It is a disservice to the education, to the degree, and to the profession when the bulk of a librarian’s daily tasks could be performed by someone with a GED. It does not take a master’s degree to place a hold on a book, clear a copier, push in chairs, tell people they are being loud, shelve items, or other similar tasks. When librarians are seen doing this and then told there is an advanced degree requirement, there is a reasoning dissonance that occurs in the outside observer.

You should go read it. It’s interesting, but not entirely on point. I like that it’s a more nuanced version of “what’s the point” with a little bit of elitism thrown in. You know that feeling, “I got my masters for this?” (Or maybe you don’t?) You should also read Emily Lloyd’s response, which I also enjoyed.

Now of course, I have to make it about me because isn’t everything about me? (That’s supposed to be a joke.) This week our student employees have had erratic schedules because it’s the first week of classes and they’re getting their own situations settled. As a result, I have spent quite a bit of time checking books out, putting holds on things, and fixing the printer. Did I go to grad school to do any of these? (Maybe the printer since it was a networking issue one of the times…) Not exactly, but I did go to grad school to be a good librarian and make our library a better, more service oriented space. If that means slumming on the circ desk, so be it. I say slumming it with sarcasm, because I think it’s really important to understand your patron’s experience with all aspects of the library.

Andy tries to soothe things over a bit with language about how his idea really can only be applied to large libraries, but I’m not buying it so much. So the degree should mean you’re only involved with planning and management and high level research? Then how will you stay connected with your users? It’s been a growing trend where more and more degreed librarians are being taken off the reference desks and given office hours instead. It’s got to suck to be taken away from the users like that. I love the fact that I spend 20 hours a week on a reference desk looking out to a library full of students and really getting an idea of what they’re doing. Even if it means that a lot of my interactions with them are for things that don’t really require my degree, it benefits me a lot as a professional.

We all have those moments where we speak out of turn, cross some boundaries, offend greater sensibilities, and put our feet in our mouth. (Yeah, both of them!) It’s one of my biggest fears, really. I have such a lousy poker face. Anyhow, Laurie Ruettimann offers this advice:

• If you can hold your pee (so to speak) for two seconds and get some perspective, you’ll gain a competitive advantage.
• Learning how to hold your pee takes practice. It takes time.
• You have no choice but to learn how to hold your pee or get stuck in a perpetual state of emotional adolescence.

You aren’t a submissive puppy. You aren’t a cat with a broken brain. Quit peeing on the carpet of life.

Well said. Holding it in will help you act less like a toddler and more like an adult. I really need to start living this advice. Now what about rolling your eyes?

I really hate that feeling and the language, but it’s something that I keep coming back to. Like last week. I was at the meeting, trying to show how dynamic and valuable libraries can be for state DOTs, but I’m just one voice and one perspective. I know when we both go home, back to our offices, things won’t totally change. I might talk a big game about the big picture, but that doesn’t mean their librarian is on the same page as me.

That was one thing that really stuck with me during SLA, was that I am not on the same page as many of my colleagues. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but just something to be mindful of. I’m interested in big picture stuff. How to really integrate libraries into the organization, not as some sort of annex where information goes to die, but really an integral, living piece of the organization. Now, getting there is tough. I get that. I also get that I’m in a very special position, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t keep championing that vision. The thing that worries me, and I know happens, is that I go to a meeting like this, paint the picture of the library as the nexus of all great things, the research managers go back to their organization and don’t see that happening. There’s lots of reasons for that – lack of resources being the root of it all. It’s also a matter of philosophy. I have mine, several of my colleagues do not share my vision, which is OK but can lead to mixed signals.

Here’s an anecdote: I was promoting the values of Transportation Knowledge Networks and how libraries can be more than just reports/books. A research manager for a state DOT was very interested to hear about this and get involved even though they don’t have a library as such. Then when I was about to seal the deal, another librarian told them they couldn’t participate without a library. This mixed message is bad, but I don’t think it’s going away any time soon. I know every time I think we’re on the same page, something like this story happens and it feels like we’ve taken steps backward.

Tying this all back to the incident last week, I often feel like I have to play both sides. I have to convince the organizations to let the libraries do more (as a means of survival), but then I also have to convince the librarians to try for more (as a means of survival). I need to work on it, I know. Advocacy is a tough game to play.

I’m at this meeting to present about my vision for Open Transportation Research. I’m also here to preach the good word about Transportation Knowledge Networks. Preach is not the right word, more like explain and field questions, but it’s all part of moving forward. It’s all good, right? Well… sort of.

