Silence

Libraries are associated with quiet.  Even as recent as the last decade there was a library blog called Shush! (Can no longer find the site, although a Google search reveals the footprint.)  Quiet is good.  Silence is good.  The modern library, however, is not quiet.  People working together at computers, talking on cell phones, sharing media, perhaps a coexistence of quiet and activity, stillness and movement.

Personally I don't bat an eye (although sometimes I am a little jumpy) when someone's cell phone rings.  It's a fact of life today, common as dirt.  I swore I'd never be someone whose phone went off at an inappropriate time but that has happened.

Library users may want spaces where people can converse and engage and also spaces of quiet - when they want them.  How to create space for both?  The Librarian in Black pointed me to an interesting sign that might help library users modulate their sound contributions.

"Call It Anything"

I've accepted a job as director of libraries at a college that offers two and four year programs and enrolls some fifteen hundred students each year.  It's a forward thinking institution in a lovely residential setting, and the people I've met seem friendly, dedicated and not taking themselves too seriously, which is instructive for me. Why am I going there?  Why am I doing this?

I love service and I love meeting people and connecting them with other people and resources that will help them meet their goals.  I'm fascinated by literature, knowledge and internet.   I love libraries, even as the idea of what a library is and what it can become changes, whether or not it is called a library.

Demanding my attention from the start include the following:


How to make students feel welcome in the library.  A faculty member used the expression "library phobia" in a conversation we had.  Many students are the first in their family to attend college.  They may not have positive experiences with libraries or use one as their first resource (or at any time) to solve a problem.  (I may not have been comfortable using libraries until after several years of working in them plus graduate school.)  What do students want?  WIFI?  Places to congregate for group study, and then quiet study places when they need them?  I think of several transformational library settings shared with me by people I've met: a community college library that is now a community hub, featuring spaces for people to get together, work together, learning resources, technology resources, and cultural events; a university library that has successfully devoted its space to integrate technology more successfully within the library setting; and another university library that has devoted space to technologically-enhanced classrooms, quiet study spaces and collaborative work.  So what's possible and what's necessary for my new setting, questions that I can only answer with a better understanding of how work functions now.

Asking myself why I come to work and asking my colleagues what they like about their jobs, what they would change, what are their aspirations, what would success mean, listening more than I talk, being there, not necessarily having answers but having curiosity about this question and then taking steps to give staff members the resources to do their jobs and achieve their goals.  I'm fortunate to work with a lovely group of people, dedicated, professional, curious, friendly, couldn't say enough positive words about each one I've met.

What does the library own, subscribe to, provide access to and why?  What do we need that we do not have?  What could we get elsewhere or get by without?  What are the programs and the students we will support?  How much should we commit to eBooks and ejournals and databases? What about promoting unique collections in college departments, archival and historical materials, is there an opportunity for digitization, networking and sharing?  What about facilitating sharing of learning materials online for those who want to do so?

What are the best ways to approach faculty and other personnel?  What's worked, what's appropriate, what can I offer.  Current awareness tools and social bookmarking as ways to alleviate information overload?  Outreach to facilitate teaching and preparing library services to anticipate particular assignments?  One thing the faculty and staff I met with reinforced for me is, often when teaching library resources, students don't retain the knowledge of the tools unless there's an immediate use for it.  Perhaps using specific course assignment situations as learning opportunities to demonstrate useful library resources has potential.  On the other hand, students just may want the information quickly and be done with it.  Create learning modules that can be accessed online?  Instructional videos as have been used in other settings? 


Then there's the question of the online catalog.  What can that be, what should it be?  How can the catalog become more "social," integrated with other library, learning and online resources without sowing confusion?  What do library users want?  What features are available from vendors, or is a consortial catalog a possibility or even a solution? 


I'm asked what is the future of libraries and a response is "Libraries have many different futures."  The belief that all information that anyone could want is available online does not yet conform with present reality.  Darnton and others offer reasons for this, at the same time addressing why libraries need to consider providing patrons with ereaders and ebooks in a variety of settings.  I don't see libraries becoming obsolete but library personnel need to act.  I mean,  know the institutional context, know our customers, align our goals and objectives with theirs, seek out creative solutions that may not be associated with a "library."  This paper offers several examples tried in corporate settings that could be applied in a variety of library and information enterprises.  Maybe it will be called a library or something else.  I think of when Miles Davis's group was recorded at the Isle of Wight festival and Miles was asked the name of the tune.  "Call It Anything," was evidently his response.  So let's call it anything but let our focus be service freely given and the removal of information obstacles.


(I don't know, this may seem presumptuous, premature, pie in the sky, mushy, unspecific thinking; at any rate, these are some of my directions as I make this new beginning, drawing on experience and not knowing at the same time.) 

The library of memory

It was the kind of library you would find in the center of any town, I suppose. I want to say the facade was stucco but maybe it was just dull grey cement.  There were the hands of a clock on the front above the doors, and there were ashtrays in the foyer, just like in the children's book Mike's House. And the children's room was inviting, and had books such as The Sneetches, and Who's a Pest, and the Sign on Rosie's Door, especially the latter.  As I grew older, the library was renovated and it was harder to find things.  There was supposed to be more space and light and probably there was but I preferred the way things were before.  At one point I discovered the 796 section or thereabouts for books on baseball.  But I could never find the Glory of Their Times, for which there was a catalog card, but was never on the shelf.  I may have asked about it at one point and received a postcard in the mail saying it was out of print.  I knew nothing about interlibrary loan, no one had told me.  One time I held onto a record album several weeks after its due date, but the library staff caught up with me, sending me a photocopy of my library card and the checkout card as evidence of my sin.  It would not be the first time I would fall foul of a library establishment, and one might remark the irony that I would go on to pay copious library fines despite being a librarian, but maybe it's just kind of boring.

