Attempting Elegance

We’re hiring again. I swear, it seems like we’ve done this once a year for the last three, and if consult the HR log, it actually is more like… twice a year for the last three.

Fortunately for us (and for you, O Job Seekers!), this is due to retirement, career advancement, and natural changeovers rather than Oh My God That Place Is Hell To Work At. Retirements opened up lines for a Web Services Librarian, an Archivist, a Library Clerk 3, and a Director (hi!). Advancement opened up lines for a User Services Librarian, a Library Clerk 2, and, now, what was once a Collection Development Librarian… except someone in-house already took on the CD challenge, and is happy and successful there. So instead, I present to you a brand new position:

Discovery Metadata Librarian

Job summary / Basic function

SUNY Potsdam seeks a service-oriented and intellectually curious librarian to serve as Discovery Metadata Librarian. The successful candidate will be excited by our professional transition away from traditional library cataloging and toward metadata creation in support of print and digital collections, and eager to consider new opportunities, creative applications of technology, and sustainable project implementation. The Discovery Metadata Librarian will leverage a strong interest in information users’ values and needs to work with existing traditional cataloging systems in support of the teaching, research, and preservation needs of the College community. S/he will also explore new initiatives and approaches to cataloging in support of emerging discovery tools, digitizing local collections, and working with students and faculty to chart a path for the online life of the College’s successful undergraduate research programs.  This is an ideal opportunity for a librarian interested in the blend of tradition and experimentation, and for an individual whose interests lie in joining a small academic library committed to supporting teaching and learning in a dynamic, transparent, and flexible environment.

Required Qualifications:

• American Library Association accredited Master’s degree, or international equivalent degree, earned by July 1, 2012;
• Excellent written and oral communication skills;
• Detailed understanding of current models, practices, and tools used by academic libraries for e-resources discovery, such as link resolving, federated searching, digital repositories, and digitization efforts;
• Experience in creating, editing, and transforming MARC and/or non-MARC metadata, and aptitude for learning new metadata standards;
• Commitment to professional development activities, including research and participation in professional organizations.

Desired Qualifications
The most successful candidates will possess some combination of the following qualifications:

• Strong service orientation and interest in information users’ values and needs;

• Ability to work harmoniously and effectively with others on a daily basis ;
• Knowledge of current issues and trends in scholarly communication;
• Familiarity with web presentation and scripting languages such as HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Perl, or Ruby;
• Ability to analyze and to solve problems creatively and flexibly in a complex and dynamic environment;
• Demonstrated problem solving, organizational and analytical skills, and an aptitude for detail-oriented work;
• Proven ability to work both independently and collaboratively in initiating, planning, and implementing projects and services;
• Prior academic library experience.
• Prior experience implementing digital services in a library setting;

Job Requirements and Essential Functions of the Job:

The Discovery Metadata Librarian is a newly-defined position, reporting to the Director of Libraries, and will be a part of the College Libraries’ team of librarians, sharing the holistic approach of working in reference and participating in library governance, with opportunities to share in the work of collection development and instruction. In addition, the Discovery Metadata Librarian will be responsible for tracking developments in metadata schemas and leading the ongoing implementation of best practices for metadata within the Libraries, and will lead in the creation and articulation of an evolving technology strategy for access to digital materials.

Near term projects in which the Discovery Metadata Librarian will be a key stakeholder, participant, or project leader may include:

• Review and revision of current cataloging policies for online resources as more information transitions from print to online
• Integration of purchase-on-demand e-books into current acquisitions, ILL, and cataloging environments
• Investigation, selection, and implementation of a discovery layer
• Partnering with the College Archivist as the College prepares for its Bicentennial celebration in 2016, working on digitizing, describing, and making accessible teaching and research collections pertaining to the College’s history
• Collaboration with new and sustained undergraduate research initiatives to create a repository of student accomplishments or otherwise showcase and enhance the undergraduate research process

Specific responsibilities will be refined by the Director of Libraries after hire, building on the strengths and interests of a successful candidate and the evolving needs of the College Libraries.

SUNY Potsdam’s College Libraries serve more than 4000 undergraduate and graduate students in the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the School of Education and Professional Studies, and the Crane School of Music.  The Discovery Metadata Librarian will join 11 library faculty and 10 support staff serving two libraries and the College Archives and Special Collections. This is a tenure-track faculty position, subject to criteria for reappointment, promotion, and tenure as established by the SUNY Board of Trustees and the Personnel Policies of the College Libraries. The Discovery Metadata Librarian will have faculty rank as a Senior Assistant Librarian, with a minimum salary of $46,000.

To be considered, applicants must submit a cover letter that addresses details of both the required and preferred qualifications, a Curriculum Vita, and contact information for 3 professional references.

