Category Archives: Musings

Things academic library directors are asked to engage with

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Topics on which I have had conversations and/or email communications in the last week:

  1. Open access, the state of publishing, and what libraries are doing about it.
  2. Textbooks, the cost of textbooks, and the open textbook movement, and what libraries are doing about it.
  3. Why ebooks suck and what libraries are doing about it.
  4. 3-D printers and their role in innovation and research, and what libraries are doing about it.
  5. Library policies as re: student expectations of service (in this case, “you don’t have enough computers”), and where our boundaries are on those questions.
  6. Library policies as re: faculty expectations of service (in this case, “I am dissatisfied with your collecting polices and practices”), and where our boundaries are on those questions.
  7. Massive online education, the library support needed to facilitate it, the complexities of delivering consistent services to geographically distributed and inconsistently institutionally affiliated students, and what libraries might do about it.
  8. Research compliance issues, data management for open data initiatives, and what libraries might do about it.

This job is certainly never boring.

Airplane blogging

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[posted from the free wifi at Vancouver's international terminal]

I’m sitting on a five hour plane flight to Vancouver, which is prelude to a 15 hour flight to Sydney. And I’m working, because while I am a highly productive person when I’m “on”, I’m also an incredible procrastinator, so I’m finishing the scripting of all of my workshops and speeches in the air. (Does that make them more lofty? A girl can aspire.)

So here I sit, thinking that if I sat and took some time to write free-form, I might warm myself up for the actual work of writing about the stuff I need to write about. It’s a tactic that works well for me, and hey, I HAVE THE TIME. (20 hours in the air, for gods’ sake.)

Thus, I offer a few random and barely relevant observations on life, the universe, and everything.

  1. Good music makes everything better. I have a mix on my iPhone called “Sleep”. I built it on the fly on one business trip as something to listen to when silence or earplugs weren’t an option, and I still needed to put myself into a quiet, sleep-like place. It’s full of songs I love – Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “Walk on the Ocean”, Madonna’s “Rain”, Band of Horses “No One’s Gonna Love You”, Butch Walker’s “Don’t you think someone should take you home”, P!nk’s “Glitter In The Air”, The Decemberists’ “January Hymn”, Pete Yorn’s “On Your Side”, Springsteen’s “Empty Sky”. And I found myself sitting here, in the middle seat on a 7-whatever-7, smiling into the middle distance. Comfort songs, like comfort food. Mellow but emotionally satisfying, interesting to listen to on earbuds without the giant swell of big speakers… If you can’t control your environment, control the little bits of it that you can.
  2. Humor makes the world go ‘round. When faced with the reality of a 5 hour flight as leg 1, and knowing that it’s child’s play compared to leg 2, I turned to my boyfriend and said, “Hey, let’s fly over 80% of Canada this afternoon.” He replied, “Well, okay, but only if we can go to the beach tomorrow.” “Nope. Tomorrow’s getting eaten by the International Dateline. But we can swim in a hotel pool on Thursday.” “Okay. Let’s do it.” We both grinned, and he went back to watching Underworld 4: Everyone Loves Kate Beckinsale in Vinyl and I picked up my pile of articles on resilience, both of us with slightly lightened hearts.
  3. I am eternally grateful to my liberal arts education for teaching me how to read science. I’m plowing through about 20 articles pulled from a variety of scholarly and trade publications, ranging from exceedingly out-of-my-scope clinical and social psychology studies to organizational leadership and training articles. The trade articles are easy; it doesn’t matter if it’s libraries or organization theory, “how to do it and summarizing current thoughts” all read the same. But the scientific studies… That’s different. And I’m exceedingly thankful that I know how scientific writing works. They all follow a formula, one I recall from my introductory science courses in college: Background of the issue and thought. Hypothesis. Varying stuff on methodology and implementation. Results. Analysis. Conclusions. It’s small things, like knowing that largely, for my purposes, I can skip everything after the Hypothesis until they start talking results, analysis, and discussion. Knowing that there will always BE a section on results, analysis, and discussion. Knowing that you can’t stop at hypothesis, as it’s not always proven correct. Without my basic science education, fostered by the liberal arts model, this would be much more arcane.
  4. I’m equally grateful to my liberal arts education for showing me how to think through and with interdisciplinary perspectives. The best article I found today, and the one most applicable to my purposes, relates to oncology nurses. Not precisely libraries… yet their conclusions are transferable and applicable. I regularly say, in re: libraries, “they’re just books. Nobody dies,” yet the best lessons I found today are ones from a field in which large numbers of somebodies die, regularly. Don’t study and learn narrowly. You’re going to lose something if you do.
  5. Always bring your own chocolate and water on airplanes. ‘Nuff said.

