"C'est la vie say the old folks"

Helping my friend Carol, who is in her sixties, buy a computer, brought back memories of my boss, another sexagenarian, and assisting her to navigate her PC (this was back in the mid '90s.) What seemed for me then and now to involve quick mouse movements or keyboard macros to accomplish a task (cutting and pasting text, opening and closing an application, switching between windows on the desktop,) caused some degree of bewilderment to both women. Things I take for granted cause others anxiety and frustration.   I found it hard to explain what I was doing in simple steps.  In my friend's case we opted to buy a mouse since the touchpad on the laptop enervated her.  All she wants to do is write verse using a word processor, and perhaps send her literary output to her sister via email, while at the same time she does have some curiosity about the online world, particularly online music.  No simple machine, however, presented itself, and most everything we looked at required additional software or hardware to accomplish what she wants. 

Then there are many older people who have no problem with technology for a variety of reasons, many having acquired some facility through everyday professional use.  My mother, a career reference librarian is a great example, and in her early working years dumb terminals were just beginning to appear.  She has a wide knowledge of internet resources and curiosity about social media sites and tools.  And from what I see on Twitter and Facebook there are many like her. 

But what about the people coming to our libraries to use a computer for the first time to fill out a job application or a government form or set up an email account?  Maybe they get some assistance from us or they avail themselves of a class at a particular time, but what they encounter on the computer screen must make no sense at all, never mind small print and unfriendly web design and inexcusable information architecture (let's not get started down that road.)  Librarians who navigate internet sites on a daily basis take for granted what mystifies relative newcomers to say, Yahoo, for instance, trying to attach a Word file to an email or verify that something was saved or sent, all new and mysterious to one library user who I helped with his email account to accomplish similar tasks.

You may wonder, if our libraries provide the computers pretty much as is, and due to staffing limitations must ration support to patrons (and a recent survey indicates many rely on libraries for computer access, ) then what?  Maybe these technology "newbies" are doing and will continue to do just fine and don't need our help.  Maybe they have to do it our way or the way it is now and catch up and get with the program.  Granted, among our libraries there is so much variation, from resource-rich to comparatively resource-poor, well-funded to under-funded, busy and less personal to a small staff/patron ratio and more personal service.  Maybe we don't want to know what our patrons are doing online, maybe it's a question of privacy and allowing some space, or maybe I will be asked a question about some application I don't have experise with and feel stupid and exposed.  And yet I sense that our future may lie in facilitating patron use of technology, in ways we may not have even encountered.  This might not sit well with some of my colleagues who prefer to provide a comparatively wholesale rather than a retail service operation, from perhaps the concern that giving too much attention to any one patron will cause others to demand the same and overwhelm the staff.   However, if we don't help those in need, where will our advocates be when our funding and space are at stake and through lack of tears the atmosphere is arid and the silence high frequency?

Open to the unknown

 (Cross posted to Quit Taking It Personally. Sorry if anyone is offended by the duplication.)



Today's #Trust30 prompt by Jonathan Fields asks: “What alternative opportunities, interpretations and paths am I not seeing?” In a field facing potentially drastic changes, librarianship, this is extremely relevant for me. So rather than defining myself as a librarian or information specialist, person, whatever it is, I have to ask, what do I like to do, what am I good at, what new abilities might I want to acquire? Maybe I don't know the answers to any of these questions right now.

Take computing. I had great difficulty using a computer when I was younger, had to rely on help from my father to pass a math course, or from more skilled peers just to type a college essay into a word processor. I knew nothing of commands or programming, could barely play games even, and for me a computer was little more than a sophisticated typewriter.

This all changed with the world wide web, software developed to browse it and information placed on remote servers for me to find using these tools to help me in my library work and answer questions for the people I served as well as for my own personal interest. And all this was completely unknown to me several years before, I could not have conceived of it, even as others were working hard to turn it into reality. And what followed has been a long fascination with information discovery on the internet. Finding. I think of the Latin word invenio, I find, I come upon, from which comes our word "invent."

