Friday Jams! (05/29/2015)

Rachel:

I love a good minor chord progression. Remember this one? It was the first single from this band and this album and it bombed because the A&R man made the mistake of putting good music on the radio. And then they got famous with joke songs. Quite sad, actually.

Erin:
The new Indigo Girls album is streaming over at Garden & Gun. With few exceptions, I much prefer Amy's songs over Emily's songs. This thought lead me down a weird rabbit hole that ended with me revisiting the eponymous Mount Moriah album. My brain is weird.

Anyway, I heard Mount Moriah, open for Craig Finn when I saw him touring behind his solo album and they were amazing. They've put out more stuff since they released that eponymous album, but that album has some of my favorite of their songs. I dug up this live version of the opening track, Lament, to share with you. It's not really a jaunty Friday jams tune, but you'll be tapping your feet and I guarantee you'll have it in your head for days.

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

All you do to me is talk talk

I joined Twitter in 2008. I was going to Bonnaroo and I wanted a way to document and share my experiences with other people. Over the course of the past seven years, Twitter has connected me to a network of my peers, many of whom have become mentors and friends. While it's true that Twitter can be a vapid wasteland of memes and selfies, it also has a valuable place in Libraryland.

Twitter democratizes conversations in librarianship, which is why I think it's become so beloved by those who use it. It allows people from various places in the organizational chart at libraries of varying sizes to converse with each other in a way that doesn't really happen organically in real life. But even as Twitter has become a widely adopted tool, I think there is still pushback from administrators against active participation on Twitter.

A couple of jobs ago, I taught a class on using Twitter as a professional development tool. In preparing for this class, I wanted to understand the theory behind the phenomenon I was seeing play out in front of me and as a result, I learned a little bit about educational theory.

There are two concepts in education upon which I think Library Twitter rests: personal learning networks and personal learning environments. Personal learning environments help you take control or what (and how) you learn by allowing you set the goals and control the process. Personal learning networks are the networks of people you interact with in your personal learning environment. These people may be people you actually know, but they might not. You learn new things through relationships in your learning network and, as a result, come closer to achieving your learning goals.

Personal learning networks are built on the the educational theory of connectivism, which emphasizes the role of a social and cultural context to learning. In a 2005 article, George Siemens writes:

Connectivism is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

One of Twitter's greatest strengths is hashtag chats. It's from 2012, but this Adweek article gives you the basics on what a hashtag chat is and how to join one. Over the course of the last couple of years, a bunch of hashtag chats have popped up on Twitter. Some that you might be interested in checking out include #libchat (and #uklibchat), #critlib, and #mashcat. These chats, along with others I haven't named, have allowed librarians with similar interests from different parts of the world to come together to discuss issues and learn from each other. #critlib even held an unconference in Portland at the end of March before ACRL.

Another of Twitter's strengths is creating a "back channel" during conferences. This recent article from Profhacker talks about what a conference back channel is and how to cultivate it. ALA has done a lot to encourage the cultivation of the conference back channel. Many conference sessions have hashtags. And ALA routinely has badge ribbons for people to share their Twitter handles with other conference attendees. The conference back channel is really valuable for people whose budgets don't allow them to attend all the conferences they'd like to. But it's also valuable to stimulating conversation that doesn't happen during conference sessions.

But what Twitter might be best at is making personal connections between people with similar interests that lead to really cool things happening. I met Rachel on Twitter a couple of years ago and we decided to start a blog together when we realized that we had similar feelings about librarianship. We'd been writing the blog for about seven months before we met in March 2015 at ACRL in Portland.

On a personal note, my life is so much richer from all of the things I've gained from being part of Library Twitter. I've interacted with people I consider heroes, found mentors, and made friendships I'll cherish long after Twitter becomes obsolete. My goal is to give back to the community even a fraction of what it's given me.

Stay positive,
Erin
(@erinaleach)

Friday jams (05/22/2015)

Erin:
Sometimes you need a really fun, really silly, seven minute Friday jam to help you shake off the stress of the week.

Rachel:
Oh I am full-on slacker. Late on my post (I have one, it just isn't written), and just so listless at work. I am almost finished buying a house and busy packing up at my current place but I just do not know what is up with me. I need it to be full-on summer. I need to do something.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should

Remember a couple of weeks ago when Rachel wrote about the value of preaching to the choir? I wholeheartedly agree. We haven't been up and running all that long, but I think that Constructive Summer is a safe space for us to tell our stories and challenge our beliefs. Hopefully in doing our own work, we challenge you to do yours as well.