More from the other side of the world.

you really couldn’t have had it all

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Earlier today, a friend of mine, also a librarian and an administrator, asked for advice on how to handle a complex personal-job-health situation. And then I saw that Abigail Goben had written about work-life balance and asked “I’m curious what self-care you have implemented in your life that helps you to cope?”. I laughed, gently, as I read those things, thinking, “Well, I have a massage scheduled for 3:30, but that’s me”, and thought I should write something.

Then this evening I read Sarah Glassmeyer’s 2012 in Review post, and got to this part:

Because after my 2012, my resolution for 2013 is to embrace my humanity and imperfections as well as accept it in others.  Because we all like to think that we keep personal life at home and professional life at work, but “business in the front and party in the back” only works for mullets.  We’re all human and have illness, death, birth, marriage, etc going on that are going to be running in the background when we’re “on the clock.”  And no one reading this blog has a job so important that personal well-being should be put aside so that their job can continue.   But of course, this requires communication.  And the bravery to admit to someone – especially your supervisor or anyone that you work on projects with – that you have something going on and may not be 100% for awhile.

And I agreed so fully that I couldn’t quite figure out what to write… until I did. Here’s what I want to write: I want to tell you all to stop trying to keep your life compartmentalized, and to stop trying to do everything. You’re sick? Say so, and earn, demand, and acquire the space to figure out how to heal yourself. You’re overwhelmed? Examine your life and figure out what has to give. You’re exhausted? Sleep more and stop doing the things that prevent that.

I know none of it’s that damned easy — saying it doesn’t make it possible — but I think this point matters: Stop trying to have everything.

We’re always looking for ways to have it all, because the modern American myth tells us we can. Hell, even as I type this, Adele is singing “we could have had it alllllll…” then lamenting about how some douchey dude’s choices mean that now he’s reaping what he sowed. Have it all! Marriage, career, family, friends, hobbies, travel, we could have had it all!

Hell no, you can’t. You can’t have it all. Stop trying.

There are 24 hours in each day. There are 7 days in each week. And you only get as many years on this earth as you do, your number being uniquely yours. You cannot, in fact, have all of those things and live each of them with fullness and passion, because for each thing — relationships, career, family, friends, hobbies, travel, insert your passion here — that fullness and that passion each ask for more than their fair share. At some times, you can choose to give more to some aspects, and live them more fully, and at other times you have to starve some things so you can feed their counterparts. We all go through cycles in these years we’re given, and our priorities and choices change with the cycles. Career, marriage, kids, travel, hobbies, passions: They all cycle us through different phases. But even if you accept that you can’t give each of the pieces everything it’s asking for all the time, even if you accept that life is full of sacrifices, compromises, delayed gratification, and deferred desires, you still have to decide how to balance the things you’ve chosen in whatever cycle you’re in. And so people, understandably struggling, ask each other how they cope.

How do I cope? Well, first, I know I can’t have it all. Your average American works a 5 day week, in which there are 120 hours total. How does mine break down?

Work:

  • For me, right now, I spend about 50 hours each week at my day job to just stay afloat with my workload.
  • I also have committed to delivering 14 hours of content, each hour unique, at 6 different conferences this spring, which means adding about 10 hours of work to each of my non-traveling weeks between January and May.
  • I also regularly wish I had a better formal management education, and try to create that by doing my own reading — say, 3 hours a week minimum — of books on management, leadership, and innovation.
  • Then there’s the networking, casual professional development, and current events and trends awareness. I’m going to guess another 10 hours on that.
  • I also spend at least an hour each night and morning at home checking my email tending to work shit, total 5 hours.

That’s the work side. The total is 78 hours.