Struggling to find information for a school paper, an article maybe, using the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature.  We had to request the back issues of the magazines from someone at a desk.  She handed the request form back to me, saying " Now what the hell does that say?" My handwriting was and continues to be a source of merriment for those around me, even though I know it is good manners to write clearly.  In my youth and adolescence, I didn't care.  And there were books that took too long to read or were too much trouble to find.  Only years later (maybe ten, fifteen,) when I was on the front lines in library service, trying to help customers decipher the arcane listings in the online catalog or the index books, did it start to make sense.  When I applied for my first library job I had no idea what I was getting into, and the director was telling me that everything was headed in the direction of technology.  Even he probably had scant concept of networked information or even such a thing as an ebook, though it's not out of the question, since Vannevar Bush had written As We May Think in 1945 and hypertext had been invented sometime during the 1960s and ARPAnet was nothing new, but I had never heard of any of it and had only used a word processor under duress to finish my senior exercise in college, a sorry excuse for a paper that featured - you guessed it - little in the way of research. 

I got off topic.  My default as a teenager was to go to the library and grab a book and lie prone in the stacks.  I looked at Jazz Is by Nat Hentoff again and again but I don't know if I finished it, and looked at other books that mentioned John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.  Poetry books were a curiosity, especially the ones in French or in translation, but I don't remember which specifically, maybe I just liked glancing at them.  Drama too.  There were comfortable chairs, but mostly I sprawled in the stacks. 

My father is a mathematician. My mother is a reference librarian.  Ironically, I combined the two and became a science librarian.  "You really landed yourself, didn't you," someone remarked to me once.  I've seen changes but not as many as some.  I'm a consumer of technology rather than a developer or an innovator.  Not long ago I went back to the library of my youth.  It had changed dramatically.  Fine paneling.  Many computers.  Wide open spaces for people to gather.  And on the second floor, books, where there weren't offices, books, which had once occupied the lower level, books, in dignified rows, waiting to be discovered. Some that I might have read or touched back in the day were probably long gone, succeeded by fresher material.  Maybe there is a connection.  Maybe nothing is lost, and maybe it is all about loss.  I don't know.  I wasn't much of a reader actually then, struggled to finish a book then and that's true today.  Do a lot of reading online and more scanning, and a good thing about a book makes me stop and disconnect, and a library gives me pause by its solidity, by its having withstood time and change, though I live in a part of the country where municipal libraries are still relatively well supported, and even not that much if I look at the budgets (~ 1%.) 

Winston Churchill on libraries

“As you browse about, taking down book after book from the shelves and contemplating the vast, infinitely varied store of knowledge and wisdom which the human race has accumulated and preserved, pride, even in its most innocent forms, is chased from the heart by feelings of awe not untinged with sadness. As on surves the mighty array of sages, saints, historians, scientists, poets and philosophers whose treaures ne will never be able to admire — still less enjoy — the brief tenure of our existence here dominates mind and spirit.”  from Painting as a Pastime (via Mighty Girl)

Getting social

I used the word "game changer" in my last post, and there were two others in my recent history.  One was the discovery of blogs and RSS feeds in 2003, which, when I learned about them at a conference, then I made a connection and saw the potential, and started a blog.  Also downloaded a feed reader and loaded so many feeds into it that finally it wouldn't load.  Yet a world had opened up and there were new discoveries to make each day.

 Slowly, I started making connections with other bloggers.  A woman at my university, whose work I admired, got in touch with me and let me know there was a blog group meeting on Thursday nights.  However, I didn't meet her until I attended a blogging conference that fall.  Then I joined the group.  It was fun to sit and learn about new aspects of blogging that seemed exciting, but which I never put into play: podcasts, OPML, to name some.  My friend and I met at library conferences and participated on several panels together, talking about how we used blogs for information management and why a librarian or library should start a blog. She always encouraged me and is a remarkable, insightful, hard-working individual, not just tech and job-savvy, but well-read, active, into knitting, clog-dancing and having fun. 

Those blog groups were fun, we'd talk technology and then go out to dinner and talk more technology.  It was a forum where many people learned about getting started with blogging and the range of things that could be done with blogs, sharing news, building communities (like one a woman made for her town and what was going on there,) politics, international issues, science and science librarianship in my case.  After I stopped attending regularly several years ago, the group had evolved into something that discussed all sorts of technologies, calling itself a blog and technology group.  I don't know what the current status is.

So I continued to read my feeds through Bloglines, which worked most of the time, and then a couple of years ago gave Twitter a look.  When I first heard of it, I didn't understand its use.  Microblogging?  Short snippets of nothing?  Then, when I realized it was another content sharing and distribution device, another game changer.  I tweeted whatever was interesting, built a following, made connections with people with similar interests (even met some at a conference that I learned about through Twitter,) and perhaps became overwhelmed as I had with blogs and RSS feeds.  Today I'm looking for an elusive balance and some sort of strategy.  I believe that libraries can use social media to good effect, but I have nothing to quantify it, only examples that I have seen here and there.  I don't know the best way to reach patrons who are not using these tools, is it just librarians speaking to one another, or is it as Aaron Tay puts it, a way not to think like a librarian, a way to expand my perspective? I don't know what's next or if these tools will soon seem antiquated like blinking 1990s websites with frames. 

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.