We held a nice big party for them today, and I had the chance to grab the mic and present them with a small gift–blank books bound in the original orange carpeting from our library. (Long story, inside joke, you had to be there.)

But before presenting the gift, I couldn’t resist a short speech. Here’s more or less what I said:

Carol and Paul, thank you so much for your work here. I have learned a great deal about leadership from both of you. First, I admire the way you treat all your colleagues with trust and take joy in working with us. Second, I admire the way you keep our mission in mind at all times: to support and enable teaching and learning at this college.

I could have gone on more about this, but I think what I said gets at the heart of what I think a good leader does. With trust and a clear sense of mission, there’s no need to mirco-manage. No need to claim credit or appeal to your own authority.

There’s more to making a good leader than trust and mission, but I’m not sure you can lead without those qualities. They are qualities I hope to cultivate more in myself.

The Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. a not-for-profit organization and leading provider of licensing solutions, announces its OnCopyright Education Certificate Program, comprised of industry-specific courses that target a variety of user communities and the challenges they face in managing copyright.

Reed Elsevier, a world leading provider of professional information solutions in the Science, Medical, Risk, Legal and Business sectors, announces its Open Access Publishing Certificate Program, a balanced look at the benefits and drawbacks of managing access openly with maximum added value.

The American Chemical Society, a congressionally chartered independent membership organization which represents professionals at all degree levels and in all fields of chemistry and sciences that involve chemistry, announces its new certificate program, Harmony of Interest, aimed at non-profits looking to leverage their positions as publishers with creative accrediting solutions for higher education.

Harvard University Libraries administration is pleased to announce its new certificate program in Change Management, comprised of case-study-based courses in openness, communication, and managing employee expectations.

•  It’s hard to beat Ranganathan’s Five Laws. They are surprisingly durable and flexible.
•  A librarians’ goal when working with people isn’t to create little librarians, just as a doctor shouldn’t expect patients to become little doctors. The goal is to help people be more mindful, more self-sufficient, better able to act in their own best interest, and better able to recognize when to ask for help.
•  A librarian contains and creates unique value for her community due to her profession. We cannot sell ourselves short, as we have knowledge, skills, and a point of view that people need.
•  Even as we experience and shape great changes in libraries, we should be proudly skeptical and conservative as well. Remember that we have responsibilities to generations past and generations yet to come, not just to our contemporaries.
• At our best, many of the things we do–listening, teaching, preserving, creating for the future, being open to all comers–are moving away from professionalism and edging shyly towards love.

Last week Meredith Farkas wrote The changing professional conversation.

Last Friday, Roy Tennant pointed and nodded at Meredith’s post when he wrote Farkas on the Changing Professional Conversation.

The upshot of all three posts is that the authors feel pulled in many different directions by all the social media sites where they are active. They feel it on the writer’s side, where they feel a lack of control over things they write and then post on sites that they don’t own. And Meredith and Roy also are feeling it on the reader’s side where they find it harder to recall and re-locate the things they saw on Twitter. Or was it Google+. Couldn’t have been Google Wave…

So. I don’t usually like to offer advice here. But I realized that I used to worry about this kind of thing and now I don’t so much. So here’s what I do, or what I would do if I were still more worried about this problem of fragmentation–your mileage may vary.

1. Blog more. If you have something kind of interesting to share, blog it. Don’t just slap it on Twitter and call it good. Let Twitter or Google+ or whatever be your first draft of your cool idea and the blog post be the second draft. If you want to link to someone else’s thing, take two minutes to write up a bit of context and blog it. You know you are just feeding your blog to all those social network sites anyway.

2. Blog less. Each post should be 25-75% shorter than you first thought it should be. I don’t think I have ever wished a post were 250 words longer.

3. Ignore almost everything. FriendFeed is my social network and professional network of choice. I  subscribe to about 20 blogs or other feeds that I’d call “professional.”

And I mostly ignore everything else. I have accounts on Twitter and Facebook and Jobs knows what else (Plurk? Hunch still sends me newsletters. Get a life, Hunch), but only because some people I care about are only active on those sites and it’s nice to check in on them sometimes.

