With a loose grip on a very tight ship

Like many of you, I went to ACRL in Baltimore last week. I was on a panel about gendered expectations for library leaders and I presented a paper that used the Framework as a lens through which to view cataloging policy and practice. I tried to think of a thread that unifies my feelings about my ACRL experience, but I honestly don't have one. So I'm going to give you a few disjointed, half-formed thoughts.

1.) ACRL is not my home within ALA--that's ALCTS, the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services. I was really happy with the increased number of collections and technical services programs this year. While I haven't been a supporter of ACRL creating a section specifically to address collections and technical services issues, I think that having a venue within the ACRL conference to talk about these issues is really important. Also, I found that having more collections and technical services-related programming helped make me feel like I wasn't a weird outlier for attending ACRL. I hope that the 2019 installment of the conference will continue this trend. If you're a collections or technical services practitioner, I would encourage you to propose a session. If the content isn't there, there isn't much the program planners can do to raise the visibility of this part of academic librarianship.

2.) I was troubled by the number of programs that were social justice-themed or Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)-themed that were proposed and lead by white men. I feel like it requires a significant lack of self-awareness to be a white man and think that you're the person uniquely qualified to speak on issues related to social justice and/or EDI. It's especially shameful when you consider that nearly 90% of librarianship is made up of white people. And it does a lot to perpetuate the gross white savior narrative upon which librarianship seems to be built. I know that social justice and EDI are hot topics right now in librarianship, so everyone wants to be on record as saying something. But if we really want to advance these issues in our profession, those of us in positions of privilege would do well to sit down and make space to amplify the voices from marginalized communities. See also: the Roxanne Gay Q&A debacle of Aught Seventeen.

3.) I grow more and more annoyed at the Q&A periods during conference sessions. By the end of the conference, I was getting up and walking out when people finished their presentations. I feel like these Q&A periods do little to advance the work of the presenters and that questioners rarely ask good questions that are generally applicable to all in attendance. Instead, these questions usually fall along one of two lines:

1. The questioner has no question.
2. The questioner has a question that is so specific to their particular situation that the answer to the question is of little value to anyone other than the questioner.

I started to think that the Q&A period should be done away with and the time given back to the presenters. But the more I think about it, I think maybe that the Q&A period, with  some tweaks, could be useful. So don't approach the microphone unless you have a question that is general enough as to be valuable to all who are in attendance. And also, yes, do use the microphone--even if you think you can project.

4.) I had a real love/hate relationship with the social media back channel at this event. I found myself using the back channel to say some things that weren't very kind about situations and programs in which I found myself. I feel like everybody has to decide for themselves how they use social media, so this is more a self-critique than a hot take on the social media back channel writ large. At some point, in wanting to build a brand and cultivate a following, I lost track of my authentic voice in favor of something snarkier. And I don't like how I feel when I do that. I think I need to spend time thinking critically about how I use my voice in online spaces. As someone who wants to be taken seriously and who wants to have their voice heard, I recognize that my words have power and that I bring energy into a space with what I say. Maybe it's all the weird things happening in my life and in the world but at some point, I started putting snark in front of thoughtfulness in the words I express on social media. As someone who wants to build a Unified Library Scene, I can be truthful and say hard things without being...unkind, and I really need to think about how to strike that balance. That being said, I really appreciated the tweets that a lot of you made during the course of ACRL. I appreciate how thoughtfully and thoroughly you documented sessions and how smartly you held us all accountable for the ways in which we forgot to be our better selves during the course of the conference.

Stay positive,
Erin

the hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder

Erin wrote a love letter to tattooed spunky hipster librarians, in response to some of the comments about whether librarianship is a dying profession in a recent Hiring Librarians post. In the next breath, the respondent goes on to state

We are all replaceable because we have no identity and once the ALA accepts the ridiculous Threshold Concepts- we won’t even be able to hold a conversation in academia without looking like the morons we allowed ourselves to become.

So in both the quote that Erin used about "tattooed spunky hipster librarians" and in this quote, there are ad hominem arguments being presented to support the claim that librarianship is a dying profession. I don't want to fall into a tu quoque by making additional ad hominem statements, indeed, the author of the Hiring Librarians post makes a number of very important points that merit discussion. I want to talk about why almost everyone I know reacted to the tone instead of the content.