You may apply here: employment.potsdam.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=51229

(If I weren’t the Director, and I couldn’t be a Collection Development librarian again, this is where I’d want to be. Our metadata is the backbone of the access we provide to users, and getting my hands dirty in that sounds like big fun to me. I hope it does to you, too.)

My autopost schedule moved faster than my job ad did, wandering its way through campus processes. Sorry to any who came looking for the job ad – it will be back just as soon as I’ve finished tying the red tape into fancy bows.

Today I was a guest on NCompass Live, for Michael Sauers’ Tech Talk on Presentations. Jezmynne Dene, David Lee King, and I  talked about what we think people should know about giving good presentations.

You can listen to it at the NCompass site, which I recommend so you can hear Jezmynne and David as well, but I said, in short:

1. Get your audience’s attention. You’ll be fighting them for attention — they have smart phones, laptops, are in their office streaming you, are talking to the person next to them… grab them. Somehow. Use humor, your appearance, a great slide, a good quote… whatever works for you. But grab ‘em.
2. Tell a story. Create a narrative line, whether it’s a numbered list, a classically structured essay with an opening, body of argument, and closing, a dramatic structure a la Shakespeare with 5 acts… something that we can culturally recognize and follow along with. We know the beats of classic structures, and if you use one, people will follow you.
3. Focus. Don’t try to tell everything you know at once. Tell the good bits, the highlights, the parts that are engaging, and trust that your audience will strive to learn more later if you entice them with the best of what you know.
4. Never read your slides. Seriously. Just stop. If you read the slides out loud, the audience will have read them first, because they can read faster than you talk, and now they’re bored and waiting for the next thing. If you can’t stop reading what’s on your slides, then  use slides with no words. Or no slides.
5. End well. You want your audience to remember something, and they remember the last bit best. I’ve heard that this is why drug commercials put the side effects in the middle and lots of “we’re awesome” stuff at the end. Help the audience remember that you’re awesome and taught them good things by ending well.

And, for the curious, I was working from this:

Sometimes you shouldn’t poke the bear.

I’m bad at identifying those moments.

Or, more accurately, I’m bad at listening to my gut when my gut says “DO NOT POKE THAT BEAR”.

So this morning, I tweeted about the internet reaction to the Harvard Libraries town halls yesterday.  The duet of tweets that got me going were these:

HVD provost & Mary Lee Kennedy are visiting Countway today. Need ideas 2 show how much I/we <3 cway community and our staff! #hlth

January 20, 2012 9:08 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@wendyrobotika

wendy robotika

One idea just came in! Wearing name tags with our years of Harvard service! Great idea folks! #hlth

January 20, 2012 9:19 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@wendyrobotika

wendy robotika

My response was:

as I watch the #hlth stream, I have to wonder: why is years of service more important to libns than effectiveness, relevance, and skill?

January 20, 2012 9:30 am via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@jenica26

Jenica Rogers

So. I got a lot of responses. (See: Bear-poking.) I responded with a bit of fire, but mostly with matter-of-fact-ness. I poked a bear, but I was willing to dance. I believe in this one.

There are a few broad categories to the responses, thus far:

1. Administrators who said “Amen” and “No shit” and “I wish I knew”.
2. Librarians who said “Because our long years of hard work have value” and “Because we love our libraries and admin should know that”.
3. Librarians who said “because I don’t trust the things the admin wants to measure” and “measuring value is HARD, but years of service is easy”.

Let me take those one by one.

1. Another library director and I had a quick back-channel conversation about this, and about our desire to know more about what’s really going on at Harvard before judging the process, because we both can acknowledge, from our own experiences, how hard change is to manage, either managing up or managing down.  And my conclusion is that I wish that more administrators remembered what it was like to be librarians in the ranks, feeling powerless, and that more librarians trusted their administrators (or had administrators worth trusting). And that, in general, we all had more breadth of experiences to pull on — time spent working for vendors, time in middle management, time in small libraries, big ones, in cataloging and reference and instruction and facilities and purchasing… so that we could all develop better big-picture understandings of the goals and intentions and needs and desires of the organization as a whole.
2. I don’t want to argue about whether or not y’all love your work, or about whether or not your decades of hard work have value to an institution I’m not a part of. What I do want to say is this: If you are engaged in what you are framing as a war with your administration, and your administration has, as their opening salvo, announced that they want things to be radically different than they have been in the past, do you really want your first return salvo to be an announcement that you’ve been an integral part, for a very long time, in creating the thing they are saying needs to radically change? Is that really the message you find most strategic and tactically sound for opening your side of the fight?
3. Yes. Measuring skills, values, strengths, and goals is damn hard. You’re totally right. And, yes, administrations that have lost the trust of their employees are also suspect in the eyes of those employees when they say they want to measure and evaluate hard things. But here’s my counterargument: Measuring time of service tells you precisely nothing. Some people have worked in their jobs for 20 years, evolved their skills and perspectives along with the changes happening in libraries, and remained an key, integral part of the success of their organization. Ditto some people with 5 years of experience. Equally true is that some people with 20 years of experience have been coasting, having minimal impact on their organization and their coworkers, doing the same thing for 20 years with no interest in adjusting, adapting, learning, or evolving. As have some with 5 years of experience. The number alone cannot tell you which is which. It simply cannot, and implying that it can means that admin will distrust your motives just as much as you distrust theirs. Measure things that matter, that are real, and that can be built upon to create something awesome, not the things that are just easy and comforting. “I’ve been here for 15 years!” is not a compelling argument. “I’ve been here for 15 years, and in that time I’ve maintained this, implemented this, mastered that and gotten certified in the other, participated in this, organized that, proposed these four things, supported Joe in doing this, that, and those, and been working with Emily toward this thing that’ll be done in 6 months” says a hell of a lot more. Harder, yes. Less clean, yes. Better? Also yes.