You don’t have to worry about finding again that thing you saw on Google+ if you never go to Google+. Who are the five people in your professional network that really bring the good stuff time and again? Who is reading tons of blogs so you don’t have to? Follow those people, and forget the rest.

4. Keep everything else in one place forever.  Put all your eggs in one basket. My basket used to be del.icio.us. Anything I saw on the web that I thought I might ever want to see again for any reason, I tried to remember to bookmark in del.icio.us. Now I have switched to Evernote, which is more versatile in what kinds of eggs I can throw in the basket, and keeps a copy of the eggs on my computer.

You don’t have to ever look at most of those notes or links ever again. Don’t groom your folksonomy, don’t spend a moment wondering if you should keep a link or cull it. Keep it. Back it up. Space is cheap.

If it’s something that you can’t ignore (see 3, above), own it.

5. Don’t delete your accounts. Just trust me on this one. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. If you can’t stop fussing with it, get a friend to change the password or something.

That’s it. If you liked this post, you’ll like my new social media optimization handbook, Who Leads the Thought Leaders Thoughts, and my book of daily affirmations, The Clothes’ New Emperor.

The thread, on a forum called Story Games, is called The Death of GM Craft and the rise of non-traditional game design. If you are interested in RPGs, you may find the whole thread interesting, but I’ll summarize the two things that struck me.

The original poster’s main point is that a once-common kind of discussion — “what can I do as a GM ["game master," or the person in charge of running the game] to make my group’s game sessions more fun, engaging, and interesting?” — has fallen by the wayside in favor of conversations about creating new games and game mechanics that will promote more satisfying experiences for gamers. An analogy might be the difference between a discussion on “how can I be a better actor or director” versus “how can I choose or write better plays to stage?”

In the discussion, a participant named Levi Kornelsen says,

Here’s the thing; if I have good GM advice, there’s an instant impulse in these circles to talk about either how to hard-code it into a game, or talk about a game that did that.

And that’s when I thought of this in library terms. Sometimes it seems that when we are talking about teaching information literacy, there’s a hope or expectation that the researcher need not learn much in the way of how to use the research tools, that instead, all the intelligence should be hard-coded into the database or catalog or website. Sometimes discussions of what a researcher needs to know or learn are seen as an admission of failure or “blaming the user,” as if it were possible to build tools that require no expertise or critical thinking to use.

Later in the discussion, JD Corley brings up the fact that gamers and game companies don’t have the same goals.

We’re in this position because it is to nobody’s financial advantage to improve the quality of your play.

Nobody gets paid when a GM does a great job.

Nobody loses money when a GM does a shit job.

[…]

It is to nobody’s financial advantage for RPG play to be improved. Only that it be “good enough” to get you to buy the next thing.

So RPG creators have said, meh, it’s not my business. I’m in the text-selling business.

[…]

I am totally down with that, you choose the business you want to be in, and texts can be a piece of the puzzle. Certainly texts matter!…

But the idea that texts distributed (ideally) to lots of people are going to help them reach their idiosyncratic, individualized, always-shifting goals?

Just saying that idea out loud shows how silly it is, and always has been.

In this comment, I started to mentally equate “RPG creators” with “library database vendors” and “texts” with “databases.” Corley may be taking his point a bit too far–of course any company who wants to sell products and services will do better if their customers find that their lives are improved by the product. But the point remains, game companies and gamers, like library vendors and librarians/researchers, have different priorities and goals. As Mark W says in the Story Games thread,

If anything, a constant level of dysfunction and dissatisfaction in the hobby is a sales driver for the new product that promises relief.

And another Mark, MarkT says,

From a business perspective, I think that JD is spot on when he points out that publishers are in the “text selling” business. That’s how they make their money, and long-term efforts on their part to get people to play their games “better” doesn’t appear to have a financial upside. It’s not that they don’t care about their players playing well; instead, they just recognize that the money that feeds their families happens when they write the next game, not when they improve how much fun you’re having with the game they already sold you.