So the path for me in the future may or may not involve a library building. It may involve skills used in finding and organizing and presenting information, connecting people with people and information, or it may be something I haven't even thought or heard of. My colleague Bill Mayer is known to say that the distinction between the library and IT in organizations or the distinction between the library and the network is dissolving. In a place, be it a business, educational institution or municipality, where these things are conundrums, this can present an opportunity for someone interested in information and knowledge, making things accessible for people and putting them to use. And I once worked with a scientist who told me it was my job to make myself obsolete, and if I did, and did it well, there would potentially be other opportunities and rewarding work for me. I believe he is right.

Confession of a librarian

I have a confession to make, even as I'm a librarian with twenty years plus experience in the field.

I'm a terrible reader.

It takes me forever to finish a book.

And there are huge gaps in my learning, "classics" I've never read, contemporary works many of my colleagues and acquaintances know that I haven't cracked.  I look at my bookshelves (well all my books are in storage now) wistfully thinking there are many titles I may never read.  And I still buy a few more, but not like in my younger years when I would think this is something I will want to read, or this is something I should read, or get this edition before they muck it up with a barcode (imagine.)

And for the most part, I am not inconvenienced by not having a book at hand.  That's where libraries come in for me and it's astounding how much is available on the web from the Gutenberg Books Project to the Internet Archive to what's just been uploaded anyhow (especially poetry, can often find what I want on another person's blog.)  And I'm not ashamed to admit that I haven't read something.  I can learn from someone who has, or put it down to read for a later that may or may not arrive.

So it is with a little amusement that I read, via Alison A, on the WebJunction LinkedIn group, that an article was published in Wired pointing out the shortcomings of ebooks at the present time.   I admire ebook technology (even as I don't have an ereader myself, except for the free app that comes with the iPhone, which leaves something to be desired, but what do I know, really).  Being able to store a library of books in a device or even just a full number is cool.  But I don't even make time for print books (or dead tree books as I hear from Shirl and others.)  What would I do with it?   Carry around more books to not read?

At the same time, as a librarian pointing people to tools and information, it is incumbent upon me to learn as much as I can about ebooks and ereaders to provide access and solve problems.  It is an evolving technology.  (See the WebJunction group for a lively discussion of preferred ereaders, and Paula Hane's overview of free ebook and ereader software sources.)

And when I reflect on my reading life, the books that have stayed with me are few, that is I can recall much of what I read and certain phrases or incidents well, mostly through rereading.  And rereading again I surprise myself that the text is different from what was in my memory.  How little I know.  I think of Gombromowicz's Ferdydurke, his description in the fourth chapter of the author's toil and ultimately the reader's distraction: "Might not just a phone call, or a fly interrupt his reading precisely at the point where all individual parts unite in a dramatic resolution ... Is this why we construct a whole, so that a particle of a part of the reader will absorb a particle of a part of the work, and only partly at that?"  Yes, this rings true with me, who reads much online and scans mostly at that. Then there are the words of Ecclesiastes.

Nobody has to read anything, but if I do, and remember it, and even act on it, I can gain something and help others, potentially.  And as far as the technology, the gain and the loss, I think of a book I didn't read but saw the movie version, No Country for Old Men, the old sheriff tells Tommy Lee Jones, "You can't stop what's coming."  And I can't, can only make the best of the situation, today and in the future.

Give the people what they want?

It's a conundrum for libraries.  What is our role, as collectors, as curators, as stewards of information?

At the municipal libraries I've worked in, folks want Steig Larsson and there aren't enough copies to go around even in a well-funded, cooperative network.  And what's wrong with wanting to read Steig Larsson?  I can't say I have, although I enjoyed the Dragon Tattoo movie when I watched it with my niece and her partner last fall.  It's a riveting story.  So it may not be the zenith of literary accomplishment.

When I was a callow youth I worked in a bookstore in my home town, one which was owned by a national chain.  Of course the bestsellers of the day were prominently displayed, Judith Krantz's I'll Take Manhattan, the latest Danielle Steele, Robert Schuller's Be-Happy Attitudes, you get the idea.  The assistant manager, Jose, was fond of creating towering book displays which were referred to as "dumps."  But he would also get ideas from more literary bookstores near the colleges and universities in the cities, order them from the vendor, and they sold, he said.  Jose was giving customers choices of which they might not have been aware.  The same thinking is well described in a recent library blog post. Or, looking at it another way, patrons may not necessarily know what they need but a need exists and it's up to us to identify it, as this story illustrates.