So. tl;dr: I wish we had more perspectives and less us vs them rhetoric. I hope you all think carefully about how you want to frame your arguments. And trusting easy but shitty data is far worse than fighting hard to create good messages that mean something.

Also, don’t poke the bear unless you’re willing to dance.

[with gratitude to The Decemberists for the inspiration.]

Here we come to a turning of the season, witness to the arc towards the sun
A neighbor’s blessed burden within reason, becomes a burden borne of all in one

At our library coffee break today, David asked who had birthdays in January. I raised the hand that wasn’t busy cutting a slice of chocolate cardamon cake, and said, “Next week.” I thought, grimly, “36.”

And nobody, nobody knows
Let the yoke fall from our shoulders,
Don’t carry it all, don’t carry it all
We are all our hands and holders
Beneath this bold and brilliant sun
And this I swear to all!

45 minutes later I was sitting in our small conference room with the Personnel Responsibilities Committee discussing a job description for a Discovery Metadata Librarian, and we were bouncing back and forth on “do we need a broad-reaching discovery layer, or do we need to intentionally locally catalog the stuff in Hathi that we’re discarding in print?” And I said, with a laugh, “We’re right back where we were 9 years ago when I was hired here, and charged with deciding whether or not we should catalog e-resources or buy a federated search product. Right back, a decade later.” Inside, I was whimpering a little.

A monument to build beneath the arbors, upon a plinth that towers t’wards the trees
Let every vessel pitching hard to starboard lay its head on summer’s freckled knees

A few days ago Justin read to me from a news site that ICANN is finally accepting applications for new gTLDs. We talked about it for a minute, and I told him about the paper I wrote in grad school on ICANN governance and the tensions between a global information infrastructure and the US government (and military) interests in control of the DNS servers and processes, and the debate raging at the time over the idea of .xxx. “It’s all come full circle,” I said. I wondered if I should revisit that paper and draft it into a “10 years later…” article. Then I acknowledged that I wrote that paper to avoid getting an incomplete from Dr. Eschenfelder because I had missed too many seminar sessions, and I’m not actually any better at time management now, and I’m far busier, so… I shelved the idea for now. Maybe in 10 years.

And nobody, nobody knows
Let the yoke fall from our shoulders,
Don’t carry it all, don’t carry it all
We are all our hands and holders
Beneath this bold and brilliant sun
And this I swear to all!

Today a broad swath of the internet is blacked out, censor-boxed, or protest-labeled over SOPA and PIPA. I agree: It’s terrible legislation which moves our national information policy and infrastructure in the absolute wrong direction, written and influenced by people and organizations and corporations who are reacting out of fear and defensiveness about processes and technologies which they barely understand and cannot adapt to. It’s the wrong thing. It’s a bad path. Contact your congressfolk.

A there a wreath of trillium and ivy, laid upon the body of a boy
Lazy will the loam come from its hiding and return this quiet searcher to the soil

All I can think as I look at all of this is that life is made of cycles. “You rise to me and I’ll blow you down”, The Decemberists say in one song. “Don’t carry it all” they say in another.  We agonize over how to access information. We debate issues unresolved about our information infrastructure. Forces that don’t understand the issues fully push on us, over and over again. And then we get a year older.

So raise a glass to turnings of the season
And watch it as it arcs towards the sun
And you must bear your neighbor’s burden within reason
And your labors will be born when all is done

And, because we know that the fight’s worth it, that the groundwork we lay during this cycle will support us through the next one,  because each year brings us a little more wisdom, and because we know we’re not alone in any of our battles,  we keep fucking fighting.

And nobody, nobody knows
Let the yoke fall from our shoulders,
Don’t carry it all, don’t carry it all
We are all our hands and holders
Beneath this bold and brilliant sun
And this I swear to all!

And this I swear to all.