The ad hominem arguments in this case serve three purposes, all of them dangerous.  A caveat to add that what I am discussing here is not only true of many folks who agree with the statement above, but many who disagree. As Nanci Griffith puts it, "I am guilty, I am war, I am the root of all evil." We all do it. We should all be watching ourselves if we care for what we do, who we serve, and the future (not of our profession, the future in general, of humanity).

First, these arguments derail conversations about important issues (for instance, about threshold concepts) by bringing moral character judgements into realms where they do not belong. Assessments of the character of others (or, here, ourselves as well?) beg answers from others because they threaten identity. Erin's post gets at how digs at identity weigh on us, make it difficult to engage in discussions, and gnaw at our self-worth. They do not offer grounds to continue discussion of the topic at hand. No arguments or premises offered. We should be talking about the merits of the proposition.

Second, ad hominems and other informal fallacies distract from the issues. Suddenly we find ourselves discussing the straw man of generational divide, not knowing how we got here. We end up treading and retreading discussions that were tired when they started. What do we look like, do people like us, why don't they care about us, all in circles and circles. Without substance because there are not grounds to continue discussion of the original topic. No arguments or premises offered. We should be talking about the merits of the proposition.

Third, ad hominems and other informal fallacies abdicate responsibility and blame. If we allow each other to engage in fallacious arguments, we let it all fall apart. It becomes acceptable to discuss tangential concerns as if they are primary. It becomes acceptable to overgeneralize our peers based on surface differences. It becomes acceptable to not offer grounds to continue discussion of the topic of concern. We need not offer arguments or premises. I start to wonder if we even care about the merits of the proposition. If we even care what we are doing at all.


There is significant damage from these arguments, but even more damage caused by the discussions that we're not having. It is essential that we address content in these discussions. Habits of rhetoric are the danger, but they are habits and we can all work on focusing on the issues. As a profession, we need to engage each other about what we are doing and why. We need to be disagreeing and challenging and working through issues and reaching a balance to move forward. Maybe we're scared and used to discussions moving in this same direction, and we let it slide. Maybe it is hard to be honest with ourselves and our colleagues about how we feel and what we think about some issues. I get it. I'm there.

Discussion that is real, honest, and deep is not easy, but it brings us forward. If we open ourselves, lay out arguments, share honest feelings and concerns, if we then listen, question, listen, disagree, listen, and hear, if we then find a path that works for us all, if we could do just that. We may not all be on board with every single move, but we will understand and know each other.  And we'll be moving.  Creating the future of librarianship, even.

Keep Rockin'
Rachel

It's Best To Make the Most Of This

It's not about you. Well it is. It is about you providing the best services to the most people. I truly believe this is what we are interested in doing, and that's why I talk about relationships all of the time, even on other blogs. Because we want to do our jobs well, we often focus on our jobs, which can work against our interests. As a service organization, the depth of our specific knowledge and the breadth of our professional knowledge and services is often invisible. We want to make it apparent, to show everyone what we know and what we can do for them. However, "marketing" our services can happen in a way that is unhelpful or even belligerent and off-putting.

I am thinking about how we listen. How often do we run into or engage in the kind of interaction I described in this tweet?

this is a not ideal situation: 1: Please, we welcome your input! 2: here is my input. 1: oh, you should do this thing.

— M is for Rachel (@RachelMFleming) September 3, 2015

Now, I am a person who hates being told what to do, so when this happens to me, I feel like my input isn't valued, and wasn't even wanted in the first place.  I understand the impulse to respond to input with the array of services available or avenues for action, but this impulse is wrong. We need to work on shutting it down. Erin wrote about developing relationships with faculty based, saying

And when we ask faculty what their ideal relationship with a librarian looks like, let's ask because we really want to know and not because we want faculty to take us seriously or see as as equals.

To really listen, to be interested and want to know, our impulse has to shift from "marketing" our services to understanding our users and their needs. The brief conversation in my tweet should read something like

1: Please, we welcome your input!
2: Here is my input.
1: Wow, okay. I hear that. Can you tell me more about what has led you to that position and what you would like to see happen to address this issue? Where do you want to be in that process?

or:

1: Please, we welcome your input!
2: Here is my input.
1: I can definitely help you with that.

