And what I choose is my voice

I am taking a class this summer wherein we are reading newly published books about higher education. For this week's class, we read Taking It to the Streets, which I enjoyed far more than I thought that I would. Even in the places where I didn't agree with an author's ideas, I appreciated the vulnerability it took to write about how they considered their relationship to public scholarship.

While all of the author's seemed to be in favor of some degree of public scholarship, a theme that permeates Taking It to the Streets is the tension between being the kind of scholar who chooses only to write and publish and the kind of scholar who chooses to both write and publish and in some way connect to the communities about which they research and write.

It may be too reductive of an observation, but it felt to me like implicit in the tension I felt in this book is whether the goal of the scholar should be to embody a positivist epistemology or a participatory epistemology. The goal of research conducted using a positivist epistemological lens is to explain some naturally occurring phenomenon. In contrast, the goal of research conducted using a participatory epistemological lens is to create change in the world using research findings as the basis for that change.

While it might be tempting to suggest that one or the other of these epistemological lenses is more appropriate for the time in which we live, it is important for scholars on both sides of the divide to understand that there is not universality in what brings scholars to the academy and what undergirds their work. In a chapter titled "A Road Less Traveled: the Responsibilities of the Intellectual," William G. Tierney (2018) writes:

I do not believe that only one route exists for intellectual engagement, and in that light, I want each of us to be aware that we are choosing a particular path. I am troubled at times that a colleague may assume that only one choice is possible and that if another choice is made, then his or her colleague is gravely mistaken or morally failing. I am equally troubled by those who do not see their choices are choices. By assuming that the choice one has made is the only possibility or not thinking through the array of possibilities that exist appears shortsighted to me, loaded with hubris and devoid of humility. (p. 101)

Reading Taking It to the Streets helped give me words to talk about a similar tension I feel in librarianship. While the divide isn't explicitly drawn along epistemological lines, there are similarities. There are library workers who believe deeply that the work of libraries and those who work in them is to be neutral actors, providing access to all types of information to all types of library users. There are also library workers who believe deeply that the work of libraries and those who work in them is to agents for liberatory change, wherein marginalized voices are privileged and hateful rhetoric is unwelcome.

In much the same way as there is not universality in what brings scholars to the academy, there is not universality in what brings library workers to the library. But there's something in what Tierney writes that sits wrongly with me. While choosing to take a particular path or to use a particular epistemological lens is, in fact, a choice, there are people for whom the stakes are higher. In her remarks at the ALA Midwinter President's Program, Emily Drabinski (2018) suggested that:

those steeped in and rewarded by dominant ways of seeing the world don't have to see how intensely political the ostensibly neutral position is. If the white supremacists booking your meeting space are not after you, you don't have to know how dangerous they are. Books about reparative therapy for gay people can simply be another point of view if yours is not the body and mind those authors seek to destroy. To imagine that neutrality could be something we could choose is an intensely privileged position, one that I have to imagine my way into as I listen to the arguments of those whose worlds are rarely contested. (para. 6)

In his chapter in Taking It to the Streets, Shaun R. Harper (2018) echoes Drabinski's thoughts, writing "Researchers frequently mistreat Black Americans and other minoritized populations as variables in their statistical models. Then they go on to make all sorts of assumptions about my people vis-à-vis Whites and other groups in their analyses. Much about this is dehumanizing" (p. 82).

The point I'm trying to make is this: for those of us in dominant groups, acting out of a particpatory or liberatory epistemology in either the academy or the library is a choice. We can choose to turn away from neutrality or positivism because we have the safety afforded to us by being some combination of white or cisgender or able-bodied or middle-class or male. But our colleagues from marginalized communities are less able to adopt the position of neutrality because it is their identities that the world seeks to destroy.

So yes, let's accept that each of us comes to librarianship with a diversity of experiences and motivation. But let's also accept that for some people, living into a participatory or liberatory epistemology is literally a matter of life or death.

Stay positive,
Erin

References:
Drabinski, E. (2018, February 12). Are Libraries Neutral?. Retrieved from http://www.emilydrabinski.com/are-libraries-neutral/

Harper, S. R. My People's Professor. In Perna, L. W. (Ed.) Taking It to the Streets: the Role of Scholarship in Advocacy and Advocacy in Scholarship (p. 79-85). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

Tierney, W. G. A Road Less Traveled: the Responsibilities of the Intellectual In Perna, L. W. (Ed.) Taking It to the Streets: the Role of Scholarship in Advocacy and Advocacy in Scholarship (p. 100-105). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

Days of swim or sink

Two things happened this past week that got me thinking about technical services workflows--a scintillating topic to be sure.

The first thing that I noticed this past week is the program for the ALA Midwinter meeting of the ALCTS Technical Services Workflow Efficiency Interest Group. Three of the four presentations address how members of technical services units in academic libraries evaluated workflows and redesigned them in order to improve efficiency within their units.

The second thing was more a thing that happened to me than a thing that I noticed. When I was cataloging something this past week, I happened upon a record in Ye Olde Bibliographic Utility that seemed to have been created by a vendor. Stop me if you've heard this one before: it had many obvious errors, incomplete description, and sub-par subject analysis. I spent a lot of time working on this record in order to make it worth importing into my local bibliographic database. Though many people have griped about the issue of incomplete vendor records in public venues and listservs, I didn't necessarily mind doing the work because improving upon the work of others is at least one the purposes of a universal bibliographic utility. It did, however, get me thinking.

As the resources (both financial and personnel) of technical services units have dwindled, those who staff them have had to make choices about how to accomplish the nearly impossible task of doing more with less. And one obvious way that libraries can do more with less is to outsource the creation of metadata either to a metadata creation vendor or by using records provided by vendors. But, maybe now is a good time to ask ourselves that question that Rachel often poses to us: What is it we're trying to do here?

It isn't so much that I think that vendor-created metadata is universally bad. I don't. But I do think that the leaders of libraries who have chosen to move large portions of their collections off-site in an attempt to transform their spaces have to consider the fact that without the ability to browse, catalog records become the only means of discover for a large portion of a collection. And yes, while some disciplines have moved from monographs being the main way information is disseminated to serials being the information vehicle of choice, there are still those who find books a meaningful component of their research.

I can imagine it feels daunting to have the kinds of conversations that lead to the kind of workflow changes that the three libraries featured in the ALCTS Technical Services Workflow Efficiency IG program. People can be territorial about the processes that they manage and it's hard to give up the workflows that have become worn into our institutional memories over time. But it's the hard conversations and difficult introspection that comes with workflow evaluation that leads to real, lasting, and meaningful changes within organizations.

Technical services units and those who lead them are not doing their patrons any favors by choosing to pick off the low hanging fruit of metadata creation when it comes to reducing cost and increasing efficiency. The myth of the catalog as a useless and outdated relic of years past is perpetuated when the newly created metadata added to it is not useful or meaningful within the context of a user community. Sure, library leaders, you've save money buy accepting metadata of a lower quality that those who are trained in cataloging would have created. But you've also made more work for your public services staff and your users.

I propose that 2018 be the year that we in technical services librarianship stop choosing the lowest handing fruit. Instead, I propose that we embrace hard conversations, workflow evaluation, and identifying what we can let go of to take on the tasks that matter.

Stay positive,
Erin

No time to think of consequence

By now I'm sure you've heard people talking about the article in The Chronicle called "What the 21st-Century library looks like." The article is paywalled, so you may not be able to read it. I don't want to write a reaction piece to the whole article, but there is one quote from the article that I do want to engage with. The middle of the article, the author writes "While traditional skills won't go away altogether, he [Mr. Wilder] says, new hires can help their employers 'figure out what the 21st-century research library looks like.'"

