Week 8: Buck the System or Reform It from Within?

Last week in IST 511 we didn't have a lecture, but got to hear from two great librarians. I am sure they didn't think of themselves as being strikingly different from one another, as librarians tend to really band together as colleagues. But the contrast for me was stark.

One librarian's style bordered on rebellion. Her aim was to redefine librarianship itself, and if what she did sometimes had nothing to do with librarianship (or preconceived notions of librarianship), so be it. She emphasized creativity, thinking so far outside the box you might throw the box away, and a passion to truly make librarianship what you want it to be. She had planted a garden on library property, brings a dog to the library for kids to check out, and she aims to create an intriguing library that isn't in fact a traditional library. I'd like to call it a "non-library," but I think she'd prefer a classier name.

The next librarian was more traditional in the sense that she tries her best to work within the system given, making what change she can. I could relate to her in the sense that she got her MLIS education later in life than most of her colleagues, since I am 28. I also can identify with her urge to pick up any task in the library that needs attention. Her devotion bordered on workaholism, but she seemed grateful to offer her services not just in her community, but nationally, carrying out virtual reference across the country.

These two contrasts in librarianship made me reflect on what type of attitude I will take on as a librarian. Do I work within the system, trying to reform it? Is that selling out? Do I rail against pre-conceived notions of the profession, which might put me at odds with administrations? Is this kind of rebellious attitude even feasible in an academic library setting? These are all questions I struggle with.

This conundrum of rebellion versus reform seems particularly fitting given our current political and economic environment in America. We are a nation formed by rebellion, after all. But at what point does rebellion become merely rebellion for rebellion's sake? There is immense disruption caused by rebellion, and almost every rebellion has at its root some unjustifiable pretense.

But it is far more interesting to be confused... I'd be more concerned if I had no internal debates about the future.

Week 7... Déjà Vu

This last week we had a lecture about "information organization." This lecture was pretty familiar, because I am currently taking a course on information organization, IST 616. It's my favorite course so far, besides the wonderful IST 511 of course. But Prof. Lankes managed to put a unique spin on it and fit it into the big picture.

I first learned that I should really stop calling my 616 course "cataloging," as it's really not the same thing as information organization. Oops, my bad.

But a big part of the organization is wading into the sea of acronyms and trying not to drown. It's not that there's just a lot of acronyms, either, but that there's lots of layers of different concepts, each housing lots of different acronyms. I have a sense of what FRBR is and does, but where does it fit in? It's not a schema or encoding language/format, but I know it has certain rules, and I know it has a role to play in MARC. But it's not a cataloging standard, like AACR2(R2). Wikipedia calls it a "conceptual entity-relationship model." See what I mean?

A more coherent part of the subject is that the end goal is facilitating intellectual access to anything. That "anything" can be a book, an article, a paragraph within an article, etc. Of course, the rub here is that librarians use controlled vocabulary, and users of the library use natural (every day) language. This can create problems with users getting access, since we're using two different languages. This is why attention to users and natural language is a big deal when we are talking about how to classify documents or document-like objects.

Another important goal is collocation. We've all had collocation events, where we go to the library thinking we want a certain book on a certain subject. We go to the stacks, and we find out the book we thought was great turns out to be a dud. But then we check the book next to it, and suddenly we see this new book is perfect. This experience is hard to replicate in an online catalog. The whole point of the catalog is to find an exact match. It can't read your mind or just throw books at you to recreate the collocation experience. I've had some ideas about how to make collocation possible in an online environment. The best one involves virtual mapping of a digital or physical collection. So what we're talking about here is when a user pulls up that specific book, he/she will be presented with an interface that is a virtual bookshelf. The specific book that was searched for will be highlighted, but the other titles' spines will be on display next to it, just like a normal bookshelf. The user can highlight the other books to get summaries or what have you. That way, collocation has the same sort of feel as a traditional walk through the stacks.

Serendipity and Planned Chaos

As I continue the struggle to find meaningful and desired employment, I keep getting hit over the head with the fact that it's hard to get a job when you're looking for a job. What I mean is the jobs people really want come to them, sometimes when they already have a job, and sometimes when they aren't looking for a job at all. The key to this serendipity is knowing a lot of people. A lot. So, knowing this, instead of looking for jobs in a traditional sense, I am trying to get to know as many librarians and LIS professors as I can. To me, this is better than a job search, and seems far more promising.

That said, this is a silly way to run a country's job market (that is to say, no one's running it). Part of me loves the fact that you can know people, be totally unqualified, and still get ahead. Maybe that's one of the final remnants of the American Dream. But it's unfair and unsustainable. What we really need is an actual way to find jobs and hire qualified people. I know: it's a revolutionary idea, but it has never been done. An astonishingly high number of job postings are bogus or outright scams. Even if a job is legitimate, the people on the employer end are usually scanning for keywords, or looking at aesthetic qualities of documents, or randomly picking people. Maybe they pick the first person who applied. Maybe they liked their name. I might get HR hate mail for saying these things, but I am basing my statements on countless HR people I've known or talked to (or the more usual case of someone who is in charge of hiring with little or no HR experience). If they know someone, they will take that person over the unknown.

I've heard several truisms lately regarding jobs that are both funny and frightening at the same time. One is that faking it is half the battle during a job or job interview. Yes, I already know this. Still, I don't lie about my abilities. This puts me at a huge disadvantage to everyone else looking for the same job, because they are all lying about their cataloging experience or knowledge of XML. If everyone's lying and we all know it, why even state the qualifications? Why not just say "Hey, if you're an LIS student or grad., apply to this job and we'll have an interview" and let's ditch the exaggerated resumés: you're probably just responding to the font I used or the layout, anyway.