This should be the response even when you already offer a service that addresses the concern. Maybe there is something you can improve, maybe you can address a past wrong, maybe you will learn something. There is never a situation where a constructive answer is "oh, you know, we offer that service" or "if you would volunteer for a committee you will be able to address that concern," even when those things are true. Those responses do not encourage the actions that either party would like to see, they do not cultivate relationships. Every interaction is an opportunity to go deeper, as well. By shifting from a focus on what we do to a focus on our users, we can turn "our tech desk checks out several types of camera" to "wow that assignment sounds really interesting, what are you hoping your students learn from it? how else do you incorporate technology into your teaching? when you have some time, I'd love to show you some of the things our technology desk offers for checkout and introduce you to our technology staff."

When we ask for input, we need to be ready to hear input, because when people give input, they want to be heard. Of course, that sounds great and we can all agree that it's best and that my example is what we try to do. I think we need to practice turning off our "let me tell you what we already do" defenses more and harder to make sure we're always ready to listen and engage on a personal level.

What can you say to tell the person you're interacting with that they're being heard? What can you personally do, in that moment or in the short term future, to address their input constructively? How can you connect with their broader concerns?

And every time, after every interaction: how could I have done that better?

Keep Rockin'
Rachel

Every Mentee their Mentor, Every Mentor their Mentee

When Erin wrote last about the Spectrum Scholar Mentor Program, I thought to myself, "why, I might be a good candidate for that, I enjoy mentoring people, this is something I care about." So I clicked on over and started to look at the form. As I examined the form, I also examined myself, and before I clicked submit, I realized that this isn't something that I can do. It isn't the best use of me, my time, and my emotional energy.

There are people (possibly you!) who are well suited for certain tasks, like being involved in a formal mentoring program. For me, I just knew that a formal program wouldn't be the best fit for me professionally OR emotionally. It's just not a situation where I am able to feel the comfort necessary to develop a good and open relationship that is an integral part of a great mentor/mentee relationship.

But it isn't that I don't value those programs. I think it is essential that we create space for them and value the work that people put in as mentors and as mentees because developing excellent professionals is a good idea for our profession.

It also isn't that I don't value mentoring. Mentoring is very important to me and I feel a strong obligation to develop mentor relationships with early career professionals and with peers (heya erin.) I especially value the role that twitter has played in helping me connect with early career professionals who have similar interests to mine. The #critlib chat, for instance, has been a way to find not only others interested in critical pedagogy, but also queer librarians with whom I can organically establish mentoring relationships (this goes both ways, of course.)

Talking baseball with some librarian (or anyone) is part of being my authentic self on twitter and it leads to the kind of relationships that I can't develop in a formal setting. (Maybe others can, I cannot.) Twitter is a place where the relationship can start with library talk or start somewhere else, but it feels very real to me and much safer than a formal structured mentoring program. So when I talk with early career professionals, first generation professionals, or others without the kind of privilege I have I can be honest with them and up front. I can find people with whom I feel safe talking about the privilege I don't have as well. I feel much more comfortable being a queer librarian on twitter than I do in most other professional setting, and twitter starts relationships that end up being in gchat or email or real life, all of which can be even safer places to have deep and honest conversations.


Informal mentoring is probably the most important thing that I do as professional. Not in that I take every individual action after grave deliberation, but that I know how much these relationships have done for me and how much it must do for others. I take that very seriously and I want to be my best for those who think they've got something to learn for me as well as those who have something to teach me. I hope we can continue learning and teaching together for a long time. That's the Unified Library Scene.

Keep Rockin'
Rachel

The Dangers of Vocation

I've talked before about how words matter, and I want to talk today about a trope not specific to library work, but one that is used heavily in library work, library education, and professional discourse. This is the talk of our work as a calling and as a vocation. This language is dangerous.

If you know me, you might assume that my major opposition is based on the religious connotations of this language. It is, but not because of the christian-centric world that created this language, although using language steeped in religious tradition is something that we should avoid. While the religious background of the language has faded, it remains quite strong.

What actually bothers me about the language of "vocation" or "calling" is the way that it impacts how we view our work, its value, and our own value.  While there isn't anything particularly wrong with feeling specifically drawn to a field that matches your demeanor and particular expertise, the sense of vocation that we use in relation to library work or education and some other fields is overlaid with a sense of service for the sake of service.