To give you some context, prior to this quote the author references the fact that there is a theoretical impending generational turnover that coincides with the fact that the shift to an almost entirely digital environment requires academic library workers to identify emerging needs of academic library users and develop services to meet those needs. The quote implies that because the newest hires among us are younger than us, they can help those they report to better understand how to navigate this new world and what it requires of us.

I have three things I want to say about this.

via GIPHY

First, that's a lot of pressure to put on the shoulders of someone who just got hired into an academic library. Imagine that you're an early career librarian. You're in your first job out of graduate school, mostly likely with a lot of student debt. Depending on how much you learned in school or through internships, you may feel out of your depth in this academic environment. If you're a person with marginalized identities, you may already feel like you were hired as the token person to teach everyone about diversity and inclusion. Now imagine that your supervisor, or someone higher up on the library's administrative team would like for you to help them understand younger library users and what they need. Or maybe they don't ask you to be part of the conversation--maybe they just add to your job description that you'll be charged with developing new and innovative services to reach younger user groups. That's a lot of pressure, right? The best outcome in this situation is that your early career colleagues will feel overwhelmed with all of this responsibility. The worst is that they burn out because you're set them up to fail.

Second, demanding that your newest and youngest library workers help you "figure out" what the future looks like disenfranchises the mid-career and late-career library workers in your organization. It suggests that an administrator feels like those library workers are too out of touch with what younger users need and, as a result, don't have any good ideas. I am not a fan of the but we've always done it this way mentality, but I do think we need to acknowledge that both our new hires and our incumbent staff are capable of coming up with good ideas about how to serve the various user groups in our academic libraries. Early career librarians have the good fortune of being new to your organization and they can see your services with fresh eyes. Mid-career and late-career librarians have the benefit of having seen the context in which your services exist and the context into which you plan to introduce new services. Assuming (and, yes, this is a big assumption) they are open to the adoption of new ideas, they can offer constructive feedback and help you anticipate problems.

Finally, the future is not as knowable as you think it is. Yes, you can use present data to predict future trends. But your user community is not a monolith and its likely that by the time you build the services you think they want that their needs will have already changed. We have this problem in librarianship where we're constantly trying to outrun our obsolescence by trying to predict the future and create services to support it. That's not great because it keeps us from engaging with the present--with identifying the needs of our users as they are right now and expending our resources to meet them. Sure, look at gate count and study how users make use of your space. And use the data you gather to be the best steward of your resources that you can. But never get too attached to the idea of the future that you give away resources your current users need to build a future that your future users may never need.

All of this is not to say that you shouldn't trust the opinion of early career librarians when it come to creating and deploying services to meet the emerging needs of library users. You should. But do it by including early career librarians in conversations in your library about these emerging issues and listening to them when they talk. Placing the burden entirely upon them for helping to create the future of your library is bound to be problematic for everyone.

Stay positive,
Erin

Listen close you hear what I'm about

So, let's talk about strategic planning.

via GIPHY

If you work in a library or you belong to a professional association, you may have been caught up in the tidal wave of strategic planning. And from the outside, it may look like all talk and no action. Or it may look like a bunch of talk that impedes action. At least, that's the sense that I get from the unhappy rumblings about the idea of strategic plannings that I've heard from within librarianship. There is a sense, I think that engaging in a strategic planning process has the capacity to take us away from the ever-changing circumstances that we encounter as library workers.

And I suppose, I can appreciate the idea that underlies this sentiment. As library workers, we don't want to lose sight of the communities we serve and the circumstances that can change rapidly within those communities. We should aspire to respond quickly and thoughtfully to those circumstances and the needs they surface for the community. And we should not reduce our communities, those circumstances, or those needs to talking points in a written strategic plan.

But having said that, I think that strategic plans are unbelievably important for libraries and our professional associations because they give leaders at every level the opportunity to define what they organization is going to be about for a given period of time. The strategic planning process allows organizations to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It gives organizations the opportunity to reassess their values. And when all of that is done, organizations decide on a direction for a given period of time and decide how resources will be allocated in service of that vision. What I think is so important about strategic planning in libraries and in our professional associations is that it gives us a compass for individual library workers and association volunteers to orient our work. Each individual project and program can be evaluated using the strategic plan as a lens. And projects and programs carried out within different parts of an organization that are in service of the same strategic plan seem more alike than different. An organization's strategic plan is something that unifies all parts of an organization that seem disparate.

But as much as I can appreciate the desire to be responsive and nimble, this feeling that we need to eschew strategic planning is short sighted. First, I think that not having a strategic plan means that your organization isn't all rowing in the same direction. Sure, if you have a solid organization culture you may be operating with the same values. But the programs and projects carried out within different parts of the organization may be in service of the mission of those parts and carried out to serve their own ends rather than to serve the strategic direction of the organization as a whole. Second, I don't think that operating under a strategic plan makes an organization inherently less nimble. Library workers can still respond to the changing circumstances within their communities and reflect the changing needs of the community back to its members. That doesn't change because you have a certain strategic direction. It just means that the projects and programs library workers choose to implement to meet a community's needs will work within a certain framework or construct. I also think it's worth stating explicitly that your organization's strategic plan should be community-centered at the outset as to avoid this false tension between working within a strategic direction framework and serving your community.

In the end, I think it's more important than ever that libraries and our professional associations take the time to figure out what we're about. We need to be clear about our strengths weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. We need to be clear about the values that drive our work. And we need to be intentional about how the resources needed to meet our established strategic directions are allocated. Doing all of this work doesn't mutually exclude the capacity for libraries and our professional associations to be nimble and responsive. In fact, I would (and hopefully have) argued that one is directly related, and intrinsically linked, to the other.

Stay positive,
Erin

The question that says everything

I got into a conversation yesterday about the ALCTS Strategic Plan. Adopted in 2015, the Plan is set to be updated during the 2017/2018 year. There is much about this Plan that I wouldn't change, but I want to point out a couple of points in the plan that I think reflect the tension, broadly, between professional associations for library workers and the members they are seeking to recruit and retain.

So let's start with the points:
IIC: Reach out to under-represented and under-involved groups (support staff and students) to encourage their participation in webinars and online meetings.
IIIC: Recruit new members, particularly students and faculty in iSchools and library programs, and public and special librarians.
IIID: Identify and address requirements for the financial sustainability of ALCTS, particularly fundraising.

So, here's the tension: ALCTS, like many professional organizations for library workers, wants to recruit and retain new members, presumably in order to help grow the next generation of Collections and Technical Services leaders. But it also needs be sustainable, financially speaking.

So let's crunch some numbers. All of this comes form ALA's personal membership page, by the way, if you want to see how this translates for the ALA division with which you affiliate yourself most closely.

For a student, membership in ALA and ALCTS is $51.
ALA membership: $36
ALCTS membership: $15
It is worth noting that ALA limits student membership fee rates to 5 years.

When you transition out of that student pricing tier, your pricing increases to one of two price points at the Association level.
Regular membership: $137
Non-salaried/Unemployed/Underemployed/Making less than $30k annually: $49

At the division-level, ALCTS charges a "regular" rate of $65 and doesn't offer a lower price tier for people who receive the lower rate at the association level.

So you could pay either $114 or $202 to be a member of both ALA and ALCTS, depending on what rate you pay at the Association level.

I should stop here and say that I don't mean to pick on ALCTS. I just used them for this exercise because they're my home within ALA.

Now that we've crunched those numbers, let's think honestly about how wanting to recruit and retain new members and how wanting to remain financially sustainable are in tension with one another.

Students and early career librarians often struggle financially because of student debt, unpaid internships, and low wages for library workers. Finding the extra room in one's budget to pay the fees to be active in professional association work simply isn't an option for a lot of our future library leaders. Our professional associations have so much to offer students and early career librarians by way of volunteer opportunities, programming, and mentorship. And while the restrictions for in-person attendance at ALA Midwinter and Annual have been loosened quite significantly, you still have to pay both an Association-level and Division-level membership fee in order to be active in committee work.