Another truism is that communication is everything. If you are a great public speaker and a salesman, you can get any job. I'm not hating on great orators: they have a place in just about any occupation. But I shouldn't have to be a salesman. There should be some process by where it becomes clear I am right for the job. If that's a CV, a background check, a professional recommendation, or trial, so be it. Let's save the elevator pitches for people who actually need to sell things.

So let me close this post of epic whining by saying that looking for a job is just one more confusing card placed atop the house of cards that we call an economy. Firing a lot of people increases productivity. Increased savings rates among the public spells disaster. Cutting taxes actually costs money (I know, right?). These problems are all here to say, but it has guys like me sitting around thinking, "Does it have to be this way?"

Maybe E-books Aren't the Future

If I had to pick one theme that sums up this blog so far, it's that as librarians (and those of us in training), we really need to overcome our fear of technology. The fear is understandable, but largely irrational. The fear sort of goes like this: technology makes everything digital and intuitive for the user, making the librarian obsolete. This is understandable, because in the modern age we have the classic assembly line analogy. A new machine is produced that can do your job 10 times faster at half the cost. The obvious result is that a lot of assembly line workers are losing their jobs.

There's several problems with this analogy in its application to librarianship, some of which I've hopefully outlined before. But I see this sort of mindset rearing its ugly head any time a new technology is discussed. Most recently, this discussion has centered around e-books.

Let me just come out and say that I'm not a huge fan of e-books, and a lot of people in my program share my reluctance. I don't think we're a particularly irregular representative of the population. Yes, e-books are selling incredibly well, and the growth will eventually be so large that we will all have one. It's well past the early adoption phase, but not yet in the "iPod" phase, where even your grandma has one but still might not know quite how to use it (sadly, this phase is permanent). For the record, I own a Zune. Yes, I know how shameful that is. You might even have to Wikipedia "Zune."

Despite my poor media player choices, I'm not stupid. Eventually resistance will be futile, and I'll have some 3rd generation e-reader that syncs with sports scores and spams me offers for car insurance when I'm trying to read about Teutoburg Forest. But is this the terminus? No! Then we will have some other future to worry about.

What I want people to do is to stop being myopic about the future. We tend to think that a future trend is finality. Who's to say that once e-books become ubiquitous, we won't come up with a way to project legible text via holography onto a good, old-fashioned, hardbound, ever reusable, pulp fiber, acid-free paper book? Or as someone else told me, a type of material that arranges itself to display the text intelligently based on whatever e-book information its given? Think about a library with a collection of empty books, just waiting for users to come in and display whatever they want onto the pages, that they'd otherwise need to pay out the nose for. The information is still the thing of value, and that will never change, whatever the medium or interface.

Once again, technology usually only makes the librarian's job more challenging, not obsolete. The problem is to rise to those challenges, and make your service more valuable, because now it's "worth" more. New shiny things cost lots of money, and there will always be a need for a library to be a "community early adopter," to help those who can't afford said shiny thing in order to really reap some rewards from their hard-earned taxes.

E-Books aren't the future, because the future doesn't exist. The future is always changing, and in fact never really happens. There is only the present. The rest is just stuff that may or may not happen. Why not work on the stuff you can change?

Arriving somewhere... but not here (Week 5)

OK. I'll just admit it. I was trying to come up with a way to make "collection development" sexy and interesting to even the most jaded internet junkie, but I have failed. You're just going to have to walk with me here, and hopefully you'll see the light. You can look at lolcats later.

The thing that will really make collection development interesting, I think, is to skip ahead to the end. That is, the vision that Prof. Lankes has put forth of the library as the publisher of the community. You might not think this vision and collection development have a necessarily strong link. And honestly, today's libraries might reinforce that impression. But as librarians, we could in fact make the library the place where the community goes to create new knowledge.

The key to making that vision become a reality is being in tune with the community's needs. This is far from an easy task. People are increasingly moving their identity, and even their entire social lives, online. Thus, libraries must make the move too. Even if you get a random tweet at 2 a.m. complaining about how you don't have the new Twilight novel (*shiver*), you are providing a way for the community to express its needs in a way that wouldn't happen otherwise. People are blatantly honest online, which can be beneficial when gauging needs. It can also backfire tremendously when abused *cough* Price Chopper.

I also think that in the collection process (i.e. acquisition-> processing-> circulation-> weeding), weeding seems to really stand out as a problem. As a Humanities student, and one who has never thought there is a useless book or useless information, weeding sets my teeth on edge. There's no doubt that it is a vital part of collection development: libraries are only so physically big, so some old stuff has to go. But how on earth do you prioritize that? Even if we go for the stock answer of, "whatever the community doesn't use," how do we know the community won't use it in the future? Perhaps the library has done a bad job of making the community aware of a certain section. Maybe it's a section that is not high-traffic, which has nothing to do with its content. These issues are perplexing.

As it stands now, the library might have to become the community publisher not because of altruism, but from necessity. As new editions of books skyrocket while material budgets decrease, and every library needs more and more licenses, subscriptions, etc., there's just no other real option. I think it would be wonderful to be a librarian that supports local artists. There's great potential for finding the kind of knowledge that would make a home in the library, that it might not otherwise make in the public sphere, where it is based on marketability.