Vocation in this sense indicates that people are called to certain types of work not only based on their skills but based on a call to service. The call to service is even more specifically christian, implying a kind of drive toward good works that are valuable as good things, not necessarily having other types of value to society. Indeed, the history of library work in the United States looks a lot like mission work. I want us to push against language that has connotations that our work isn't essential to society, and I believe that our work has become more and more valuable over time.

Language that frames library work as a call to service also opens a door wide open to devalue the labor of library work. If we are called to do service in the sense of a vocation, and that work is good work, the calling is one that pulls us apart from general life, from business life. Why then would one called to this work demand to be appropriately compensated for labor? Think of the fields other than library work where this language of vocation is used. Notice anything?

Let's talk more about how this language frames our understanding of our own work and our profession. Let's be more careful about the words that we use because the impact of how we speak is far more broad than we imagine.

Keep Rockin'
Rachel

On Actions and Perceptions

On Wednesday, Erin's wrote that Words Can Get Weird while friend of the blog @winelibrarian wrote a post that is not so unrelated, It's My Library and I'll Cry If I Want To. Taken together, we get a conversation about effective leadership and perceptions, which seems to be impossible to divorce from a conversation about gender. It's true that especially in positions of leadership, perceptions of actions are highly colored by conceptions of gender. It's also true that the entire profession has been in a highly gendered position in regards to the nature of our work and professionalism. I want to complicate a tiny bit more with my thoughts on pragmatic actions.

Now, on a personal level, I operate along these lines where in my head I am also navigating space as a queer queer (as opposed to a queer man or a queer woman.) I say in my head, because it I can't speak to how people perceive me negotiating the space. I can make some assumptions about how people see me and I can try to influence how people view me as a person and a professional, but, frankly, I don't have the time or energy to engage in what is often a fruitless and frustrating effort. So I operate on the premise that we have very little control about how people perceive us.

What we do control are our actions. Now, surely we modulate our actions depending on the environment and people we are interacting with. For instance, I am wearing a sweatshirt today, because I have no meetings. This is something I might not do if I had a different job or for any number of other reasons. My perceptions of my role as well as my understanding of how others may be perceiving me plays a key role in my choices in what I wear (and in everything else).

So the question is "how willing am I to modulate my behavior in order to alter perceptions of me?" and the answer is "exactly the minimum amount necessary in order to accomplish my goals." The question of how I am perceived in a highly gendered culture and what I do to alter that culture is a separate (often concurrent, but separate) struggle. What determines the minimum amount is a consideration of whether some kind of behavior would actually change perceptions of me in a way that makes it easier for me to accomplish my goals. It is harmful and pointless to change my behavior, probably in ways that affect my self-perception, if the end result does not create a changed environment. However, if changed perceptions do help accomplish personal and organizational goals, we have a different story. This is a path much narrower for women and other marginalized groups.


I think we'll leave it at that for a Friday Musing.

Keep rockin'
Rachel

Personal Vision

When I got my first professional job, my number one joy was that I wasn't going to have to move again for a while. After a lot of changes, I was so excited to settle in to a place and build a space of comfort. That was my goal at the job, as well: figure out what I'm doing and do it.

I think that's a goal we all have in our positions: to figure out what we're doing and do it, and do it well if we're lucky.  It is easy to make that the end goal. After I know this I will know it, done done let's go hiking this weekend. For me it happened so fast out of library school that I hardly noticed how I wasn't thinking hard about the long-term, strategic consequences of my decisions or about the my field generally or librarianship widely.

I think of library work (we do here at Constructive Summer) as highly responsive service based work. The trick comes where there is a lot of daily work, where sometimes we confuse the responsiveness of our actions to the responsiveness of our ideas. We can think that because we've figured out our jobs and are good at them that we're operating at our peaks. Really what we need to do when we've got it figured out is to look forward.

Looking forward in our fields and in our profession has to start with having a vision for yourself. From yourself. We're all too happy to react to other ideas, suggestions, theories or whatever, but if we don't have a real idea of what our position is all of our reactions are basically worthless reflexes without substance. If you're just reacting, you're just reacting. When you have a reasoned position that you're coming from you can have a real discussion, one that can result in your own mind being changed, one that can result in moving your workplace and our profession forward.