Professional associations for library workers have bills to pay, so it is a challenge to consider changing a fee structure because of its potential impact on financial sustainability. But our professional association leaders have to think about the lived experiences of the people we intend to recruit and retain as members. Without both consideration for how the current environment impacts the capacity for students and early career librarians to pay to belong to any given association and an intention to respond, professional associations won't remain financially sustainable in the long run because they'll lose a generation of members.

I know that the people engaged in leadership of professional association for library workers care deeply about the future of librarianship and about recruiting and retaining the next generation of professional association leadership. But until we take seriously the financial burden that association membership places upon students and early career librarians, we can't move forward.

Stay positive,
Erin

It's like a dead-end when a road map is useless

One thing I like to talk about over here at Unified Library Scene headquarters is the value of well-formed metadata. Because I'm a cataloger, I'm often looking at the idea of well-formed metadata as it relates to the library catalog. But I think that well-formed metadata has value outside of the cataloging department as well. I was interested to read this post on OCLC's Hanging Together blog about how the changing landscape of metadata creation and remediation requires an emphasis on new skill sets for both early career and incumbent metadata creators.

I was especially interested to think about the Hanging Together blog post in relationship to this post from Ithaka S+R which highlighted aspects of their 2016 US Library Survey. Figure 1 of this post addresses the functional areas of the library to which library directors at baccalaureate, masters, and doctoral academic libraries indicated they would add positions over the next five years. At doctoral institutions, nearly 70% of respondents indicated they would be adding positions related to "specialized faculty research support (digital humanities, GIS, data management, etc.)."  At masters institutions, this functional area was significantly smaller at about 25%. At those institutions, the area that stands to see the greatest amount of growth in the next five years is "instruction, instructional design, and information literacy services" at nearly 40%.

If you go back to the 2016 US Library Survey, you can see a table that corresponds with this one. In this table, library directors at masters and baccalaureate institutions indicated which functional areas they would be reducing employee positions. It will probably not surprise you to learn that technical services, metadata, and cataloging was the highest vote getting functional area at about 25%. In fairness, this was down from close to 30% in 2013.

While it's worth noting that the responses for added and reduced positions aren't exactly one-to-one since there isn't data on which functional areas library directors at doctoral institutions would target for position reduction. But I suspect, anecdotally anyway, that technical services would be what they chose were they to have been queried.

The Hanging Together blog posts indicates that managers are looking for people to work with metadata who understand how information is organized rather than being skilled at working with a specific schema. The post also suggests that those of us who are interested in helping to recruit and retain the next generation of metadata creators "should promote metadata as an exciting career option to new professionals in venues such as library schools and ALA's New Members Roundtable." The author goes on to state that "emphasizing that metadata encompasses much more than library cataloging can increase its appeal, for example: entity identification, descriptive standards used in various academic disciplines, and describing born-digital, archival, and research data that can interact with the semantic Web."

While some of the tasks the author outlines in their post can be directly mapped to the faculty research support described in the Ithaka S+R survey, much of it still maps directly into functional areas of the library that may be cut in the next five years. And while many of the respondents to the Ithaka S+R survey indicated that they have a commitment to reskilling staff and reallocating them to different areas of the library, it's no wonder that people who understand metadata concepts and have technological skills are choosing careers in industries outside of librarianship--a problem that the Hanging Together post points out.

The disconnect between the need to recruit and retain people who can create well-formed metadata and the fact that these positions are some of the first to be targeted for elimination in academic libraries is one that needs to be addressed. After all, some of the emerging faculty support services rely upon well-formed metadata to be successful. I hope that connecting the dots is the first step in facilitating this difficult but necessary conversation.

Stay positive,
Erin

All I do is keep the beat and bad company

So, last week I wrote about the Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2016 and the importance of charting a course for the future that is built upon listening to your library's various constituencies and understanding the needs and values. After reading that report and writing that post, it was interesting to read in Inside Higher Ed that Ithaka S+R is partnering with OCLC to work on a project that looks at the relationship between university success and library success.

As someone who is about to start graduate school to study higher education, I have developed a keen interest in the idea that the library plays an important role within the campus community. So I was interested to read this part of Ithaka S+R's release on the project:

"it [a discussion of the future of libraries] often proceeds without reference to the universities of which they are a part. We contend that the most important long term influence on the library is the requirement placed on it by changing patterns of research and learning. The changing patterns, in turn, are shaped by the focus of the university and the direction it is taking."

I am interested to see higher education and librarianship put into conversation in this way because I think it draws explicit lines where there may only be implicit ones.

What gave me pause is the research question at the center of the project: what happens when libraries differentiate themselves in terms of services, not collection size; are there multiple models of success?

I think this is a fair question to ask, and I am curious to see what Ithaka S+R and OCLC find. How would our libraries be different if we thought more about the services we offer our user communities instead of the number of volumes in our collection. I think that collection size does not necessarily directly correlate with value or relevance to the user community. And while our collections are important to the people who use our libraries, they are not necessarily the first or only concern. So if the decision-makers in libraries only think of their library in terms of the number of volumes it holds, they may be missing out on making important connections with user communities. And, as the release on the project points out, a change in the patterns of research and learning on a campus can significantly alter how a library presents itself in order to response to that change in patterns. That is, in some ways the library of today looks different than the library of tomorrow will.

But what gives me pause about this question is that it surfaces a thing that often happens in libraries. Decision-makers in library seem to frame a conversation that puts collections and services at odds. Because space in a library is finite, short of the funds to undergo a building project, a choice must be made about how space is allocated: collections or services? How many new services and spaces can we offer our user communities, one wonders, if we clear our libraries of the collections they don't seem to want to use? So we clear our our stacks, either moving things offsite or withdrawing them from our collection. And we tell a story to our users about the value of the collections we have to offer them.

The collections in our libraries are not the enemy. And creating a false choice between collections and services is not the best way for a library to become more valuable to its user communities. Decision-makers have to balance the need to have a thoughtfully curated collection and the need to offer services that are relevant to the user communities that their libraries serve. Choosing to focus their efforts mostly on building a large collection is as unhelpful as choosing to focus on building a suite of new, cool services. The strength of a library, it seems to me, is at the intersection of thoughtful services and an intentionally built collection.

So yes, let's stop thinking that our value is tied up in the size of our collections. Let's weed our collections thoughtfully and relocation our collection when we need to make space for something new. But let's also stop think of our collections as the enemy of progress within our libraries and of engagement with our users.

Stay positive,
Erin

How it feels when we fall, when we fold

The Ithaka S+R US Library Survey for 2016 was published yesterday and if you're a person who works in academic libraries, it is definitely worth a look. What caught my eye was a chart fairly early in the document--Figure 4. Figure 4 compares the responses of library directors and faculty members to the following question: How important to you is it that your college or university library provides each of the functions below or serves in the capacity listed below? 

What emerges when you look at that table is that what library directors see as valuable roles for the library to play don't necessarily converge with what faculty members see as valuable roles for the library to play. I suspect this isn't surprising if you work in an academic library.

I noticed that the categories that received a larger percentage of positive responses from library directors seemed to be centered around they ways in which the library helps develop information literacy skills in undergraduate students how the library supports faculty with teaching and research activities. And the single category that received a larger percentage of positive responses from faculty is centered around the library paying for resources in all formats.

While I am wary of asking charts to do things they are not intended to do, it is interesting to see these different visions of the library juxtaposed.

Academic libraries invest a lot of resources into marketing and outreach in an attempt to sell our campus communities on the library services that I mentioned in the earlier paragraphs. We set up departmental office hours. We print flyers and create digital signage to market the services no one seems to know about no matter how often we remind them. We hold open houses. We have orientation sessions for new students and faculty. We try, through marketing and outreach, to get other people as excited about this version of the academic library as we are.