Each weekday, for my own personal health, wellness, and happiness, I generally do the following:

  • I spend an hour every evening cooking dinner and prepping the next day’s breakfast and lunch. [Yes, I have a partner, and yes he can and will and does cook, but it's also a hobby of mine, and something I take pleasure in. So I often do it.] (5 hours)
  • I spend 45 minutes exercising in an intentional and focused way. I am most certainly not getting any younger… (About 4 hours)
  • I spend 20 minutes meditating for clarity, blood pressure management, and stress relief. (less than 2 hours)
  • Have a massage or a chiropractic appointment as a part of both stress relief and management of my physical health issues, most of which reside in my muscles and joints. (2 hours)
  • I spend at least two hours of every evening actively interacting with my boyfriend, because, seriously, why bother if you’re not going to bother? (10 hours)
  • Each day has about two hours of personal grooming, household cleaning, tasks and chores, running errands, and other miscellaneous stuff in it. Inevitably. (10 hours)
  • I also like to sleep, and have learned that I am only healthy and effective if I get at least 8 hours of sleep each night. I really need 9. (45 hours.)

That totals 78.  (Which is pretty damned coincidental!)

If you add all of that up, it’s 156. I said a workweek has 12o hours in it. You can already see that I have a problem: I’ve come up with 31 hours of stuff to do in 24 hour days. Which side do I steal from, the 78 hours of living, or the 78 hours of working? In practice, I do both. Some weeks I slight my contract work and push deadlines, and don’t do my ‘extra’ professional reading, and bug out of work after 8 hours rather then 10. Some weeks it’s my personal life, and we order pizza, I buy breakfast on campus, I escape into my home office instead of hanging out with Justin, and the laundry just doesn’t get put away. And I didn’t even include any of my hobbies: gaming (board, video, roleplaying, and live action roleplaying), crafting (knitting, crocheting, leatherworking, jewelry making), reading (any one of the 6-10 books I usually have in progress), traveling (I love going new places!), outdoorsness (camping, hiking, rock climbing, kayaking), or writing (here and elsewhere). I should be getting ready for bed right now, in fact… because I’m doing what I often end up doing: stealing from sleep to feed a hobby. Either that or I end up cramming it all into the weekends: 48 hours of intensive something, depending on what’s more behind. Sometimes I work all weekend. Sometimes Justin and I run off somewhere on an adventure. Sometimes I play Skyrim for 14 hours. Sometimes I COOK ALL THE THINGS. Sometimes I sleep til noon trying to play catch-up.

And yet. Most of the time, I think the balance I’ve crafted doesn’t suck. It’s imperfect (check my math!) but it’s what I’ve got. (And I also would clearly note: I don’t have kids, which would change the math like whoa.)

So. Work/life balance, huh? What I just described is clearly deeply personal, because you can’t have these conversations without being deeply personal. At this point, I sort of feel like there’s very little left I’m not willing to share, so have at it. There’s my math. Welcome to my life: it won’t match yours. We’re each going to do our own math. We’re each going to choose our own priorities, and we’re going to offer what we can when and where we can, based on those priorities. But I’ve learned that if I don’t prioritize my personal needs, the rest falls apart. I tried working 60 hour weeks in my office and making my day job my first and absolute priority. Everything fell apart. And so I learned what mattered to me, where I had to put my energy and where I didn’t, and where I could borrow from one to give to the other. My coping tactics are also deeply personal: reading, writing, sleeping, massage, cooking, gaming, crafting, Justin. You can’t have my hobbies, and you can’t have my boyfriend, so you’ll have to find your own tactics. There’s no transferable solution here. Your work and your life and your balance: Find your own, in your own way, and just make sure it works for you.

And stop trying to figure out how to have it all. Figure out what you value most, and make sure you have that, in sustainable and maintainable ways, for this particular cycle of your life. That’s the only thing that matters.

Be well.

Plant your flag

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It’s the end of the semester, and things are, as usual, a little overwhelming on campus. It’s how it goes, every year. In fact, some years, we’ve put up signs that say, essentially, “Be kind to others. We’re all stressed out.” Because we are. Even if your own work doesn’t change just because December’s approaching, the people around you every day are impacted by the approach of exam week, and the stress is palpable.

