and more diverse professional community.

The financial membership model of ALA creates a certain attitude among members. Their investment in the organization is only as important as the amount of their check. Instead, ALA might consider adopting another membership model that incorporates service to the organization as a stipulation of membership. This is the model of both the National Honor Society and Beta Club. Requiring members to serve their professional community can only create a stronger community that better represents its largest constituent base. Examples of this service might be acting as a guest editor for a portion of American Libraries or other journals published by ALA divisions, writing op-eds for journals, or otherwise serving ALA in capacities, as they are able. Changing the parameters of ALA membership is something toward which we need to strive. While this service model may not be feasible to adopt for a good many years, there are other issues that we can address more directly.

Cost is a major deterrent for the increased involvement of many level 1 and level 2 members. Paying membership dues to ALA and its numerous divisions can be quite expensive. This deters individuals from serving on committees (one must be a member of a division to serve on a committee of that division) and contributing to ALA’s general body of work (one must also pay conference registration and travel to serve on committees). New librarians struggle with student loan debt and as a result do not have room in their budgets for personal memberships. They may also work for libraries affected by slashed budgets and national policy decisions and funding practices. In response to these conditions many libraries are no longer able to support their employees’ professional membership costs. This means that individuals must use their personal funds to pay for membership in ALA and its divisions. Coupled with travel costs to conferences, it is simply financially unfeasible for library professionals to participate on a higher level than they do (even before recent economic collapse).

A simple way to make conference attendance and professional development easier for those who cannot afford to travel is to create webcasts of conferences and workshops. We are in the age of virtual conferences and seminars, and they have proven successful. It should plain and simple be the standard that ALA conference programs be made accessible virtually. If pricing is an issue, ALA might consider creating a price structure for “virtual” attendance to ALA conferences. Members and their employers would be better able to afford this model of conference attendance and involvement. If ALA were truly committed to including level 1 members, then it would create and implement ways for individuals to engage virtually by using a combination of videocasting, chat programs, message boards, and other participatory and collaborative applications. Because of their ability to participate in professional programs and conference activities, virtual participants will feel as if they have more stake in ALA than they did before. Consequently, we will see these members begin to actively seek other avenues of participation with ALA.

The level 1 ALA constituent is not the only constituent that ALA should reach and better utilize to create an organization that reflects a community beyond “professional obligation.” There are level 2 participants who attend conferences. The next logical step would be for these members to engage in service opportunities such as sitting on a committee or hosting and presenting at professional programs. One way for ALA to show its commitment to these level 2 members would be to mandate a seat on every ALA committee for a new member or conference attendee. Soliciting member service via ALA governance and policy will show that the organization as a whole is committed to the needs of new members, member recruitment and member retention.

However, once a member begins to serve ALA as a committee member cost can still be an object. For level 2 members to become more engaged and sit on committees this object must be addressed. Most ALA committees require members to attend two conferences each year. Instead of mandating in-person attendance for committee members at both Midwinter and Annual Conferences, shouldn’t we be encouraging the use of those collaborative tools and technologies (chat, wikis, web sharing applications, online conferences, etc.) that we as professionals tout? If ALA were to move to a model of mandatory in-person committee participation at one conference a year, costs would be cut in half for committee members, thereby enabling more new professionals to better afford conference attendance and committee participation.

Conferences themselves need to adopt new models to attract greater participation. In addition to the mix of meetings, presentations and workshops that comprise ALA Midwinter and Annual meetings, hands-on professional service opportunities would enhance conference goers’ experiences. Instead of passively sitting in a conference session, librarians and conference attendees could engage in service learning workshops or service challenges. A group of professionals would be tasked to create a body of work to serve the organization or create a professional development tool in one day. The service could be the creation of a new resource guide, a new web portal, or a new best practice statement. Whatever the participants created, it would be a piece of professional work as well as enable professionals to network with others in their areas of interest. Producing a body of work will be more professionally satisfying to some conference goers, and will give a diversity of participation and service opportunities that will appeal to a larger audience.

New members will not be recruited nor will members remain active within ALA unless the organization as a whole engages in dialog about how to remain a viable, interesting, and diverse professional community. We need to advocate for and attempt to implement membership model and policy changes within ALA. These changes will encourage greater member investments in their organization and help to reshape the ALA pyramid into a globally shaped membership that is dedicated to ALA’s success. This will make our association a more diverse and stimulating organization of which we can all be proud.

We need to think creatively and to create programs and workshops that embrace virtual participation. We need to break the mold of traditional ALA membership. The next time you attend a conference or a committee meeting, bring up these issues and ask questions. Propose and implement pilot service projects at a conference and publish your successes and challenges. Help to create new models of participation and share them with your professional community. The more experimenting we do at a grassroots level the more we are able to best find the models of participation, service, and governance for a sustainable and successful ALA. By continuing to adopt these changes in ALA, the membership pyramid will eventually flatten and the globally shaped ALA membership can form.