And we wring out hands when our efforts don't cultivate new relationships or lead to the more widespread adoption of new services.

This is not to suggest that these outreach efforts are misplaced. Teaching faculty aren't a monolith and some of them are as excited about our vision of the academic library as instructor of students and supporter of faculty activities. Some of our teaching faculty colleagues are, indeed, our strongest supporters and our best allies. And it is absolutely true that the best way to establish new relationships with teaching faculty by way of a satisfied faculty customer.

But I do wonder how much of our marketing and outreach efforts could be better spent by listening to our teaching faculty colleagues on our own campus and developing a shared vision of what the library on our campus should be--even when that vision isn't exactly what we think it should be.

Creating conversations between the academic library and its user communities is really challenging because it asks us to stop putting our vision ahead of the needs of our user communities. And when the vision that is reflected back to us by our user communities is not where we think we should be heading, we have to decide whether to chart a new course or not. It's scary, we think, because our user communities don't understand the history of the academic library. It's scary, we imagine, because our user communities couldn't possibly know what they need better than we do.

But in the end, the way to build an academic library that is not only useful on a campus but creates experiences for our user communities that is transformative is to listen far more than we speak.

What is one way that you can listen to your user communities about the library they want and need? Tell me in the comments!

Stay positive,
Erin

Trying hard not to get too obsessed with it

At the end of February, a post to the BIBFRAME listserv linked to an essay by Jeff Edmunds that enumerated the reasons why the author believes that the standard will not be widely adopted by the GLAM community. There has been much conversation in various parts of the cataloging community about the merits of the arguments that Edmunds lays out in the essay.

Throughout the essay, Edmunds suggests repeatedly (and in various ways) that those who are engaged in the work of developing BIBFRAME have gotten so in the theoretical weeds that they have lost track of the realities of resource description in the modern age. Toward the end of his essay, Edmunds suggests that the greatest challenges facing metadata creators today are:

"the utterly unwieldy immensity of the bibliographic universe, the ongoing and accelerating decline in the quality of bibliographic metadata, competition for the organization and delivery of information by non-library entities (Wikipedia, Google, Facebook)"

I should say that while I wasn't a fan of this essay, I don't actually disagree with Edmunds' assertions about the challenges facing metadata creators. I think he does a fine job of surveying the current landscape. What was apparent to me when reading this essay was that it points to a growing rift in the cataloging community that will only continue to grow as we move toward a crisis point related to the adoption of BIBFRAME as a standard. And as one side on that growing rift, it's representative of an argument that I've heard being made in the cataloging community.

There seems to be a growing tension between those engaged in the theoretical work of developing BIBFRAME as a standard and those who are still currently working on describing the resources their library owns in MARC. And in some ways, I think his boils down to a tension between those who have the means to innovate and those who don't.

There is a large contingent of the metadata creation community that has invested resources in the development and modeling of BIBFRAME as a standard. This work is ongoing and while I understand very little of it, if we're being honest, it seems like this work is driven by a belief that there is a future for BIBFRAME as a standard within our community. I think it's important work, but I also think it's worth being transparent about the fact that this type of work requires material resources. And those institutions who have stepped into the role of early adopter are often entities with the ability to devote those material resources to standards development.

For other libraries, there are simply not enough material resources to devote resources to standards development. There are too few staff and not enough money to devote to both the quotidian work of resource description and the theoretical work of standards development and modeling. Because choices must be made strategically about how to spend resources, these libraries find themselves on the outside of the theoretical work of standards development and modeling looking in.

There is a very real tension between these two sides, which leads to each one being defensive and suspicious of the other. And it is easy to see the other side and not find value in their work. Those who are invested in BIBFRAME development see people who are suspicious of it as change averse and negative. People who are suspicious of BIBFRAME development see those who champion it as being too caught up in the theoretical and divorced from the practical.

One thing I have grown more certain of as I have seen BIBFRAME development is that I am out of my depth. While I am on the younger end of those who are currently cataloging, my education was based in the AACR2 environment and sometimes I have a hard time pulling myself out of the quotidian work of metadata creation to find the value in the development of future standards. But I make myself do it, because I don't want to be the person who is so stuck in way of thinking that I outlive my professional usefulness.

I think that, as a community, we have to have a conversation about the merits and drawback of making the intellectual shift from a siloed past to an interoperable future. And there's room for people on both sides of this conversation. But the longer we allow this rift to grow, the less likely it will be that such a conversation will be able to happen respectfully and with acknowledgement of the value of both sides of the conversation.

Stay positive,
Erin

Waging wars to shape the poet and the beat

In 1994, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging emerged from the work of a group called the Cooperative Cataloging Council. The founding documentation of this movement toward a national-level cooperative cataloging initiative came as the result of the work of a group called the Cooperative Cataloging Council. This group identified potential goals of a cooperative cataloging program and then charged task groups with writing recommendations in each of these areas. A short monograph, Towards a New Beginning in Cooperative Cataloging, includes both background documents and the final reports of each of these tasks groups. The six task groups reported on record creation and reuse, availability and distribution of records, authorities, standards, cataloger training, and foreign MARC. At 76 pages, it's a quick read. And one I would recommend if you're curious about the history of the PCC. It felt especially timely to look at the PCC's original strategic plan in light of the fact that the group will soon be embarking on a new strategic planning cycle.

Task Group 1's final report, titled "More, Better, Faster Cheaper," proposed a new model for the cooperative cataloging of non-serial materials. The group contextualizes its argument by stating "they [current cooperative cataloging efforts/models] fail because they are based on the belief (or hope) that any library can, and will, create a cataloging record that will be fully usable by other libraries. In fact, no single library can create such a cataloging record. Or, perhaps more accurately, it won't-nor should it be expected to" (30). Task Group 1 goes on to argue that the non-serial cataloging community should see the cataloging process as iterative in the way that, at the time, the CONSER program did. "Rather than focusing on cooperative cataloging, CONSER has focused on cataloging cooperatively, if you will: on cooperative creation and maintenance of cataloging records" (30). Task Group 1 then went on to propose that the cataloging community "should be putting its efforts into fostering an environment in which cataloging records are 'vouched for' or 'authenticated' and made part of the national database for subsequent use and emendation as necessary" (30). One can imagine that Task Group 1's report served as the foundation for BIBCO. And it gives us the basis for our current understanding of the record creation and reuse model that we know and love today.

As a serials cataloger, I feel really connected to the idea that cataloging is an iterative process. Because a serial record covers the entire life of the publication, our work on a record representing a serial title is not done as long as the serial continues to be published. And I like that other communities took seriously the idea that it makes more sense to build upon the work done by others rather than continue to duplicate their work. The current record creation and reuse model is a smart one, built on collegiality and on enhancing the work of others.

I'll be honest, though, I bristled a little when I read the title of Task Group 1's report. And it's the same reason that I struggle to accept the current record creation and reuse model. If our motivation for accepting this model is for cost savings and efficiency, how much does the cataloging community truly build upon the work done by others? How often do we accept the records we find as being good enough for our local context when our local context might vary significantly from the one where the record was originally created?

And this, I think, is where I find myself feeling stuck when it comes to thinking about the current catalog record creation and reuse model. I don't think it would be a wise use of our resources to go backwards in time to a place where catalogers at many libraries created records for the same title. I think that thinking of cataloging as an iterative process where one cataloger enhances the record created by another, leveraging each one's strengths makes much more sense. But our motivation for cataloging cooperatively in any format should be to create records that others can not only reuse but can also enhance.

I also think that part of the record creation and reuse model has to incorporate a consideration of the context of users in any given library. Records downloaded from a bibliographic utility or purchased from vendors should be evaluated to ensure that their metadata reflects the needs of a particular user community. This may mean enhancing those records in any number of ways, including additional access points or additional subject analysis. This requires a commitment to well-formed metadata that goes far beyond a more/better/faster/cheaper way of thinking.