So how do you have a vision? The first step is to take care of the basics, yes knowing the job and being good at the job are important. It's okay to focus on that where necessary. We need to read up on the literature and keep an eye on what's happening (a particular recent failing of mine). We need to allow ourselves the time to step back and think about issues when they arise to see what kind of strategic importance they might have.

If you can't manage the time in your day to day, take a week and jot down all of the issues you run into broadly, and pick one to consider on your commute. What have I worked on this week? ebooks, streaming media, budget, weeding, format migrations in AV, next drive I take, I'm going to think about what I really think about streaming media. Where is it going in our library, where is it going generally, what might change in the next five years, what kind of things do I wish were different, what do we need to do today and what do we need to do to get ready for the future?  That's the kind of thinking that will make it easy to have an in depth conversation with someone about the future of our collection, way more than a recitation of just what I've come across in my work.

It's also important to have a good long think about what YOU want to be doing. When I first heard someone tell me this, I was in the midst of being so happy about not moving, 26 and in my first professional job and I was not ready to hear it. Now I know it is important. I refer you to Erin's recent post for a little bit more. There isn't need to make a five year strategic plan (as I was instructed to do), but sit and think (or run around and think) about what is in store for you.

In building to strategic planning we're on step two: Personal Vision
Step One was Introverts and Introspection, assessing our natures.

keep rockin'
Rachel

From The Outside

I've been involved in a few space planning projects now, and it always seems that we are surprised at how we look when we see ourselves reflected back through the eyes of outsiders we've invited. Architects and other outside consultants can offer a view that we can't get from our own entrenched positions and that is a good thing.

Outsiders only know what you tell them and what they can see. When you see yourself through their eyes, you can get a good look at the foundational narratives of your organization: the stories you tell yourselves. These can be good or bad, but they are foundational in a way that makes them hard to uncover during day to day business. When what they see and what they hear don't align, that gets drawn out in discussions and narratives. You find yourself being asked to clarify why things that conflict with your narratives exist.

Outsiders don't have a vested interest in the organization. They can't retaliate directly against anyone, and can anonymize issues. If you let folks talk directly to the architects, consultants, etc, either individually or in peer groups, you can get feedback that might never get spoken aloud in other contexts.

A colleague of mine recently invited an "equity consultant" to come and work with their department. The consultant held a day of open forums for undergraduates, graduates, untenured tenure track faculty, adjunct faculty, women, faculty of color. The forums were open to those groups specifically, and afterwards he reported back what he had heard to the administrators and leaders in the department. The result was a deconstruction of the narrative of "we've got a few issues but we're doing okay" based on hearing comments that people only felt comfortable making in a safe space.

Even when a consultant isn't hired specifically to address issues like "are we a truly equitable workplace" or "what are our foundational narratives," when you pay attention to the organizational dynamics that go on when an outsider is involved (especially for an extended period like with an architect), you can learn a lot about your organization.  And, most importantly, you can use that information to start to make changes to be a better organization.

 Keep Rockin'
Rachel

On radical hospitality

For me, the Unified Library Scene means a lot of things. It means collaboration across functional areas in libraries. It means putting library users squarely in the center of any decision you make about how your library runs. It means leaving Librarianship better than you found it.

But mostly, the Unified Library Scene means being the change you wish to see in both Librarianship and in the world.

Today, in the wake of the non-indictment of Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, the Ferguson-Florissant School District is closed. But the Ferguson Municipal Public Library is open. And from 9-3, they're inviting teachers and volunteers into the library to work with kids.

WE ARE OPEN! Teachers and volunteers are here 9am-3pm to help kids who can't go to school today. Library open 9-4, presuming it stays safe.
— Ferguson Library (@fergusonlibrary) November 25, 2014

The Ferguson Municipal Public Library also opened its doors to kids, teachers, and volunteers back in August after the killing of Michael Brown and the subsequent protests delayed the start of school in the Ferguson-Florissant School District.

This. This is what a library does. A library opens its doors to the community and meets its needs. Maybe that means building collections. Maybe this means building a makerspace so that users can dream and build and create. Maybe this means teaching classes on any number of topics relevant to the needs of the community. Maybe that means opening your library so that children in your community have a place to go and process their feelings and where teachers can continue the work of helping the children in your community grow.

The how looks different for every library in every community. But the why? The why is always the same. It is the job of a library and its staff to be hospitable in the most radical way possible to the community it serves.