Scenes From The MOMA: sometaithurts © LarimdaME / CC-BY-NC

In 1968, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, a couple of newlywed architects, had the humility to laugh with Las Vegas rather than at it. A few years earlier, Tom Wolfe had written,

Las Vegas has become, just as Bugsy Siegel dreamed, the American Monte Carlo-without any of the inevitable upper-class baggage of the casinos… At Monte Carlo there are still Wrong Forks, Deficient Accents, Poor Tailoring, Gauche Displays, Nouveau Richeness, Cultural Aridity-concepts unknown in Las Vegas. For the grand debut of Monte Carlo as a resort in 1879 the architect Charles Garnier designed an opera house for the Place du Casino; and Sarah Bernhardt read a symbolic poem. For the debut of Las Vegas as a resort in 1946 Bugsy Siegel hired Abbot and Costello, and there, in a way, you have it all.

For Wolfe, this was neither a good nor a bad thing, but many architects found Las Vegas and what it represented (such as Route 66′s commercial strips and the emergence of suburban Levittowns) less than inspiring. Venturi and Scott Brown thought architects should “suspend judgment on it in order to learn and, by learning, to make subsequent judgment more sensitive.”

Though relatively young—Venturi was 43, Scott Brown, 37—they were established and confident. Influenced as much by Pop artists as by Rome’s piazzas, they believed Las Vegas could help their peers “learn a new receptivity to the tastes and values of other people and a new modesty.” For them, the charm of Las Vegas was inextricable from its neon-steepled wedding chapels (“credit cards accepted”) and reproductions of Venus and David with “slight anatomical exaggerations;” they described the exaggeratedly phallic sign at the Dunes as “an erection 22 stories high that pulsates at night,” yet still declared it “more chaste” than the sign for the Aladdin. They saw in Las Vegas an architecture that acknowledged Americans’ desire for pleasure and catered to their taste.

Venturi and Scott Brown first published their thoughts on Las Vegas in the March 1968 issue of Architectural Forum. A few months later they turned their article into a graduate studio course at Yale: for the fall semester, thirteen students and three instructors—Venturi, Scott Brown, and their partner, Steven Izenour—“spent three weeks in the library, four days in Los Angeles, and ten days in Las Vegas,” followed by ten weeks back in New Haven. In 1972, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour documented their article and course, and detailed their philosophy of Pop-influenced architecture, in Learning from Las Vegas, “a collage of passages, short essays, maps and diagrams… meant to evoke the lived experience of the Strip (and) challenge traditional two-dimensional modes of representation.” The book included frames from a movie, tourist brochures, and their students’ studio notes.

Like Learning from Las Vegas, Sophie Brookover and Elizabeth Burns’s Pop Goes the Library is part textbook and part manifesto. Instead of growing out of an article and a studio, it grew out of a blog, also called Pop Goes the Library, that Brookover founded in 2004 and has since expanded to include eight regular contributors, including her co-author, Burns. In place of studio notes, Pop Goes the Library has survey responses from librarians—they call these “Voices from the Field”—that read very much like comments on a blog post. And, as Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour did in Learning from Las Vegas, Brookover and Burns in Pop Goes the Library argue that understanding, anticipating, and accommodating popular taste is a professional responsibility:

You don’t have to like pop culture to embrace its importance in your library. You read that right: You can be uninterested in pop culture, or even harbor a bit of antipathy toward at least some aspects of it, and still put it to use in your library’s collections, services, and programming. So take a deep breath—if you don’t watch American Idol, have no interest in anime, or think most Top 40 music is unlistenable—it’s okay. Obviously, we encourage you to enjoy a varied media diet and to experiment with your listening, viewing, and reading habits—after all, having access to your library’s holdings is one of the small luxuries of working there, right? But we recognize that not every pop culture trend is going to float everyone’s boat. That’s reality, and it’s perfectly fine. What’s not fine is dismissing pop culture as something that’s of interest only to teens (or any other demographic group) to rationalize its perceived unimportance.

Brookover, the Library Media Specialist at Eastern Regional High School in Voorhees, New Jersey, and Burns, the Head of Youth Services for the New Jersey State Library for the Blind and Handicapped, have written a book “about identifying and harvesting the power of your community’s pop culture… about your library, your community, and how to build better and stronger relationships between the two using pop culture,” which they define as “whatever people in your community are talking, thinking, and reading about”—an intentionally broad definition. Anything and everything can be pop; readers are taught how to identify what pops in their community, as well as how to make it as accessible as possible for their neighbors.

The book is itself as accessible as possible. Where Learning from Las Vegas is occasionally tongue—in-cheek-like Warhol’s soup cans it is a high art appreciation of low art—Pop Goes the Library is written like the well crafted blog entries that Brookover and Burns and their blogging collaborators produce, in general, a few times each week. Imagine an articulate, pragmatic how to article in a glossy magazine or a great email from a friend, useful yet chatty, full of rhetorical questions and exclamation points. For instance, here’s a typical passage, taken from its chapter on advocacy, marketing, public relations, and outreach: “Since outreach is about going where you patrons are, don’t forget the patron at home. We don’t mean instituting door-to-door outreach projects! Just don’t forget the person sitting in front of his or her computer. Knowing that your website reaches a sizeable portion of your audience, why not view it as an outreach opportunity?”