It’s not a crazy, capitalism is evil argument. It’s a “this is the way the incentives in this industry are built” argument.

I’d argue that in the library industry, database vendors have found that the money happens when they have exclusive content or more titles than the next guy, not when they improve how easy it is to use the product they already sold you.

An example from Open Cover Letters

Open Cover Letters is a clever site and a welcome addition to the library job-hunter’s training camp. The idea is simple: the site publishes anonymized cover letters for library or archives jobs that resulted in the applicant getting the job (or at least an interview).

The letters as they appear on the site are somewhat amusing, with identifying information redacted in black, making them look like something obtained through FOIA or the like. Or even sillier, like an exercise in fill-in-the-blank or MadLibs.

But they also showcase how the cover letter is a formal exercise like a sonnet or an ode or a tweet. Having read a lot of cover letters in the past few years, it’s interesting to see how people manage to accomplish everything they need to in the cover letter. I’d say those things they need to accomplish are:

1. Establish their bona fides (degree, relevant experience of the proper duration).
2. Establish that they fit the requirements by mentioning some specific things they have done that match the job description.
3. Demonstrate that they can write a formal letter without embarrassing anyone through errors of tone, grammar, punctuation, or typography.
4. Keep it to a single page.*
5. Make me think, “wow, I need to talk to this person.”

Many people seem to have problems with numbers one through four on my list, even though they are simple formal requirements, such as ending the sonnet with a rhyming couplet. The truly difficult thing, I think, is keeping all the formal elements under control while still hitting number five. There’s not a lot of room for voice or anecdotes, but the applicant still has to do something to make the reader say “yes, this is good, and I need to know more.”

If I come up with any good ideas of how to do that, I’ll let you know. Open Cover Letters looks like the place to go to find models as you try and figure out how to make this formal exercise work for you.

* A few people on FriendFeed have questioned the “single page” part of the formal requirements. I agree, that this is not as hard and fast as the syllable count in a haiku, and perhaps closer to the distinction between a short story and a novella. As a reader, I wouldn’t bat an eye at the letter than ran a paragraph or more onto a second page. If it’s a full two pages or more, I would likely approach reading it with a “this had better be good” attitude. If you need that much space to convince me that you understand the job, have the skills for the job,and possess that something extra that makes me want to interview you, I will suspect that you are wordy or over-compensating.

So, speaking as a provocateur: “Provocative” is not the same thing as “immune to objections.” You don’t get to hide behind it, PENN STATE. You don’t get to hide behind it, TAIGA. I’ve taken a fair amount of flak for my more provocative writing and speaking. It’s part of the damn game, so get with it.

To which I responded with the title of this post: Provocation without accountability is trolling.

Be provocative. Go out on a limb. But when people call you on it, engage meaningfully. Defend yourself or clarify yourself or recant, but please don’t say “hey, I was just trying to be provocative.”

See also this commentary from The Onion, Come On, Lighten Up, I’m Just Being A Total Asshole.

Which is to say I really like the old stuff.

Debra Kolah’s guest post on ACRLog, Librarianship: As We May Evolve, points back to Jesse Shera’s article “Librarians Against Machines” from Science, May 1967. [JSTOR link to article; Science link to article] I’m glad she did, because I have been wanting to mention this article for a long time.

I recall discussion about the “professional” nature of library work when I was in library school, and, regardless of what people actually were saying, what I always heard was “we need to present ourselves as a profession in order to command respect.” I never bought that.

Shera’s “Librarians Against Machines” deals specifically with the stance of librarians vis-a-vis information science, documentalists, and computers. His view of librarians in 1967 will still strike a chord with many when considering our standing today. “The humanities,” Shera writes, “had long been the gate of entry into librarianship, and indeed many librarians were fearful and distrustful of science. They had turned to librarianship for the very reason that they were self-consciously inadequate in science” (749). Early efforts at automation were “received by librarians with little more serious attention than if it had been the scientific fantasy of a Rube Goldberg or a Buck Rogers” (749).