I think of asking a researcher before I took on my previous position what he wanted from the library. "I don't know, Garrett," he answered with a sigh, and we were talking about table-of-contents journal alerting services, which he said overwhelmed his email box and consequently went unread.  (At the same time, as many journals went to e-only format or print subscriptions were discontinued, their needed, and still needs, to be a way to alert researchers of new material.)  I spent much subsequent time learning about this gentleman's research, trying to learn what keywords would pull out of database searches the articles he would want to read.  Much trial and error.  He gave me the word "clusters," talking about a concept in physics and chemistry, large aggregations of molecular material, specifically for him metal clusters in the gas phase, observed in a mass spectrometer or  with similar instrumentation.  But "clusters" pulled up computer clusters and galaxies.  The researcher laughed at me when I showed him the first search results, but I kept refining it and incorporating not only disparate literature databases but contents from the journals themselves, filtering, searching and researching, and keeping an eye on what the researcher's group was up to with regard to publishing and presenting results and new developments.  Even after all that, I don't have a magic formula, but the regular communication between us was positive for the library.  Some of my colleagues will object, probably, to paraphrase William James, wanting to do a wholesale rather than a retail basis, for efficiency's sake.  To my view, the information landscape is overwhelming and any kind of assistance we can provide these dealing with it will only increase our value.

Then today I was pointed to a posting on Patron-Driven Acquisition (PDA,) the thinking being that academic libraries with limited funds should not attempt to purchase widely or exhaustively in a subject but respond to purchase requests from their constituents.  This is what I did in my previous position, with some purchases for reference volumes and other materials of general interest at my discretion.  And I think librarians using model can maintain some middle ground and some level of participation.  Browse publisher's catalogs and also reviews in journals such as Nature, Scientific American, Physics Today, Science, Science News, American Scientist, and others.  Browse library catalogs of similar institutions and consider if your constituents need a particular title onsite or through the network. Know the activities of your institution, the current courses and assignments, the experiments going on in the laboratories and keep an eye out for publications in whatever format that will support these endeavors.  Dana Roth similarly suggests many of these ideas in his presentation on the future of science librarianship from last year's SLA meeting.

All of this is a roundabout way to say, yes, we can respond to patron wants while thinking creatively about delivering materials, services, environments, communities, opportunities, collections yet unasked for.  It's not an either/or.  It's a yes and.

Intro

Maybe I was always going to be a librarian.  The summer I broke my foot (I was 8,) I organized my book shelf by title, put pockets and cards in them and checked them out to my friends.  There was one who would not return his books on time and I was strict with him.  "I've given you a lot of kindness," he said, referring to the fact that he'd visited me frequently.  I still wouldn't budge, which shows how flexible I was, where my mind was.  Throughout my childhood and younger years I gravitated toward the local public library, spending considerable time reading and browsing in the stacks.  However, when it came to write research papers, I had no idea, I was flummoxed, perhaps having ignored the librarian's useful instructions about the Reader's Guide and other resources.  Later, working with faculty and graduate students and seeing how they used databases, indexes and journals, gave me an understanding of how it can be done thoroughly.  The graduate students writing theses needed to read virtually everything on their topic, hence the search for obscure journals and interlibrary loan requests.


I went to a small liberal arts college in a midwestern state.  There is a path that runs through the middle of campus and at the time most of the humanities classes were held in the buildings on the left side of the path and the science classes were conducted in the buildings on the right.  I stuck to the left side of the path.  Could not decide on a major, make a choice, I wanted to study everything, as though there were infinite time to do so.  Finally I settled on religion, since I knew nothing about it, and my understanding told me that much of literature and art referenced the scriptures, so it was essential to learn.  I didn't want college to end, but end it did, and I was without a job, a plan, a clue. 