In one of these meetings, one of the transportation researchers basically threw their local librarian under the bus. How? When we were talking about all the fantastic things TKNs (and librarians) can do for the transportation research community. This researcher mentioned a wonderful demonstration of research tools and techniques that was provided by some academic librarian (their emphasis, not mine) and how their agencies librarian could “never provide that level of service.” I had to fight a bewildered look of, “Really? Did you just say that?” It was interesting to hear their impressions of one of my colleagues, but at the same time, it was weird to hear somebody slag their librarian off in front of me and 20 other people. I wanted to stand up and proclaim, “Your attitude stinks, just like your institutional support for the library, which is why your librarian probably doesn’t have the time and energy to give awesome instructional sessions that I’m sure they’d rather do than the billion tasks you expect them to do with no money, time, or staff,” but I let it go. I guess I chickened out.

This made me think though, is there ever a way to throw somebody under the bus and still remain professional? How do you convey your felling of, “Wow. This person/place/thing/idea/goose chase really is a waste of matter,” without seeming irrational/immature. Damning with faint praise, or that telling silence always seem effective and acceptable, but is there anything so bold as to really just call people out? I guess there’s something to be said for being frank, but really, if you’re going to do that, have some tact. (Is that possible?) Or at least remember your audience. People talk.

(That’s me, lo almost 4 years ago doing course work for my online MSLIS/MSIS program.)

I’ve never been able to (or really tried) to hide the fact that I went to school online. Was it my first choice? Not exactly, but given my options and my field I think it was the best choice for me at the time. I was worried that somehow my degree would be considered less worthy by my colleagues, but that hasn’t been the case. I still get the weird looks when people make the connection that “attended” a school in Philadelphia whilst living and working in Berkeley, but they get over it quickly. So that’s my background – I am a product of online education, as are several talented librarians. It’s hard to ignore that for many areas, it’s the only option for library school.

There has been a lot of discussion and angst about online programs recently in the area. University of California’s Commission on the Future is looking at ways to maintain access to education in the face budget woes, and they seem to determined that online education is the answer. The pilot is supposed to start with online courses that are required at all the campuses, which makes sense on an economies of scale thing. The Daily Cal and SF Chronicle have talked about it. It’s clear from the mood on campus that people are not happy at the thought. It’s clear that UC is thinking more students means more money, and there are legitimate concerns about the quality of education, but it could help make UC affordable and possible for many students who would otherwise qualify, if it were not for cost. Just yesterday it was announced that fewer Latinos were admitted this past year, while out of state admissions saw a jump. It’s related, naturally.

Then today University Diaries reported about a story in Georgia, where a student is accused of taking tests in online courses for a fraternity. Margaret Soltan’s concern is that with online courses you have no way to verify the students are who they say they are, and why she refers to online education as poor white trash. I can’t really tell how tongue-in-cheek it’s meant to be, being educated in poor white trash manner, but then again I’m not really trying to be too much of an academic. I am in the quasi-ghetto of the library after all.

Regardless, I think there is good reason to be concerned with how academia proceeds with online courses, but that doesn’t make online education and distance learning the end of civilization or the worst thing on the planet. I don’t think Drexel was like the University of Phoenix. (Or maybe I’m lying to myself?) I can’t imagine whatever UC ends up doing will be like something like they advertise in those catchy/annoying Education Connection commercials. I also wonder how much of the concern is legitimate concern for the quality of education for the students, and how much of it is concern about change. Maybe I would feel differently if I took the other path where I because a professor of Historical Germanic Linguistics, and I would be up at arms about how we are ruining the academy. I wish the criticism of online education didn’t have that tinge of elitism that tends to be so entrenched in higher education.

Honestly, when I think about people getting online degrees I think of my classmates. Most of us were either working full-time or raising families and working part-time. The flexibility of the program allowed us to continue to do so and only take out loans for tuition. There are lots of bright students who simply can’t afford to go to university with the current model, yet we as a society keep telling them that college is the answer. We need to change the message I guess.

As I alluded to in another post, I’m working on a taxonomy for transportation websites. Why? I’m trying to redesign my library’s website, we’re moving to Drupal, and all my ideas and fantasies hinge on content being aggregated by thematic types. It’s magical, really. OK, not really, but lots of website do it and it eases browsing. It’s definitely one thing I love about the web. Not sure what I’m talking about? Check out Amazon, or Zappos, or even Craigslist. They’re all browsable by some sort of hierarchal structure – the taxonomy.