Beyond these descriptions of librarians’ resistance or confusion in the face of technological change, Shera’s diagnosis of the source of the anxiety is even more pertinent:

Fear is especially strong among those occupations that are service oriented, or when the innovation comes from without the occupational group or subculture…. Even in those areas where automation promises relief from burdensome detail, the computer is not always accepted with enthusiasm. Resentment can easily replace reason, especially when the benefits come from those who are outside the culture group. The engineers do not really understand library problems, so the argument goes, and it has sufficient validity to delay the benefits that fresh insights from nonlibrary disciplines might bring. (749)

Shera hoped this challenge would be a blessing in disguise, a “catalyst” that would “compel the librarian to ask the right questions about what he really should be doing, and … direct his thought to the right answer to those questions” (750). The missing piece in the professionaliztion of the librarian, for Shera, was the lack of a theoretical grounding.:

Their discipline is a vast accumulation of technical details rather than a body of organized abstract principles that can be applied in concrete situations, a body of knowledge that is known and understood by all members of the guild and one which the librarians themselves alone have created.

Because librarians have not devoted sufficient attention to the theoretical considerations of their work, and because they are not truly professional, they have largely failed to grasp the meaning of the dilemma in which they find themselves. (748)

I’m not sure if I have the same idea of what this “dilemma” is as Shera does, but for me it goes back to something he says earlier in this article, when he discusses how engineers, scientists, and executives had recognized the potential for “mechanized information retrieval” while librarians were still resistant to the idea:

When the federal government and other sources of research support began to provide quite substantial support for the exploration of automated information retrieval, the trend of the future became reasonably clear. It also became evident that many scientists were coming to believe that librarianship was much too important to be left to the librarians. (747)

This article has changed my thinking about “professionalization.” Shera’s article replaces an abstract, wishful-thinking notion of a profession as a mechanism for generating “respect” with a simple choice. If librarianship isn’t a profession, if we concentrate on the service and the technical elements of our jobs to the exclusion of the theoretical and creative approaches to the problems we face, we will be left in the dust.

In short, a truly professional librariate gets to solve the most interesting problems in our field. Otherwise, other professions will solve them for us, regardless of what we think about that.

As good as that thread was, I was torn between wanting to keep contributing and wanting to slow down and get my thoughts straight first. Sometimes I have a misguided nostalgia for 2006 or so, when all the discussion was on blogs, and we didn’t have Twitter or FriendFeed for the instant discussion. I don’t know that my thoughts below are that well thought-out, but they have the benefit of a few hours more reflection. I don’t know if these thoughts are all that original or if I’m mostly restating what Iris or other people have said, but sometimes saying things yourself is the best way to learn them.

• We are playing different games. I think this is the central point of Iris’s post, and the most important thing to remember when librarians talk about vendors of information products. Most of these vendors are for-profit companies. Profit is what they are for. And while few librarians would say that the profit motive is a bad thing, it seems like we do have a hard time putting ourselves in that mindset. We seem to sometimes expect these companies to care most about sharing information with readers. But widespread sharing is our game. For the vendors, profitability is the game, and sometimes it makes sense to share and sometimes it doesn’t. If you want to understand what a vendor is up to, follow the money.
• We should ask vendors what they are up to more often. Too often, in the LSW room and blog posts, librarians complain about vendors. This is natural, and I don’t want to discourage people from complaining to sympathetic ears when we need to. But I think we need to be more proactive in asking those vendors we do business with to explain themselves. In my experience, they are happy to do so. Iris didn’t wait for a representative of EBSCO to find the LSW thread complaining about the lack of information exchanged between ExLibris and EBSCO, she emailed some questions to a person she’d talked to before at EBSCO. Jenica Rogers blogged some frustration combined with empathy for ProQuest around 1:00 this afternoon, and by 5:00 she’d had a phone conversation with two ProQuest execs. I wonder if sometimes I don’t make those phone calls or emails myself because it would involve acknowledging that these vendors aren’t a bunch of idiots bent on the utter destruction of library budgets, but instead are people trying to compete at their own game which is not our game.
• I’m not sure how to lead on this issue. I am much in the debt of Dorothea “RepoRat” Salo and Mark Kille for engaging me so energetically in that FriendFeed discussion. To sum up where I think I ended up there: I have talked and will continue to talk to faculty at my institution about Open Access. I will publish more and more of my own writing as Creative Commons/OA publications. But I’m not comfortable with pushing for radical change for all until I have a better idea of how that might come about. Even had I the power to filibuster a contract at my library on a general principle of not compounding our engagement with entities which don’t have our best interests at heart, I don’t think I could bring myself to sacrifice the needs of the faculty and students I currently serve for the needs of the profession and scholarship as a whole. I resign myself to the status of a fellow traveler, rather than a radical on the barricades.
• You can borrow ideas but you can’t borrow situations. The more I talk to other librarians and academics, the more I realize how much I have to learn from them, but also, the more I realize how different local situations can be. At my institution, I believe that change can only come with faculty support. Not necessarily every professor–a small group of influential faculty willing to speak up would be plenty. But questions about why the faculty are the key constituency seem nonsensical to me in the context of my institution. They are the key constituency because the College is theirs. The library exists to serve their needs and their students’ needs. This doesn’t mean we have to bow and scrape, and doesn’t mean that we cannot be leaders in our own right. But to make major changes to how the library operates without faculty buy-in would be suicide. At other institutions, that may not be the case. It puts me in the mind of the Billy Bragg song, “North Sea Bubble”:
  

