Attempting Elegance

This is brilliant.

When I’m reluctant to take a risk or face something uncomfortable, I ask myself these five questions which, in melodramatic form, I call the “Five Fateful Questions.” They help me think clearly about a situation.

What am I waiting for?
What would I do if I weren’t scared?
What steps would make things easier?
What would I do if I had all the time and money in the world?
What is the worst, and the best, that could happen?

So many library stalemates could be moved forward if we all asked those questions and then honored our responses….

The semester starts on Monday, and as a result there are small hordes of students and parents staring at maps in puzzlement, waiting for books and IDs and paperwork, lining up for pizza and mac and cheese, and generally filling the campus with stressed-out joyful buzz.  The College Libraries are also almost ready to go… or, we will be on Monday, regardless.  In this buzz of chaos, there are some questions I’ve been thinking about that I don’t have time to write full, thoughtful posts on, but which are deserving of some attention:

1. Why are librarians so eager to adopt cutesy gimmicks?  What’s with faux words like “guybrarian” and “gaybrarian” and all of our ridiculous acronyms and names for services that are supposed to be catchy but really are just unprofessional?  Why do we feel so drawn to twee as a profession? Why did it feel so very refreshing to agree that we’d just call it the “new catalog beta test”?
2. Why do so many LIS grad students (or, more specifically, the ones on the internet) seem startled to discover there aren’t many men in their graduate programs? Did they miss the “feminized profession” memo? Have they ever been to a library and looked at the staff?
3. How do we move past the depressing trend of managing library staff by either a) ignoring the problem, b) waiting for the problem to quit or retire, or c) making the problem miserable until it reverts to option b?  If new managers feel that the majority of current and past library managers are modeling ineffective skills, how do we find good mentors to learn from?
4. Why did no one tell me how important it would be to make friends with custodians and carpenters, and where did I miss the course in How To Take Care Of Your Library’s Carpet?
5. Nooks, Kindles, or iPads?  Discuss.
6. What shall I do with the squadron of yellow velvet ropes and stanchions that are in our locked storage room?

Happy semester start, academia.  May you remain sane long enough to get the doors open, the lights on, and the coffee hot.  Remember: So long as the doors are open, the lights are on, and the coffee’s hot, they won’t know how many things you didn’t get done this summer.

In tandem with working on the annual report for the libraries, I’m also doing my self-evaluation for last year.  I feel like an idiot trying to talk about myself this way… I feel very matter-of-fact today.  “I did the budgets.  I made sure the building didn’t fall down.  I ran meetings and wrote reports. I did lots and lots of paperwork.  I played cheerleader and commander in chief in equal parts.  I went to lots and lots of meetings.”  And that seems like the wrong attitude and tone for this task, so I took a break, went upstairs to get the iPad from Carol, and then walked down the stairs with Dan.

Dan is our new Sign Czar (<—- Official Title), charged with applying a style template to them all and reducing their overall number, with an eye to improving passive communication with our users.  He’s taken down dozens of signs, and replaced dozens more.  He’s also removed 2000+ words from our signage.

Can I steal his thunder?  Put “I facilitated succinctness” in my performance evaluation?

That’d probably be wrong. Why do I give away all the fun tasks?  Man, my job’s boring compared to what the librarians do…

Well, that’s done.

Er… wait.

The College Libraries at SUNY Potsdam have a Strategic Plan to drive us through the next 5 years.  And yes, it’s written — done!  Except, not.  If it’s any good, it’s a living document that we’ll use over and over again until we write a new one.  So it’s not done… ever.

But that’s okay.  There’s gotta be something for us to talk about, else we’d never have any meetings, and that’d be a tragedy.

All flippant nonsense aside, this document represents a huge amount of staff time to complete our program review, hours upon hours of one-on-one consultation meetings between the staff and two directors, a lot of thought and research and writing time on my part, feedback from across the Academic Affairs unit of the College, and a whole lot of back-and-forth discussion that led to careful wordsmithing.  And I’m proud of the work we did, and of the work we’re doing in support of our lofty goals.

It’s a good time to be a librarian.

I’m always amused by what sticks with me after a conference.  After two days at the IDS Conference and a half-day meeting with other SUNY library directors, here’s what’s on my brain: Doors.