Anyhow… so I want to use a taxonomy to organize the content of our new site so that we don’t have to worry about that during content creation. If I blog about transit oriented development resources, by golly, you will find it in planning and transit (and maybe TOD?), all because I tagged it with the terms in the taxonomy.

Of course, life would be easy if we could just plug in the Transportation Research Thesaurus and use that. I tried. The TRT broke Drupal. It’s massive with something around 10,000, which for the purpose of organizing a website is excessive. As much as I love the TRT, and I really do (seriously, just ask me about it and I will start frothing at the mouth, going on and on for hours about it), it’s really been designed and maintained as a tool for indexing transportation research for databases like TRIS. (I also love TRIS, if you didn’t know.) Indexing articles for a database is very different than indexing content for a website. TRIS, due to its volume and scope, needs something fairly precise. If you want to find articles about “transit oriented development,” you can! But for a website, I don’t see people looking for that level of specificity, I mean, TRIS can handle that. Think about it like looking for stuff in a record store. I may really only be interested in a handful of punk bands, but I know they won’t have a section for be to browse that “Lookout Records” or “DIY Punk related to Plan-It X”. I’ll look under “punk” and it will suffice.

So since the TRT is too big, I thought I would just pare it down. Cut out the über specific stuff and focus on terms that I would actually need for our site. Well, looking at the broad facets, it was clear that’d be nearly impossible. I would probably end up spending more time figuring out what to keep and what to hack than if I started from scratch, so I am. I will be using the same terms when possible, but with a different hierarchy. (Really, I think the hierarchy gets in the way of the TRT, but that’s a whole other story.) I’m still sketching stuff out, but that’s the plan.

Well, actually the plan is once it’s done, use it to build our new site and then also release the XML file for the world to use. I bet other transportation organizations could benefit from this sort of thing, and wouldn’t be be nice if we didn’t keep reinventing the wheel. (TRT, why can’t you just work? Why?)

If anybody already has an existing taxonomy like this, please let me know! I want to use it! Otherwise, stay tuned.

So the 2010 World Cup ended this past Sunday and I’m going through withdrawals. (I am a bit fanatical about football/soccer. I’m card carrying member of Wednesdayite, that’s seriously a burden of love.) So pardon me, if I use a picture of La Furia Roja to illustrate this post that I’ve been thinking about for some time.

There’s a cliche we joke with here at my work: “When it’s teamwork, it doesn’t seem work.” Feel free to roll your eyes, but it’s sort of true. If you can work and collaborate as a team, it can make things more enjoyable and less tedious. Idle chit chat can work wonders. I think lots of people could agree on that. Teamwork is also important for committees and group projects. Writing a strategic plan? Need lots of input? Work together! Again, it can make something bearable. This isn’t really a new concept and I think most people would agree on it.

My problem (other than the way England performed at the World Cup) is that I’m tired of the culture that we will only collaborate or share in formal settings. It’s all fine and dandy to have a committee to tackle a group project, but how can you find out a committee is required? What if it’s not so codified?

What I’m getting at is that I want librarians to be more open with what they’re doing with their colleagues. This goes for all of us. It sort of reminds me of some of the talks I’ve had about data sharing – people want to see other people’s stuff but don’t want to have to share their own. Perhaps this is residual from SLA networking, but it just astonishes me how little we know about what each of us do. I want to know about your work minutiae because you might have a technique to tackle it that I could borrow, or vice versa. Yeah, we all have different jobs and different responsibilities, but none of this are really all that unique. I say this as a member of a relatively small cadre of transportation librarians.

The thing that killed me recently was seeing one of my colleagues talking about an idea that they had which there is actually a committee working on tackling. This person, rather than participating in said committee, has decided they need to write a formal proposal on their own and then present it to the group (which group?) later. This seems akin to playing basketball by themselves when there’s a game they could join the next court over. They might want to play with others, but it has to be on their terms. I can understand wanting to have organized thoughts and a proposal, but if there is a group already working on the problem, get involved! Otherwise you’re just adding to the silos.

Last week I sort of put a call out to my colleagues about a project I’m working on – making a taxonomy for navigating/organizing transportation websites – looking for potential collaborators and just to let people know what I’m thinking about. It was great because turns out somebody else is working on the same thing. I made it clear that I wanted to work together because I want whatever the outcome is to be usable for as many people as possible, so they don’t have to do this work. It was not revolutionary, but it’s also not a common goal (without a committee that is).

