[Part one is here. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.]

I think something remarkable can happen. I think that if I saw anything worth reporting on at ALA this year, it’s that I saw librarians stepping up, stepping forward, and saying “I can help make this better.” Our world is shifting and changing, in trivial and profound ways.

[image source]

On June 26th, I sat in the Super Shuttle from the Anaheim Super 8 to the John Wayne Airport, tracking our time and progress on the Google Maps app on my iPad, and tweeting about it. Because of some late-night online reservation snafus, I was nervous about getting to the airport on time, with enough room to spare to get myself lunch. And so while my use of the iPad was trivial and superfluous to whether or not I arrived on time, it changed my world just a bit to gather that information in real-time and communicate with my friends about my anxiety. Now imagine a 3 year old child of 2012 who has never been self-aware in a world that didn’t have in it an always-connected portable touch-screen computer loaded with communications and learning objects. Imagine that my use of the iPad to soothe my worries about the minutia of my life is second nature to every learner who enters our libraries in 2027. Imagine that when those students start arriving at our service points, our websites, our offices, we’re ready for them. That we’ve acted in conscious, thoughtful ways that lead us to a place of clever relevance in the world being shaped by the changes happening right now.

In contrast, this year we saw 3 pieces of legislation that made my skin crawl. SOPA and PIPA would have given unprecedented power to the government to shut down websites for copyright infringing behavior by users of those sites, and the Research Works Act would have outlawed open access mandates like that coming from the National Institutes of Health. None of these are in the best interests of access to information and freedom of research. All three were defeated. All three will be back.

So where did they come from? They came from the old guard information industries. The MPAA. The RIAA. Elsevier. They came from monolithic segments of our information economy which have long had control over production, distribution, and the financials of their corner of the information economy. Traditional media, in all its forms. And then the internet came along. And it changed everything. And user expectations and behaviors changed. And corporate stakeholders said, “but we’re caterpillars, and we’re very successful at being caterpillars, and they should stop encouraging us to sprout wings. Let’s try to cut off all the wings.” And when users started gluing on external wings, they tried to pass legislation to cut those off, too. Well, I think it’s clear in 2012 that suing teenagers for file-sharing, censoring websites, and forcing taxpayers to pay for taxpayer funded research won’t stuff the wings back inside the caterpillar.

If it wasn’t already, the mass protests against SOPA and PIPA and backlash from the new information economy over the RWA made that clear. There are new economic drivers in play. There are new user expectations creating new drivers. And pretty much no one thinks we’re going back to the days of Blockbuster, Borders, print newspapers, and record stores having compelling market share. That era is over. We’ve moved on to Netflix, Amazon, Google News, and iTunes.

SOPA, PIPA, and the RWA are all reactions to the fact that things fundamentally changed, and the traditional industry powerbase wasn’t ready for it. So they reacted. They reacted out of fear. They reacted out of protectionism. They reacted out of ignorance. They reacted out of misplaced arrogance. And they’re going to continue to wave their power around… but the avalanche has already begun, and even the boulders don’t get to vote, anymore.

And so my point, as I suspect you can see, is that if we want to do something remarkable with libraries, information literacy, access to information, data, and research, preservation and digitization, and all the potential that we see out there… we have to act. Not react. We do not want to model ourselves after the dying reactive archetypes of the old information economy. They are simply providing us with bad examples of what happens when the fearful try to replicate the past, mire themselves in the present, and control the future.

Let’s be better than that. Let’s not react and move toward zero. So I say get inspired. Think of the kid with the iPad, not of the way things used to be. Be something more interesting than SOPA and PIPA. Think farther, think further. Then acknowledge your fear of doing that, and move past it, and move. Do something. Be better. Be more. Be remarkable.

I gave this talk the first time in April, poetry month, and quoted two poems. One was Neil Gaiman’s “instructions”, which I offered up because I think sometimes the fairy tales were right, and their lessons are still important. You can find fan art of Gaiman reading it here:

I closed with my favorite Shel Silverstein poem, which I will do again here.

Listen to Mustn’ts, child, listen to the Don’ts.
Listen to the Shouldn’ts, the Impossibles, the Won’ts.
Listen to the Never Haves, then listen close to me.
Anything can happen, child, Anything can be.

Be remarkable. Anything can be.

[Part one is here. Two. Three. Four. Five.]

Okay, this is a big one.

Start with this TED talk. It’s really really good.

Gottlieb observes that most of us are working harder and harder, planning and planning, and things aren’t getting better. She says that when she and her partner took a look at the plans that people made, the things that they worked hard on, and which were so strongly meant and deeply felt, and saw that they weren’t getting any traction, they asked WHY.

She posits that when we ask about change in our culture, we talk about what we don’t want. We look for change in what we dislike, not in our goals. Not in what we do want. And she astutely notes that eliminating something negative does not get us to something possible and yearned for – it gets us to stasis. To 0. Instead of striving to get rid of things we dislike, we need instead to reach for what’s possible and what we yearn for, moving beyond the removal of the negative to get to a positive.

And Gottlieb also suggests that we all know how to do this. And we do!