There is a message, and that message is important, but Brookover and Burns have decided not to dress that message up in theory or historical context. Instead, they focus on combining practical advice with serious fun: Melanie Griffith’s character in Working Girl provides an example of applied research; Angelina Jolie’s transformation from wild child into latter day Mia Farrow illustrates good public relations; and Johnny Cash, David Bowie, martinis, and iPods are listed as celebrities and trends that are Cool (Kenny Chesney, KC & the Sunshine Band, cosmopolitans, and Zunes are Not Cool).

If you’re not interested in pop culture, it may be tempting to dismiss the importance of this book’s message or to overlook its ambitiousness. That would be a mistake: Brookover and Burns cover most of the important lessons on librarianship that can be taught in a book: creating a niche; building a collection; using technology; and developing crowd-pleasing programming, among others. As an added bonus, their writing style is as much fun to read as Michael Buckland, S.R. Ranganathan, Jesse Shera, or Elaine Svenonius. (Speaking of pop culture: does anyone know if Elaine is related to Ian?)

Like Learning from Las Vegas, Pop Goes the Library is meant as an example of the ideas it is promoting. In addition to its pop-inflected, chatty tone and “Voices from the Field,” it includes interviews and guest essays as sidebars, an extensive list of links and other resources, a calendar of events for pop-related programming, and it features a companion wiki. Some of this works marvelously—think Martha Stewart meets Jesse Shera—and some of it seems less effective. As with Learning from Las Vegas, there may be a need to publish a revised edition before this book reaches its full potential. The first edition of Learning from Las Vegas was expensive, included pieces that were not central to its thesis, and suffered from some design flaws. It still deserved the attention it got, and would likely have remained influential had its authors not released a smaller, more tightly edited, and less expensive revised edition, but it’s likely the work they put into their revisions helped their book remain a generalist classic.

If Brookover and Burns decide to produce a revised edition, they might consider:

• Making the sidebars into traditional sidebars, with text adjacent to the narrative. Right now, the text is periodically interrupted, a guest writer takes over for a couple of pages, and then the narrative resumes. Because adjacent sidebars are tough to include in a small paperback, it may have made more sense to include these pieces at the end of chapters or in the appendix. Another option: go larger. Edward Tufte’s beautifully designed and manufactured, full color, hard back books on information design have about the same retail price as Pop Goes the Library. It would be fun to see what Brookover and Burns would do with added space and color, and with better print quality;
• Deleting anonymous responses from “Voices from the Field.” It didn’t seem like the anonymous responses were needed, since none of the responses seemed to require anonymity, and dozens of respondents to this survey identified themselves and were comfortable with attribution. It is also useful to know what type of library the respondent is referring to, as well as its location;
• Making “Voices from the Field” easier to read. The responses are presented in a tiny typeface against a grey background, which is not a reader-friendly combination;
• Focusing as much attention on recipes as ingredients: that is, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of exceptionally good ideas, but little explanation of how to assign those ideas a priority or sequence;
• Providing a conclusion. The book just sort of ends after the chapter on pop programming year-round.

It’s worth mentioning that Sophie Brookover lives in a neighboring town and she gave me my copy of Pop Goes the Library. However, we’ve only met once and I’ve enjoyed her writing for a number of years. Her generosity was certainly welcome and appreciated, but not enough to compromise my objectivity. The fact is, I very much like this book’s execution and I strongly agree with its message: we’re going to remain relevant by acquiring and marketing materials, and by providing programs, that appeal to the people whose libraries we steward. You don’t have to like every popular item in the collection, you just have to make sure it’s available.

As Denise Scott Brown wrote a year before the publication of Learning from Las Vegas,  “…liking the whole of pop culture is as irrational as hating the whole of it, and it calls forth the vision of a general and indiscriminate hopping on the pop bandwagon, where everything is good and judgment is abandoned rather than deferred. Yet artists, architects, actors, must judge, albeit, one hopes, with a sigh. After a decent interval, suitable criteria must grow out of the new source. Judgment is merely deferred to make subsequent judgments more sensitive.” Scott Brown and her co-authors succeeded, not just in deferring judgment about architecture, but in making sensitive subsequent judgments about their own work. Brookover and Burns excel at figuring out what people want and delivering it to them, so they’re certainly capable of doing the same. They’ve already done a wonderful job of creating a book that everyone who cares about libraries should read. And they may well have a book, in this version or a revision, that attracts a far greater audience to the sort of questions we ask ourselves on a regular basis.

Reaching a general audience is a tall order. Few fields have a Stephen Jay Gould, Paul Krugman, or Atul Gawande, serious practitioners who document the major issues of their field in popular essays that are collected in bestselling books. In Pop Goes the Library, we have an encouraging sign that librarianship might someday produce its own bestselling scholar.