In the midst of this regular seasonal upheaval, the ongoing ACS stuff, and some other big campus changes, I asked the library staff to please consider volunteering for a task force that will rewrite our mission statement. Most of the staff are (unsurprisingly) unenthusiastic. I know that there’s a serious contingent of libraryland that thinks that strategic planning, mission statements, and learning outcomes for libraries are a giant pile of nonsense, who think they’re a bureaucratic waste of time that pay lip service to external needs, and have no interest in crafting, discussing, or heeding them. And some of those people are right to call it crap. (Others just don’t like administrivia and want to do their jobs without thinking about that stuff, I think.) Some mission statements are ignorable fluff. Some strategic plans are forgotten monstrosities. And some learning outcomes are simply laughable.

But I think it can be done well, and usefully. And I’m going to try.

I have one very simple reason why. You have to know who you are.

When you know the winds of change are coming and you can see the stormfront on your horizon, you need to plant your flag before the wind gets to you, so that you can blow in the direction it aims you in instead of being blown away by it. You need to know where you stand so you can plant your feet and lean into the change rather than be knocked over by it. You need to know who you are rather than letting someone else mandate, dictate, or demand that you be someone else. If you don’t know what you stand for, you can’t compromise on anything, only cave to it.

I think that in libraries, we do know who we are, what we stand for, and why do what we do. We just need to figure out how to say it, and say it in ways people can hear. We can’t just dogwhistle to people who already know what we mean, and we can’t let concise simplicity become trite platitudes. We need to find a way to communicate clearly about who we are, what we stand for, and why we do what we do, so that we can honestly and effectively argue for the best ways to do and be those things.

Else we’re gonna get blown over and pummeled with hail. I’m not interested in collecting those bruises.

questions about library leadership

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I’m a member of a SUNY Council of Library Directors task force on leadership, and my fellow task forcers and I had a conference call on Friday to talk about our next steps. The problem statement we all agree on is that we need to nurture library leadership and management talent from within the SUNY system, but that we have wildly varying local approaches and resources for that. So, can we create something centralized? We’re batting around ideas, and having a good time doing it. And then we started talking about doing a survey in conjunction with social sciences faculty at one of our campuses, and so we started posing questions we want answers to. Like,

What leadership skills do library directors think librarians need to build?

or, the flipside,

What leadership skills do librarians want to build?

and on in that vein.

And then I posed my question, which I think we all agreed didn’t belong in this survey, but which I still think is fascinating and needs an answer. My question is this: Knowing that too many SUNY library director searches were closed, postponed, extended, failed, or ended with an internal hire when it was clear there was an initial desire for an external hire, why is this happening? I think there are several possible issues at play:

These are guesses: SUNY wants to attract top talent, but there isn’t enough talent interested in management roles to fill our (many) searches. SUNY wants to attract top talent, but doesn’t pay enough to seal the deal when it does. SUNY’s reputation in some way damages our ability to attract the talent we want. The locations of many SUNYs (rural, charming, RURAL) prevent candidates from applying, so what we want in regards to talent is irrelevant.

There’s a demographic issue I also want to explore, namely: In 2012, is there a dearth of first-career librarians in the 40-55 age group, ie, the folks who would be ripe for top management positions? If not, is there a trend in that group’s attitudes toward management that would explain low and/or unsatisfying leadership candidates and pools of applicants?

And then there’s the thing I wonder about most often:  Are library search committees demanding a unicorn when a horse would serve admirably, and thus ignoring the really fine horses in the pool?

I wonder. I wonder if we want perfection, if we want the impossible, if we want innovation and deep experience and a sense of humor and a perfect institutional fit but not so perfect that you don’t shake things up a bit and outgoing but not too aggressive and empathetic but with broad personnel management chops and a history with budget management and also information literacy and reference and cataloging and, I dunno, moon landings.

I wonder.

But then, maybe I’m way off base. Maybe we’re asking for fine horses and getting goats. I haven’t run one of these, nor seen the pool, nor interviewed applicants. But I wonder.

And it occurs to me that if anyone’s gonna do the research, maybe it needs to be the person doing the wondering.