Specifically, librarians and doors.  I was chatting with a library friend at the IDS conference, and she revealed that she has no door on her office — not in a way that provides privacy.  And she supervises several staff members.  I was floored (to use a bad pun of an architectural analogy).  How can we expect librarians to function effectively and efficiently in management positions without the tools of the trade?  I’ve always believed that an environment that allows privacy, respect, and confidentiality is just as much a management tool as basic skills in project management, budgeting, writing performance plans, and communicating effectively are.  How can you do the other work without the door?  (Walls are good, too.)  I have taken it as given that if you supervise staff, you have a door (and walls), and as such am building some construction costs into my budget for 2010-2011 to accommodate the staffing changes that arose from our reorganization — we have need of walls and a door in our Collection Management unit.

But I know lots of librarians who work in cube farms, and do so successfully and with a minimum of strife with Irritating Cube Neighbors.  I also know I’ve been lucky in my own jobs to have adequate and effective offices that suited my role in the organization, and that I’ve worked for organizations that have reinforced my own sense that this is The Right Way To Do It.  So I’m curious:  How ubiquitous is my situation, compared to my friend’s?

Do you have an office with walls and a door?
Do you supervise staff?
Do you think one way works better than the other?

I don’t expect any scientific results… but if you’re willing to share, I’d love to know more about the examples being lived, and how that works for you.

I had two moments yesterday that gave me pause.  It’s annual report season, and my own self-evaluation for my performance review is in draft form, always open on my laptop. So I’m reflecting on accomplishments and failures, successes and places that need more work, just as a general background state of being.  And then I caught myself staring at a space problem, thinking about solutions and my opinions on them, and later in the day I read an email chain and started to compose a reply.  And in both cases I stopped myself. I walked out of the shelving area and closed the email, unwritten.

I didn’t stop myself because I thought my ideas were bad or wouldn’t be a strong contribution to finding a solution to the issue.  I stopped myself because it’s not my job, and I’m not needed there.

As I write my self evaluation, I remember the conversations I had with my supervisor (the Provost) when I wrote the original Performance Plan that I am evaluating now.  We talked about a lot of things, but I remember very clearly our agreement on the the notion that my job is now less an exercise in Doing Things and more an exercise in Helping Other People Do Their Things, and knowing that their successes are my successes.  The Dean Dad elaborates on this particularly well:  “The contribution I can make from my office — and for the record, there is one — is in setting the processes, background conditions, and climate in which people can do their best work without getting embroiled in unproductive conflict or drama.”  That.  I do a lot of that.

And yesterday I stopped myself from stepping into conversations I didn’t need to be a part of because I had already done the That above.  The libraries are functioning well, the processes, background conditions, and climate are in place to ensure that the creative, dedicated and effective staff of the College Libraries can solve these two problems on their own.  They don’t need me.

More than that, I am more and more aware that if I stepped in to the discussions, my opinions or contributions would be heard and interpreted inside a framework of What The Director Says, laden with the implicit and sometimes explicit authority of my position.  Even if I intended it to be just Jenica speaking from her experience as a shelving manager 10 years ago, or as a collection development wonk, it’s What The Director Says, now.  And I need to be careful and sparing in leveraging that authority.

All of which boils down to this: It’s not my job to Do Things like those anymore.  My job is to make sure that everyone else can Do Their Things.  And sometimes that means getting out of the way, and keeping my mouth shut.

It’s annual report season, and I’m eyeball deep in data analysis.  The trouble I run into is stopping myself from going seriously granular in my analysis.  I love this stuff.  And, sure, it’s fascinating to me to map changes in data over the years, but I have to stop myself to ask which trends will actually tell me something actionable.  Knowing things is not the same as knowing things that can help me make our services better.

I think that’s the challenge of effective assessment, right there.  Watching the ratios of circ rates between different material types shift from year to year is fascinating, but which data points will tell me how we need to improve?  Those are the ones that deserve more than a moment of my attention.

I’m reminded of Bellwether, a smart and funny novel by Connie Willis.  There’s a scene in which two scientists are trying to tie a ribbon to the bellwether — the leader of the flock — in a pen full of sheep, to no avail.  First they can’t figure out which one it is, and then they can’t catch it.  That’s how I feel today.

Here, sheepie sheepie sheepie…

I went back to Illinois again, for a friend’s wedding and to visit my family, and this time… I brought an iPad.