So I went home and applied at a large university, and surprisingly they hired me for an entry-level position in one of their libraries.  I had to file corporate report microfiche, keep track of government document receipts in an oppressive ledger, and fix the microfilm machines when they got jammed.  I moved up a position, shortly after, and then spent several years applying for higher-level jobs and getting turned down.  I did not have an MLS, although the situation certainly seemed to suggest getting one, as the tuition-reimbursement benefits offered by the university were quite generous. I saw other colleagues completing the process and leapfrogging me and I could not make a decision. 

What changed was the university went through a reorganization.  It was a nervous time and jobs were threatened, and I felt lucky to still be in a position.  However, professional positions (reference librarians, for example) in my unit were becoming vacant and not being filled.  The reference staff came up with an idea to train the support staff to back them on the reference desk.  I took the opportunity and soon discovered that I enjoyed interacting with patrons and had a wide knowledge of the library's resources.  My previous years had been behind the scenes in technical services.  As a result of this cross-training, I began to feel like I had a stake in the organization, or at least the work of my immediate unit.

Another opportunity arose, this time in a branch library within this same university's library system.  It was a two-person library, and I suppose I approached it to advance another level.  However, it dawned on me that someone in the process of getting an MLS might be hired for the job, someone showing a commitment to the profession.  Then I thought, why not, and I applied for the job and applied to library school.  I was accepted for both.  Got off to a shaky start at the new job, being thrust in the position of supervising the student workers, but after learning from my mistakes, whether they involved payroll or scheduling and logistics, it worked all right, and gradually I was able to approach every situation with confidence, using the experience and knowledge I had about libraries and being open to what I didn't know.

Library school was fun, although difficult to manage while working full time, and a slow progression, one course per semester.  But I delighted in applying what I learned.  About that time came the second game changer for me, the arrival of the world wide web into mass consciousness.  My computer knowledge was mediocre, I knew how to use a word processor or check email by telnetting to a mainframe, and had mostly used dumb terminals to access the library systems.  The web was the great equalizer.  When I saw how the browser could take me just about anywhere with a URL, I felt I had arrived, perhaps like "stout Cortez, as he stared at the Pacific") (Keats, Chapman's Homer.)  I even learned rudimentary HTML, although web techniques have long since eclipsed my skills (thank heaven for content management systems.)

After completing my degree, I looked for a position and after several months found something interesting on one of the professional websites.  It described an opening running a library at a scientific research institute wholly unknown to me, although it turned out to be in the same city where I was working, and in fact I had gone jogging past it on many occasions but never knew what it was.  Although I didn't know anything about the science going on there, I knew about the organization of scientific libraries, scientific literature and scientific databases.  So there I went.  It was a hard adjustment and I felt intimidated, being the only one who did what I did, a librarian in a sea of scientists.  However, I knew one thing - I had a habit of finding information, and little by slowly I learned about the research groups and what they did, found out where they published and who they read, went to their talks and gleaned what I could.  A scientist at the institute told me he felt he could either do his experiments or follow the literature, so I took on the latter and soon was supplying each scientist relevant papers and citations and stories and leads even before they were requested. 

Eventually the family that owned the institute made a gift of it to a large university.  In one sense, this gave the scientists and me access to resources such as electronic journals and databases that we couldn't have afforded otherwise.  At the same time, with so much available at their desktops, the scientists spent less and less time in the library.  I experimented with tools such as blogs, Twitter, and a weekly newsletter.  Having seen, however, how other librarians in similar positions took on new responsibilities to increase the value of their units, I know I could have done more.  At one point, through the blog and university news channels, I tried to be something of the institute's publicist.  Finally, at the end of 2009, I was informed that the institute had a choice between keeping me or funding more scientists and they had chosen the latter. 

I don't know what my next move is.  Logically, I could use my experience in another academic library setting.  At the same time, I have some experience in public libraries (having moonlighted at one and volunteered at another,) and would also consider working within a company that may not have a physical library but would need access to and organization and dissemination of information to meet their goals.  I still like the idea of libraries, visited my home town library recently and was awed by the beauty of the facility and the fullness of the book collections.  And yet, I might not advise an organization to create a library in the traditional sense.

Where I'm going and where libraries and information are going, I don't know, but I will consider these things in future posts.