I felt grateful to read this book because it helped me understand the ideas that undergird so much of our modern ideas about catalog record creation and reuse. And it helped me better understand and articulate my feelings about that process. I think we should continue to think of the cataloging process for all formats as iterative, and think about how our local processes could change as a result.

Stay positive,
Erin

Works cited:
Towards a New Beginning in Cooperative Cataloging. Washington, D.C. : Library of Congress Cataloging Distribution Service, 1994.

I'm sick of all this waiting

A thing I think about a lot is the next generation of technical services leaders. I have met a lot of wonderful early career librarians who are choosing to make technical services their career. And I return home from each ALA Midwinter and Annual feeling energized by their interest in, and enthusiasm for, moving technical services librarianship forward. But when I think about the future of technical services librarianship, I worry that collectively, we're not doing a great job of recruiting and retaining the kinds of people we need to propel acquisitions, collection development and management, cataloging, and preservation into the future.

I feel like the first year as a librarian is full of challenges for all kinds of librarian, especially for people without previous library experience. Not only are you figuring out how to succeed in your job, but you're also thinking about how (and whether) you want to make an impact in your organization and in the larger library world. This can be compounded if your first position is in an academic library and you suddenly find yourself on the tenure track with the directive to publish and present. If you're moving into a technical services position, your challenges may be compounded by the fact that your coursework did not prepare you for the kind of work you do as a technical services librarian.

Helping early career librarians of all kinds grow in their first year requires intentionality on the part of those who supervise them. For those who supervise technical services librarians, there is an added layer of helping early career librarians who may also require an additional level of support in understanding the specific culture of technical services librarianship and work. When I think about my own experience and about what changes technical services librarians could make to better recruit and retain early career technical services librarians, a couple of ideas come to mind:

1. Library administrators should provide newly hired technical services librarians with mentors from other parts of the organization. 

Yes, a lot of professional organizations have mentoring programs, and that's great. Those kinds of programs are wonderful for helping early career librarians learn more about what it means to serve in a professional capacity. But you also need to pair your new hires with people in your organization to help mentor them through issues specific to your organizational culture. A formalized mentoring program that starts during onboarding need only last a year--time enough for a new hire to feel comfortable in the organization. But I can say from firsthand experience that those conversations over coffee will help your new hires feel more confident and comfortable in their jobs and in your organization.

2. Technical services supervisors should meet regularly with newly hired technical services librarians to ensure that growth goals are established and progress toward meeting them is made.

I think that growth requires intentionality. And setting aside the time and space to talk about where a person is, where they want to go, and how they plan to get there is so important. These conversations are especially important in an academic library where a new hire is on the tenure track and expected to meet certain benchmarks. A component of these conversations should also be what kind of training and tools an early career technical services librarian might need to meet established growth goals, because directives become so much more difficult to meet without material support.

3. Technical services supervisors should identify areas within an organization for cross-training and cross-departmental collaboration and support newly hired technical services librarians in taking advantage of those opportunities.

Sometimes the hardest thing about working in a "back room" position is understanding what opportunities exist for collaboration with departments outside of your own. Supervisors of newly hired technical services librarians should identify and facilitate this kind of cooperative work. One idea that immediately comes to mind is setting up short rotations through each department within technical services so that a new hire can learn how the work of those departments intersects with their own. Additionally, technical services supervisors should identify important cross-departmental committee work where a new hire's expertise might be needed and ensure that the new hire is invited to join in the work.

I think that recruitment and retention of early career technical services librarians is so vital to the future success of technical services both on a large scale and within individual libraries. As librarians at individual libraries, we owe it to our future leaders to intentionally develop plans to help them grow rather than tossing them into the position and hoping that they find their way. What other ways do you think libraries and their administrators could support early career technical services librarians? Drop your ideas in the comments!

Stay positive,
Erin

It's getting kind of hectic

I spent the better part of January trying to get my paper for ACRL 2017 into shape for submission and I am only now returning to the things I was doing before that. One of those things is working my way through Frances E. Kendall's Understanding White Privilege. This book has really helped me think about the privilege I have and how it has helped me advance in ways I am not always aware of.

In one of the chapters, Kendall talks about our natural inclination to see the places where we don't have privilege instead of the places where we do. She writes:

Because we measure our own privilege by looking at what other have received that we haven't, rather than at what we have that others don't, frequently it is hard to believe that we have access to power and influence because we belong to one identity group when we are so clear that we don't have power and influence because of our membership to another (108).

I immediately put this quote into conversation with the fact that as of 2009/2010, 87% of female librarians are white, according to some number crunching I did from this table off the ALA Diversity Counts 2012 report. There are certain intersections that this table hides, of course. But think about what kind of access to power and influence white librarians have, and then recognize how this statistic reflects what many of our marginalized colleagues already understand to be true about librarianship.

Because we measure our privilege against what others have that we don't, I have often looked at what I lack as a female librarian. My male colleagues have access to leadership opportunities and opportunities for advancement that I don't. And surfacing the difference in expectations for male and female leaders is absolutely a valuable conversation to have--and one that the LibLeadGender community has coalesced around. But what reading this passage in Kendall's book reminded me of is that when I think about this, I also have to consider the ways in which my whiteness and position in the middle class give me access to power and opportunities.

Memberships in professional organizations are expensive and yet they are often a requirement for volunteer service. I am able to pay those dues, so I have access to those volunteer opportunities. And as I look around at in-person meetings, I see a lot of people who look like me. Traveling to conferences is often costly--between registration fees, flight costs, and meals. I am fortunate that my library pays a portion of the amount that it costs me to attend multiple conferences in a year, but I am also able to pay the amount that isn't covered out-of-pocket. When I look at who is in the room with me at conferences, I see a lot of people who look like me.

It is worth acknowledging that certain parts of library professional associations shape policy and practice within librarianship. One such body that comes to mind is CC:DA, the Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access. Housed within the Cataloging and Metadata Management Section of ALCTS, this committee serves as ALA's voice in the international conversation about cataloging policy. Being able to serve on that committee is contingent upon one's ability to afford to be a member of both ALA and ALCTS. Those who cannot afford to pay association dues or travel to conferences are excluded from important conversations about the future of librarianship.

The Unified Library Scene is about building relationships within libraries. As part of that work, I am committed to learning how to be an ally. One of the places where I have started in this process is honest self-reflection about the places where I benefit from my power and privilege. Anything I do before an acknowledgement of how I have benefited from my whiteness, my able-bodied status, and my middle-class status make my actions both inauthentic and oppressive of those I wish to be allied with. I would invite you, friend of the Unified Library Scene, to also engaged in honest self-reflection. If the idea of power and privilege is new to you, there is a body of work that exists on this topic and reading more about this should definitely be part of your self-reflection process If you're interested in understanding more about the intersection of privilege and librarianship, I would offer two articles as a starting point: April Hathcock's piece in Library Lead Pipe on diversity initiatives in librarianship. I would also recommend Angela Galvan's piece in Library Lead Pipe on the perpetuation of white, middle-class values in librarianship. If you have additional recommendations, drop them in the comments!

Stay positive,
Erin

Not a question of if, but a question of when

Back in the fall, I wrote about how ALA could rebuild trust with its membership after the Great Press Release Debacle of Aught Sixteen. In that post I laid out a three-point plan for how I believed that the association could restore the relationship with its members. There is one point that I want to use as a framework for this post:

First, I think it is incumbent upon Association-level leadership to restore the relationship between the Association and its members by centering the voices and taking seriously the concerns the people among its membership who will be most vulnerable in the coming years.