It's possible that you didn't go into Librarianship to practice this kind of radical hospitality. Too bad. This is your job now, in a world that is increasingly and unequally unsafe for members of your community. It's possible that you think that Libraries are only for collections. Too bad. As R. David Lankes put it in this blog post, great libraries build communities.

Being the change means standing up and meeting the needs of your community. It means putting yourself at risk to ensure that your library is a safe space for the most vulnerable in your community. It means thinking critically about the collections you build and the services you offer. It means putting the needs of your users ahead of your own comfort.

So, here's the question: What is one thing that you can do today to practice radical hospitality to the community you serve?

Conference Power

Academic libraries can be lonesome, especially for folks in areas where there are not a lot of people (like my field of acquisitions). When you're already in a place like that, and you're trying to build the constructive summer, it can be, you know, a little

There are so many paths of new doctor who references I could follow from here, but I'm not going to follow any of them! Admire my restraint!

Just like Erin talked about earlier this week, we gotta take care of ourselves.  Part of that is recharging personally in things like vacations, or playing games, or building elaborate blanket forts, or building elaborate cakes to share with me. Another equally important part of recharging is taking a break professionally.

Stepping away from our daily duties to think big thoughts about what we do, to see what other people are up to, to meet and talk to people who are both as tired of the day to day and excited about the possibilities that exist, to drink new and exciting beers in new and exciting towns.  Yes, my friends, I'm talking about going to a conference.  While it is possible for a conference to be hard work, I also find them extraordinarily rejuvenating.

I just got back from my conference, the Charleston Conference, and I have a TON of new ideas, and a TON of leads to follow up from vendors, and a TON to share with y'all and maybe even a new research project or two. And I'm excited about it all. Again. It happens every year.

The level of interaction with other people can be overwhelming, and the lack of sleep can wear, but I suspend all rules at conferences because the returns on fully engaging are so high. If I wish one thing professionally, it would be a way to get a real conference experience to folks who don't have the means to regularly get to regional or national conferences.

 Go Conferences!

Here's a bonus song about feeling alone and how that's true and not true.

What We Do All Day

I'm a middle manager. I'm not afraid to admit it, and I'm not ashamed of being it. I make things happen. On the ground. I advocate for staff, I advocate for the institution. I get to do all kinds of awesome things. I really, really, really enjoy it.

One of the greatest challenges of being a middle manager is the way that a line can be drawn between the kinds of work we do. Between administrative work and what I'll call it production work, between your team and the team of which you're a smaller part.

What is not cool, I tell you it is not cool, is when we think of administrative work as "meetings" and production work as "real work."  Meetings are real work. Say it with me. Meetings are real work. It is my job to go to meetings. It is my real job to go and talk to people. It is my real job to know what is going on in our building and in the larger organization and to talk to people and go to meetings. Meetings are real work.

"Real Work" is real work, too. And meetings take time. In middle management, the challenge is to balance the administrative work (both broadly and of your group specifically) along with the other duties you may have (original cataloging, vendor relations, teaching and reference, assessment, etc. etc.) and for me, also faculty responsibilities for research and scholarship.  That's a lot of stuff. Perhaps another time we'll talk about strategies for managing all these things.

What is not okay is a scenario in which you do administrative work during the day, when other people are around and able to have meetings, and production work at night or in other off hours. That's not okay because the night is not for work. Work time is for work. Night time is for, you know, your life. No.

I insist you have a life even if you do not want one. You need it to make that leap from good at your job to omg so incredibly amazing at your job.

So, case in point. I have about six meetings a week. That's not too many. But sometimes, they come all at once, like yesterday and today. I thought, on Wednesday night, let me just write my blog now, during the baseball game, and then it'll be done and cool cool. But instead I did this:

I made a tiny cover for the tiny torah that @thewanderingjew sent me. Because. pic.twitter.com/uYMV9sp4em
— M is for Malevolent (@RachelMFleming) October 23, 2014

Which was good. Because it made me feel good. And that's a good use of my time.

What Are We Afraid Of?

