I am king of all I see, my kingdom for a voice

I'm in the midst of writing a book chapter--which sounds like the world's worst humblebrag,I realize. While it's been a real challenge for me to write long form, it's been nice to have the space to expand my thoughts beyond the length of a blog post and explore my ideas a little more.

I'm not sure that this will make it past the cutting room floor, but yesterday I wrote:

Metadata creation has both a privilege problem and an image problem and we have to wrestle and reckon with both in order to find a place where metadata creators are both valued for the work we do and empathetic in the words we use.

This isn't a particularly novel idea, nor it is particularly inflammatory. But it's not a place I came to easily and without struggle.

The LIS program I attended didn't have a lot in the way of theoretical grounding as as a English major with a creative writing focus, I wasn't exposed to much beyond literary theory as an undergraduate. So being exposed to critical theory and ideas was something that has only happened in the last few years.

When I turn over new ideas, I am almost never walking through new territory. There are people who came well before me and people whose work is more recent. And I am both aware of, and grateful for, their work.

I appreciate how Emily Drabinski has challenged me to think about how impossible it is to fix (in any sense) language that describes people.

I appreciate how April Hathcock has challenged me to understand my privilege and my complicity in the maintenance of oppressive systems within the LIS community.

I appreciate how Maria Accardi has taught me to bring my whole self into my work and to value the worth of all of the users I serve.

I appreciate how Derrick Jefferson has challenged me to think about intersectionality in the LIS community.

I appreciate how Netanel Ganin has challenged me to think in literal terms about the construction and application of LCSH.

All of this is to say that I understand that when I think and when I write, I'm standing on the shoulders of the kindest, most thoughtful giants I can imagine.

Stay positive,
Erin

Friday jams (05/20/16)

Erin:
May has been a really busy month. I've got a lot of really great projects in the works, but even fun work feels tiring sometimes.

You know who else have been busy? Tegan and Sara. Their new album, Love You To Death, comes out on June 3rd. Which is two days before my birthday, so happy birthday to me! Anyway, this performance of the first single from that album, "Boyfriend," is pretty great. Enjoy!

Rachel:
Ugh I need Tegan and Sara to not read my old diaries. Like I'm still upset about it and that interrupts my enjoyment of the song. TOO REAL.
ANYHOW. The other day Erin mentioned Better Than Ezra on twitter dot com and we're just gonna have to go there and do that today, okay?  This used to be the lead-in music for the 4th inning of cardinals baseball and it made me so happy every time I heard a few seconds of it.

Oh dance, don't stop

I have Future of Libraries fatigue.

There...I said it.

I have Future of Libraries fatigue and the future hasn't even gotten here yet.

One of my favorite posts from Rachel contains this gem:

Here's the thing about the future:
There is no map.
There is no telling, there is no knowing.
It is out there and you have to go whether you like it or not.

I love that so much I printed it out and it's on my bulletin board at work, reminding me that the future is coming whether I want it to or not.

Two things I want to acknowledge at the outset:
1. I recognize that I need to stay informed about advances in the field of librarianship. I try to read widely about new projects and ideas. And when I feel like it's appropriate to add my comments, I do.

2. There are people (and libraries) who have the infrastructure and the bandwidth to live out beyond the bleeding edge. And for those experimenters, it is fruitful to keep their eyes open and their ears to the ground in identifying what the Next Big Thing might be.

Having said that, I want to say this: librarianship should be present with users to understand their needs and react to them as quickly as possible. And you can't be present if you're busy talking about what the future might look like.

So what does it mean to be present with users and to react to needs quickly?

Libraries needs to be agile and able to change course quickly when an emerging user need is identified. And this requires a commitment to experimentation and an acceptance that not every initiative is going to succeed. It requires that libraries stop romanticizing the past and drop the 'but we've ALWAYS done it this way' mindset in favor of letting of of what isn't working to make room for new things that will.

It also requires an engagement of users at every possible opportunity. Have you talked with your users about what new services they might want that you don't currently provide? Have you invited your users to give you feedback on services you are considering establishing? And if you have, have you taken their feedback seriously and acted upon it?

Look, there is absolutely nothing wrong with identifying how you want the future to be better than the present and then altering the course of the present to reach that future. We should all aspire to eschew stagnation at both a personal and organizational level. After all, libraries create strategic plans and then work to bring those strategic plans to life. And most librarians have the opportunity to include growth goals in their annual evaluations.

But let's not sell our present users short by focusing so much on a future that, when it arrives, will probably be significantly different than we even dared to dream.