  I went out drinking with Thomas Paine
  He said that all revolutions are not the same
  They are as different as the cultures
  That give them birth
  For no one idea
  Can solve every problem on Earth

  So don’t expect it all to happen
  In some prophesized political fashion
  For people are different
  And so are nations
  You can borrow ideas
  But you can’t borrow situations

I’m not sure if those musings get me anywhere new. But I think to solve problems–hell, to just reasonably discuss problems–we need to see all sides as clearly as we can. I’m glad that Iris is helping us one step further down that road.

“come together @ your library” by jessamyn, on Flickr

The library is a potent symbol. It attracts metaphors to itself: the library as scholar’s laboratory, as people’s university, as the cradle of democracy. It lends itself as metaphor to other things: the digital library, the pocket library, “library-quiet.”

I believe that until the relatively recent past, the library was thought of mostly as a collection of texts or a warehouse, albeit often a lofty and idealized warehouse. Consequently, the dominant dreams and metaphors of the library had to do with assembling universal knowledge. Jorge Luis Borges is the patron saint of this metaphor, with his oft-quoted line, “I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.” Borges, too, is responsible for “The Library of Babel,” the story that envisions an infinite library containing every possible book, which seems to use the library as a metaphor for the world, for God, and for hell or purgatory all at once–while simultaneously using all of these as metaphors for the library.

Today, librarians at least seem less likely to speak of the library in this fashion. Borges and the Internet have taught us that the universal library is a black hole and an asymptote. It is at once irresistible and inevitable and ultimately unreachable.

Today librarians are more likely to speak of the library as an experience or a conversation. The emphasis is less on what we build and more on what people do when they use the library. The desired end result of our conversations and our fine-tuning of the experience is often described as a near-complete disintermediation between the reader and the information. We succeed to the degree that we enable the experience of effortless mastery. The user need not pause to learn how to use the library; the library is self-evident and transparent.

The new metaphor, then is the library user experience as “zipless fuck.”

The “zipless fuck” comes from Erica Jong and her 1973 novel, Fear of Flying. It is the fantasy of the novel’s narrator, Isadora. Frustrated by the limitations and complications of life as an American woman in the early 1970s, Isadora evolves a highly abstract fantasy of anonymous sex as transcendence of self.

The zipless fuck was more than a fuck. It was a platonic ideal. Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover.

The zipless fuck is anonymous and brief and free of emotion, complication, consequences. It is also, for Isadora, unattainable.

This is, I think where we are. On one side we have the Universal Library of Borges. On the other, Jong’s Zipless Fuck where reader and library come together in a brief perfect moment of instinctive total information exchange. We walk between the two metaphors, and in the distance the parallel lines seem to meet.