So what’s the point? I think we need to promote a culture of sharing and openness of practically everything. Not just finished projects, but just sharing your work opens up opportunities for collaboration and working with people you might not even think about. It’s amazing how it also sort of humanizes people. (“Oh you’re doing that on top of all that other stuff? Wow. Nevermind about my silly request…”) If you value the community, you need to be a part of it. Networks need nodes to have value, so be a good node!

Really? What are you up to? I want to know!

IEEE Xplore just found out about that the hard way. From a recent email they sent to subscribers:

We learned that the majority of IEEE Xplore article metadata records had been eliminated from Google search results. This means that anyone attempting to search for IEEE articles by using Google or Google Scholar would be less likely to find IEEE content. Because half of all IEEE Xplore traffic comes through Google searches, particularly among our corporate customers, this could result in a significant drop in your IEEE Xplore usage.
…
In investigating the current issue, we learned that Google had changed its indexing policy regarding IEEE Xplore. In April 2010, Google decided to discard their previous IEEE Xplore metadata index and completely rebuild an index of over 2.5 million IEEE Xplore metadata records.

How long had this been an issue before IEEE or its subscribers figured it out? How many people were using Google or Google Scholar after being told it’s OK, only to be disappointed or confused by not finding what they need? I hope Google re-indexes things quickly, and as the SLA Gov Info blog points out, searching IEEE Xplore directly is the still the best way to access the material, I know most people will still just try Google first off. The question is, will they then try Xplore or just give up?

Maybe this is old hat to most of you, but I had a realization about all of these committees last week at SLA 2010… they set up turf wars. There’s a couple ways I’ve seen this manifest – either it’s the same people in variations of the same committee, each with a slightly different scopes and missions, or it’s different people in different groups trying to assert themselves in same area, vying for supremacy of a narrow strip of libraryland. Turf wars are the logical extension. A very wise librarian, in the middle of a committee meeting that was trying to distinguish itself from another committee meeting, said that the problem was, “[we're] stepping on each other’s toes, and somebody’s going to get hurt.” They’re right though I think the hurt and pain is sort of what keeps us in check.

Someday, when I finally make sense of the tangled mass of committees that feed upon transportation librarians, I will go into gory details, but for now I’ll just stick in vague generalities.

The funny thing about libraryland turf wars is that the stakes are usually fairly low. Occasionally, the committees are working on something big that matters, that will have a legacy that will actually leave an impact, but overall I think it’s all pretty incremental and low. That’s not to say things don’t matter, but the perspective is off. I am often guilty of drawing my personal lines in the sand in preparation of some sort of battle, but upon reflection I realize that not getting my way is not the end of the world. (Though this also plays into my personal belief that you have to be the change you want, or “put up or shut up.”)

Maybe I just need a better separation of work/life?

This month, it seems like one of the big issues I’ve been having professionally is finding the balance between memory/history and change/innovation in my library community. I don’t think these problems are unique to SLA or the transportation library world. It’s also not a generational thing. When is providing context for the “why” things were done go from explanation to excuses? Now, I’ll also recognize that a lot of this is my own attitude, and that I see lots of opportunities for growth and improvements. (This has to do with my paranoia.)

It is important to have institutional memory and to know who made the decisions and why. What was going on at the time? Who were the people involved? The context really shapes the outcomes. My frustration, and what I need to work on, is really when do we say, “Ah, so that’s why it happened that way, now how can we move to this other place?” A lot of times, providing detailed explanations for the past seems to not really provide excuses, but sort of muddy the waters. It’s hard, as somebody who wants to see change and innovation, to hear a long account of the past without thinking that the teller implicitly thinks it should still sort of be that way. Now, a long exposition with some sort of proposal for the future would allay my concerns, but that is rare.

So how can I temper my frustrations? I’m not advocating changes for the sake of just being different, but I don’t want to see us pass up opportunities because there might be difficult roads ahead. Is this something that I’ll get over with age, or will I always be pushing against the past?

In some ways it seems like libraries can’t win. We’ve been told over and over that we must innovate. We must change or die. We must stay relevant in today’s world. So some take that charge to heart and we push ahead, only to be told we need to look at the past and we need to take on more archival responsibilities and be more of what we had been, but our stakeholders didn’t seem keen on. Does that make us a victim of our own marketing? Is there room for both sides? I’d like to think so. Finding the balance is going to be tough though, and I need to learn to mellow out and keep doing my think I suppose.