I have this fear of dropping my keys down a grate.  It's like my fear of heights, only infinitely more reasonable. If I am not mindful of my keys, a perfectly reasonable series of events could lead to my dropping my keys down a grate and that would totally suck. A friend of mine once had his keys in his sweatshirt pocket, and they ended up flushed down a convenience store bathroom toilet two hours from his house. These things happen! Moreover, my fear of dropping my keys down a grate causes me to act in ways which result in my keys never getting dropped down a grate. So it is a reasonable and effective fear.

Now, librarians have some fears which are, if I may, just ridiculous. These are, of course, the Image Of Librarians and The Future Of Libraries. Personally, I am so confused about why we have these fears I can hardly react. But I'm going to have a go at deconstructing them because that seems like fun and I learned some stuff about how to think about things last week. So.

We're afraid of our perceptions of people's perceptions: of librarians and libraries. The cultural thing that is "a library" and "a librarian" is much easier to define, and people's "perceptions" about them are easy to say. It's lazy thinking, and as I've talked about before, lazy thinking is dangerous, and it's our collective responsibility to say something about it.

If we don't know what folks in our communities really think about libraries and librarians, that's on us. People have deeply complex ideas about libraries and librarians. People have deeply complex views on pretty much everything. If you ask and are willing to listen, people will tell you all about it. Erin wrote about asking our users this question a little while back.

So the real question is why do we prefer our lazy thinking to having a discussion with people in our community? I think we're scared of what they'll say. I think we know that we might not be doing a super job. I think we know that we've somehow got our entire identities tied up in doing work we know isn't vital. I think we want to do what's best for our libraries and our communities but are scared to jump. That's not about the Image Of Librarians or the Future Of Librarians at all, that's on us as individual people dealing with our Stuff.  Trust me, I know Stuff isn't easy, but, I mean, suck it up. We've got important work to be doing.


Reasonable fears keep my keys out of grates, but lazy thinking, unreasonable fears and hand-wringing keep our focus away from the simple steps that will lead to our institutions being vital in our communities and our ability to make powerful change in those communities. Let's keep our eye on the prize.

Keep Rockin',
Rachel

Sins of Omission

For me, this year has been one of revelation.  The events this year in Gaza and in Ferguson made me think hard about communities I love and how they operate as institutions of oppression, even when they're doing much better than Israel and St. Louis County were doing this summer (and now). Even more importantly, I realized that thinking right about tough issues isn't enough. What that meant was some hard conversations with my parents about their city (a city I love), and some very tough conversations in my faith community (I don't want to talk about those). And these have to be ongoing, like the way I have to keep learning and growing in my own understanding. But if I think right and say nothing and do nothing, my thoughts have no value. In fact, to do nothing where I could have done something is an equal sin to doing the wrong myself.

I want to try now to expand that to my professional life: to start to look at what it would be like to address with action the of sins of omission we commit frequently in libraries and higher education.
 I really want your help with this, too, please leave your comments. Let's start with keeping out mouths shut when we shouldn't.

First, I think that we, as librarians, we don't speak our minds generally, let alone on tough issues. It could be rooted in the history of our pink profession, or because someone fears retaliation for a simple disagreement.  Instead of focusing on what it might mean for us to speak up on a professional matter, think about what you are doing when you don't speak. You could be creating a poorer user experience. If you don't speak up to say "tell me about how this will affect patrons," or "I really don't think that will be the student response to this service, let's get some more data," you may be actively damaging the experience users have in your library.

We also don't speak up professionally, because we don't feel sufficiently expert, because we don't think people see us as sufficiently expert, because a topic isn't sufficiently "professional" and a myriad of other reasons. Take for instance, net neutrality, U.S. domestic surveillance, discrimination and abuse in our profession, lack of diversity in the profession, on and on. On these issues, it is helpful for me to think: what kind of professional am I if I don't feel the need to educate myself? do I want to be in that kind of profession? So I hope to, in the next year, do more work on both educating myself and helping us all to educate ourselves so that we can speak out with authority on issues of import to ourselves and our communities.

Now, don't get me wrong: I intend a full level of professionalism in these discussions. It is professional to have a disagreement. In fact, a passionate disagreement is professional (I want you to be passionate about your work!) So my ideal is something like we passionately speak our minds in disagreement giving respect where it is due to our colleagues because THAT is the only way to get the best outcomes.

So that's a start. What do you think our biggest sins of omission are as a profession? What can we do to address them? Let me know in the comments.

and Keep Rockin',
Rachel