If we talked about how to get me to my flight to Anaheim for ALA, most of us would start with what time I need to be at the airport to get on my plane, and then count backwards – getting to the airport means being there an hour early, and leaving time for the ferry, and so I should leave the house at 9 am, so the alarm needs setting for 7:30, which means I need to finish packing my suitcase the night before, etcetera and onward back to the moment in time that is your starting point. We reverse engineer the planning in our daily lives almost instinctively – it’s how most of us get places on time with intent.

Except, that’s not how most of us do our organizational strategic planning. In those cases, we study the shit out of today. As Gottlieb sees it, we root ourselves in today and plan for tiny steps forward as a reactive strategy tethered to our understanding of today. This is certainly true of most of the planning experiences in my professional career – self study, external review, build a plan. That’s our process in academia, and it tells us tons about today, and leads to lots of movement from -1 to 0 as regards our assessment of today.

But we know how to do proactive strategy. We do it in the rest of our lives, every day. We just seem to be unable – and possibly afraid – to apply it to our organizational planning. It feels too bold. It’s scary.

Scary cannot – must not – be a roadblock. Peter Bregman’s TED talk on fear is worth checking out.

Bregman says that “We learn by falling face first into the unknown, and then exploring our surroundings when we get there.” Kids do it all the time – you ever seen a 3 year old on downhill skis? They just throw themselves down the hill, and they fall, and they laugh, and they get up and do it again. But when we get to be adults, we know the falling is coming. And we’re further from the ground. And it’s scary. So we try not to fall. And as a result, we don’t learn.

If we want to learn, we have to feel the uncomfortable emotions that go along with learning – there’s no other way to do it. You can either stay comfortable, or reach your full potential. You have to choose. Bregman tells an anecdote about a woman and her grandson, and the little boy is staring at a big flight of stairs. She asks what’s wrong, and he says, “I don’t like the steps”. And she replies, “you don’t have to like the steps, you just have to climb them.” And that’s our life as humans in the world. We don’t have to like the steps… we just have to climb them. Fear is just a piece of our world, another thing we have to integrate into our daily functioning.

Bregman encourages us all to take a look at our institutions, and consider “What are the undiscussables?” Find out what those are – find out what things we’re too resistant, afraid, or hesitant to talk about. The undiscussables are the things we will gladly ignore for 10 years, and we all have them. Bregman encourages us to identify them… and then discuss them. Confront them. Because those are the things we most need to change, but they are also the things we are afraid of. (And fear prevents us from learning.)

I think this is the logical next step: as librarians, we have to explore our fears if we want to move past them, if we want to learn, if we want to grow, if we want to change, if we want to move. It’s comfortable right here, in the now, where we like how things were and how things are and we’ve spent a lot of time examining the present… but if we want to move forward, we’re going to have to acknowledge our fear, honor it, feel it, and then choose to climb the steps.

[Part one is here. Two. Three. Four.]

To quote an angry friend, “DEAR LIBRARIANS, IT’S NOT OKAY TO BE CLUELESS ABOUT COPYRIGHT ANYMORE.”

• No, you may not post to a listserv that since something was posted to the internet it’s now “public domain”.
• No, you may no longer think its ok that you’ve never looked at an ebook.
• That you don’t really get apps.
• Or understand why people use Facebook.
• Or why SOPA was a big deal.
• Or what all the fuss is about publishing and open access.

That’s cluelessness, and it’s not okay. I dunno why it was ever OK for librarians to behave like ostriches, but yeah. NO. It’s not okay now, and won’t be again, so get your head out of the sand. Now.

I got into an argument a few months ago with a cataloger in a special library who maintained furiously that he has no need to understand copyright in order to be a librarian. His argument, as best I can tell (we were arguing on Twitter, not the best place for nuanced discourse), is that as a cataloger in a special library, all he needs is the item, his systems, and a desk. He can do his job without understanding a bit of copyright, because all he has to do is catalog things.

And he might be right, on the face of it. I was a cataloger, and I know that yeah, to catalog a book, you just need the book, or a representation of the book, and you can create a MARC record. But I disagree that you can be a successful librarian if you don’t have more than that. You can surely do the task work of cataloging with a computer, some software, and a pile of books, but what about the bigger picture of the work you do? The whys, the wherefores, and the for whoms? I assert that if you don’t understand the issues of librarianship, and the information environment we operate in, you’re not acting as a librarian. You’re working as a copy clerk.

None of us who consider ourselves to be librarians has the luxury of just sitting in a corner and “doing our jobs” without a rich contextual awareness of the atmosphere and environment in which we operate. Or we shouldn’t. That’s cluelessness, and as I said, I don’t think that’s okay.

Instead, go learn something. Delve into the forces that push and pull at us as we do our daily work. Begin to understand what shapes our working environment.

In my personal life, when friends ask for advice or are struggling through a personal choice, I often say “chase hope” or “chase joy” or something similarly cheerfully motivational and impossible. But those aren’t always reasonable things to suggest in our work lives, and I don’t mean to insist y’all should want them from your work life. But I do feel confident exhorting us all to chase inspiration. Surely inspiration isn’t too much to ask for?

There are some things that come to mind quickly when I think about what inspires me – I’ve elaborated on them here – and maybe some of them will have meaning for you, or inspire you in turn.

Stay inspired. Chase inspiration. Educate yourself.