In a post from 2 years ago I described my friends and family who are not librarians and technologists, who use the internet and computers very differently than I do.  Let me update a few:

• The eleven-year-old girl who could master and manage having 23 different online pets, make playlists in iTunes for her new iPod, and search Google for information on Harry Potter, but hasn’t ever really tried to do anything else with the computer or the internet.  I didn’t see this particular kid, but I did see my teen cousins, and was reminded of Christmas this year, when Ryan, 13, spent an afternoon setting up and loading music onto his 11 year old sister’s iPod Touch, and who also configured his new Kindle without any help or intervention.
• A friend who “doesn’t have time for email”, who, when he last went online to find the answer to a question he had about his new stereo, realized he had over 200 email messages and just ignored them.  This is still true, but he and his wife both have Facebook profiles, which they mainly use to play games and share photos of their girls.  We also communicate by text message, a LOT.
• My mom, who has a desktop computer, a photo printer, a regular printer, a digital camera, a cell phone, and digital cable with a DVR… but no internet connection, and no home phone number to allow dial-up.  Deb now has broadband on her ancient but effective computer, and recently told me that she gets why I’m online so much, now that she has home access to the internet.
• My aunt, who is a regular public library user, both for (a huge number of) books and computer use, who refuses to get digital cable or a home computer with internet access. She has an email address (Gmail, set up by me) which she’s never used. She still doesn’t use the gmail account, or have a computer other than the one she uses at the public library.  What she does have is a Kindle.
• Another aunt, living in a lovely brand-new-construction home with every possible amenity except broadband. The cable only goes as far as the house across the street, and the phone company doesn’t offer DSL. All bookwork for the family chiropractic practice is therefore done offline in her home office.  Broadband has been acquired, and a wireless router installed.  I suspect this was mainly to facilitate use of the iPod Touches that the grandkids have, and for easier access to the Amazon store for the family’s Kindles.  The books are still done in the basement in paper, though I hear my uncle got computers in his exam rooms to allow for electronic charting.
• A friend who knows that his girlfriend and his teenage daughter both have MySpace pages, but has never looked at them — “I don’t bother. They’re smart people. They won’t get in trouble, and I just don’t care that much.”  The whole family has now moved to Facebook (and it was fun seeing both Christian and Leslie change their relationship status to Married after the weekend’s festivities), but they still aren’t really living online — except for the daughter, who, as a college sophomore, is, well, a college sophomore on Facebook.

So that’s intriguing to me.  Goodbye MySpace, hello Facebook.  Facebook and texting replacing email.  Kindles everywhere I turn, and more broadband penetration.  But still, the internet isn’t stop 1 in their days.

But it could be.  I brought the iPad with me.  I showed it to my mom the night I got home; at first glance, she said, “Oh, I’ve read books on Karen’s.” But when she realized it was an iPad, not a Kindle, we spent an hour or so playing with it, and she was intrigued.  So then I took it to my aunt and uncle’s for Saturday dinner, and showed it off to them.  They all liked it, too — “Could I take this on a plane, and watch movies?” and “Can I read my Kindle books on it?” and “Oh, that’s not so hard to figure out” and “How much can it do without the internet? Oh, that’ a lot…”

And then I gave it to my cousin Ryan when he arrived.  He’s 13.  His sister Katie’s 12.  Ryan wants one.  I handed it over with a smile, and the warning, “It belongs to the College, so don’t drop it.”  And I got it back five hours later.  He was surfing the web, showing YouTube videos to his dad, and I think he tried out every app I have and fiddled with most of my settings, though I got it back nearly the same as I handed it over, just with less battery.

He still wants one. BAD.

And that… right there… is our audience.  Our users.  Public or academic, the teenagers are the future user of our services and institutions.  I don’t know that Ryan knows much about how he could, can, or does use information, but he does know that he likes the form factor, the flash, and the utility of the iPad and similar devices.  And it’s not just fanboy desire.  The kid already has an iPod Touch and a Kindle.  He knows what he likes, and uses his devices confidently.  And he likes the iPad.

So it doesn’t really matter how much I like it, or how much my life does or does not resemble my friends and family.  What matters is what I learn from them, and how we respond as a profession.