Much of the conversation around the conflict within the Association membership seemed to center around conflating personal opinions with professional ethics. And the thing I was most disappointed about at the ALA Town Hall was that the first speaker read this part of the ALA Code of Ethics, "we distinguish between our personal convictions and our professional duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources." I could find no other way to interpret that action than as a way to silence dissent from those who wanted ALA to stand up more forcefully for the values it holds at its core and more forcefully against an administration who seems to be poised to dismantle everything our core values stand for.

I was glad to see ALA come out in opposition of recent policies enacted by the new Administration to silence, intimidate, and ban. Even more so, I was glad to see the Association say, "we encourage our members to continue to speak out and show their support for and work on behalf of our core values, in their communities as well as with their local, state, and national elected and appointed officials." Given the ways in which its membership had been holding the Association responsible, the statement was the first thing that made me believe that the Association heard what its members were saying. And while this is the beginning of a conversation and not the end, it does seem to be a promising beginning.

Let us be absolutely clear in this moment: our marginalized colleagues and user community members are at actual, literal risk right now.

And given that almost 90% of librarianship is white, those of us in positions of privilege have a decision to make. Will we stand up for our colleagues and community members as the tactics used to silence and oppress them grow more bold? Or will we stand idly by behind the "professional duties" of the clause of the ALA Code of Ethics while the rights and lives of our colleagues and community members are destroyed?

As the co-author of this blog, I get to make choices about what kind of content ends up here--the issues that get addressed and the voices that get amplified. The Unified Library Scene will always be about bringing together people from disparate groups within librarianship to build a better future for our users, and right now that means standing alongside our marginalized colleagues and user community members, not just in words but in deeds. I invite you to join me in listening to the voices of our marginalized colleagues and community members and in interrogating how we can each better use our voices, our time, our talents, and our money to support those around us who need us to show up.

Stay positive,
Erin

Pretty soon now you're going to get older

The dust is finally settling on ALA Midwinter 2017 and I left Atlanta on Tuesday feeling like this conference was different than other ones. I know that some of it had to do with the ways in which the world changed around us during the conference, but the shift in my feelings wasn't only driven by external forces.

As I've moved into my mid-career years, I care more about ALA-level governance. In some ways, I think this deepened interest stems from my volunteer work within ALCTS. But I also think it comes from the recognition that at both the macro-level and micro-level, the Association reflects the values of the member volunteers who act as its leadership. Beginning in November, there has been a lot of chatter about whether and how ALA represents the values of its members. And while there are some people among its leaders who are paid staffers, many people in positions of power are members.

It would be foolish not to acknowledge a significant number of systems and structures that are meant to further white supremacy and oppress marginalized communities within ALA. At two different times, in two public venues, a black woman was either not given the opportunity to speak or was cut off when she was speaking. During Council II, ALA Council resolved to continue to have the MLS as a required qualification for the ALA Executive Director position. And while ALA Council resolved at Council II to protect caregiver and parent volunteers from punishment if those duties kept them from attending in-person ALA commitments, there is still no protection for people who are unable to attend for other reasons--financial or otherwise.

I have made it a priority to attend at least a little bit of ALA Council meetings at ever ALA Midwinter and Annual conference I attend. But this time I devoted significantly more time to attending these events. I attended both ALA Council I and II and felt like I got a good sense of how these meetings function. I also saw the ways in which ALA Council is (and isn't) a representative body. Many of the same councilors got up to speak at every opportunity, and many of the councilors seemed...disengaged from the process entirely. While the resolution on the MLS requirement for the ALA Executive Director position had a good bit of discussion, I wished that there had been lively conversation around every topic. I didn't attend Council III, so I can't speak to what happened there. I also didn't attend any of the Council Forums, so maybe discussion and discourse happens there instead of in the actual Council sessions? I also wondered to what extent politic-ing happens around Council resolutions. Do councilors form voting blocks?

I also attended the ALA Presidential Candidates' Forum. It was interesting to hear three candidates give platforms that both overlap and diverge wildly. I left that event not feeling sure about who I think should lead our association, and feeling like I have much more work to do before I make that decision. It was valuable to hear not only the prepared statements that the candidates made, but also to hear questions from the audience about the things that mattered to them. I look forward to reading more about and from the candidates in the weeks between now and the ALA election.

Finally, I attended the ALA Town Hall which gave members an opportunity to state their frustrations, hopes, and dreams for the association. As I stood at the microphone to make a comment, I recognized how brave you have to be to stand in an enormous room and speak your truth in front of a room of people who don't all share your views. Many, many people had much more impassioned and eloquent things to say than I did. But I felt an obligation to state publicly that I am holding ALA leadership at all levels accountable for the ways in which their actions support (or don't support) our association's emerging commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion.

My sense from all of these experiences is that if we truly want our Association to reflect our values, we have to find candidates for ALA-level leadership positions who are willing to advance those values and them hold them accountable for the work they do (and don't do) on our behalf. I think this means fielding and voting for candidates whose values align with our own and then holding them accountable by attending Council meetings and publicizing what happens there. I livetweeted council, as did many other people in the room, in the hopes of boosting a signal about what is emerging as important work of the Association.

I keep tweeting about this, but it's worth saying again: Association governance work is boring, but it's also valuable. There are a million other things you could be doing other than reading the ALA Council listserv and attending Council meetings and forums at conference. But if we want ALA to reflect our values in an increasingly divisive and challenging world, we need to do this work. I don't think that the change that people want to happen within ALA is impossible. But I do think it requires being intentional. I'll be watching, reading, listening, and voting. If you're an ALA member, I invite you to join me.

Stay positive,
Erin

You've seen it all

Earlier in the week Jacob Berg, friend of the Unified Library Scene, made a point about SciHub as a phenomenon.

Reminder that Sci Hub is popular and works because it was developed by an end-user, not for our cruddy workflows.

— Kakistocracy Man (@jacobsberg) January 2, 2017

I chewed on this idea for a couple of days and yesterday I had a tweet storm that I ended up deciding needed to be a blog post.

The thing that I kept turning over in my mind is that libraries implement a lot of solutions and workflows meant to help their users that were created without actual user input. And while I applaud the impulse that librarians have to implement systems, structures, and tools to help library users, I do think that excluding them from the design, development, and testing phases is a little short-sighted. Especially because our best intentions lead us to crate things that require that we create research guides and tutorials in order for them to be useful to our end users.

I feel like this impulse to exclude the user from the design, development, and testing phases of a library resource or service is a holdover from the time when librarians were both literal and figurative gatekeepers within the library. For many years, we've stood at reference desks and in classrooms as the sage on the stage, teaching people how to access the information that we have acquired and described. And while this was probably never a good idea, it definitely isn't how people interact with information anymore. Regardless of how you feel about the document, one of the things that ACRL's Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education really crystallized for me is that information comes from many places at this point in time--not just the library--and an information literate person knows how to make the most of information in whatever place they find it.

So if being a useful library isn't about being a storehouse full of information kept safe by a gatekeeper, it seems like we should invite our library's users to become co-creators of the systems, structures, and tools meant for their benefit. To do that, though, we have to understand--really understand--what our users need and want. And in order to understand what our users need and want from us, we have to listen to them. And I don't just mean conducting an annual State of the Library survey. Yes, those surveys are good for getting a broad picture of what your user community things you're doing well or doing poorly. But you're wasting your time if you don't use that information as a jumping off point to gather additional, more targeted information.

I think you also have to engage your user communities in more direct ways. Host focus groups with your user communities. Show up at meetings in your community and get to know their actual concerns. Hire an anthropologist to teach you how to conduct effective observational studies to understand the habits of your user communities. And as you engage your user communities, listen more than you talk.

And, yes. When you listen to your user communities they're going to hurt your feelings by telling you about how your tools and processes are hard to use. They're going to tell you that you aren't relevant to their life and you don't meet their needs. You know what? Listen to that feedback and sit with your discomfort, but don't take it personally. Hear what people are telling you about what they actually want, what they actually need.