Stay positive,
Erin

The right notion in the meantime

Last week I attended the Program for Cooperative Cataloging's Joint Operations Committee Meeting. This is, essentially, the business meeting of the various groups that form the PCC. This year's OpCo meeting included a lot of discussion on BIBFRAME and what a world after MARC might look like. In the midst of this conversation, I sent out a couple of tweets:

Interesting thought: movement away from MARC means we have opportunity to decide what to keep and what to give away from current practice.

— Erin Leach (@erinaleach) May 5, 2016

How do we decide what to keep from current practice given that 'we've always done it this way' will likely not be a compelling argument?

— Erin Leach (@erinaleach) May 5, 2016

There is much about BIBFRAME and the post-MARC world that I don't understand. And until I attended this meeting, I was pretty sure I wouldn't wade into this discussion because I had nothing smart to add.

But now I do.

Building a new encoding standard is really amazing. I doubt many people really think of it that way because it's such nuanced work. Honestly, I don't think about how amazing it is most of the time. I mean, I quit the BIBFRAME list because it was so far over my head as to be useful to me. So the wonder of standards creation is lost on me most of the time.

The part about building an encoding standard that excites me most is that it gives us the opportunity to radically reconsider our current practises. What parts of our current practices are so important that we want to preserve it and what parts no longer serve us? What new practices could we incorporate to better serve our user communities?

I hope that as the metadata creation community builds out and implements BIBFRAME that we don't just try to map MARC fields into BIBFRAME elements and create what might essentially be considered MARC2.0. I hope that the community takes the time to consider what MARC fields are essential in helping users complete the tasks that brought them to the online catalog in the first place.

This evaluation and decision-making process requires the metadata creation community to think about who it considers its users and what they might require in order to successfully navigate the online catalog. I desperately hope this means consulting with actual library users in order to devise user tasks and use cases based on actual user needs as opposed to talking about a monolithic user.

This evaluation and decision-making process also requires the metadata creation community to have a difficult conversation about administrative metadata and about the extent to which the metadata community itself is a user. What I think we need to wrestle with as a community is the fact that while the metadata community is a user, we are not the primary user. We should not put our needs first and we definitely shouldn't cling to old ways of doing things because they suit our needs. Instead, I would argue that the metadata creation community should identify the minimum amount of administrative metadata required to successfully complete our work.

As we build this new encoding standard, I hope that we decide to use this opportunity to radically reconsider our metadata creation process. And when we do, I hope our benchmark for which practises to continue and which to stop are based entirely on end user needs and not on our own.

Stay positive,
Erin

Friday jams (04/29/16)

Erin:
I needed Friday jams today. I just did. Because my life is really, really busy and sometimes the best thing to do is just stop and have a dance party.

Rachel:
So I've been trying to work on some self care, and getting back to writing on the blog is one of the things that I need to be doing for myself. Reflecting on why this blog is something I want to do can be summarized by one Miss Missy Elliott. Gotta be writing rhymes everyday.

And when I start to feel it making sense for me

So...let's talk about this story that circulated last week about the Representative from Tennessee who wants to introduce legislation to force the Library of Congress to reverse its decision to cancel the heading Illegal aliens and, in its place, use the headings Noncitizen and Unauthorized immigration. It seems likely that this proposed piece of legislation is little more than a push for attention by a person who is up for reelection. After all, what better way to make a name for oneself than taking on the bastion of political correctness that is Library of Congress.

I think this story surfaces, again, an issue that I've written about before: the Library of Congress is not the U.S. national library even though we in the U.S. library community treat it as if it were. We use the Library of Congress' thesaurus and classification scheme for subject cataloging even though many in the U.S. cataloging community have been talking for many years about its flaws and working for many years to try to correct "-ist" headings and class numbers.

And while it would be fun to talk more about the problematic nature of treating the Library of Congress as de facto U.S. National Library, I think that there is a more important issue that this story surfaces: cataloging is not a neutral act.

While it's true that catalogers are taught to be objective in how they are taught to describe the objects they're tasked with cataloging, this feels impossible. One could argue that it feels less impossible in descriptive cataloging, because it is easier to be object about, say, the publisher of a book than the subject of that book. But this feeling of impossibility is even baked into our content standards, which leave room for "cataloger's judgment." In some cases, the standards reason, a cataloger will have to interpret a rule and apply it in a way that makes the most sense to them. Which means that even descriptive cataloging --the part of cataloging that is meant to have the greatest chance of objectivity--isn't actually all that objective.

And while it feels like a challenge to talk about objectivity in descriptive cataloging, it feels wholly impossible to talk about objectivity in subject cataloging. If the language itself isn't neutral, how can we be expected to be objective in our application of that language?

I have long thought that in addition to talking about cataloger's judgment, we should also talk about cataloger's bias. So, let's do that. One of the definitions Merriam-Webster gives for bias is "an inclination of temperament or outlook, especially: a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment." And when we talk about cataloging--especially subject cataloging--that makes sense to me.

