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

They didn't name her for a Saint

The notion of controlled vocabulary is interesting. In the book Introduction to Controlled Vocabulary, Patricia Harping described controlled vocabulary this way:

A controlled vocabulary is an organized arrangement of words and phrases used to index content and/or to retrieve content through browsing or searching. It typically includes preferred and variant terms and has a defined scope or describes a specific domain.

There are a variety of thesauri with which to describe material. Library of Congress subject headings and the Getty vocabularies are probably the best known, but there are a variety of thesauri with which one could do subject analysis.

Organizing and labeling the world for the sake of information description and retrieval is not, on its face, a terrible thing. It seems advisable to be able to find all of the books on a particular topic by doing a single search, and controlled vocabulary allows you to do that.

Controlled vocabulary often falls short. An innocuous example: Until June 2010, the subject heading you would need to know to find a cookbook was "cookery." This post does a great job of showing how the subject headings were structured when the change from "cookery" to "cookbooks" took place. Before that time, if you typed in "cookbooks," the catalog would redirect your search to "cookery" and you would be dropped into a results screen. It was annoying for catalogers and for users.

One of the more damaging examples of controlled vocabulary falling short happens when we attempt to describe people. One of my favorite articles is from Amber Billey, Emily Drabinski, and K.R. Roberto. In "What's gender got to do with it: a critique of RDA 9.7," they argue against coding gender in authority records. The argument is best summed up this way by Billey et. al:

When RDA requires catalogers to select from only two gender categories—male or female—the rules affirm ideas about gender as a binary and innate characteristic, something it is always possible to know, and know completely, about an individual. Indeed, “unknown” is listed as the only possible third option. The rule fails to account for those who know their gender, but experience it as outside the bounds of simply male or female (417).

Basically, it's problematic to ask someone to make assumptions about someone else's humanity. And it's even more problematic to ask someone to codify these assumptions in authoritative sources.

Let's take a brief detour to talk about faceted search. Facets allow users to narrow down a set of search results based on a set of criteria extracted from elements in the records. Among other things, users can narrow by date of publication, format type, and subjects. Let's go back to our cookbook example. If you search for cookbooks, you could use the "publication date" facet to narrow down your search results to cookbooks published last year.

The Library of Congress is piloting a project called Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms, or LCDGT. The rationale for the project is that including these demographic terms in records allows users to find material for, or by, a particular group of people. The examples they use in the description of the program are "novels by lawyers" and "handbooks for nurses."

Seen through the lens of the Billey, Drabinski, and Roberto article, one can see how this project might be problematic--especially when it comes to assigning demographic information like gender or sexual orientation.

The pilot documentation states that:

In order for a demographic group to be proposed, a creator or contributor of a resource must self-identify with the group, or a resource must clearly indicate that the group is the intended audience. Furthermore, research in standard reference sources should be carried out and documented.  

I think that the self-identification piece embedded in the LCDGT project is the place where it has the potential to diverge from the problematic practice of recording gender in authority records. If a person self-identifies with a group, catalogers are not foisting an identity upon someone based on contextual clues. And multiple terms can be put together to describe demographic groups. But I do think that a set of controlled terms, no matter how broad, will not be able to keep pace with the spectrum of terms a group of people uses to identify itself. And, while the terms in this particular thesaurus "should reflect current usage, and pejorative terminology should be avoided," LCSH has been notoriously bad at keeping up with the current usage of terminology.

I think it's important to weigh the value of being able to find material by, and for, certain demographic groups against the dangerous act of describing demographic groups based on contextual clues. Would it be great for users to find information related to the demographic groups to which they belong? Probably. Is doing so worth the possible mis-identification of people and resources? Probably not.

The arguments for, and against, LCDGT are nuanced. And despite my best efforts, I am sure I've fallen short. The comment period for the pilot of LCDGT is open through June 5th. I will be curious to hear the reaction of the cataloging community and to see the progress of the pilot.

Friday jams (05/08/2015)

Erin:
I'm in D.C. today for a business meeting today. Well, not actually today. I'm actually posting these jams a few days early so that Rachel doesn't have to GChat me and ask me what my Friday jam is.

Jason Isbell's new album, Something More Than Free, doesn't come out until July. But he released a single from that record on Soundcloud. Isbell's tune, "24 Frames," is a lovely, jangly, rocking tune and I can't wait to hear the rest of the record.



Rachel:

Erin always fills me with guilt because I know that I should be super into the stuff that she posts because it is right up my alley but I just don't have time in my day or room in my heart for new music. I guess I'm maybe getting old?

Anyway, I am looking for a house to buy so that I can live in it.

On Preaching To The Choir

I think most of you are probably picking up what Erin and I are laying down over here on the blog. Maybe not all of you all of the time, but most of the time most of you are smelling what we're cooking. What we're up to is Building the Unified Library Scene. However, we could be accused of preaching to the choir, talking only with folks who agree with us. Not going out and spreading the word, not going out and actually fighting any kind of real fight. There is value in preaching to the choir, I would argue.

We're building a community. All of us in our lives do this work daily, and the Unified Library Scene is about a kind of community of practice in library work. We can find support in a community, lift each other up and help each other out. A community is a safe space where you can let your emotional guard down a little bit. A community is impossible to live without.

We're exploring our beliefs. This space is not one where we want to be unchallenged. We're interested in growing. There is a base of things that we generally agree about, and we push each other to think harder and be better both in our thoughts about the Unified Library Scene and in other parts of life.

We're testing messages. A benefit of preaching to the choir is that you're preaching, and practice has myriad benefits. From a practice of writing (on deadline) to knowing what kind of messages resonate and what kind of messages spark discussion. What kind of message could we spread if we're not secure in what our beliefs are and what we want to communicate about them?

In your own organization, you may have some allies, a little choir of your own. What work you do with them does make a difference. Take some time to reflect on the kind of conversations you have with them and note all of the benefits that you're getting. It's more than a rant or a gripe session over coffee with the one person in your library who understands you. You're talking about a lot of strategic things, I would bet, and you're practicing your message.  Of course, it might sound different when you cater it to other audiences, but it might not exist at all if it weren't for your choir.

Keep Rockin'
Rachel