And yes. When you listen to your user communities, you're going to have the urge to tell teach them something that it would easier to use a particular service or tool. You're going to want to say, 'using [x] would be easier if you only knew [y].' I get it. You want to make things easier for them. But resist this urge, because your user communities aren't broken. What they're telling you is that if you have to tell them [y] in order to effectively use [x], then it isn't a good solution.

True engagement with user communities is hard. But creating structures, systems, and services intended for their use without their input is a waste of everyone's time and resources.

Stay positive,
Erin

You're all alone and so peaceful

So, I want to talk about our tendency as librarians to over-market our services as a substitute for listening to what our users really need from us.

An opinion piece on Forbes' site discusses the how a combination of Big Data and information literacy can create a more informed citizenry--one that can identify fake news when it sees it. It's not an objectively terrible take on the idea of fake news and what can be done about it. There is a part that gave me pause, though. The author begins the closing paragraph of his article by stating "...we see that fake news exists because as a society we have failed to teach our citizens data and information literacy."

I feel like Michael Bluth speaks for all of us here...

via GIPHY

Okay, but also yes.

I should start by saying that I believe that librarians have thought a lot about what it takes to create information literate people. I should also say that I believe that those among us who have taken on reference and instruction roles go about the business of creating information literate people in really thoughtful ways. If you want a thoughtful take on information literacy in an age where people believe that truth is relative, I highly recommend that you take a look at what Kevin Seeber has to say about how creating information literate people is more complicated than just teaching people that this source is good and that one is bad. I think that Kevin makes a well-reasoned, thoughtful argument. You should read it.

As a metadata creator, I spend relatively little time thinking about information literacy and about creating information literate people. But I do spend a lot of time thinking about whether (and how) our collections and services resonate with our user communities. I feel like one of the things that librarians do when confronted with a message like the one in the Forbes article I linked to is freak out and double down on their outreach and marketing efforts. If people can't see how hard we're working on [insert a topic here], that's a failure on our part to market our services well. We must not be doing a great job of making people aware of our tools and services, librarians think. so we need to work harder to connect with people. But sometimes the answer isn't another research guide or more table tents. Sometimes people don't notice the work being done by librarians on [insert a topic here] because we believe we know better than our users what they need to be successful.

Librarians talk a lot about The Future of Libraries: how can we invent our collections, services, and tools to maintain our relevance? I would argue that the best way for us to meet the future is to stop acting like gatekeepers of information in both a literal and figurative sense and to start spending more tine in conversation with our user communities learning more about their needs and thinking critically about how we can meet them. Having those conversations means having conversations with the people who are your most regular customers and those that you feel most comfortable around. But having those conversations also means talking to people who never set foot in your doors and those who make you feel the most uncomfortable. And most importantly, listening to your user communities likely means that the decisions you make will go against what you believe as a self-appointed gatekeeper.

I get why it's easier to choose yelling louder and louder over listening. It's easier and more comfortable and it allows us to remain comfortably in this notion that librarians know best. But the louder we yell, the more we become background noise. So let's stop yelling and start listening.

Stay positive,
Erin

It's gonna have to get a little bit heavy

I didn't submit this anonymous tweet to the LIS Grievances bot, but I could have.

Our obsession with linked open data, despite the fact that we've been outsourcing our cataloguing for years and now have garbage metadata.

— LIS Grievances (@lis_grievances) November 2, 2016

There is an oft-quoted aphorism about metadata: Metadata is a love note to the future. It's a great idea, right, that the metadata you create will help future generations access information? But I think that we do ourselves a great disservice when we don't acknowledge that well-formed metadata is really the best kind of love note to the future.

I think the problem with not being able to see the future is that it can lead us to make choices that make sense in the moment. It's easy to say that the feelings that catalogers have about poorly-formed metadata spring from a misguided place filled with artisanally created catalog records. It's easy to say that catalogers are perfectionists who have trouble accepting "good enough" records that get the job of discovery done. It's easy to say that the catalog is a place where we can cut corners because the catalog has less to do with the library user's experience than, say, the physical space. But saying all of those things can be problematic in the long run.

When decide that metadata creation isn't a task worth doing well, we're not writing a love note to the future. We're writing it a passive-aggressive note.

When we place value on quantity over quality or bottom-line over long term investment, we're making it more difficult for those future generations to access information in our libraries.  When we accept poorly-formed metadata into our systems, we are creating a future where people we will likely never meet will have to remediate our metadata in order to make it usable. We are suggesting that it's fine to kick the can down the road, as the saying goes, to let someone else deal with it rather than taking the time to do things right the first time.

I should be clear about one thing. Vendors aren't inherently the villains in this story. Sometimes because of lack of staffing or money or expertise, a library has to outsource some of its cataloging to someone else. And whether we like to acknowledge it or not, those records we download from our bibliographic utility of choice are technically from a vendor. So whether you're downloading records from a bibliographic utility, sending pockets of your collection to be cataloged, or receiving MARC record with your newly purchased material, the fact that you're getting your metadata from a vendor isn't the problem. The problem comes when the records we receive have poorly-formed metadata and we either don't remediate it or don't demand that vendors create metadata that is up to our standards.

So it's time to acknowledge that simply creating metadata to describe a resource alone isn't a love note to the future. If we truly want to write a love note to the future, we should decide in the present that well-formed metadata is something to which we're willing to dedicate sufficient staff and financial resources.

Stay positive,
Erin

The personal is political is personal

I'm currently reading a book by Frances E. Kendall called Understanding white privilege: creating pathways to authentic relationships across race. In the chapter titled "Understanding white privilege," Kendall tells an anecdote about something that happened in conjunction with one of the diversity-related training sessions she facilitated. During a break on the second day of the workshop, a white woman and a Latina from the class ended up at the same store. The white woman watched how the Latina was treated by the sales clerk from which she was trying to make a purchase--being asked for additional identification when she presented her credit card, being told that the security guard would want to see her receipt when she left--and contrasted that with her own experience. The white woman came back to the training session and told Kendall that she wouldn't have believed how her Latina colleague was treated if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes. Kendall writes:

even though Debbie had been listening to employees of color talk about their painful experiences for a day and a half, she had essentially chosen not to believe what they said; she had continued to say that she thought the different experiences were individual, not race based. She used her own privilege of expecting to be educated about race by the people who were most affected--those of color--and then chose not to believe them (61).

I read this passage right around the time that people were starting to express their outrage over the press releases that ALA sent out regarding its desire to work with the newly elected administration and which highlighted a trio of initiatives that it felt aligned with the newly elected administration's stated goals for its administration. People have addressed this situation in smarter, and more nuanced ways that I have. If you're interested in reading other people's points of view, I would suggest checking out #notmyALA on Twitter. A lot of opinions and posts are aggregated there.

There is a piece of this conversation that relates to the passage from Kendall's book that I want to highlight. In its most recent communication on this issue, the ALA President stated "the ALA executive board will discuss these issues and our processes and will use your comments to help guide us in our discussion and planning as we work to earn back the trust of our members and prepare for the work ahead during this new administration."

So, let's talk about trust.

ALA has identified diversity as one of its key action areas, charging a task force and then a subsequent implementation working group with considering how equity, diversity and inclusion could be built both within ALA and in wider library community. You can read the task force's final report here. By charging people at the Association-level to do the work  of identifying and proposing ways to further DEI-related initiatives, the Association has both implicitly and explicitly asked the margainalized people throughout ALA what can be done to make ALA a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive place. The Association has asked people to entrust us with their stories and told people that it is part of our value system that we will hold those stories and respond in an appropriate way. And then we have chosen not to believe them when they tell us that they are afraid that they will be the targets of state-sponsored violence.