Catalogers bring to bear on the works they catalog a lifetime of lived experience. It is impossible to put away that lived experience in order to describe works in an objective fashion. And it is both disingenuous to library users and unfair to catalogers to continue to perpetuate this....lie. As a middle-class, white, cisgender woman, I can't put away my lived experience in order to describe the things I catalog--nor should I. And I shouldn't expect that my colleagues from marginalized groups to do the same.

So how do we reckon with this? How do we acknowledge cataloger's bias and then move through a flawed system in order to order the objects we are tasked with describing? I think we do it in two ways.

1. Appreciate the lived experiences of your colleagues and your users and think about how this is reflected in your metadata.
My experience with the heading Illegal aliens is different than someone who has lived that experience, which means I should believe them when they say that this terminology is dehumanizing. The same goes with any number of "-ist" subject headings. If someone tells you that the words you're using in your metadata to describe them invalidates their lived experiences, take that seriously. Don't dismiss it because their lived experience is not the same as yours.

2. Educate yourself and your users.
If you are unclear about your place in creating and maintaining oppressive systems, you have some work to do. I wrote before about how you have to understand your place in an oppressive system before you can dismantle it. Read everything you can and have hard conversations with you friends and your colleagues about white privilege and oppression. If you need a starting point for educating yourself, April Hathcock's blog has a lot of great posts on intersectionality and on doing the work.

If you have a relationship with library users, you should use every appropriate opportunity to talk about catalog records and bias and how the material you retrieve when you search is based on biased algorithms. It seems likely that making the catalog as transparent as possible for users will help them find the material they seek while navigating the biased language of subject headings. Emily Drabinski's article, "Queering the Catalog," is a great read when thinking about how to bring users into the conversation about metadata. And anything you can read by Safiya Noble is great for thinking about algorithmic bias.

There are a wealth of tools out there to help you get started in thinking about how to educate yourself and your users. If you have other ideas, feel free to drop them in the comments!

While coming to terms with cataloger's bias is both challenging and uncomfortable, it's unbelievably necessary. We cannot continue to believe that cataloging is a neutral act. And the quicker we move on from that point, the quicker we can help our users identify how to get the best information they need to complete the task at hand.

Stay positive,
Erin

Step two! There's so much we can do

I didn't watch Parks and Recreation, so I know relatively little about Nick Offerman from that context. My introduction to Offerman was in his capacity as a writer. He spoke at ALA Annual 2015 behind Gumption, whose twenty-one chapters profile twenty-one historic figures. When I heard Offerman read from Gumption, I was struck by the eloquence of his prose and his admiration for the people about which he had written. He was funny, sure, but he was also wise.

Offerman owns a wood shop and in addition to being a writer and an actor, he does woodworking. You might've seen the clip of Offerman giving Stephen Colbert a table? If not, its right there.

In advance of his new book, Good Clean Fun, Offerman did an interview with Etsy about what it's like to own a wood shop and to be a woodworker. And while it does have some great wisdom on woodworking and living a DIY lifestyle, it also has some great wisdom about life. When asked about the most valuable lesson he's learned from woodworking, Offerman writes:

I'd say patience is the most important thing I've learned from woodworking. From the get-go, all of my great teachers, many of whom have only communicated with me through the writing they've left behind, have said: Slow down and do this one step at a time.

This segues nicely into something I learned about myself at an in-house training last week. We were asked to talk about whether we saw ourselves as big picture people or as a details people and then, later, if we saw ourselves as visionaries or implementers. I suspect you think you know what I would say, and I also suspect that you might not be correct. While I might come across as a details person who enjoys implementing, I actually operate more as a visionary who is interested in the big picture.

Honestly? As a big picture person, details sometimes fill me with a sense of overwhelm. I can envision what I want the outcome of a project to be or what I want a final product to look like with relative ease. But I find the process of getting from what I pictured in my mind to the the tangible, final product a panic inducing one. While I love writing the blog, the blank page that signifies the start of another post fills me with the smallest hint of dread because I'm not sure how I'm going to shape my thoughts into words that you (hopefully) want to read.

Offerman's quote reminds me that whatever the project or product, it isn't a good use of energy to be overwhelmed with how to get from the starting line to the finish line. It is important to have an idea in mind when you start, yes. But instead of obsessing about how to get to the end from the beginning, it's more valuable to think about how to get from the starting line to the end point of the first step. Then, when you've finished the first step, you can direct your attention to getting from that point to the end point of the second step.

I'm going to try to keep Offerman's advice in mind the next time I'm working on getting from the endpoint in my mind to the actual product of my work. Slow down and do this thing one step at a time.

Stay positive,
Erin