ACRL's Dr. E.J. Josey Spectrum Scholar Mentor Program is looking for technical services librarians from academic libraries to volunteer to serve as mentors for Spectrum Scholar recipients. As a technical services librarian, I immediately went to the volunteer form. I want to do my part to help recruit and retain new technical services librarians--especially people from underrepresented groups.

The goal of the Mentor Program, as stated on its ALA webpage is:

to link participating library school students and newly graduated librarians, who are of American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino or Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander descent, with established academic librarians, who will provide mentoring and coaching support; serve as a role model in academic librarianship; and provide guidance in seeking a career path and opportunities for leadership in the profession.

I want to serve as a role model and help new technical services-minded librarians find their way in the profession, so I started to fill out the application. The questions asked about my ethnicity, my gender identity, and my physical disabilities. And these questions served as my light bulb moment that maybe I'm not the right person to do this job.

I'm a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered female. I basically check all of the white privilege boxes.

As much as I want to help mentor a new technical services librarian, my privilege definitely creates a lens through which I see librarianship. And I am pretty sure that the last thing a person who already feels like an outsider in librarianship wants to hear is another white lady telling them how to "do librarianship." Librarianship is overwhelmingly white. According to the 2012 edition of ALA's Diversity Counts, 104,392 of the 118,666 credentialed librarians were white. In academic libraries, 23,207 of the 26,954 credentialed librarians were white. That's 86%!

By using our privilege to put ourselves in positions of power--especially in positions where we give advice to new librarians--we shape a future of libraries that looks a lot like us. In a recent blog post about the amorphous idea of "fit" in libraries, Jacob Berg breaks down the idea of homogeneity in librarianship. Berg points to a Smithsonian article that states that diverse groups get better results when it comes to decision-making, problem solving, creativity and innovation, and scientific research.

All of this leads me to this place: just because I can be a Spectrum Scholar mentor doesn't mean I should. I do have advice and experience to share with a newly minted technical services librarian, but I also have biases that come from privilege.

So instead of serving as a mentor, I want to signal boost the opportunity. I am not sure I have an abundance of street cred or clout, but I want to use whatever I have to share this opportunity with you. If you are a technical services librarian from an underrepresented group, I urge you to apply to be a mentor for a Spectrum Scholar.

I'm trying to do the work to build a future of libraries. And sometimes that work requires me to challenge my beliefs and, as a result, go a different way. Building the Unified Library Scene isn't easy, but doing awesome things never is.

Stay positive,
Erin

Friday Jams! (05/05/15)

Rachel:

Intersessionnnnnnn, and the parking is eassssssyyyyy. Your email is neat, and your boss is on vacaaaaaaaaaation.

Here's a summer song.

Erin:
It is impossible to beat that Friday jam.

I followed Rachel's lead and went with solo Mike Doughty. While Haughty Melodic is a better record, I love Golden Delicious. Enjoy this live version of a track from that album, "I just want the girl in the blue dress to keep on dancing."

Making Space for...

When I was in high school and college I worked at the same company as my mom. Technically, I worked for my mother. I did various things, which we may discuss at some other time if we ever get into our origin stories. What I learned from that job, other than a passing knowledge of microbiology (which isn't really helpful in any way, surprisingly), I learned from watching my mom go about her business.

One of the things she did was have a very tidy workspace. Surely this came from her many years running a research lab -- you can't just leave mouse spleens laying around at the end of the day.  One of the labs that my mother ran was a dirty lab, dirty in that they worked with live human pathogens that could kill you. Put everything away, clean everything, check again, check again. When working in an office, she cleaned and organized her workspace.  Daily neatening, the last hour of her week cleaning her area thoroughly.  Monday morning met with a neat clean ready-to-go workspace.

I managed to pick up some of these habits and carry them to both my kitchen and my shop, but I struggle with them at work. When the end of the work day comes I tend to pack everything into my bag and take it home. Things get more and more disorganized throughout the week, until I need to take a half-day to sort it all out. Random things get spread across my desk and I know that my calculator doesn't go there but I'm "too busy" to take three seconds to put it where it does go.

In this time between class sessions, though, I have enough time to get to inbox zero, so it is a good time to try to reinstate a habit of orderliness. It is important for me because this orderliness has a huge impact on my efficiency and clarity of mind. So I will take tomorrow to organize my office. I will book off the last hour of Friday on my calendar every week to make time for neatening the office. I will resolve once again to take the first and last 20 minutes of the day setting priorities and organizing my tasks.

We let some things slide because they are fundamental. Because we don't appreciate fully how other things are built on them. What core practices help you be your best self? How do you value these in your work day? Let me know in the comments!

Keep Rockin'
Rachel