In the same week, ALA's President released a statement affirming ALA's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion and two statements affirming ALA's commitment to working with the incoming administration. And, yes, one of those statements was taken down and an apology issued. But one can see how people within the Association's membership would be outraged that such an affirmation was issued in the first place. ALA asked people what they needed to trust the Association as a diverse, equitable, and inclusive organization and then didn't listen to them as they expressed their loudest fears and their deepest concerns.

In the days following the election, Hugh Acheson posted to Instagram a letter he sent to the staff at each of the restaurants he owns. In the letter he writes "The customer is always right, until they are wrong. And when they are wrong with epithets or cruelty they will be asked to leave. This is not me giving you an aggressive power to wield, but rather making sure you understand the ethos I have in protecting what I believe in, and what I do not have the patience for."

I understand that ALA has a dual responsibility to serve both libraries and the people who staff them. To that end, I believe that our goal in libraries should be to serve the communities in which we find ourselves, even when their beliefs don't align with ours. Libraries should be places that foster conversation and an exchange of ideas, but I believe that in libraries, as in Acheson's restaurants, there is a point past which the patron isn't always right--especially when a member of our user community is wrong with cruelty.

So how does the Association go about the work of rebuilding trust?

First, I think it is incumbent upon Association-level leadership to restore the relationship between the Association and its members by centering the voices and taking seriously the concerns the people among its membership who will be most vulnerable in the coming years.

Second, I think it is incumbent upon the membership to make even more space for people who are traditionally underrepresented in librarianship to take on leadership roles. The includes not only providing increased support for programs like the Spectrum Scholarship Program but also the development of a pipeline for leadership both at the Division-level and Association-level.

Finally, I think it is incumbent upon both Association-level leadership and Association membership to ensure the safety of our most vulnerable members through both our words and our actions.

I'm sure that the path toward a restored relationship between the Association and its membership will not be without bumps and will probably look different than what I've suggested here. But I do hope that it happens. And I'll continue to attend ALA Council meetings and ALA Midwinter and ALA Annual in the hopes of seeing signs of the Association working toward that restoration.

Stay positive,
Erin

Mountains grow from just one stone

One of the things that I talk about over and over (and over and over) again on the blog is the idea of imagining what it would be like to center the lived experiences of our user communities when it comes to creating metadata to describe our collections. I was thrilled when a friend, Anna-Sophia, sent me a link to the transcript for a 2015 talk by Sara Wachter-Boettcher called "Everybody hurts: content for kindness."

The talk centers around this idea:

And what I've come to is there's an opportunity that we have to make every decision an act of kindness. Make sure everything we write, everything that we build, come from a place of kindness at its core.

Wachter-Boettcher goes on to talk about how this mission of centering kindness can be lived in when it comes to better understanding both the needs and the triggers of our user communities. While the audience of this talk wasn't those engaged in the work of libraries or librarianship, I can get behind this premise for librarianship in general and metadata creation more specifically. I spend a lot of time wondering how metadata creation would be different if those of us who create metadata saw it as not just an act of service, but also as an act of care for the user communities that we serve and support. And then I wonder why we don't.

I was struck by something that Wachter-Boettcher referenced early in her talk. She made mention of an address given by Paul Ford, in which he states:

If we are going to ask people in the form of our products, in the form of the things we make, to spend their heartbeats--if we are going to ask them to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure than we are now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely?

And I think that this quote is at the center of why we don't always see metadata creation as an act of care, and why we should.

I worry that we take for granted that users will spend their  heartbeats using the collections and services that we offer. I especially worry about this in academic libraries where students and faculty require access to scholarly resources in order to conduct research and create scholarly works. As this applies specifically to metadata creation, I worry that we take for granted that user communities will have to use the library catalog in order to access our collections. As many people wiser than I have pointed out to me when I try to reckon with this mindset, it's a direct holdover from the time when our collections were kept in closed stacks and library workers were the gatekeepers to these collections. It's also a significant conflation of the catalog as both the content and the carrier--a thing that I do all the time and which my wise friend, Kyle, regularly holds me accountable for.

So what would it look like for those of us who create metadata to describe collections to choose to put kindness at the center of our work? First and foremost, I think that we should stop taking our user communities for granted and create software systems and rules for description and encoding that respect the lived experiences of our users. While I don't agree with the idea that people in Technical Services are change averse, I do think our public services colleagues have been quicker to see the ways in which the needs of our user communities are changing and then responding. Second, I think it means evaluating our local policies for metadata creation and remediation and amending them in ways that have the biggest impact on our user communities.

I don't think that evaluating our metadata reuse policies means we have to stop reusing metadata. For some materials, records don't need a significant amount of customization. And for smaller libraries, metadata reuse is the only way that their cataloging operations stay afloat. But I do think it's worth considering which types of material and which subjects are important enough to your users to provide the extra care of customization. Especially if the library for which you are describing collections has made diversity, equity, and inclusion a priority.

I think that many people who create metadata would tell you that the work they do is a public services. I think what is important for us to be explicit about is that we have the choice to treat our work as an act of care for the user communities we serve. I think it's time for us to think more about what it would mean for metadata creators if we thought about making sure that our user communities were using our heartbeats wisely when they accessed the metadata we create.

Stay positive,
Erin

The spotlight is focused, the audience rapt

I am in the quiet space between a couple of writing projects and I'm thinking about the thread that ties the two together.

In the first writing project, I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about how my lived experience acts as a lens through which I view the material that I catalog. In the early drafts of this project, I tried to argue that catalogers should both identify biases and work to push against them in their work. I even used the phrase "eradicate bias." As I wrote subsequent drafts, however, I became convinced that our job as catalogers shouldn't be to work against bias to create a neutral catalog. As many people smarter than me have said, the catalog is not neutral ground--nor should it be. Instead, I thought more about how catalogers should consider their lived experiences more to identify who they are and what privilege they do (or don't) possess. In much the same way that understanding how I benefit from whiteness changes how I move in the world, understanding how I benefit from whiteness changes how I approach the material I catalog.

The second writing project is going to turn my attention toward the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. I'm interested in thinking about the six frames can serve as a lens through which catalogers can view what our cataloging priorities should be. I'm interesting in thinking about how cataloging work would change if we brought our practises into closer alignment with what librarians doing information literacy instruction are teaching students. My gut reaction at the outset of this work is that bringing our practises into closer alignment means that we will be less able to reuse records from Ye Olde Bibliographic Utility without making at least some degree of local changes. At the outset of this project, I feel like bringing cataloging practises and information literacy instruction practises into closer alignment will result in more work for catalogers rather than less.

I think the places where these two projects (and the thinking behind them) come together is that we need to spend a lot more time considering our local communities and the values that our local libraries embrace when creating and adapting records for use in our local catalogs. We must consider how we will change every aspect of how we work when we decide that our libraries should be anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, anti-ableist, and anti-classist spaces. We cannot create inclusive physical library spaces without also creating inclusive digital spaces--and that includes are our library catalogs. We cannot address signage without also addressing metadata creation content standards. We cannot address loan policies without also addressing controlled vocabulary.

I don't resent people for thinking first about how to create more inclusive physical spaces since changing physical spaces has a visible return on investment for users. But not every person who uses the library does so by coming into our physical spaces. For some of our user groups, the library's digital presence is the only way they will interact with the library, so we also need to put some thought into how we will reflect in those spaces the values we profess in our physical spaces. This might mean changing our website's design or creating a local thesaurus of terms that reflect our values more than any of the existing thesauri. But whatever it means, we have to do it.

Making the changes in local practise that bring information literacy practise and cataloging practise into closer alignment will be neither easy nor cheap. And creating inclusive digital spaces will require both financial resources and staff time. We'll have to decide what we're willing to give up to take on this new work and we'll have to have administrative support to move forward. But if creating inclusive physical spaces is a priority for us, we have to think about how our digital spaces will change too.

Stay positive,
Erin