I’ll let you know if I come up with any answers. 

I recently told my mom that I plan to drive to Illinois next week.  An old friend is getting married on the 4th, my cousin’s turning 12 on the 1st, a 97 year-old great-aunt is in the hospital, and, well, my mom’s there.  But because of the timing, plane tickets were going to be unpleasantly expensive.  So I’m driving partway, staying the night, and continuing on, for half the cost of the airfare.  Deb did not like this.  I asked why, saying, “If I know what you’re worried about, I can either tell you why I’m not worried, or I can tell you how I plan to handle it if it happens.  And then maybe you’ll be less worried about it.”  And we worked it out.  I’m arriving Friday night, and I anticipate no big troubles other than being tired of my car (and Ohio) somewhere past Cleveland, and I know that my mom will be waiting for me when I get there, happy to see me.

But the conversation came back to me as I tried to think about what, if anything, I wanted to write about a conflict I had in an online community earlier this week.  From this side of the issue, it looks like this: I asked a question of a group of librarians, in short-form as suited the venue, and then began refining my question based on the feedback I was getting.  I also revised the information I was sharing, adding in details and clarifying others based on the questions people were asking and the assumptions they were making.  My initial question was a fast, vague summary of a three-page proposal that had been distributed to the library staff, and so was necessarily incomplete, and as people asked questions, I was filling in details.  And more than that, I was asking “Why?”.  The group was, on a whole, dissenting with my position, and I genuinely wanted to know why.  It didn’t make sense to me, and I wasn’t hearing compelling reasons that took into account the scenario I was trying to describe.  I kept adding details, and asking why they thought what they thought.

Or, that’s what I thought I was doing.

Several participants — people I trusted and respected — assumed I was “playing” the group, trying to compel them to give me answers that agreed with what I thought was best.  And accused me of such.  It went downhill from there.  I am no longer participating in that community until I can figure out my feelings about how the interaction went down.

But as I consider my own words and motives, I’m sure of one thing.  I still don’t understand why they were all disagreeing with me so strongly.  I still don’t see the connections they were drawing between their positions and the greater good of the problem I’m trying to solve.  I still don’t see the “why”.

And, like with my mom, I can’t offer assurances, make changes, or re-evaluate if I don’t understand the underlying issues that are rising to the surface of the argument.  I need to know why.  It’s part of how I understand my world, assign value to opinions, and make decisions.  I’ve done some soul-searching about my part in the social disintegration of the conversation, and regardless of what I did wrong, I still believe in this: I need to know why if I’m going to understand.  I won’t back down from that.  In most circumstances, unless you’re one of a very small group of implicitly trusted people, your word is not enough.  But I’ll believe you when you tell me why.

But the point is moot.  I walked away from the conversation because I thought it was the best thing to do, and at our staff meeting, no one advocated against the change I was proposing, though we made modifications to other aspects to suit the concerned reasoning of the staff.  The deal is done.

as the University of California takes on the Nature Publishing Group.  Beleaguered libraries take on super-profitable publishing giants, story ongoing.

UC internal communication about the proposed NPG deal

NPG response

UC’s response to NPG’s response. (.pdf)

My favorite bits from UC’s last response:

We find this to be an implausible explanation given the remarkably large sums of money others and we already pay to NPG every year. The notion that other institutions are subsidizing ‘our discount’ is nonsensical. If anything, other institutions are simply paying too much.

[...]

In summary, the CDL, UCOLASC, and UC Libraries categorically reject the notion that we have resorted to misinformation or distortion of any sort, as well as any suggestion that we sought to engender premature publicity.  We included accurate information, not misinformation, in an internal communication intended for our Faculty.  As the UC Libraries contemplate budget reductions of 20% or more over the next two years on top of reductions already taken in 2010, we are faced with difficult choices and seek publisher partners who are willing to work with us over the long-term.  That being said, we want to emphasize that the UC letter represents the deliberations of many Faculty committees and librarians across the UC System who unanimously felt that UC needed to take a stand on this issue as a matter of principle and not merely as a budgetary consideration.  Plainly put, UC Faculty do not think that their libraries should have to pay exorbitant and unreasonable fees to get access to their own work.

Go get ‘em.  Librarians everywhere are applauding you. To quote from a FriendFeed discussion, “Gauntlet. Thrown.”